For The Wicked (Fantasy Heights) (14 page)

Tony was stuffing Brandon into a suit coat, too. Brent was tossing the end of a necktie around, making a Windsor knot. The tie looked like the one Derek had worn that day in The Viewing Room.

Brandon didn’t look right. His eyes were half open. He kept trying to pull away from Tony and Brent.

What were they doing? Something bad. Should she be trying to get away?

She struggled to sit up. Her arms didn’t respond to orders.

Tony said, “Okay. Brandon’ll be fully awake soon. Use Amanda’s phone, now. Text Josh to find out where he is. Say ‘Where are you? I need to see you’ or something.”

Amanda tried harder to focus, to make her hands respond. Everything seemed to stall at her shoulders. She had to stop these people. Stop Brent from sending that text.

She tried to reach for her phone, but nothing moved. Helpless, she watched Brent type on her phone while despair began to spin a smothering web.

Brent spoke to her, very near her ear. “You’re a nice girl. You wouldn’t want anyone to suffer, would you? And they will, unless you stay still. Can you be sweet for me?”

The feel of his breath on her cheek made the hairs stand up on her neck. Get away. She wanted to shout at him to get away. But it felt as if he were holding a muzzle to her brain. Couldn’t escape.

She heard a familiar buzzing sound. Phone. Her phone was buzzing.

“Shit,” Brent said. “Josh just texted her back. He says, and I quote, ‘You know I can’t do this.’ He’s not cooperating. What do we do now?”

Silence for a moment. Then Tony spoke again. “That program you gave Yvette, the one she uses to text the stepsister from Thomas’s number... Could we use it to text Josh?”

Panic forced Amanda into sharper focus. Ideas took on solid shapes, solid form. Clone. Yvette had texted with Shelley. Not Thomas. And now they wanted to trick Josh that same way.

If only her limbs would catch up with her brain. She still couldn’t move. Couldn’t fight this.

Brent said, “No. It doesn’t work the way you think.”

“Okay. It’s all right. I still have Amanda’s car. I guess it’s time for plan B.”

Amanda truly began to panic as Tony held up a strange-looking gun.

“What the hell is that?” Brent asked.

“A chemical capture weapon. It’s the same sedative and paralytic cocktail Amanda and Brandon got, only in dart form.”

“You people and your drugs. No sense of fair play whatsoever.”

“Fuck fair play. Josh isn’t exactly a weakling, and you know how dangerous Bishop is. If it makes me a pussy to shoot them with darts, then so be it. I’d rather be a live sissy than a dead one.”

“Whatever, man,” Brent complained. “Just hurry up. I don’t want to be here alone with Yvette if I can help it.”

Josh set his phone on the coffee table. He leaned forward to prop his elbows on his knees and rub his eyes.

He never would have taken Amanda for the vindictive type, but she sure did know how to twist a knife. How could she send a text like that so soon after he’d called it quits? Did she think giving her up had been easy for him? Painless?

He’d had no other choice. Thomas loved Amanda, but he would never tell her while his best friend stood in his way. Amanda fit with Thomas like a puzzle piece. What gave him the right to remain between them, especially when he was nowhere near ready for another relationship? He never would be while the Janos albatross hung around his neck. Amanda deserved better. And Thomas needed his queen.

Josh sighed, and squeezed his eyes shut before standing up to stretch. Late or not, he should go for a run. Maybe that could burn away the feel and smell of her. Or scald the raw hurt on Amanda’s face from his brain.

He rolled his neck and walked away from the phone. If she texted him again, he wouldn’t know about it until morning when he could approach it with a level head.

After a quick swing upstairs to change into running clothes, he hurried outside. Better take the short route. He still had to be at the office by dawn.

It didn’t take long for the run to pay off. Running at night brought the burn on with a vengeance. His mind surrendered itself to physical needs. Cool, humid air made his lungs hurt like hell, and by the time he turned the last corner, his legs were riding that tight edge between light as air and unresponsive as lead.

Headlights headed his direction. The roads were usually deserted this time of night. He watched the car swerve toward his driveway. Its lights swept over him, and then the car veered back onto the road.

Great. Drunk driver. The car sped up toward him, then slowed way down.

The closer he got, the more alert to danger he became. He couldn’t see the car itself yet, but those headlights sure looked like Honda headlights. Amanda drove a Honda. That had better not be her. If it was, he would personally wring her neck for getting behind the wheel.

He sped up to see if that was really Amanda’s car. When he was about forty yards away, the car stopped. Closer still, he realized that yes, that was her car.

Ah, man. Why was she doing this? What was he going to say?

With twenty yards left, something hit him in the stomach. He felt a pop of impact just below his sternum, followed by a sharp, cold stabbing pain. His step faltered as he looked down to see something long and white sticking out of his gut. It looked like…

What the hell? He stopped running. His heart pounded and he panted, lungs burning, as he stared down at the object. It took a moment before he could close his fingers around the barrel of the hypodermic needle embedded in his gut. There was a red fan of feather at the end. A dart.

Mother fucker. What was this? The Serengeti?

He felt a jolt. He thought perhaps another dart had hit him until he realized he had simply fallen to one knee.

Trouble. His body was still in run mode, speeding the contents of that hypo through his system. The thought stuck in place for only a second or two. He barely got his hands out in front of himself in time to prevent a face-plant, right there on the road.

He tried to pick his head up. Amanda. Her car. Had she… No. She wouldn’t do this, would she?

He started to slide sideways when suddenly there were hands bracing his shoulders, pulling at his t-shirt.

“Oh, no you don’t. You can make it into the car before your legs stop working. Don’t make me carry you.”

His ears began to buzz. It felt like there was a cotton ball behind his nose, on the inside. Growing. Expanding, softly blocking out his sight with a gray void. His hearing was absorbed next.

He froze there. Stalled out for no idea how long. He came back to himself, uncertain at first, confused by what he heard. Car. He was in the backseat of a car. On gravel. Stopping now. He tried to sit up but then the fuzz swallowed him again.

When next he returned, he was sitting in a hard chair. His head rested on his forearms. Table in front of him. Dim light, and one of his favorite smells. Gasoline.

He took a deep breath of it, and then wished he hadn’t. He started to cough. So strong. The smell was really strong.

A sense of menace dragged more of him back to the fore. He picked his head up. Opened his eyes, and began to take in his surroundings. Table. Black lumpy shape on top, surrounded by neat rectangle shapes. Something blurry off to his right. More chairs, probably. And a couple people.

“Shit,” someone said from behind and to his left. “He’s awake.”

“Don’t worry about it. That stuff will keep him loopy for a good long while, yet.”

“It better. Help me. These gas tanks are friggin’ heavy.”

Unsure what was happening, Josh squinted, trying to figure out what those shapes were on the table before him. And the blurry forms in those other chairs. Fleeting reason told him they were people, of course. He just couldn’t make out faces. Everything was so fuzzy. Disorienting. Frustrating.

He took another deep breath. Not so deep as last time. With the first good pull of air into his lungs, the edges of his vision sharpened considerably. Better. Much better. Again. And again.

A stirring motion drew his attention to the chair farthest from him. With better focus now, he recognized its occupant. Brandon Briggs.

That sense of menace ballooned into danger. He didn’t understand what he and Brandon were doing here, but the last time people had been drugged and socked away together in some strange place, Derek O’Shay had ended up dead.

Tension escalating, Josh shifted his focus onto the nearer chair. As the person in it took shape, the shock hit. Amanda. That was Amanda. She sat with her head resting against the wing of the chair. Eyes closed. She wasn’t moving. His gaze fell to her chest. Saw the jacket gaping open and the troublingly slow but even rise and fall motion as she breathed.

The sight reassured him, except his system had kicked into overdrive with a fight response his head hadn’t quite caught up with, yet. Why was he panicking?

Why
turned out to be a dangerous mirror. Once his mind looked into it, all manner of hell reflected back at him. Amanda sleeping in a chair. Little black cases on the table. Janos. Headlights. Amanda’s car. The smell of gasoline.

Very slowly, Josh leaned back, keeping his head at a weak angle meant to fool the talkers while he focused on Amanda. She was in danger. The certainty kept him focused. He had to sharpen up for her sake, if not his own.

He was still watching her, breath by breath, when behind Amanda a door opened. For the first time, his focus widened to include their surroundings. Not a house. A shed of some sort. Crude wooden walls. Wide doorway.

Another shape appeared in that doorway. Tall. Slim build. Platinum blond hair, white suit.

The shape moved forward, closer to his end of the table. A frantic warning fired inside his brain. He inhaled sharply.

Kay. Kay back to life. Or… No. It was not Kay. The eyes were too round. Must be Yvette, with the Kay makeover. Didn’t matter. He still had to catch her. Stop her before anyone else got hurt.

He would have to move fast. Praying his arms and legs would cooperate, he pushed backward, away from the table. The chair bumped into something behind him, but he got the response he was looking for. He was on his feet. Yvette’s eyes went wide as his hands closed around her neck.

Screaming. Yvette was screaming.

Josh tried to squeeze, but he was falling away. He lost his balance, and then there were hands grabbing him from behind, and everyone yelling. Dragging him back to the chair, slamming him into it once more.

He felt a sharp jab in his shoulder. Gritted his teeth as a warm, oily feeling made him shimmer like a mirage.

Easier. So much easier just to slip away with it. Let himself flow. He knew it might mean the end of them all, but it was too hard to fight.

Thomas itched his forehead with the cap-end of his pen. Somewhere down the hall, a phone rang. The sound trilled dull and dead in a near-deserted branch office. Near midnight, the words before him on the monitor wanted to bleed together into a nonsensical smear.

Still, he kept reading. To kill time, he’d begun to pull files on Scott Milazzo’s missing gamers. The sheer number of them was troubling. Eighteen disappearances indirectly linked by online video games. Each of the missing gamers had played religiously, though they hadn’t all played the same games at the same time. And there was a connection to Fantasy Heights. Not only had the prodigal plastic-surgery guy been to the resort, but another of the missing gamers had, as well.

His cellphone buzzed on the desk. As always, he felt that extra zap of interest now that Amanda had developed a habit of texting him at bedtime. Nights when they weren’t together, he caught himself waiting for that text.

Christ, she was turning him soft. Didn’t stop him from grabbing the phone and swiping his thumb across the screen. While he did so, the phone buzzed a second time with a second message.

The first text read
Josh and I have a surprise for you
.

The second text was a picture that raised his eyebrows. The image showed a fairly close shot of Amanda’s hand resting between her breasts. Lapels of a white jacket covered her nipples, yet the enticing bulge of cleavage started his libido on fire.

Meanwhile, the rest of him very calmly leaned back in his chair. Not jealous. Nothing to be jealous about. Josh and Amanda were trying to surprise him. They meant to include him. His girlfriend, and his best friend. They were enlightened enough to make this work, weren’t they?

Sure. Enlightened or not, his gut reaction made him want to put his fist through a wall.

Fuck. He couldn’t go on like this much longer. Someone would break eventually, and he grew more and more certain he would be the first.

He was still staring at the picture when the third text arrived, this time with coordinates and driving directions from the map app they all used.

Time to decide how to handle this. Should he pretend to be a good sport and show up? Should he cry off? He did have an excuse. The guys in Virginia were still going over Jerod’s note, comparing it against what they knew from other sources, and what they’d surmised about Yvette’s motives. Waiting on their verdict gave him every reason in the world to stay here instead of jump to Amanda and Josh’s bait.

He sighed and rubbed a stubbly cheek. Why was this such a mess? Why couldn’t he just find them, march in there, and tell them how he really felt: Josh had been right when he’d said there was no way they could share Amanda without pissing each other off.

So here he was, eating his heart out over Amanda, but staying silent because Josh loved her too. Maybe not the same way, but the fact remained. So which was worse? Sharing someone he loved, or having nothing at all?

He muttered a curse, shut down his computer and headed out. He could decide on the way home. The GPS coordinates Amanda sent placed their rendezvous point about ten minutes from Fantasy Heights, outside town in the other direction. Forty or so minutes away from the branch office. He’d stop home first, ditch the suit, and head out there.

Thomas was almost home when Helen called. She sounded dead tired, which invited guilt to take a bite of him. Helen was catching the brunt of enforcing all the new security measures, pulling long hours without a single complaint.