by Lauren Esker
"They're shipwrecked, and now you know about as much as I do." He grinned again; her stomach flipped over.
She shifted a little closer on the couch.
In the lamplight his skin was a deep, rich brown, inviting her touch. She wanted to run her hands over the broad solidity of his chest, touch her fingers to that strong jawline to tilt his head toward her—
And then he did turn toward her, mouth open to make a comment about the movie—and he stopped on the first word, lips parted, the unspoken sentence dying in his throat, when he realized she was watching him instead of the movie. "Peri?" he murmured. His warm brown eyes held hers.
She couldn't speak. Her pulse pounded in her ears. She and Noah were like two poles of a magnet, being drawn together by a force more powerful than either of them. An instant longer, and she wasn't sure if she would lean forward, or if he would, but one of them was going to ...
And everything would change.
She jumped to her feet. "I'm sorry," she said, as he stared at her in surprise. "I'm sorry—I think I'm too tired after all. I ... I need to go to bed."
There was a part of her that desperately yearned for him to ask her to stay, and for an instant he seemed poised on the edge of doing just that, but then he gave her a smile that was tempered with half-hidden regret. "Good night, then, Ms. Moreland."
"Good night," she said and hurried down the hallway before she could change her mind.
The other bedroom doors were closed, all the lights off. Peri stopped at her door and strained her ears. There were no sounds from the living room except the low murmur of the TV.
What did she think he was going to do, come after her?
Corner her in the hallway against her door?
Push her gently through the door into the bedroom, down on the bed ...
"Aaargh," she murmured. She pressed the palms of her hands against her eyes until red and purple pinwheels erased the images that had begun to frolic across the fields of her subconscious.
"He's a fed," she muttered as she let herself into her bedroom and quietly closed the door. "He's a cop. The only reason he's with you now is to protect you."
Don't want things you can't have.
She should try to sleep. But now, of course, she was wide awake, and she had a feeling her imagination would start right up again with the X-rated party as soon as she closed her eyes.
Without turning on her room light, she sat on the bed and looked out the window. The sky was clear; moonlight drenched the yard. Her bedroom was located in back of the house, facing the woods. The cars were leeched of color in the silver moonlight, the trees a dark wall beyond them.
She was just thinking about taking off her prosthesis and giving sleep another go when movement in the yard, just behind the parked cars, caught her eye.
Peri leaned forward, her heart beating fast. With all the lights off, her room would look pitch black from the moonlit outdoors, so she doubted if anyone looking in could see her. It was probably only an animal, a fox or something, but—
No, it was Agent Cho, distinctive with her small stature and swinging, shoulder-length dark hair. She had traded the light-colored sweater for a black turtleneck, suitable for sneaking around at night. Moving furtively, she went swiftly across the lawn to the edge of the woods, glanced back, and then followed some kind of path into the woods.
Peri stared after her. Doing a perimeter check? Or something else, something more sinister? Was it possible that one of the agents assigned to protect her was actually in league with their enemies?
She couldn't afford not to know. Also, if she didn't follow, curiosity would drive her crazy all night; she knew she wouldn't be able to sleep, for reasons unrelated to Noah Easton this time.
Peri grabbed her jacket. She no longer had her camera and all its night-photography attachments, a loss she regretted acutely, but she did still have most of her other ghost-hunting gear. What might be useful? Rummaging quickly in her backpack, knowing that Cho was getting farther away the longer she delayed, she stuffed the thermal-imaging attachment for her phone into one pocket and her high-sensitivity microphone into the other.
As quietly as possible, she pushed up the window and slipped out into the night.
She crept past the cars to the edge of the woods, relaxing a little once she was out of the moonlight and under the trees—but only a little. At least now she was somewhat in her element. Her whole life was sneaking around at night trying to get a peek at things she wasn't supposed to see.
What she'd taken for a path was actually an abandoned, overgrown driveway, two ruts winding into the trees. She glimpsed Cho up ahead, a moving shadow flitting among the trees. A litter of damp leaves and pine needles helped muffle her cautious footsteps.
Forests always seemed so alive at night, full of strange rustles and tantalizing hints of smell. One of the times she'd gone out looking for Bigfoot with Zach and his friends, a mother bear with a cub had wandered into their camp. A very aggressive mother bear. They'd managed to chase it off, but her heart still fluttered a little, thinking about it. She jumped at small rustles in the undergrowth, even though she knew that it was probably nothing more than nocturnal rodents going about their business.
The old driveway ended at a rutted dirt road. Peri paused at the edge of the trees. In the moonlight she could clearly see Cho's dark, slim shape further down the road, which meant that she would be just as visible if Cho looked back—and Cho was looking back a lot; Peri could see the pale flash of her face now and again.
Peri considered but discarded the idea of sneaking along in the woods at the side of the road. She'd make too much noise; she would surely be discovered. Instead she waited, one hand resting on a mossy tree trunk, straining her eyes in the moonlight, until Cho vanished around a bend in the road.
Then Peri left the trees and hurried as quickly as possible down the road. The treacherous moonlight made the footing hard to see; she nearly tripped a few times, and at one point her non-prosthetic foot slipped into a muddy pothole with a wet splunch that sounded hideously loud, soaking her sneaker.
Heart beating fast, she stood still for a moment, listening, and in that silence she could hear quiet voices coming from somewhere up ahead.
The bend in the road was just in front of her. Instead of following it, Peri left the road and entered the woods, hoping to cut across and see the conspirators without being seen. She had to go very slowly now; it was almost pitch dark under the trees, and she didn't dare use her phone's flashlight app. Every time a twig cracked underfoot, she froze for an instant before going on. The murmur of voices was still audible from up ahead. Sometimes they paused, as if they were listening too; at those times, Peri tried to hold herself still, barely daring to breathe.
Moonlight was now visible through the tree trunks ahead. Peri crept through damp ferns and peeked around the large bole of a fir tree to see the next loop of the road like a silver band between the dark walls of the forest. There was a car parked in the middle of the road and a man beside it, talking to Cho. From here Peri couldn't see much of what he looked like, just that his face was a pale blur, his hair and clothing dark. She strained her ears to hear what they were saying.
"How sure are you?" Cho asked.
"As confident as I can be under the circumstances."
He had a soft tenor voice with a slight accent. Peri couldn't place it in geographical terms, but her breath caught at the familiarity. She wasn't great with accents, but her attempted kidnapper's voice was seared by panic and adrenaline into her memory, and she was pretty sure he'd had the same soft lilt on his vowels.
She sagged against the tree trunk. Cho was working with the guys who'd tried to kidnap her and shot Noah's friend. She couldn't believe it.
"Flagstaff, Seattle, and where else?" Cho was asking.
"Buffalo, New York, is the only other one I know of."
"I would have expected Chicago or New York, somewhere like that. Seattle is the biggest municipality on your li
st."
"We can operate more freely in small cities away from major population centers."
We. She had to record this for proof. Peri missed a chunk of the conversation as she fumbled through the contents of her pockets for the microphone and struggled to plug it into her phone in the dark. It was meant for picking up ghost noises and not so great with human speech (not that she'd ever used it for secretly recording people, ahem) but she knew she couldn't get their soft voices from here with her regular voice-recording app.
She covered her phone with her sleeve to keep the screen's light from catching their attention as she tried to get the mic's recording app started up. Meanwhile, the man was asking, "Who else have you told?"
"Right now, just my boss and my boss's boss. And the other agent at the house knows now—about the Valeria, that is. Not about you specifically."
The other agent. Noah? He couldn't be part of this, could he? She didn't believe it. And "the Valeria"—what did that mean? Maybe the SCB weren't running a conspiracy after all; maybe they'd been infiltrated by something else, like an apple riddled with rot from within.
She had stumbled onto something big. This wasn't like werewolf rumors and UFO reports. This was a real story, the kind of story that could prove her worth as an actual reporter. She held out the microphone, her heart triphammering against her ribs. They were so far away; all it was going to pick up was the rustling of leaves and her own soft breathing.
She crept from her tree to the next one, trying to work her way closer without making noise, holding her phone against her chest and the microphone in her other hand.
"How many Valeria are in Seattle?" Cho asked.
"A dozen, perhaps. Not very many. Unfortunately the Seattle contingent includes—"
Peri missed what it included. As she tried to lean out as far as possible, stretching her arm toward the conspirators under the shelter of an overhanging fern, the phone slipped out of her grasp. The rustle it made when it fell was clearly audible.
Cho and her contact both fell silent and spun around.
"Someone's there," the man snapped.
Cho drew her gun. Peri, crouching to fumble for her phone, let out an involuntary squeak of terror.
The man zeroed in on it like a hunting predator. Quick and silent, he ran in her direction. Peri scrambled backwards, turning to run, but in her panic the dark woods were filled with obstacles to trip her. She crashed through ferns and stumbled into trees, making as much noise as a buffalo.
But when a hand caught her arm, panic gave way to certainty. She might not be used to dealing with actual government conspiracies, but this was something she knew all about: getting caught in places she wasn't supposed to be. He's just like a security guard, and you've dealt with plenty of them, she told herself, and lashed out with her artificial foot, the same move she'd used on Noah—good grief, had it only been less than twenty-four hours ago?
But her assailant was prepared for her. He gracefully sidestepped her attack, and all Peri managed to do was throw herself off balance when her foot failed to connect. Firm, deft hands twisted her arms behind her back, and she was forced down to land jarringly on her face in a damp layer of leaf mold and moss, with a knee pressed into her back.
She wanted to be brave and defiant. She wanted to threaten them with lawyers and scream loud enough to be heard back at the house. But his weight was crushing the air out of her lungs, and her head was twisted painfully to the side, making her feel like she was choking. And all she could think was that the people who had already tried to drug and kidnap her, who'd shot a federal agent, had her in their power. It was like being a child again: helpless, scared, trapped. She could manage nothing except a breathy pleading.
"Don't hurt me, please—I won't tell anyone—help, please, I can't breathe—"
The crushing weight eased up slightly, as a crashing in the brush heralded Cho's arrival. "Who is it?" Cho demanded.
"I don't know. Not one of ours. At least I don't think so."
Sudden bright light speared Peri's face. She screwed her eyes shut. Cho cursed, and the brilliance behind Peri's screwed-up eyelids vanished as Cho snapped the light off. "Damn it. Matteo, let her up. It's the kid from the house, one of the people we're protecting."
"I'm not a kid," Peri said, but it came out sounding shaky, on the verge of tears, not at all the defiant rebuttal that she intended. However, the bruising grip on her arms let go, and she was able to roll over and sit up. She brushed shakily at the dirt and pine needles clinging to her chest, struggling to get herself under control. She refused to burst into tears in front of them.
"Is this yours?" Cho asked, waving Peri's phone and the attached microphone at her.
Peri wasn't sure whether a denial would be more incriminating than a confession, but she hesitated too long, trying to decide. Cho gave a brief nod.
"Just out in the woods for a quick sneak, right? Recording us, too, it looks like." Cho swiped at the phone with her thumb, and Peri flinched, but all that came from the phone's speaker was a soft crackling and rustling, with perhaps the faintest murmur of voices in the background. She had been too far away to record them, after all.
"What did you hear?" Matteo asked quietly.
"Nothing," Peri said. She glanced up; he was little more than a dark shape above her, half hidden behind the blue and purple splotches still dancing in her vision from Cho's flashlight. "I—I'm bird watching. There was a, er, a nightjar in the pine tree. I was trying to record it." She wasn't even sure what a nightjar was, except it was some kind of bird and it had "night" in the name, so maybe it came out after dark.
Matteo gave a sudden laugh. It sounded a little startled, as if he wasn't a man who laughed often and had surprised himself. "She reminds me of you," he said to Cho.
"I'm close enough to hit you, buddy." Cho's thumbs moved swiftly on the phone as she deleted the recording.
Peri made a mental note to see if any of her recovery apps could get it back later. She cleared her throat pointedly. "I'm very tired and I want to go get some sleep, so if I could just have my phone back, please ..."
"Peri, listen." Shadowed by the canopy of trees, Cho's face was little more than a dim blur, with the fading blotches on Peri's retinas dancing over it. "I swear you won't be in trouble. I need very badly to know what you overheard."
If you're working with the bad guys, of course you do. But now anger surged in her. She was done with people pushing her around, condescending to her like a dim child, telling her what to do. Peri closed her heart like a fist around that anger, using it to prop her up and chase away any lingering possibility of tears. She slipped a hand into her jacket pocket, felt the comforting weight of her collapsible baton, and scrambled to her feet.
"I'm going home now," she said, backing slowly away with her fingers curled around the baton. "You can—you can just keep my phone, it's not like it'll do me any good out here in the woods anyway." And when I get back to the house, I'll tell Noah what you're up to. I don't know if he'll believe me, but at least you'll have some explaining to do.
Matteo went into sudden, graceful motion, gliding like a ghost to block her retreat. Peri drew the baton and snapped it out to its full extent. She managed to catch him by surprise; she saw the look of shock on his face as she swung it. She almost went for his head, but the possibility of seriously hurting him was too great. She didn't want to accidentally kill someone, enemy or not. Instead she went for his ribs. He blocked it with an arm, and she felt the jarring shock through her hand and heard his sharp, pained intake of breath.
Cho charged in and dealt a sharp blow to her wrist. The baton fell from her suddenly nerveless fingers, and as Peri turned to run, Cho swept her feet out from under her. Peri went down hard on the forest floor, and as she lay half stunned, small brisk hands patted her down.
"Okay, my mistake," Cho muttered. "Should've checked if you had any weapons. Everyone okay?"
"I will be," Matteo said through gritted teeth.
Cho gave Peri a little shake. "Someone needs to teach you proper self-defense skills. You've got a lot of heart, kid, but not a lot of technique."
"I'm not a kid! Stop calling me that," Peri snapped, twisting her head to the side to get her face out of the dirt. She was too angry now to even be scared anymore. "I'm twenty-fucking-six! You can't possibly be more than a couple of years older than me."
"It's a gap of life experience, mostly," Cho said, holding her down with a seeming lack of effort when Peri bucked her body to try to throw her off. How could such a tiny woman be so strong?
"I grew up in a cult," Peri said. "Is that enough life experience for you? Okay, so I didn't come out here bird watching. I came out because I saw you sneak out of the house. Do you blame me? But I didn't hear a thing, at least nothing that makes sense. That's why I was trying to get closer with the mic. Good enough?"
She waited, panting with sharp heaves of her shoulders, until Matteo said quietly, "Let her up, Jen. She's right."
"Fine, you get to figure out what to tell her." But Cho eased off her, and Peri scrambled to her feet, glaring at both of them through the tangled mess of her hair. Matteo bent and picked up the baton, then held it out to her with his left hand. The right, the one she'd struck, hung at his side with the fingers loosely curled.
"You're right to be scared after everything that's happened to you," he said. "But I'm not going to hurt you. The people who are after you—I'm working with Jen to try to stop them."
Peri reached out quickly, snatched the baton from his hand, and backed up another few steps. "Or maybe you're one of them."
"I was," he agreed. "Now I'm Jen's contact on the inside."
"So who are they? What do they want?"
Matteo hesitated before saying, "They're ... trying to kill people like Jen and Agent Easton."
"You guys are white supremacists, you mean? Like some sort of far-right fascist group?"
"Er ... I suppose you can think of it that way, but they're—we're—not racially motivated, exactly. Same idea, though. I guess."