Spark Rising (12 page)

“You told me you’d protect her.”

“I told you I would get her to safety. And I did. And if you’ll notice, I’m still working on doing that.” Alex pointed a finger in Ace’s face. “I also told you I was running out of time and at some point my hands would be tied.”

“Your hands would be tied? You shot her.
You shot her
. Then you handed her over to them.” Ace’s chest heaved. His lips thinned.

“I stunned her. And at that point, I had to. Lucas would have had her in custody in a matter of moments, and I had to be sure I would be included in her interrogation. It was the only way I could think to buy the time to figure out how to get her out of there.” It sucked. It did. But it had been the first step to saving her. Did he even stand a chance at making Ace understand it?

“You stunned her? You betrayed her.” Ace all but snarled rage and frustration at Alex.

Nope, not a chance. He sighed. “I never intended for her to stay in custody. It was just something that had to happen to buy time. There is more at stake than—”

“Like Mercedes’s death?” Ace’s voice rose now, enough that any neighbors at home might hear. Alex needed to end the conversation now. But Ace shouted, “You said you would keep her safe—”

“And you think I haven’t?” Alex interrupted. “I’ve risked everything to help her. Who the hell are you to tell me you don’t like the way I’ve done it? She would be dead right now if not for me. Dead or worse.”

“Or worse?” Ace scoffed. “I’ve got news for you, man. There ain’t anything worse than dead.”

Alex snorted his disdain. He leaned in and lowered his voice. “I’ve got news for you, simpleton. There damn well is.”

Ace’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Get out. I’ll keep her safe myself.”

“You’ll get her killed,” he told him calmly. “And you’ll die with her.”

“Get out!”

“Stop it.” Lena’s voice, tired but strong, carried from the arched hall leading to the rear of the apartment.

Alex swept his gaze over her, checking her small body for injuries. She was whole, but she still wore her dead mother’s dress. Somehow, it made her command more effective. He snapped his mouth shut and bit back the words he’d been about to growl at Ace.

Ace wouldn’t give up. “I’ve had enough of his lies and doubletalk. I want him gone and—”

“I said stop!”

They stared at each other. She didn’t move. She didn’t so much as blink. Ace did, looking away.

“He helped me, Ace. Even when he was hurt, the first thing he did was help me.” She was matter-of-fact, as if she’d been turning the thought over and over until it became clear. “You’re focusing on the wrong part of the story, Ace. I get it. The whole time they tortured me, I blamed him, too. But as soon as he had the opportunity, he’s the one who got me out.” She shrugged. “And if I’d listened to him and come straight here instead of going to Teresa’s….”

She shrugged again, but her focus scattered. It darted away from them, across the room, touching on a chair, a picture, the floor. She lifted her face back to them again with a sigh. The blue-green of her eyes was darker.

“Are you okay?” Alex asked her. He immediately winced. Stupid, stupid question.

Ace stared at him incredulously.

She laughed, the sound a little hollow. She reached both hands up to her face and pressed the heels of her palms against her brow. When she dropped them, she shrugged with her hands. “I am. I guess I really am. Wonder what that says about me.” It was a statement, not a question, as if she’d already decided what it said about her. No doubt she’d had Teresa’s help in coming to whatever conclusion she’d reached.

“It says you’re a survivor.” He looked from Lena to Ace. “So now we have to make sure you survive, no matter how motivated they are, and get you somewhere the Council can’t reach.”

“I’m pretty motivated myself,” she said. “You say you have a place safe from the Council. Are you and your people working against them?”

“We are working
for
Sparks—”

“Yes, but are you working against the Council? I’ll go with you if I can help destroy them.”

Her soft voice filled with an intensity that took his breath away. The Council had carved a hole deep within Lena Gracey, and she wanted to fill it with vengeance.

Alex nodded at her. He could give her vengeance.

“Lena, no. He just wants to use what you can do.”

“I want this.
I want this.
So let them use me. It turns out I’m a pretty good weapon.”

She was an exceptional weapon.

“I can get you out,” Alex swore, making the promise to all three of them. “I have a safe house. You get to it at dusk, when the streets are full of people heading home or to night shift. Wait for me there. I can get you out.”

“Dusk is really soon,” Lena said. Her hands picked at bits of the hospital room wall still embedded in the weave of her mother’s dress.

Alex nodded. “Shower. Do you have any clothes here?” At her nod, he continued, “Good. Change. Then you and Ace can go for a walk. Take some food and water. I should be able to come for you tomorrow, but it may not be until late. Once Ace leaves, sit tight and wait.”

“You expect me to just take her somewhere and
leave her
?”

“I expect you to do what needs to be done in order to assure her safety. You know, like
I’ve
been doing all along?” He was nonchalant, but the words were meant to dig.

Ace bristled.

“No, Ace, you aren’t leaving me anywhere.” Her voice had gained strength.

“That’s exactly right.”

The man had no idea how dangerous it was to give Alex that look.

“Stop smirking, Ace.” Lena tossed out. “You aren’t leaving me anywhere because you aren’t going. You’ve risked enough. And I can take care of myself, as you well know.”

Ace shook his head and opened his mouth. Alex turned away and tuned them out. He ignored the argument behind him and crossed to a desk. Deliberately slanting his letters far to the left and shifting his neat block lettering to a casual scrawl, he dipped a pen in ink and jotted down the address of the safe house. If she got picked up, this wouldn’t come back to him. He couldn’t save her ass again if he was in the cell next to hers.

He blew on the ink until it dried, then folded the paper and turned back to them. She stood serenely, as if waiting for him. Ace was still infuriated. Alex held the slip of paper aloft between his first two fingers, waving it back and forth between them as if unsure who would take it. After several seconds, he made as if he’d finally realized Ace would not be going along. He pulled a sad face at the man before crossing and giving the address to Lena.

Yeah, I’m an asshole
.
Oh, well
.

“You should leave in about twenty minutes,” he told her, all business. “You’ll be traveling away from every area they have the manpower to watch so far. Blend in, and you should be good. Remember food and water. The address is between two storefronts, around back down the alley. Get in. Hunker down. Sit tight, ’cause the streets will be crawling with agents in a matter of hours. I’ll be there as soon as it’s safe to make a move.”

She nodded. Her arms went around herself.

“I will be there,” Alex continued. “This time…do us both a favor and actually wait for me.”

She cracked a smile. That was good. If she realized how badly she’d misjudged him, maybe she’d stop.

Chapter 10

Lena wove through a crowd of people. Some moved against her to get to their homes and others hurried with her to make it to work. She settled the knit bag holding flatbread, hard cheese, and water further up her shoulder for security and focused on blending in. At least she looked like she belonged. She’d quickly showered away the dust and grit coating her skin and hair and shed the dress—her mind veered from the memory and instead focused on the clothes she wore now.

Ace had found them on one of his trade excursions. She’d left them with him because she had little use for bright, lapis-colored, antique blouses and silky teal skirts in her everyday life in the desert. Now they helped her look like one of the brightly clad young women who worked the power plants but hoped to catch the eye of someone in the Council building. Well, except for the bloom so bright Lena imagined she could see it herself from the corners of her eyes.

Reyes had commented on it before he left, wishing that they had some way for her to ground. It wasn’t like she could march into the grounding center. After what she’d done, the accumulated power zinging through her now would discharge spectacularly. She hoped anyone noticing the bloom would dismiss it as a young woman pushing her grounding way past the limits of what was smart.

So far, so good. Passersby were immersed in their own thoughts. The foot traffic was swift and free-flowing, citizens moving with heads down, hardly seeming happy in a city that billed itself as the comfortable, fair alternative to the unpowered wilderness.

A gust of southwestern spring wind roared through the street like a moving wall, pushing at the people. Dirt rose into the air in visible eddies. She automatically narrowed her eyes and turned her head away from the dust-filled wind that sent small, unsecured items rolling down the street with it. With her eyes squeezed into narrow slits and watering at the grit, she almost missed the faded lettering above the boarded up storefront. She darted into the small doorway. An equally faded notice informed her that Longoria General Goods had moved.

She steeled herself against the wind again as she stepped out of the slight protection the little alcove had provided. Only a few quick steps down from it, though, she could turn into the narrow alleyway between the two adobe buildings. When she reached the end of the building to her left, she turned behind it. The tiny little add-on building nestled in the far corner of the small lot. As promised, an electric lock secured it, tucked away to be as unobtrusive as possible.

Lena settled her hand against it, exhaling as she reached out to the Dust. The lock snicked open, and she slipped inside. She took the time to add her own special touch when she re-locked it. Now the Dust would send her a silent alarm if anyone attempted to open it.

She turned to the small, spare room. It covered only the essentials. A narrow cot ran along the wall across from the door. In the far corner across from the cot sat a lidded bucket. Being trapped in this tiny space with the smell of whatever waste she added to the bucket wasn’t ideal, but at least someone had provided one. She’d wait as long as she could.

She took a long, uneven breath. She was proud of herself for managing it without tears. As a rule, she wasn’t a crier. Being strong mattered, her parents had taught her. If the neighbors heard, they would question the sound of a dead child’s grief. Tears were a mistake none of them could afford.

Instead of crying, she looked around again, making a memory and knowing its import: this room was the first step on the road to revenge. She allowed herself a moment to savor the thought before setting it aside. She’d pick it up again later, when she could show the memory of her parents all that she’d done to make it right.

She crossed to a tiny table with a pair of three-legged wooden stools tucked under it and a book resting on its top. She set her bag of food and water down before picking up the book –
The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake
. It was very old, the cover dusty and worn, the edges of the pages yellowed. A small scrap of torn paper peeked out from the top. She carefully turned to it, hoping the thin pages wouldn’t tear in her hands.

“Auguries of Innocence,” she whispered to herself. She skimmed downward. Specific groups of lines were carefully underlined here and there, with tiny, neatly lettered comments written beside the poem. It appeared the words had been underlined at a different time than the comments, perhaps by a different hand?

A Truth that’s told with bad intent,

Beats all the Lies you can invent.

The note beside the lines read, “Integrity versus Honesty?” She skimmed down the poem to the next set of underlined words.

To be in a Passion you Good may do,

But no Good if a Passion is in you.

She reread the line a couple of times. The carefully lettered note beside the lines read simply, “EXACTLY.” Lena blinked. “Huh.” She had to disagree. Maybe. If she felt a little more confident that she understood the words.

She raised her brows. Whose book was it? Did anyone other than Reyes use this safe house? Or were there others in Relo-Azcon who did similar work and might have need of a place to hide? She shrugged and hooked one of the stools out from under the table with her foot, dragging it back. She plopped down and bent over the ancient book.

It didn’t take her long to decide she didn’t agree with the mystery commentator’s tiny notes, however thoughtful they might be. She had the urge to write a snarky reply. Good thing she had no pen and ink. On the upside, a one-sided debate while she read would give her something to occupy her attention while she waited.

By the next afternoon, however, not even puzzling over the ancient poetry kept her occupied. She paced the confines of the space, arms swinging loosely with nervous energy, as she had been for at least an hour. She heaved out a breath and fell onto the cot.

She’d tried to sleep the night before. Her efforts to beat the dust out of the pillow had resulted in a sneezing fit and streaming eyes and nose. Once she’d finally lain down, wiping at her nose every few minutes, she’d jerked awake every time she started to doze off.

While she was conscious, she could force her mind to focus on things other than the events in the Council building. The Kewa. Her home at the edge of their territory. The things she needed to get done to be ready for the harsh high desert summer. The puzzle of Reyes.

Every time she started to drift off, her mind flew back to that Council room with Lucas leering over her. She would force herself to wake, jerking up and away from both the cot and the pain. She’d finally fallen asleep out of sheer exhaustion. Hours later, she’d woken from a sobbing, cold-sweat nightmare. She couldn’t remember the details. She didn’t want to. Her hoarse cries had been for her mother. She didn’t need to know more.

She popped up from the cot, arms still tight around herself. She paced, every step a slap of heels on floor, and swore savagely at herself. It was ridiculous. She hadn’t seen her mother in months, and even longer before then. Neither of them had any real presence in the life of the other, and that was as they both preferred. Her mother hadn’t been able to deal with the strength of Lena’s “gifts,” and Lena refused to hide.

After several tries, she swallowed down the lump in her esophagus. She told herself her allergy attack caused her sore throat. It wasn’t tight with tears.

The alert from the lock made her jump. She dropped her arms, looking wildly around, but with no bolt hole she had nowhere to run. Reyes swung open the door and entered. He barely spared her a glance before turning to re-secure the locks.

He turned and did a double take. His right hand came up as if to calm her.

Lena swiped at her nose. “I’m not crying,” she lied. “I’m having a reaction to the dust in the pillow.” She lifted her chin with stubborn pride, but she couldn’t keep it from trembling.

Reyes’s gaze swept over her as he evaluated whether or not he believed her. Finally, he nodded and crossed the room to stand in front of her. He chewed the inside of his lower lip as he regarded her. His eyes were deep and so dark his pupils disappeared. He opened his mouth to say something, closed it, then nodded and started again.

“You were right,” he said, his voice soft, “back there outside Santo Domingo. They did snatch little Alejandro away from his mom and dad to make him a Ward. And it fucked with his head.” He paused, swallowing, but not taking his steady gaze from hers.

“I was five years old when my parents handed me over to the Council. And the last words my father said to me before they put me on that steam train were, ‘Be strong, little man.’ I thought that meant I couldn’t cry. Every night, all of the other boys cried. All the way to the Ward School, and after we were there, the sound of crying lulled us all to sleep. But not me. I was going to be strong. Except it didn’t make me strong. It made me mean. It made me weak. It wasn’t until someone showed me that crying could help me heal that I learned how to be strong. You have to mourn what’s gone. You think if you nurse that wound, it will feed you. But if you let it heal, the scar will make you stronger than the wound ever could.”

She shook her head back and forth, refusing. She held the grief back.

He lifted his hands to her shoulders. “Yes. It’s okay to cry.”

“It’s not. It’s not, because I don’t deserve it,” she whispered and dropped her face so she wouldn’t have to look into his anymore.

“You don’t deserve to heal?” The soft words were incredulous.

“No!” The trembling was spreading from her chin. The tears were going to come anyway. “Because it’s my fault. They’re dead because of who I am, decisions that I made—”

“No. They died because of the Council, for decisions that Three, and Lucas, and whoever else they’re in bed with made. They died because they loved you, and they wanted you to live. You looked away at the end. You looked away. But I didn’t. Your mother never faltered. She didn’t falter, and she didn’t let go of you. She didn’t give you up, not even at the end. Do you think the woman who valued you more than life would say you don’t deserve it?”

He kept talking, but she couldn’t hear any of it. The tears had come, too loud and ugly for her to be aware of much more than being pulled close to his chest and the rumble of words inside of it. Finally, the rumble stopped, and he just held her.

A little while later, the tears stopped coming, too.

She stood still, even after the hiccupping breaths had eased, allowing herself to be held. It felt good. Not surprising. Under the scowls and barked orders, Reyes was a beautiful man. He was also solid and warm. She sniffled and rubbed her cheek against his chest, moving closer and sliding her arms around his waist. She drew in a deep, relaxing breath and enjoyed the familiar almost-tickle of the Dust moving within her. It pooled in her chest and belly, and all along her inner arms, as if drawn into the embrace as well. It swirled lower, too….

Under her ear, his heart skipped. So did the sound of his breathing.

Her eyes flew open. What was she doing?

Lena yanked her arms from Reyes and stepped away. She crossed her arms, and her mouth worked for a moment. “I—I’m sorry. I mean, thank you. I’m good now. So thank you.” She didn’t want to look up from the spot on his chest that was damp from her tears. She had to.

His lips twitched, but his eyes were still grave and concerned. “You sure?”

“Yep. All better.”

“Lena—”

“Thank you, Reyes. Really, I’m good. Thank you. You went above and beyond. Thanks.”

You can stop thanking him now. It was just a damn hug.
It was. Why was her heart racing?

Reyes searched her face, as if looking for something. Whatever conclusion he reached, he nodded and crossed to the little table.

She moved in the opposite direction to perch on the edge of the cot.

Wincing and favoring his left side, Reyes pulled the straps of a bag he’d been wearing slung across his back over his head.

“Oh, yeah,” she mumbled, mostly to herself. “Broken ribs.”

He glanced over, shrugging his right shoulder in acknowledgment of his injury.

She’d forgotten to offer to help him back at Ace’s. She hadn’t offered when he got here, either. He had broken ribs because of her. He’d spent the last day and night in serious pain. And he was the one comforting her.

“Come here,” she said hoarsely, beckoning him over.

Reyes made one startled sweep of her and the cot. His brows rose. “Enticing as you are, Lena,” he drawled, “That’s really not what you need right now. I’m going to have to pass.”

Her mouth fell open. She snapped it shut. The heat of a redhead’s flush flooded up her skin, from chest to face. “I’m not offering to screw you, Reyes. I’m going to fix your ribs. Or do you like being in pain and short of breath?”

“Fix my ribs?” He stopped working at the knot securing a rectangular flap over the bag’s opening. She had his full attention now. “You can do that?”

She shrugged. Then, unable to help it, she smirked. “I’m multi-talented. I can smash a room over you and break your ribs. And then I can fix them.”