Fatal Strike (21 page)

Nina lifted her eyes, fixed them on Miles. “I didn’t send him, honey. I would’ve, if I could, but I can’t take credit for that. He did that on his own. All of it. With no help from us.”

Miles clearly heard the acerbic tang of reproof in her voice.

“Ladies?” he said again, plaintively. “Can we take this inside? Please? I could use some cover. This is making me nervous.”

“I just bet it is.” Nina let go of Lara and strode toward him with purpose. “I have just two things to say to you, Miles Davenport.”

Miles took a wary step backward. “Uh, let’s hear them.”

“They’re both non-verbal.” She reached out, gave him a fierce, tight, shaking hug. Then just as abruptly, she stepped back, hauled off and whacked him hard in the face,
smack.
A bruising open-hand.

“Fuck!” He reeled back. “Jesus, Nina! What was that about?”

Lara ran toward them. “Nina? What the hell are you doing?”

“I am so pissed at him!” Nina’s voice vibrated with fury. “Well and good that he saved you, but he is an opportunistic son of a
bitch
for seducing you right after!” She turned on Miles, cherry red with anger. “You might have waited! Even a few days would have been less indecent, for God’s sake! But I imagine your dick wanted what it wanted, right? You thought you had the right? You saved her, so you get to fuck her? Was that how it was? You
dickhead!
”

Miles pressed his hand to his stinging cheek, and opened his mouth to say he knew absolutely not what, but Lara broke in, leaping in front of him. A human shield.

“Do not hit him!” she yelled. “Not ever, Nina! You hear me?”

Nina pressed her fist to her shaking mouth. Her eyes were wet. “He shouldn’t have done that! He shouldn’t even have
looked
at you!”

“It wasn’t up to him! I jumped on him with all four feet! He had no choice!”

Tam snorted, giving Miles a mocking once-over. “Awww, poor little Miles. Forced, were you? Did she have to tie you down?”

“Fuck off, Tam,” he growled, licking blood off his lip, which Nina’s lusty blow had smashed against his tooth.

“If I were wrecked and broken, you might have a point, but I’m not!” Lara raged on. “Do you get it? They did not wreck me!”

Nina cupped Lara’s face. “Okay,” she crooned. “Okay, okay, I believe you. Good for you, sweetheart.” And they melted into a sobbing embrace once again. Miles was blessedly forgotten. Thank God.

Not by Tam, though. She sauntered toward Miles, giving him one of her X-ray stares, the ones where she read every fear and doubt and fatal fault line. She then turned the same stare onto Lara, who met it squarely, over Nina’s shoulder. After a minute, Tam nodded, having come to one of her inscrutable conclusions.

“Leave them alone, Nina,” she said. “Look at her eyes, her color. She’s all right. He’s doing his duty.” Miles flinched as she smacked the same reddened cheek Nina had slapped. “It’s about time, big boy. Glad to see you finally misbehaving like a man.” She punctuated her statement by swatting his ass, very hard.

“Hey!” Miles backed away. “Public service announcement. Next person who slaps me, I slap back. Girl or no girl.” He glanced at Lara. “Except for you,” he amended. “You can slap me any time you want. Thanks for sticking up for me.”

Her eyes swept down as a subtle smile quivered on her lips. “Least I could do. You were such a good sport about being tied down.”

Miles gaped, and turned his gaze wildly upon the other women. “Uh, that was a joke,” he told them hastily. “You get that, right?”

That cracked them all up.

He suffered through the snickering and chortling as they walked back to the house, but his discomfort melted away like magic when Lara grabbed his hand, a defiant, possessive gesture. Her slender hand was cool, her narrow fingers closing around his, jealously tight.

Staking her claim. He liked it. Let them mock and scold and slap and kick him around like a fucking soccer ball.

When she touched him like that, he could feel no pain.

L
ara rocked in Nina’s tight embrace and groped in her pocket for a tissue. It did something strange to her, seeing Nina after all these years. She’d worshipped the older girl as a child. And though they weren’t blood relatives, Nina was the only person left with whom she shared actual memories of her mother. It made Mother feel closer, somehow. More real. It had been such a sad, remote feeling, being the last repository of memories for a person. Like being lost in space.

Problem was, this warm fuzzy stuff melted her to mush. Nobody seemed to judge her for it, but still. She quelled another wave of emotion. “I can’t believe how different you look.” She stared at the bright, fitted sweater Nina wore. “I always thought you were pretty, but you wore baggy dark clothes, so I never knew you had a hot figure, too.”

“Oh, well. Aaro insists.” Nina darted a smile at her guy, Aaro, who sat on the couch near them. He was tongue-tied and uncomfortable, but clearly unwilling to be more than a few feet from his lady. Even if she was hugging the sobbing girl. Tough-guy Kryptonite.

Miles was seated on the other side of her, twitching with discomfort and embarrassment, but whenever he made a move to go, she grabbed his hand and yanked him right back down.
Nope. Plant your ass right here, buddy. Do not move it one inch.
Everyone needed to get the non-verbal cue that she had not gone to rack and ruin, she was not a poor, broken girl that Miles had taken advantage of in her moment of weakness. Hell, no. None of his fierce friends would dare to slap or scold him if she was clutching his hand in a white-knuckled death grip.

So there, everyone. Take that. She hung on. He was all hers.

Hours had gone by since Nina, Tam, and Edie had arrived. Big platters of deli sandwiches had appeared on the table at one point, and Miles had nagged and poked and prodded until she’d successfully gotten around half of a turkey and swiss, and another glass of juice.

The room was packed. It was an overwhelming number of people, after months of solitude with only occasional vicious attacks from Hu and Anabel to break the monotony, and she and Miles were the main attraction. But damn, out of nowhere, a group of smart, brave strangers had saved her and borne her up. How crazy and improbable was that.

She would endure their focused attention if it killed her. She fished for the tissue again.

“You okay?” Miles leaned in close.

She nodded. “Need more tissues,” she muttered.

“I’ll go and look for—”

“No!” She yanked him back. “Don’t go anywhere. Sorry to be clingy, but just . . . just stay put. I’d rather just leak.”

“Uh, okay.” He sank back down, lifted her hand to his lips, kissed it. Eight people in the room took notice, and exchanged meaningful glances. The stunning redhead with the tight bun and the skintight black clothes, the one they called Tam, clapped her hands briskly.

“Time for one of Edie’s drawings,” she announced. “We need to speed things up. Do you know about Edie’s drawings?”

Lara looked up at Edie, who had been introduced as Kev’s wife. She was tall and slim, with a long, loose, dark braid and a gentle smile. Very pretty, in an understated way. “Know what?”

“I have this ability,” Edie explained. “Maybe a tiny bit like yours. When I draw, I see things about the people I’m drawing for. Sometimes they can be useful. It’s not a precision instrument, but it can help.”

“It only happens when you draw?” Lara asked.

Edie nodded. “It only runs on that channel.”

Lara sighed. “I wish I could pick a channel. When it comes on me, it’s more like an epileptic seizure.”

“We can probably help you with that,” Nina said. “We’ve been working on blocking techniques, control issues. Me, Aaro, Edie. We’ll help you out. We’ll work on it together.”

She tried to smile, but her smile felt weighted down. She had a hard time imagining what kind of conscious control could keep her from tripping when the pull started to suck her down into the vortex.

“Thanks, I guess,” she said, faintly.

“Of course, when it comes to shields, nobody beats Super-Miles,” Aaro said, sourly. “The magical boy that no bullet can kill.”

Edie serenely ignored him. “So? Can I draw for you, Lara?”

Lara stared for a moment, blankly. Still unaccustomed to the idea of her wishes being considered. She stammered a little. “Ah . . . sure.”

Edie still hesitated. “Sometimes it’s scary.”

Lara just looked at her. Edie broke eye contact, her face reddening. “Um, sorry. Forget I said that. Stupid of me.”

“It’s okay,” Lara said quietly. “Go ahead.”

A hush came over the room as Edie started to draw. It was quiet enough to hear the scratch of the pencil on paper. Everyone seemed afraid to breathe. Clearly, they all took Edie’s ability very seriously.

Kev, Edie’s husband, the scarred twin of the one they called Sean, came over and sat next to his wife. Val, too, came over, sliding his arms around Tam, from behind. Nina grabbed Aaro’s hand.

Lara glanced at Miles. Her gaze stuck on him. Those beautiful, soulful dark eyes, so charged with emotion. His gorgeous, battered face.

He held out his arms to her, and she moved into them with such a feeling of magnetic inevitability, it made her heart shake.

She huddled there, folded up tight, her head beneath his chin. Blocking everything out but his warmth, his scent, his heartbeat.

Sometime later, she sensed the breathless tension in the room resolve. She looked up. Edie stared down at her sketchbook with a puzzled frown. Kev pondered it, too, over her shoulder, his mouth grim. Neither of them seemed to like what they saw.

Gee. Why was she not surprised.

The others were clustering around, peering at the sketch with various expressions of perplexity.

Lara held out her hand. Edie passed the sketchbook over.

It was a sharp icicle-in-the-belly feeling, to see something from inside her head externalized. She’d witnessed this scene over and over. It was as disturbing rendered on paper as it had been in her head.

It was a freeze-frame from the worst vignette in her weird sleepwalker vision. The woman in the pink shirt staring out the window, hair uncombed, mouth slack, eyes vacant, while behind her, the toddler wailed desperately in her crib.

Superimposed over the woman’s head was another drawing, an odd, ball-shaped thing with tiny tentacle-like protuberances all over it, like an illustration in a biology book. She had no clue what it could be.

She looked up into their expectant faces, and cleared her throat, trying to make her voice loud enough for all of them to hear.

“This is a scene from one of my recurring visions,” she said. She glanced at Miles. “I had it last night, along with the Tokyo bomb one, remember? It starts in a city park, and things seem normal, but it’s too quiet, and the grass is too long, and deer are grazing in the park. And people are just sitting there, or lying on the ground. Maybe alive, maybe dead. Then I see . . . her.” She indicated the woman in the sketch. “But I don’t know about that thing that’s drawn on top.”

“It looks like a virus,” Kev said. “I’ll identify it, if I can.”

“Another terrorist attack, maybe?” Miles offered. “With biological weapons?”

“Could be,” she said, reluctantly. What a horrible thought.

“Another? What do you mean, another?” Con’s voice was sharp. “You mean there was one already?”

“One she stopped,” Miles said. “Tokyo. Last night.”

“Oh, yeah,” Nina’s eyes widened. “We heard on the radio when we were driving here from Portland that they evacuated the main train station in downtown Tokyo, and the bomb squad found enough explosives on a train to blow up . . .” Her voice trailed off, as she looked into Lara’s eyes. “Wait,” she said. “You mean, that was you? The anonymous tip?”

“Yeah,” Miles said. “She got a Japanese friend to call for her.”

“Keiko, this guy I hung out with in high school,” she explained, suddenly on the defensive. “He has no connection to my life in San Francisco. He lives in Seattle. I figured, why would Greaves or anyone make the connection? A bomb in Tokyo, and me? Why?”

She looked around at the faces of the men in the room. The sense of growing dread in the air. No one would meet her eyes.

“She had to call,” Miles said, more forcefully. “The bomb was going to go off in a matter of hours. There was no time to lose.”

God, how she loved him. Never more than in that moment. Their clasped fingers tightened.

“I’m not saying she should not have called,” Davy said. “I’m saying you should have told us. And we should have ground the fucking phone into powder and hauled ass out of here. Last night.”

“Why would this high school friend in Seattle calling with an anonymous tip pop up on Greaves’ radar?” Miles protested.

“Don’t even ask. Did he at least understand what he was messing with?” Davy’s voice was uncompromising. “Did you warn him?”

“We told him to leave town,” Lara said, pressing her hand against the flutter in her belly. “I’m sorry. I was just thinking about the four hundred and seventy three people who would have been blown to bits. Body parts everywhere. I’ve seen it so many times. I wanted to stop it. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you guys, but I would have done anything.”

“Of course you would,” Edie said gently. “And so would any of us. And you did save them.” She leaned forward, tapping the sketchpad. “Maybe this is another one of the things you can actually change. That’s what always tormented me about my ability, that it seemed like I could never change the outcomes. But you did, Lara! This is great news! This is a big victory! Chalk one up for the good guys!”

Lara was deeply suspicious of the impulse to see any ray of hope in this mess. Letting herself be happy seemed like a trap.

She smiled at the woman anyway, appreciating the encouraging thought. “I don’t have any hard data for this one, though,” she said. “With Tokyo, I had a time, a place. I saw the bomb, the date clock. With this one, all I have is random images of strangers in a park, and a picture of an unidentified virus. And a sense that it’s very bad. Even worse than the Tokyo bomb.”

“In any case, we need to get out of here,” Connor said. “Let’s settle on someplace for her to be. We talked about it last night, while you guys were resting. The most fortified places are Tam and Val’s place up in Cray’s Cove, or Stone Island, with Seth and Raine. We figured we’d drive up with—”

“No,” Miles said.

His flat negation silenced the room. As if he had said something shocking.

“Ah . . . Miles?” Nina said carefully. “You do know that Lara needs a safe place to recuperate from—”

“I know damn well what she needs,” Miles said. “But these places are not safe. All the physical security in the world won’t stop Greaves when he comes down. And he will come down. He’ll figure out who I am, if he hasn’t already, and he’ll finger all of you.” He turned to Val and Tam. “You’ve got Irina and Rachel up at the Cove. You wouldn’t be able to protect them if he came after us there. Don’t give him any reason to do that. Really. Trust me on this.”

Tam’s face looked like a marble statue. Val’s mouth was flat.

“Same with Stone Island,” Miles pressed grimly on. “The security there is useless for our purposes. Who’s there, Seth and Raine, their security staff, plus Jesse, and the twins, who are, what, eighteen months old? Same problem. All of you guys with kids, you’re already too exposed. He’ll be looking at everyone I’ve ever had social or professional dealings with, and you guys are smeared all over my life.”

“Excuse us for that,” Aaro muttered.

“Don’t be a snotty bitch,” Miles said sharply. “That’s not what I meant. I appreciate the help you’ve given me already, and you know it.”

“What you’re saying is that we can’t help you?” Kev asked slowly. “You’re saying that you and Lara are better off alone?”

Miles grimaced. “Fuck,” he muttered. “I don’t mean to sound like an arrogant asshole. We wouldn’t have made it out without your help this far. But look at the facts. These people are all enhanced. Nina and Aaro and Edie are the only ones of you all with any practical experience at all in blocking invasive telepathy, and Greaves would smash them like bugs. You felt him, Aaro. You know it’s true.”

Aaro stared back, stonefaced. Unable to deny it, but too angry and proud to say that Miles was right.

“You can’t help us now,” Miles went on. “None of you can. You can’t even know where we run. It’s come to that.”

Lara could feel the anger and resistance vibrating in the air. She broke the silence, pulling out the cell. “I’ve got to call Keiko.”

“For Christ’s sake!” Miles flared. “Have you been listening?”

“Yes,” she said. “The upshot is, we run like hell to someplace no one on earth knows about. Isn’t that the plan?”

Miles shrugged. “Such as it is.”

“I have to know Keiko is okay first, and I might as well call from this place, since I appear to have already burned it for us. Right?”

A tense silence followed.

“She has a point, at that,” Davy said heavily. “Call, then. We all want to know. But hurry. We need to get out of here.”

Lara got the number wrong twice, with her shaking, rubbery finger. The phone buzzed and buzzed. Then a recorded voice, telling her the client was unavailable, and to try later.

She met Miles’ eyes. Shook her head. The dread got heavier.

“I’ll call the magazine he works for,” she said. “Can you find the number for me on your smartphone? It’s
Beat Street Style
magazine.”

Miles’ finger tapped, teasing the number out of the database. He held up the display for her to see. She tapped it in, and waited.

“Beat Street Style,” answered a young, male voice.

“Hi. I’m looking for Keiko Yamada,” she said. “Is he there?”

“Um . . . um, no. I’m sorry, but he’s not here right . . . oh, God.” The guy’s voice wobbled. “I can’t do this, Kim. You do it.”