Deception of the Magician (Waldgrave Book 2) (22 page)

“I 
will
 find her.”

She started to follow Dorotea out into the hall.

Thank you.

Lena turned, and they shared a disquieted smile. Then Dorotea led her to the entryway that she had come in through only twenty-four hours before; there was Griffin. Standing off to one side, a blank expression on his face and circles under his eyes, he studied a portrait of the Virgin Mary on the wall. He was wearing new clothes; a grey t-shirt and loose jeans. Lena hadn’t seen him wear jeans since doing lawn work at Waldgrave. Then he turned, walked quickly over to her, and before she could say a word, he wrapped his arms around her so tightly that she couldn’t breathe for a moment. She realized that without meaning to she was hugging him back.

You’re okay? They’ve been treating you okay here?
 He asked with concern.

He let her go and held her at arms’ length, looking her over for injury. She knew she probably looked terrible; she hadn’t slept and she was still wearing the frumpy t-shirt, sweats, and old sneakers that Dorotea had given her. She was happy that the sweat pants were loose enough to hide the thick bandages wrapped around her knee; he probably would have completely lost it if he knew how bad it really was.

“I’m fine, Griffin…” She whispered.

The worried, tired expression on his face didn’t change, but he nodded in a disoriented way. “We need to go.”

Lena nodded, pulled away from him, and turned to Dorotea. “Thank you. For everything, thank you.”

She pulled Lena into a warm embrace. “You will always be welcome here.” Then she took her necklace with the cross pendant off and put it on Lena. “This is to keep you safe. I think you have a long way to go before you are finally home.”

They embraced one last time, and then Lena followed Griffin out to a car. It was a newer model grey sedan with Texas plates; Lena had never seen it before, but guessed he had probably made a quick cash deal with someone to gain possession of it. Griffin opened the door for her to get in, closed it behind her, and Lena sunk into the plush fabric of the front passenger seat. Her travel bag, which she had left in the last sedan, was at her feet. Griffin slid into the driver’s seat, turned the ignition, and they were once again on the road. It was so eerily similar to the way things had been before, except that there was no contention between them now. They sat there quietly together, just happy to have each other’s company.

Lena remembered that she was supposed to call Howard and asked Griffin for his cell phone. After she checked in, promised to call when they got to the hotel, hung up, and gave the phone back to Griffin, she curled up and tried to fall asleep. After three hours, when she still couldn’t sleep, Griffin offered to stop for food but she wasn’t hungry. They continued to drive, and just before dusk he picked an up-scale hotel and checked them in. He got Lena settled into the room, and then locked her in while he left to do some quick shopping for them.    

The room was nicer than anything she had stayed in for the whole trip; there were two queen-sized beds, a private balcony, a very large bathroom, and a miniature sitting room with a couch and two chairs situated just beyond the beds. She continued to try to fall asleep until he got back, toting two large shopping bags filled with food and clothes. She was caught between worlds, not wanting to sleep and dream about her father, and not wanting to stay awake and think about her mother. She checked in with Howard, who told her it might be a couple of days before things settled down enough for it to be safe for her to get back to Waldgrave, then settled onto the couch and turned the television on, looking for anything to distract herself. After a while Griffin came and sat next to her.

They didn’t talk about what happened. Griffin didn’t try to explain anything, or try to make her feel better by saying it wasn’t her fault. She didn’t tell him about Warren Astley, or anything he had told her. They just sat there, two people trapped together in their own minds, watching television late into the night.

*****

CHAPTER 12

When she woke up the next morning, she didn’t know where she was. She was surrounded by a sea of clean, white linens and overly fluffy pillows. Light was streaming through the open widow on the far side of the room, illuminating everything in a bright, almost blissfully divine glow. The pale blue walls and the clean smell around her was confusing. She didn’t remember falling asleep in a bed. If she had dreamed, she didn’t remember it. She looked around and saw Griffin, sleeping in the other bed, and the last few days started to come back to her.

It all seemed so far away from the hotel room and bed that she had been sleeping in, and she wondered if it had all been a dream. She seemed to be jumping haphazardly from one dream to the next constantly, never sure which reality she was supposed to be living in. She got up and went to the shopping bags Griffin had brought back the night before.

He had bought her clothes, and she grabbed a new t-shirt and some jeans and went to the bathroom to change. Everything was the right size, and for once, Lena was grateful for Griffin’s stalker-like level of detailed knowledge. She checked the bandage on her leg, and saw that it needed changing as well. She went back out to the bags, hoping to find some new socks that she might be able to wrap around her cut to keep it clean, but found something much better—Griffin had bought bandages, wraps, tape, disinfectant, and gauze. She turned and looked at his sleeping form; how had he known?

She changed her bandage and her clothes, then went looking for food. Pulling out a box of breakfast granola bars, she started to eat one as she settled back onto the couch and flipped the television on. She turned the volume all the way down so she wouldn’t wake Griffin up, and stared at the mute cartoon characters on the screen until he finally stirred and sat up.

Lena looked over; he had his shirt off. He also had a wad of bandages tapped to his right shoulder. He looked around, confused, and then laid back down and brought his hand to his head like he had a headache.

“Are you okay?” Lena asked, turning around to face him.

“Yeah.” Griffin sighed deeply. “Could you close the curtains?”

She got up and pulled the curtains shut over the window, throwing the room into darkness. “What happened to your shoulder?”

“I was shot,” he said in a nonchalant tone.

Lena spun around. He was still just lying there, a hand covering his eyes, acting as though they were discussing the weather. “You were…shot? Did you go to the hospital?”

“No. I had to take care of things.”

Lena walked over to the side of the bed, stunned that he could be acting so calm. “Get up. You need a doctor.”

Griffin didn’t move. “I had someone look at it after we got the cars off the road. The bullet’s out, and it didn’t hit anything important, so just drop it for now. I’m not in the mood to fight with you. Is there anything else you’re going to need for the next half-hour or so?”

Lena looked around the room. “No.”

“Okay…” Griffin pulled himself up to a sitting position. “I’m going to take a shower. Then I think we need to talk about what happened, and what’s going to happen.”

Lena nodded, and Griffin got out of bed, grabbed a few items out of the shopping bags, and went into the bathroom. Lena picked up her travel bag, emptied the contents onto her bed, and started sorting through it. It was all there; everything from her half-empty bottle of water to Ben’s letters, and even the same old paperback she had been toting around for well over two years at that point. Her cell phone battery was dead, and as was her luck, she had left the charger in her suitcase. It was all so familiar, and yet so foreign—as though all of it was just a prop used in a movie, and not a part of her actual life. She took great ceremony in organizing everything back into her bag and then started to unload everything Griffin had bought onto the floor for further inspection.

There was an array of clothes ranging from socks to coats, three grocery bags of non-perishable foods, and two large backpacks. Lena stared at the backpacks for a moment, not sure why he would have bought them, then figured they were for the clothes; even then, it wasn’t like they were going to leave the hotel room. She sat down on the edge of the bed and looked around the hotel room; there wasn’t much else to do. Griffin was still in the shower, so she got to work folding her new clothes and putting them in drawers.

Once everything was put away, she picked up the two backpacks, intending to throw them into the closet, but paused halfway. They were too heavy. She weighed them in her hand, then tentatively opened one of them up. Inside, there were several boxes of bullets and a gun wrapped in a blue towel. For a moment, all she could do was stare at the heavy piece of metal in her hand. Time seemed to tick by very slowly; Lena was almost sure she could hear the flow of the shower become sluggish.

Why in God’s name was he carrying a gun? And where did he get it from?

She carefully wrapped it back up, put it back in the bag, and set the backpack where she had found it. She backed away, as though she were afraid it would lash out at her at any second. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she stared at the bag; one of those things had killed Ava, and perhaps several others.    

The phone rang, and Lena almost jumped out of her skin. Perfunctorily, she picked up the receiver.

“Hello?”

Silence on the other end. Then, finally, “Hello? Lena?”    

Lena sat motionless. How had the receiver gotten into her hand? She wasn’t supposed to be picking up the phone. No one was supposed to know she was there, and the voice, whose ever it was, wasn’t Howard’s. Panicked, she did the first thing that came to mind. “I’m sorry! You’ve got the wrong number!”

She slammed the receiver back onto the dock with more force than she had meant to, then looked up and saw Griffin, standing in the frame of the bathroom door in a bathrobe, staring at her with wide eyes. “What were you just doing?”

“Nothing!”

“You were just on the phone.”

“I—“

“Are you stupid?! You know you’re not supposed to pick up the phone!”

They stared at each other from across the room. The silence was only cut when the phone started ringing again.

Griffin didn’t exactly glare at her. The look was one of deeply mixed emotion.

“I...I’m sorry. It just sort of happened.” She said desperately.

He walked over to the two backpacks and threw the empty one at Lena. “Put your clothes in it. We’re leaving.”

He took the backpack with the gun back into the bathroom with him and returned uncharacteristically fast, out of his bathrobe and in the same clothes he had worn the day before. He started opening drawers and shoving clothes into the bag very quickly. Still only half done packing her own clothes, Lena looked over at him. He was afraid; she felt the adrenaline rising in her blood.

“Howard said we should stay here.” She explained.

“And I say we’re 
not
 staying here anymore.”

“But if we keep the door locked…” Lena’s voice trailed off.

Griffin kept packing. The fact that he seemed so determined to get out of the hotel as quickly as possible was terrifying—he knew what was coming. Lena didn’t, but she knew that there wasn’t much that really scared Griffin. He was usually so reserved and intimidating; now, he was a young man with wet hair in economy super store clothing, shoving what few possessions he had into a backpack that was slightly too small to fit them all. Among its contents was a gun and enough ammunition to arm a small militia. This wasn’t the Griffin that had asked her to dance a little over a year ago at the first dinner before Council meeting, nor was he the obnoxious tutor who had forced hours of conjugations on her over the past few years; this was someone else.

“Hurry up!” He snapped.

As Lena stood frozen, he grabbed the bag from her and finished the packing. He shouldered what little luggage they had, grabbed Lena by the wrist, and was once again dragging her away. She turned and caught one last glimpse of the hotel door as it slowly drifted shut behind them. There was a quick check-out in the lobby, and then they were back in the car. Griffin made quick work of getting them on the highway, and Lena wasn’t quite sure what she was feeling. She wanted to believe that he was acting ridiculous, but she knew he wasn’t.

She looked over at him from the passenger seat. He was staring stoically ahead, driving just over the speed limit, keeping the arm belonging to his injured right shoulder straight down at his side. He must have agitated the injury while carrying all the bags, because there was a red, wet spot forming on the front of his shirt.

“We should pull over.” Lena cringed. “You’re bleeding.”     

“I’m fine. Let it go.” He growled, without looking over. “Where did the next letter come from?”

For a moment, Lena wasn’t sure if she had heard him correctly. “What?”

“The next letter. Where was it from?”

Lena gazed at him in disbelieving awe. He actually wanted to keep looking for it. When she didn’t answer, he looked over at her quickly before returning his attention to the road.

“I’ll take you home if you want. I’ll do whatever you want me to as long as you stop answering phones and living out this…subconscious death wish…that you seem to have. But I want to find it—this is the last chance. You know what’s at stake here.”