Fatal Strike (McClouds & Friends #10)(68)

He stared at the sweating bottle in his hand. The McClouds were tougher than boot leather, all four of them, and so was Aaro, but they were no match for Greaves. That was definitively proven. It was a hard fact to swallow, but there it was, in his face.

It was up to him. It was all on him. I’m keeping her. Was he, now? What manic shit-for-brains actually dared to say something like that? What had felt like steely confidence now rang in his ears like swaggering arrogance. Keep her, would he? Keep her where, in a pumpkin shell? He had f*ck-all to fight Greaves with, other than a good mind shield, and a gun. The gun was useless against an opponent like that. His other assets were all defensive in nature.

Unless he counted his brain. Which was currently flash-fried.

Until he took out Greaves, he couldn’t keep her. Alive, maybe, but not living. What did she have to look forward to? Living on the run, eating crap strip-mall food, sleeping on lumpy, sagging beds in cheap hotels and rentals, tense and terrified, looking over her shoulder every second, jumping at every sound? No work, no art, no friends or family or children—or life. No ripening, no hope for the future, no peace. Just him, trotting along beside her like a hopeful hound dog, happy to be needed.

Until she started to hate him for it.

He’d find a way for her to be free. He had to. Just not free of him.

He set the bottle down on the kitchen counter with a decisive thud, all impulse to drink it gone, and answered the question in Davy’s eyes. “Lack of vigilance will get you killed,” he said.

Davy nodded sagely. “Whatever.”

“I can help keep guard,” Miles said. “Where are you guys posted?”

“Go guard her,” Davy said. “Do your mind-shield thing. That’s the best way to be vigilant right now, since none of us can do it.”

That made sense, though he had to be suspicious of his reasoning, being how there was nothing on earth he wanted to do more than wrap himself around that girl’s naked body.

Crazy. As completely f*cked up as he had been, he’d suddenly found this vast geyser of sexual energy. He’d always had a lusty appetite for sex whenever he could get it, and granted, it had been a while since Cindy had gone on the fateful tour with the rock star and subsequently dumped him. He’d been celibate for over a year now.

But the feelings assaulting him were so far removed for his mournful adolescent pining for Cindy, he needed a whole new unit of measure for it.

Maybe it was the dreams. Her visits to his brain, all those weeks in the mountains. She’d imprinted on his brain somehow, and now he was helplessly programmed to nail her every chance he got. Out-of-control, like the rest of his life. It was like living in a f*cking centrifuge.

He didn’t knock, not wanting to wake her if she slept. She was such a slight bump underneath the fluffy white comforter. He tried to close the door without making a sound, but the door latch clicked, and she exploded into movement, sitting bolt upright.

He froze. The cover flew back. Her hair was wildly tangled over her face, her eyes wide and staring. She was staring at him, but did not see him. Her heart raced. He could hear it, stuttering in a desperate skip-hop.

Stress flashback, maybe, or a nightmare. He was afraid to move, for fear of scaring her. Something flickered in her eyes. She blinked.

“You okay?” he ventured.

She hid her face in her hands and shook her head, violently.

He still hesitated to approach the bed. “Bad dream?”

She shook her head again. “Tripping,” she whispered. “I took off the moment I started to drift off to sleep. Got sucked right down into the vortex.”

“Vortex,” he repeated, letting his silence be the prompt.

She nodded. “When I trip. That’s how it feels. Like I’m being sucked down into another dimension. Oh, God. Is this going to happen to me now, all the time, at random? Am I going to start seeing alternate realities while I’m in line at the grocery store? I might need to be locked back up in a cell after all.”

“No!” His voice was savage, as if the force of his declaration could make it so. “No, that’s not going to be your life.”

She just shook her head back and forth.

He ached to sit down next to her, take her in his arms, but he’d had enough stress flashbacks to know that she probably wouldn’t be able to stand the contact. “You’re shaking,” he said. “What did you see?”

She shuddered. “My two favorites, you might say. Or anti-favorites. I saw these visions almost every time they injected me. Now I’m seeing them even when they don’t. Disaster and doom.”

Dread mounted in his belly, but he didn’t want her to be all alone with it. “What did you see?”

“The first one is like a recurring nightmare,” she said slowly. “I see a park, but it’s overgrown, and the people in it look listless, vacant. Sometimes a man is collapsed on the sidewalk, and two people are sitting on the park bench next to him, staring into nowhere. They don’t even seem to see him. People are lying on the grass, and it’s not clear if they’re dead or alive. Garbage is blowing everywhere. Then I see a woman, staring out the window, and behind her a baby in a crib is screaming, but she doesn’t hear him. I have no idea what it all means.”

He shivered, too. “Creepy,” he commented.

“Oh, yeah. And I saw the bomb one, too, like always. The Tokyo train station. A terrorist attack. Four hundred and seventy-eight people dead. Every time I saw that, I begged Hu and Anabel to do something about it, but they ignored me.”