Winter's Storm: Retribution (Winter's Saga #2) (21 page)

“
What was all that about the plumbing?”

“
Long story; you kinda had to have been there,” Alik said smiling at the memory.

Then his facial expression changed.

He was squinting as though trying to see something far away. “Wait…maybe you were there.” Alik peered over at Creed and replayed scenes in his mind. He made himself think back and ran Creed’s face through sort of his own mental image search engine. “I can’t believe I hadn’t put the pieces together before,” Alik said after a few moments.

“
What are you talking about?” Creed asked, though his heart began pounding violently in his chest.

“
You were there, at the hospital in Kansas. I saw you in several locations there: once in the corridor, again in the cafeteria and the last time I saw you, you were standing in the crowd of people watching me spar with Meg and Evan on the hospital lawn. You were the guy Meg met there. She didn’t want to tell us about you, but we made her. Then you stood her up. She was supposed to meet you at noon, but you weren’t there.” Alik was tensing his muscles reflexively and sitting at the edge of his seat. He looked about ready to leap down Creed’s throat with each new piece of the puzzle he snapped into place.

“
Look, she was just an assignment. You were all just assignments,” Creed looked heart-sick with guilt.

“
Assignments?
You
were the one who tried to attack our mom that day!
You
shot Maze!”

Evan had been on his way back to his seat when he just caught the tail end of this conversation. It sent him into a furry. Before Creed knew what was happening, Evan charged down the aisle and full-on tackled him out of his seat. “
You piece of crap!
My family trusted you and you have been trying to hurt us all along!” Evan was whaling on Creed. He had him pinned against the cabin wall and was smashing his face into the leather side paneling.

“
Evan, cool it! We’re forty-thousand feet above the Pacific Ocean!” Alik had to work to pull his brother off Creed. “Cool it, man! This isn’t the time or place!”

Evan allowed himself to be separated from Creed long enough to deliver a stream of expletives Alik didn’t even know his brother knew. “Dude, enough. This isn’t helping Meg! Beating the crap out of the guy who’s taking us to get her cure isn’t going to help her.” Alik’s hand was still on his brother’s shoulder. The veins in Evan’s neck were pulsing and his fists were involuntarily clenching and releasing.

Turning back to the stunned Creed, Alik said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him as ready to kill as he is right now, so for your sake, you’d better start talking.”

“
Just so we’re clear,
asshole.
If you try to deliver even a
fraction
of a lie to us, I will kill you, quietly, and no one will mourn your loss,” Evan fumed, but held back, waiting for the vermin to speak.

“
You’re right,” Creed nodded. “You have every reason to off me now. I’ve done nothing but hurt your family since the moment I snuck into your lives.”

“
You’re not helping your case here,” Alik cautioned as he felt his anger surge.

“
Remember the story I told you about the Retribution Match where I was set up to fight my brother?” Creed stopped and waited for acknowledgement.

“
That was all true. Everything right up until I was three days out of the surgery to fix my kidney. Commander Oldham wanted me dead for defying his orders in battle. Williams offered me another option.” Creed explained.

“
He said that he would help me find the rest of my real blood family and release me of duty as a meta soldier if I completed two objectives for him,” Creed had never been to confession, but he felt an unreal need for absolution from these two men whom he had harmed.

“
Keep talking,” growled Evan.

“
My objectives were laid out by Williams. The first was to find and kill the ‘thief’ Margo Winter. The second was to bring the three ‘stolen’ assets back.”

“
Just to be clear, we’re the ‘assets,’ right?” Alik looked sick to his stomach.

“
Yes.”

“
So your first objective—to kill our mom?” asked Alik.

“
I didn’t complete that objective.”

“
Williams is going to let her live?” asked Evan.

“
I don’t know.”

“
What do you mean, you ‘don’t know’?”
Alik yelled.

“
I mean, he was so thrilled that I got you three on a plane en route to Germany that he didn’t bring it up,” Creed explained.

“
He’s not going to just let it go,” Alik said, deep in thought.

“
So this whole thing with Meg getting sick was just a convenient excuse to get us back to Williams?” Evan asked, appalled.

Creed’s face fell. He didn’t say a word.

“
No, little brother. It was all part of the plan.” Alik was revving up.

“
What the hell did you do to our sister!
Was it poison? A deadly virus? What did you do to Meg?” Alik was so angry spittle was flying from his mouth and now it was Evan who was holding him back.

“
Gentlemen, the captain asks everyone to please calm down and take a seat. We’re headed for some unexpected turbulence, and you’ll need to fasten your seat belts.” Missy, the flight attendant spoke in a squeaky voice. The looks on the faces of the three huge, fighting men was arguably the scariest she had ever seen. Without saying another word, she turned-tail and slipped behind the blue velvet curtain.

Ignoring the attendant, Evan growled, “Answer him.”

“
What?”

“
Answer him! What did you do to Meg?
Why is she so sick?
” Evan’s voice rose with every word until he was yelling.

“
I…I don’t know,” he stammered, running a shaky hand through his hair.

“
What the hell do you mean, you ‘don’t know?’”

Creed looked painfully over at the frail waif of a girl dying because of him.

“
Williams sent his assistant, a female meta named Farrow Schone, with something he called a ‘gift.’ Farrow shot Meg in the neck with it—it looked like a small, silver dart. As soon as she was hit, she fell. Whatever that dart was tipped with, that is what has made Meg so sick.”

“
You knew all this time that Meg was poisoned and you didn’t stop this Farrow and you didn’t tell us so we’d know what to look for?
You sick freak!
” Alik flew into a rage. He grabbed the nearest arm rest of a passenger seat, yanked it off and started beating Creed.

All the guilt and self-loathing Creed felt forced his arms to hold at his side instead of up defensively. As Alik unloaded his anger, Creed knew he deserved it.

“
All passengers please take your seats and fasten your safety belts. We’ve hit some unexpected turbulence. I’m sure you noticed we are pulling up, in an effort to fly over the bumpy air. Bear with us while we get the craft to a smoother flying altitude. Captain Jacobi, out.”

Alik administered one more whack to Creed’s neck with the chunk of plush leather wrapped around metal that was the arm rest. The three men glared at each other, not wanting to be the first to move. Feeling more a sense of responsibility to his sister than bravado, Evan turned toward Meg and started to walk down the aisle to check her safety harnesses for the umpteenth time. Under his breath he was mumbling furiously, but he was also forcing himself to calm down and think before he said another word.

Just then, the plane vibrated violently. The three men standing in the private jet’s passenger galley instinctively reached out to grab something to steady themselves.

The nose of the jet fell into a steep decline. From all around them, plastic and metal rattled fiercely indicating a worrisome level of breakability to what only moments before had seemed like a safe aircraft.

Even with the warnings, what happened next hit the three boys with complete surprise. Evan hadn’t taken three steps when whole plane shook spastically and dropped a couple thousand feet, as though free-falling. Not having heeded the repeated warnings and instead choosing to continue their furious discussion standing in the aisle turned out to be a really bad idea after all.

Alik, Evan and Creed flew up and hit the ceiling of the cabin. They scrambled to regain their balance but everything was happening so fast, even they couldn’t help but be thrown around the cabin. The nose of the plane dipped and with it anything that wasn’t bolted or secured. The overhead compartments popped open releasing even more debris into the storm that was the inside of the private jet. Oxygen masks burst out of the panels above the seats and an alarm screamed a high-pitched, “beep, beep, beep!” The aircraft was making terrifying noises, sounding distinctly like metal on metal screams.

Their fight abruptly interrupted, the three metas scrambled to their seats and for their safety harnesses. Even during the brutal turbulence of the plane, Evan crawled back toward his sister’s gurney. He was more worried about checking Meg’s oxygen levels than himself, despite the airplane safety rules. The plane was leveling off some by the time he could get the mask over his own face and secure himself in the seat closest to his patient.

Everything happened in the span of no more than three minutes, but it left everyone onboard rattled and out of breath. Finally, the plane felt like it was leveling off and the sadistic screaming of the alarm stopped. Captain Jacobe’s shaky voice came over the intercom. “Mr. Young and guests, I hope everyone is okay back there. That was a highly unusual pocket of fast forming wind conditions causing us to drop…uh, thirteen thousand feet. We’re now traveling at an altitude of about fifteen thousand feet above sea level, and boy, if you look out your window, you can almost see the scales on the fish!” No one laughed at his attempt at humor.

“
Yes, well. We’re going to stay at this altitude for a while, hoping to avoid any more surprises. Missy will be back momentarily to check on you and straighten up the cabin. My copilot, Mr. Trainer and I are sincerely sorry for the scare and will do our level best to make the rest of the flight as smooth as possible.”

The passengers were silent for a few minutes, still recovering.

Alik broke the quiet. “If my sister dies because of you, I’m going to rip you limb from limb.”

Creed looked warily at Alik and took a slow, deep breath and slowly released his vise grip on his chair’s arm rest.

Alik was rubbing his temples as though trying to fight off an oncoming headache. The vein in his forehead was bulging as it always did when he was angry. Evan glanced at his brother and thought how grateful he was not to be the object of Alik’s anger. He was up and out of his seat again, checking Meg’s vitals and making sure none of her tubes or monitors had come undone during the turmoil. Once he was satisfied she was stable, he returned to his seat. He was exhausted and revved up at the same time.

“
If Meg were awake, she would be the one ranting louder than any of us.” Evan was staring at his sister’s pale hand as it lay vibrating slightly with the movement of the plane.

Picking up on Evan’s lead, Alik forced himself to calm down and think of his sister. “Oh yeah, you think we’re upset? You just wait till Meg wakes up. And if I were you, I wouldn’t even bother trying to explain yourself. You’d just better run!” Alik mused affectionately at his big sister, thinking back to many an argument back on the ranch.

“
I saw her fight that day on the hospital lawn,” Creed said. “If you two hadn’t ganged up on her, she would have won.”

Alik was smiling softly at the memory of it. “Yeah, she was pretty mad. She’s one tough girl, I’ll tell you that.”

“
I don’t know what I’d do without her,” Evan confessed softly.

“
You don’t have to worry about that, Evan. We’re going to get her better,” Alik glared at Creed.

“
I know it doesn’t help matters, but—I’m sorry. I never knew what it was like to have a family. Watching you guys with your mom and Theo and Paulie these last few days has made me do some serious thinking.” Creed looked earnestly from one brother to the other. “Listen, guys, I don’t want to be a bad guy. I really just want to make it all right,” he said.

Alik and Evan exchanged looks. They were trying to decide whether this guy was full of it or if he was being sincere. This is the kind of situation where they would usually defer to Meg’s skill of being able to feel people’s emotions. She would be able to tell if he was honestly remorseful, or if it was just a lie.

Alik squinted at Creed. “Meg would know whether or not you were lying, but she’s not able to help now, thanks to you. So we’re going to have to find another way to figure out your true intentions.”

“
Let us contact our mom to warn her that Williams knows her location and is probably setting her up as a target,” Evan said calmly.

“
Good idea. Who do you think he’s sending to finish your job?” asked Alik.

“
Farrow. She’s probably still on the island.” Creed said and looked down at his watch shaking his head. “It could already be too late.” He looked up at the metas apologetically.

“
If our mother’s dead, then so are you,” Alik said evenly.