Trouble and Treasure (#1, Trouble and Treasure Series) (16 page)

I didn't respond.

“
Oh, shit, you're covered in scratches and
cuts,” Sebastian said, voice quick, “Jesus Christ, I should not
have left you alone. I'm so sorry. I'll take you somewhere safe, I
will take you somewhere safe,” Sebastian kept repeating, as if he
thought that saying something comforting twice would somehow make
it twice as comforting.

“
I'm okay,” I managed to speak, but my
words were so quiet and so gentle that they couldn't have convinced
anyone.

Sebastian gently shushed me, repeating that
I was okay.

“
I am okay,” I said, voice getting a touch
firmer. I was even able to let my hands go, the knuckles stiff but
relaxing somewhat.

“
What happened? How did they find you?”
Sebastian asked, facing me as much as he could as he kept driving
way too fast along such a narrow road.

“
They came not too long after you left,” I
said, voice quiet, but thankfully even, “And, well...” I trailed
off.

He raised a hand. “It's okay, I get it.
Those bastards.”

Yes, but were they? As I sat there, warming
up from the heaters that blasted warm air my way, I was starting to
do some serious questioning. Yes, I’d been chased, and yes, by
soldiers of all people. Yet they'd protected me from that
thick-necked goon and promised they were only here to help.

I was confused.

I leaned forward, sucking my lips in
tightly, and putting a hand on my stomach; I felt sick. A powerful
wave of nausea was ricocheting through my stomach, just as those
bullets had ricocheted through the woods.

“
Oh shit, are you okay? Did they hurt you?
You didn't get shot, did you?” Sebastian fired off his questions
just as quickly as the soldiers had fired off their guns at the
thick-necked man.

I wasn’t sick; I was overcome, drowned by
the situation. I didn’t know what to believe, and I didn’t know
what to do next. Despite my fear of Maratova, and the fresh memory
of being chased last night, I was starting to question why I was
running from the army at all. They were meant to be the good guys.
Yet I had convinced myself, mostly through the words of Sebastian,
that I had to get away from them.

Was it the right thing to do?

“
We need to keep moving, get out of the
country as quick as we can,” Sebastian said.

Well, that made me freak right out. I gave
a startled, choked bluster. “Get out of the country? What? We can't
come back ever again? What do you mean? What have we done?” my
words all came out at once, as if my silence had been a great dam
that had been broken by Sebastian's suggestion.

“
I don't mean out of the country, I mean
out of the countryside,” he clarified. “You haven't done anything
wrong, Amanda.”

I wished I could believe that, but the
thing about having so many people, including the army, chasing
after me, was it made me feel as if I was a criminal. Innocent
people hadn’t anything to run from.

S
ilence stretched between us for several minutes, and while
I was aware that Sebastian kept turning to me to check how I was, I
couldn't think of anything more to say to him. I was thankful that
he hadn’t run me over, and forever thankful that he had gotten me
away from the bullets and shouting. But I didn't know what to do
from here. Something was telling me that if I chose not to go to
the authorities, then it would be too late.

The thrill of having solved my
great-uncle’s clue and having found the scales had been wiped from
my mind. The reality of this desperate adventure, and more
specifically running from criminals and soldiers, had overshadowed
any illusion I may have had that I was somehow a budding treasure
hunter. I wasn’t built for this, because I was pretty sure that
this should not exist; the rules of law didn’t make room for people
to dash around the countryside shooting at each other on the hunt
for treasure.

As the day wound on, and the sky became
overcast, I began to realize that despite the fact I didn’t know
what to do next, we were still heading somewhere new. Sebastian
obviously knew where to go from here, even if I was too frightened
and overcome to give it a single thought. We had left the
countryside some time ago, and while we’d not joined onto a highway
heading into the city, we were still heading out along a far
larger, far wider main road.

With clouds overhead pressing in,
threatening rain in an hour or two, I realized that I could hardly
sit there and stay quiet forever. “Where are we going?” I asked,
voice croaking.

Sebastian played with his collar, as if it
were bothering him. “We have to keep moving, our advantage is the
only thing that is keeping us ahead.”

I didn’t understand his words, and he
didn’t pause to elucidate them. Despite the fact I was still
getting over the shock of my tumbles in the woods, I began to
realize what he meant. “You're going after the other clue, aren't
you?”

He nodded.

He was going after the other clue. I had
almost been kidnapped by two different sets of people, and I had
given myself a harsh beating trying to get away from them, and
Sebastian was going after the next clue.

I'd thought he was going to get us somewhere
safe, somewhere where I could have a shower, somewhere where I
could change out of my torn tights. Oh no, we were headed to the
next clue.

I was distinctly aware of the irony of it
all. I’d seen my fair share of ridiculous adventure movies, and
read perhaps more than my fair share of even more ridiculous
airport novels, and I knew that the golden rule in both genres was
to never stop. Once the action started, the character would never
be allowed to pause until it was all over. They would be chased to
the point of exhaustion, but somehow they would push through. It
was all in the name of adventure. Audiences didn’t want to see the
protagonist go back home and have a kip after a lengthy and
powerful car chase. They didn’t want to see their hero stretch out
and have a siesta and a snack after having escaped from the pirates
or mercenaries. The entire point was that from the moment the
action began, it didn’t end until the story ended.

This wasn’t a book and this wasn’t a
movie. Normal people, real people, needed time to process events,
especially stressful, traumatic ones. I was being given no time. I
was being pushed from one frantic experience to another. While from
the outside, it might have made this damn entertaining, from the
inside it felt like it would turn me insane.

“
Look, there will be an end to this,”
Sebastian assured me.

An end? When? What would it look like? Would
the end be when I handed myself over to Maratova and his men and
they gently pulled me aside and informed me that they were the good
guys, whereupon they would take out all the bad guys and I would be
able to resume my normal life? Or would the end look more like me
being shot to pieces by some heavy-leather-jacket-wearing goon? Or
would I end up in prison?

“
I don't want to do this anymore,” I
surprised myself with my own words, but they were genuine and they
were honest. I just didn’t want to do this anymore. It might have
been wild to begin with, and I may have been briefly excited at the
prospect of finding treasure in the church, but I was over it. This
had to stop.

Sebastian gave an awkward and light
chuckle. Perhaps he thought I was joking. His eyelids descended,
stare dead. “I wish I could make it stop. The reality is, as long
as everyone else out there thinks you know where the globes are,
there isn’t going to be an end. Not until we find those
globes.”

“
We have to find a way to tell them. There
must be some way,” I said, voice desperate as it peaked and pitched
loudly. “I made a mistake in selling that globe at auction,” I kept
swallowing between my words, throat horrendously dry and sore, “But
surely there is some way to get away from this.”

Sebastian winced. If it was because of my
desperate and pathetic plea, I wasn’t sure; it was hard to get a
read on Sebastian Shaw, and even harder to tell whether he was
showing genuine compassion or putting on an act to ensure I played
along.

“
Look, Amanda, I promised that I would get
you out of this, and I will,” his voice was far more quiet now, and
slower, as if he was choosing his words carefully, “But you are
going to have to trust me. I know these people, you don't. I know
this industry, you don't. I know how these things go down, you
don't. Trust me when I say that the only thing to do is to get our
hands on those other globes.”

I honestly had no idea whether to believe
him. I was too tired, too injured, and too desperate to bother
doing anything else. So I gave a single bitter nod and let him
drive to god knows where and to god knows what next.

Sebastian Shaw

Shit, I was being a bastard, I really was.
I mean, look at the girl, she was covered in scratches and mud,
with torn clothes, and her shoulders huddled as she could hardly
look at me. I shouldn't have left her alone in the car; I should
have gone with my gut instinct and we should have continued along
in my shot-up Lexus, ditching it at the first chance, but not going
anywhere near old Arthur Stanton's manor again. I knew Maratova,
and I knew he would have left some look out around the manor. Sure
as hell they had found her, chased her through the woods, and given
her what looked like the fright of her life.

That wasn't the only reason I was a
bastard. Number one on the list of reasons to hate myself was that
I was fucking lying to her. In all honesty, the best thing she
could do was to go straight to the police, hell, maybe even
straight to Maratova. While the guy was a monster, he wasn't nearly
as bad as the others after her. Obviously the army could offer her
more protection than I could. But there was this great fucking big
problem for me, the singular reason that I was truly a bastard: if
I lost Amanda, I might lose my chance at getting the
Stargazers.

Though I honestly wanted to check on her to
see that she was still okay, and wasn't about to black out or
anything, I was finding it harder and harder to turn to her. I
usually compartmentalized my work, rationalizing away the shitty
things I did in order to get to whatever treasure waited for me,
but this was a new low for me. I hardly ever had to deal with
people outside of my profession. I wasn't talking about lawyers
here: I was talking about treasure hunting. It was a closed off,
specialized world, where everyone was cutthroat, and it didn’t
matter if you had to tread on someone else's toes to get to what
you wanted, because the toes belonged to a hairy, mean, son of a
bitch who would as soon as kill you is look at you.

Amanda was normal, or at least innocent. She
wasn't from this world, and it was clear that she didn't belong
here.

I shook my head several more times, and
sliced my gaze to the side to check on her, without turning to her
fully. I was worried that if I faced her she would be able to see
the lie dancing through my eyes. Pick up that I was leading her
astray, that honestly the best thing she could do was ditch me and
flag down the next police car she saw.

I’d been honest about one thing: I was
going to do everything I could to keep her safe. But I was going to
do that while getting my hands on those globes. I’d been tracking
them my whole life, and I couldn't let go of them. Even if it meant
that I had to do what I was doing: lying to a woman who looked as
if she couldn't take any more.

Rather than taking her to the hospital or at
least a pharmacy to get some bandages to clean her up, I was
heading straight to the next clue. Because I didn't want to lose
any time, because I didn't want to give anyone else any time to
catch up. I didn't even want us pulling into a service station to
grab her a drink and a bite to eat.

Dear God, I was a bastard.

“
Where are we going?” she asked again,
voice gentle, but not kind, I fancied, because she wasn't trying to
be nice – she probably lacked the strength to make her words any
more forceful. She was likely using all she had left to sit
there.

“
The coast,” I answered, honestly. Although
I hadn’t planned on telling her everything, the words came out. I
did owe it to her.

She nodded, hands still clutched in her lap.
They were dirty and covered in scratches, like the rest of her.
Those fitting cute clothes that Elizabeth had given her were ruined
and muddy. There were several leaves and small sticks hanging out
of her hair, but I didn't bother telling her, considering her
general state.

For the millionth time I thought about how
much of a bastard I was. Did I need her? Could I get through this
on my own? Could I deposit her at the nearest police station? Maybe
even call Maratova myself? I still had that worn leather journal of
her great uncle’s. I knew the locations of the four Stargazers were
in there, so surely I didn't need her anymore, right?

That would be the case if she hadn't proved
to be so useful at that church. Though I hadn't admitted it to her,
I wouldn't have solved that clue without her. I took the direct
approach when finding treasure and solving clues: the one that
involved the most explosives and the least thinking. It didn't
matter how many permutations there were to a particular puzzle that
kept you from the treasure within; if you packed enough c4, you
could blast right through it.