I Dream of Danger (19 page)

The three other men came at a dead run while the man in the windbreaker shot out the lights in the lobby. The only illumination came from the clerk’s old-fashioned flat computer monitor, which illuminated the scene with an eerie pale glow.

Without speaking a word, the man in the windbreaker pointed down the hall, then gestured right. The four men pulled their stunners, all set to yellow, a voltage guaranteed to knock out a bull, and moved silently down the corridor toward Elle’s room.

Where her defenseless body waited, unable to wake itself up.

Chapter 9

T
he hovercar had been tested at 200 mph. Nick pushed it to 160 off highway in hovercraft mode. Coming down off Mount Blue, Nick had to be careful not to ram into trees. The hovercar responded like a dream and he speed-slalomed his way down the mountain.

Once he was off the mountain and into the flatlands, though, Nick took off, paralleling the interstate, sailing over ditches and fences. The hovercar had excellent forward radar and he swerved around obstacles the hovercar couldn’t clear. When the quickest way forward was the interstate, he simply jumped the guardrails, went to wheel mode, and flew down the fast lane. The hovercar was invisible to radar and not too visible to other drivers. By the time a driver could flip him the bird, he was twenty miles away. He could outrun any police car. And frankly, he didn’t give a shit about anything except getting to Elle as fast as humanly possible.

Jon was in contact over the comms link. He was making good progress fitting a new rotor head. Mac was giving a hand and he estimated he could be in the air within the hour.

Maybe, just maybe he could get to Elle and save her from whatever danger she was in. But there was no one in the world who understood the underlying principle of the universe—shit happens—better than Nick Ross. He wouldn’t feel anything like relief until he had Elle with him, in his bed, in Haven. Surrounded by a mountain and sensors and trip wires and drones up the wazoo. And once she was in his bed in Haven, he’d keep her there for the next week. Maybe more. Not only to bed her, but to
feel
her, touch her, reassure himself that she was safe and with him.

And she’d stay that way for the next hundred years.

But first, he had to find her.

He had no idea what that distress call was about, but it had been
potent
. A blast of pure terror. He’d woken up, heart pounding with fear. Up until about an hour ago, Nick would have said he didn’t know fear, but now that was a lie. Sheer bone-chilling terror had infused every cell of his body when he’d received the blast in his head.

Nothing like that psychic blast had ever happened to him before. Well, except for Catherine somehow reading through touching him that he’d lost Elle and mourned her. Which made sense because Catherine had the gift of reading people and missing Elle was in his blood and bones, not just in his skin.

As far as he knew, Nick had no gifts beyond strength, a good aim, and an ability to fight. Certainly nothing woo-woo. He’d fought and worked like a dog for everything he had, no “gifts” at all. So receiving that blast from Elle had been completely off his radar.

It wasn’t a dream and it wasn’t craziness. It was definitely Elle who’d contacted him, no question. The blast had had Elle in it, unmistakable. Fear, yes, but gentleness and smarts in a mixture that was simply her. He hadn’t questioned it for one second.

So here he was on the interstate going as fast as humanly possible to get to her.

Traffic was getting intense on the approach to Palo Alto, requiring all his attention, when Jon’s voice sounded in the comms button behind his ear. “Yo man,” he said. “Check the drone monitor.”

Nick glanced down to his left and froze.

Fuck!

Faint lines moving toward the motel, almost invisible. The men on the screen were wearing stealth combat gear, but Haven’s drones combined IR and thermal imagery that made visible what would have escaped the drones’ technology if the two sources hadn’t been combined. Four men, moving slowly and carefully down the street where Elle’s motel was. The street was dark, every other streetlight was burned out. When they were still, the men disappeared, but when they moved, he could see—just barely—their outlines. They moved like fighters. That and the fact that their signature was mostly cloaked was enough for him.

They were operators and they were dangerous and they were out for Elle.

He checked the GPS and saw that he was five minutes out.
Jesus
. He moved the accelerator stick to its maximum power and shot forward, leaving a wake of startled cars behind. As he zoomed down off the interstate ramp as fast as the vehicle could go, straining forward as if he could personally make the hovercar go faster, he kept checking the drone monitor.

Three of the men disappeared into a dark spot by the side of the road that was clearly bushes. One man pulled off his face mask and his head bloomed bright red in the thermal images. As Nick watched, he pulled on a windbreaker and made his way across the street, a shimmering red man shape, head twisting, checking the road for traffic.

There was none. The place was deserted. It looked like the motel was half deserted too, to judge by the empty parking lot. And whoever was in that motel, including Elle, would be no match for the four trained men who would converge if they discovered Elle was staying there.

Nick studied the maps, calculating a trajectory that didn’t include roads. He didn’t need roads, he just needed a path that didn’t have barriers over one meter high. He could do it, just, in hover mode. Haven had rules against using hover mode in densely populated places. Hovercars were military secrets. He and Jon had liberated two hovercars from a base in Nevada and appropriated them for their use. They were particularly useful in winter on Mount Blue when the roads were snowed in. Using hover mode in towns would raise interest and maybe alert military authorities, and that was the last thing they wanted.

But this trumped everything. Danger to Elle? No question.

Nick switched to hover mode and pressed the stick forward to maximum speed. He had seen a path, but it ran through backyards and between houses. He’d leave a trail of broken branches and disrupted flower beds behind, but he didn’t give a shit. Arrowing his way to Elle took every ounce of expertise he had and then some, like slithering down a rubble-strewn mountainside at top speed, but he had no choice.

Though he was moving at top speed, taking insane risks, he always kept an eye on the drone monitor. He was two streets down when he saw the lights in the lobby of the motel dim and a figure with a flame red head appear in the doorway. The thermal image cooled as the man pulled his headgear back on. When he gestured, three ghost images crossed the street.

Fuck-fuck-fuck!
They were honing in for the kill!

Not if he had anything to say about it.

By the time they entered the lobby, Nick was at the corner of the cross street. The hell with security. He braked hard and abandoned the hovercar where it was. Who cared if anyone saw it? The only important thing now was Elle, Elle, Elle. The thought that he’d lost her for ten years and that he might find her now, dead body already cooling, made him break out in a sweat.

His heart was pounding, which was a good thing and a bad thing. A good thing because it meant more blood to the extremities together with a decent dose of adrenaline which would speed up his already-fast reflexes and shut down pain for a while if he got shot.

A bad thing because above 120–125 beats per minute fine-motor skills began to degrade. He was going to shoot to kill, and he wanted to hit what he was aiming at.

The only way to slow his heart rate down was to breathe deeply and force it down. He and Mac and Jon had trained for this, though what they did you couldn’t train to do, you had to be born to do. Training only took natural abilities up a notch.

So he spared a second, two, for deep breaths and a conscious tamping down of his body’s fight readiness.

Then he ran.

Just as he took off, he could hear a murmur from the open door of the hovercar. Jon’s voice. Well, whatever it was Jon had to say could wait because Elle had about a minute left to live.

Afterward, he couldn’t remember closing the distance between the hovercar and the lobby of the motel. He jumped out of the hovercar and then a second later he was wrenching open the door of the lobby, barely casting a glance at the body of the night clerk whose legs he could see sticking out from behind the counter.

He didn’t need to know where Elle was. All he had to do was follow the last of the men, who was at the end of a corridor, turning right. Everything in Nick screamed to run full tilt into them and mow them down, but though there was no contest between him and four other men—no matter how good, no matter how well trained—he had no idea where Elle was. Once he was in combat mode his senses narrowed; he couldn’t take the fuckers down and at the same time ensure that Elle wouldn’t get caught in the crossfire.

Nick sprinted silently to the corner and caught the last guy around the neck in a chokehold, yanking him back into the main corridor. The stunner made a light buzzing sound so he pulled his Glock 32 with the silencer, rated at two decibels, less noise than an exhale. He nudged the ballistic mask up with the muzzle, shot the man right between the eyes, and eased him quickly down to the dirty carpet.

One down.

He peeked around the corner and saw three men congregated at a door. They’d found Elle’s room. Elle was behind that door. They wanted to hurt her, maybe kill her—and that wasn’t going to happen. Not even if there were a hundred of the fuckers.

The man with the windbreaker, clearly the leader, had grabbed a key card and waved it in front of a monitor set in the wall to the side of the door. In a second, the door to Elle’s room would swing open. The card didn’t take immediately and windbreaker guy waved it again. Nick could hear the faint click of the lock disengaging and watched as the guy at the door brought his stunner up.

They were covered in LocTite, head to toe. Nick’s stunner couldn’t stun through the suit designed to dissipate beams; and his Glock, powerful as it was, would break a bone or two but wouldn’t penetrate. Nick wanted these fuckers
dead
.

It would have to be done the old-fashioned way. By hand.

Nick was good at combat strategy. In an instant, the whole thing was planned to the second; he didn’t have to think at all. It was like a geometric equation, moves calculated and precise.

He ran full tilt into the corridor, a swarming mass of muscle and deadly intent. Planting his right hand on the wall next to the last guy, he pivoted, lifting his body, putting his entire weight behind the kick to the head. The man fell like a bull in the slaughterhouse, but Nick was already at fuckhead number two, dropping to the ground, scissoring his legs between the man’s legs, throwing his entire weight into his elbow, which he drove straight into the middle of the man’s face. Bone crunched and blood sprayed. The leader had turned around, aiming his stunner at the ground but Nick wasn’t there anymore; Nick was aiming a kick at the solar plexus, something the LocTite couldn’t protect against.

The man fell, temporarily paralyzed, without breath, and that was fine because it allowed Nick to finish all three of them off properly with three hard head-twists. He lifted each head slightly to make sure that the spinal column had been severed from the brainstem, because he wanted these fuckers to
stay
dead.

The instant he finished off the third, he ran into the room and his head nearly exploded with panic when he saw it was empty.

She wasn’t there! Elle wasn’t there!

Where the hell could she be?

The dead guys thought she was here, so he’d assumed . . .

Had she escaped? There was one window that gave out into a courtyard, but it had been painted over a billion times; and if it had once been designed to be opened, that day had long since passed.

He pulled with all his strength, then desisted. If he couldn’t open it, Elle couldn’t either.

Oh God, oh God.
If she’d escaped, how could he find her, how could he protect her if he didn’t know where she was?

Think!

Not on the bed, not out the window, maybe the closet? Nick yanked open the plywood door and stared inside at the tiny space full of empty misshapen wire hangers.

Not there . . .

And that was when he saw her. Lying faceup on the floor, one arm outstretched, pale as ice. Unmoving, unbreathing.

His heart stopped. Simply stopped for a long horrible second.

He was too late.

Somehow they’d killed her.

He hadn’t been able to save her.

All his life, all he’d ever wanted was to keep Elle safe. And now he’d found her after all these years and she was dead.

He took a shaky step forward then sank to his knees . . . to be near her, and because his legs simply wouldn’t hold him up. He felt hollowed out, totally, completely empty. Incapable of thought or action. Merely a bag of skin holding in guts and bones.

He wanted to gather her in his arms, but his body wouldn’t obey him. He gave the order but nothing happened. His entire body was lax, as if it had simply given up. As if it had died but hadn’t told him yet.

But he wanted to be closer to Elle, so he did the only thing he could think of—he toppled forward onto her, hoping that his limbs would recover and that he could gather her in his arms and weep over her.

She was cold, so very cold and still, rocking gently when his full weight fell on her, but not gasping or jolting.

His face was cold. That was the way he understood that tears were tracking down his cheeks. He didn’t wipe his face—he couldn’t. All he could do was watch the tears as they plopped on her neck.

One large teardrop had fallen on the pale skin just above the collarbone. It quivered, stilled, quivered, stilled.

Her heart was—it was beating! He shifted his head so his ear was right over her heart and . . . there it was! The faintest of heartbeats, thready and faint but regular. His head moved up and down gently on her chest. Her chest was moving—she was breathing. She was
alive
!

She wasn’t conscious, her eyes were unmoving behind her lids and her breathing was shallow, but by God she was breathing and she was alive.

A bolt of energy shot through him. Now that he knew Elle was alive, he could do anything. Strength returned to him in a hot rush. Nick gathered Elle’s limp body up in his arms and stood up. He studied her face hungrily, wanting to understand what the past ten years had been for her.