Someone tapped on her window.
She startled and twisted. A middle-aged woman peered into the car, her expression concerned. A man stood waiting nearby, holding a dog on a leash. Mary rolled her window down partway and raised her eyebrows in inquiry.
“Excuse me.” The woman spoke in a pleasant soft Virginian accent. “My husband and I were just walking our dog, and I couldn’t help but notice—are you two all right?”
Michael had barely stirred at the intrusion. It was a measure of how depleted he had become. Mary could sense he had slipped into a half-conscious state. Her mind raced as she thought through their options.
“No,” she said. “We’re not. He’s sick and I don’t want to leave him. Would you mind doing us a favor?”
“Why sure, sugar,” said the woman. “We have a cell phone. Do you need us to call 911?”
She shook her head, her thoughts strangled with uncertainty. Should she say she was a doctor? No, that seemed too distinctive, although the situation itself was already distinctive enough that they would already stick out in the woman’s mind.
It was too late to fret about any of it now. She said, “Thank you, but I can drive him somewhere quicker than an ambulance could get here. I need you to do something else, please, if you would.”
The woman didn’t hesitate. “How can I help?”
Mary slid one hand along Michael’s wide-muscled back to the pocket of his jeans, located the bulge of his wallet and pulled it out. A quick, discreet peek at the contents revealed several thousand dollars in large bills, and around fifty-five dollars in smaller denominations. She pulled out a twenty and a ten, and handed the money to the woman.
“I don’t want to leave him. Would you mind going inside and buying all the Gatorade and bottled water you can? I hope there’s a way to get change. When we pulled in, I didn’t notice if this rest stop has a snack shop or just vending machines.”
“Gatorade and bottled water.” The woman’s hand curled around the money but her voice had become uncertain.
It was clear the woman thought she was acting oddly. Mary didn’t blame her. She glanced at Michael lying slack in her arms. Hell, the whole thing looked odd.
She tried to look as sincere as she could. “We thought his fever had broken and it would be okay to keep traveling until we got to our hotel. Now it has spiked again, and I think part of the problem is that he’s gotten dehydrated. It may take me at least a half hour to find an urgent-care clinic. I want to get some liquids into him right away before I leave. If you don’t mind.”
“Of course I don’t mind,” said the woman, her uncertainty vanishing. “Do you have aspirin or Tylenol, or do you want me to see if I can buy any of those little travel packets?”
In spite of her worry, Mary smiled at the other woman’s kindness. “I have a bottle of Tylenol in my purse.”
“I’ll be right back,” the woman promised.
Mary watched her approach her husband, say something to him and hurry toward the nearby building. She shook her head. Her improvised explanation still seemed flimsy to her. She hoped the other woman didn’t think too hard about it.
“This has got to be the road trip from hell,” she muttered.
Feeling a surge of protectiveness, she cradled Michael’s big, heavy body close. She rested her cheek on top of his head and sank her awareness into him. He was still bleeding sluggishly from a couple of the more serious wounds. He had a nasty bone-deep gouge in his thigh.
The Deceiver had attacked them on more than one front, not only with a troop of well-trained fighters but also with hundreds of dark spirits in the psychic realm. When Michael had taken physical wounds in the fight, the dark spirits had swarmed over him. They took advantage of the opportunity his injuries gave and drained him of energy.
The damage he had taken from the swarm seemed fairly shallow. Her main concern with those wounds was there were so many of them. To her mind’s eye, they looked like dozens of claw marks. What disturbed her most were the almost imperceptible shadows that ran like fractures through his energy. Normally his spirit had an indomitable quality, a sense of boundless strength, but now there was something vulnerable, almost breakable about him.
Fresh from the lessons she had learned from healing her own body, she found it was the work of a few minutes to stop his bleeding, enhance his body’s own natural pain inhibitors and pour a lavish amount of her own energy into him.
She was spending strength she could ill afford to spare from her own overtaxed resources, but they were stronger when they could work together as a team. She didn’t know where they should go after they reached Petoskey, and Michael wouldn’t be able to tell her if he was unconscious. Besides, he had scared her when he had leaned over and collapsed. She hadn’t yet had a chance to recover from the last time he had scared her, when the Deceiver had taken him.
It was hard to leave healing him unfinished, but she did. She concentrated on cradling him close for a few more stolen moments. This might be all the reaction time she got after their recent brush with destruction, so she would have to make the most of it. She rubbed her face against his soft, short, dark hair until the woman approached with her arms full of Gatorade and bottled water.
“There was a snack shop, so I was able to buy plenty,” the woman said.
“You are an angel,” Mary told her. The woman handed cold bottles to her through the window. There were eight twenty-ounce bottles, three of them water. Pleased they had so much of the sports drink, Mary set the bottles on the passenger floor.
“Here’s your change.”
Mary shook her head even as she opened a bottle of Gatorade. Distracted, she said, “Please keep it.”
“I can’t keep your money, sugar.” The woman held her hand insistently through the window.
Mary looked up, her attention caught by the woman’s genuine distress. She glanced around their shabby, cluttered car, then back at the woman, noticing the woman’s expensive clothes and carefully tended appearance. She gave the woman a crooked smile and held out her hand for the money. “Thank you for everything.”
The woman lingered. “My husband thinks your best bet for finding an urgent-care clinic is to go back to Cadillac. You remember passing through? It’s just fifteen minutes south on the highway.”
“Yes,” Mary lied. “I was thinking of Cadillac too.”
The woman glanced at Michael. “Well, my name is Charlotte. My husband, Jim, and I will be over by the picnic tables for another half an hour if you need any more help.”
“I’m grateful for what you did,” Mary said. “There isn’t anything more we need. I’m just going to get some Gatorade down him before we leave. Thank you again.”
“You’re welcome. God bless.”
Mary’s eyes flooded with sudden dampness. She blinked them back as she watched Charlotte and her husband walk away. She had been so braced in survival mode, so busy dealing with one horror after another, that the simple kindness of a passing stranger almost broke her composure. Then she thought of Michael suffering without complaint, rejecting her overture until the car had stopped, and she wanted to yell or hit something.
“Okay, Michael,” she said gently. His heavy unconsciousness had eased into sleep. Even though she hated to disturb him she gave his shoulder a brisk shake. “Wake up. I’m not going to start driving until you get some of this Gatorade down. If you want me to drive, you’ve got to wake up and drink this.”
She felt his awareness surface before he stirred. “How long have we been stationary?” His voice was slurred.
“Only for about ten minutes.” Helpless to resist, she gave in to impulse and pressed a kiss to the hairline at his temple.
He lay sideways against her. He passed his free arm around her waist and pulled her against him, the muscles of his bicep rigid as he held her tight. “You were supposed to keep going.”
&n
bsp; Irritation flared. “How was I supposed to do that with you passed out in the driver’s seat? It’s not like I can move you by myself. I know we need to keep on the move. You and Astra don’t need to keep reminding me.”
He let go of her and pushed himself upright. He scanned the scene. He still looked desperately weary, but his gaze was alert. “You talked to Astra?”
“I took a short nap after I healed myself,” she told him, her tone truculent. She handed him the Gatorade and he drank it in thirsty gulps. Then she opened a bottle for herself. It was a black cherry flavor and tasted little better than the sugared water she had forced down at the cabin. She drank it anyway. “She came into a dream I was having. We talked.”
The strong muscles in his neck moved as he tilted back his head and finished the bottle. “What did she say?”
She hesitated as she thought of the frail, elderly body Astra had shown her. Whenever Michael talked of Astra, he seemed to think that uniting with her would be an asset, but Mary wasn’t so sure.
Still, she was unwilling to disappoint him as much as she had been disappointed, so she spoke with caution. “Only that we needed to get to her as soon as we could.”
He glanced at her. “Why would she bother sending you a dream just to tell you the obvious?”
“I—don’t know.” She blinked, startled, for she hadn’t thought to question that. “She dropped out so quickly from the battle. Maybe she was worried and wanted to check on us.”
“Maybe.” His voice was noncommittal. Mister Enigmatic was back. “Are you ready to drive now?”
She remembered that she was supposed to be annoyed. Her truculence returned. “Yes.”
“Good.”
He waited until she got out, then as she moved around the front of the car to the driver’s side, he eased over the bench seat to the passenger side. She slid behind the wheel, adjusted the seat and mirrors for her shorter height, started the engine and pulled out. As she drove past the picnic tables she waved at Charlotte and her husband, who waved back. Michael’s eyebrows rose at the exchange but she didn’t volunteer an explanation and he didn’t ask.
Mary had set his sunglasses on the dashboard earlier. She reached for them and slipped them on. They were too big for her and slid to the end of her nose, but they were better than nothing. The car leaped forward as she accelerated onto Highway 131. Taken aback at the engine’s smooth surge of power, she eased off the gas pedal.
Michael opened another bottle of Gatorade and drank it at a slower pace. After a minute, he said, “You stopped the bleeding and blocked the pain.”
“I stopped your bleeding and I blocked your pain.” Her tone was short. If he could be Mister Enigmatic, well then, she could be Miss Petulant.
He said slowly, “You’re angry about something.”
All she could hear in his voice was weariness and puzzlement. Her anger drained away and she felt ashamed of herself again.
She strove for a calmer, more conciliatory tone. “Sometimes you talk about things as though they are distant from you. I guess maybe you’ve had to do that. After the last couple of days, I think I can even understand it, but it still disturbs me. It was not a mistake for us to stop at the cabin for a rest.”
“Maybe you’re right.” He didn’t sound convinced.
She gave him a stern glance over the rim of the sunglasses. “We did the best we could with the information we had. It wasn’t a mistake for me to help you just now either. You were suffering, and I couldn’t stand the thought of doing nothing when I have the capacity to help. More than that, I need you to get better as fast as you can. I know I’m outmatched right now. If something else were to happen while you are incapacitated, I couldn’t handle it by myself. I haven’t recovered enough of my memories yet. I’m feeling stretched thin as it is.”
He mulled over that while he drank his Gatorade and shifted the pillow to a more comfortable spot. When next he spoke, he seemed to be making a non sequitur. “I didn’t care about anyone when I was a kid. Not my parents, not my so-called friends. Nothing seemed quite real.”
She frowned. “How did you and Astra meet?”
“She found me when I was eight. Even at that early age, I had already started to do crazier things in an effort to feel something other than anger.” He stretched his injured leg and winced. “Astra was the most amazing thing that had ever happened to me. She was real like nothing else had been. Of course now I understand why, and what that meant.”
She drove with care as she listened. Her heart ached as he spoke with such matter-of-fact calm. “Do you have any idea how many lives you’ve lived since—over the last nine hundred years?”
Since you killed me, and I stopped reincarnating. Those had been the first words that came to mind, but she couldn’t bear to say them. She might never be able to say them out loud. The memories were too raw. They lay between them like a shadow.
“A few. I connected with two others from our group, Ariel and Uriel, just before they were destroyed. Astra and I found each other in other lifetimes.” He looked out his window. “I haven’t bothered to try to recover much of those memories. They seemed pretty meaningless.”
She gripped the steering wheel. She tried to imagine how he had lived, how he must have recovered his sense of identity time and again, only to realize after searching that she wasn’t anywhere to be found, neither alive nor destroyed but lost somewhere in limbo. That all he could do was fight and wait—and wait—and wait. In all that time, the only person who had been anything like a kindred spirit, the only person he could rely on, had been Astra.
She took a deep breath. “Astra doesn’t trust me.”
“Probably not.” He finished the second bottle of Gatorade.
“I don’t blame her.” She glanced at him sideways. “As damaged as I was—and by the Deceiver, no less—I wouldn’t trust me either if I were her.”
“Don’t take it personally. Astra doesn’t trust anybody, not even me,” Michael said. He punched the pillow and eased his head onto it. “Maybe especially not me.”
“Why especially not you?” Her anger was quick to flare again on his behalf.
One corner of his mouth quirked up. “She had her reasons. Remember, she met and trained me when I was a young and budding criminal.”
She asked, “Do you trust her?”
“I trust her to do anything and everything she can to destroy the Deceiver. So yes, in a way I do. For certain things.”
She nodded although his eyes were closed. After a few minutes, she said in a soft voice, “I’m sorry I got mad.”
She thought he might have fallen asleep until he replied, “You weren’t really mad. You’ve just been scared and upset. You’ve had—”
“—a rough day,” she finished with him. Although it wasn’t really funny, they both chuckled and tension eased from the car. “Yeah, I guess I have.”
He laid his arm along the back of the seat and settled his hand, large and warm and heavy, at the nape of her neck. She startled at his touch and forced herself to relax. A complex set of emotions surged in reaction. Primary among them was a deep sense of comfort.
“I was there. I know what the dragon did for you,” he said. “You were injured, your spirit somehow bent, and now that’s gone. I trust you.”
She blinked. “I didn’t know I needed to hear that, but I did. Thank you. I trust you too. Michael?”
“Yeah.”
His voice was sleepy. She hated to say what she was going to say next, but it had been bothering her ever since she woke up.
“I think the Deceiver has to have ties to the police,” she said. “Don’t you? I can’t think of any other way those two drones could have tracked me to South Bend to try to kidnap me. Nobody knew where I was going when I left my house. Hell, even I didn’t know—most of what I did was on impulse. Maybe he could have found me through his abili
ties alone, but I don’t think they could have. Could they?” She hesitated, then finished, “You see, I’ve been worrying about this car. He had to have gotten a good look at it, along with its license plate.”
A pause. He released a heavy, exasperated sigh. “Where the fuck is my brain?”
She lifted a shoulder and gave him a wry look. “It’s with the rest of your body, which is seriously injured and exhausted.”
The glance he gave her said quite clearly that he didn’t consider that an excuse. “I know for a fact he’s got ties to the police, and to the FBI, and other organizations. And of course he would have noticed the make and model of this car, along with the license plates. I’ll try to counteract that.”
“By doing what?”
“I can project a kind of null space around us so that people will tend not to notice us.”
She blinked. “A null space?”
“It’s a kind of energy—a spell if you like—that encourages the mind to look elsewhere. But it doesn’t really turn us invisible, so to be on the safe side, we still need to ditch this car and get a new one. Do you know how to get to Petoskey?”
She nodded. “I’ve been there before. The route I took was Highway 131 until it reaches 31, which follows the shoreline of Lake Michigan. Is that okay?”
He grunted. “That’ll do. Wake me before we get there. We’ll need to change vehicles before we go through town.”
“Okay.” She blew out a breath. “Can you at least try to rest while you do that null space thingy?”
He nodded and settled back into his seat. She listened as his breathing deepened, but his hand never moved from her neck and she could tell that he wasn’t quite asleep.
Then she sensed something coming from him, a strange kind of subtle energy. She meant to focus on it, but then her thoughts slid away to something else and she forgot.