Hellbent (Orphan X #3)(116)

He did not recognize his own voice.

He clamped his hand over Joey’s thigh.

“Copy that,” Tommy said. “En route.”

“Now. We have to get her to medical.”

Across the stretch of dirt, Evan watched Van Sciver wriggle his shoulders up the side of the Tahoe, shoving himself to a standing position. He fell into the driver’s seat.

The SUV drove off, its momentum kicking the door shut.

“You let Van Sciver … go,” Joey said weakly.

Evan pictured again the serene expression on Jack’s face as he’d stepped from the Black Hawk, and he understood at last what had filled him with such peace.

Joey blinked languidly. “Why’d … come back for me?”

Evan drew in a breath that felt like broken glass. He said, “That’s what my father taught me.”

He bent over Joey, his hand still sealed on her leg. The sound of the Tahoe faded, leaving the valley desolate, overtaken by late-twilight gloom. They were a stone’s throw from the busiest freeway intersection in the world and yet not another human was in sight.

She looked up at him, her emerald eyes glazed.

“You were supposed to jump,” he said. “Across the freeway. Away from all this.” His eyes were wet. “Goddamn it. What did I teach you?”

She said, “Everything.”

Her dark hair was thrown back, exposing the bristle of that shaved strip, the faraway city lights turning a few strands golden, and he realized that at some point over their days and nights he’d come to know the scent of her, a citrus brightness off her skin.

“You’re okay,” he said.

“You’re gonna be fine,” he said.

“You’re worth it,” he said.

Her lips pressed together. A weak smile.

He tightened his clamp on her leg.

Headlights swept the valley, a vehicle approaching. It parked, the glare making him squint.

The door slammed shut. A figure stepped forward, cut from the brilliance of the headlights.

Not Tommy.

Candy.

Evan’s last ray of hope left him.

Candy approached, appraising them.

“Find what they love,” she said. “And make them pay for it.”

Evan would have to let go of Joey’s leg to reach for his knife on the ground.

He did not.

He stayed where he was, his palm covering her wound.

He closed his eyes, saw his tiny feet filling Jack’s footsteps in the woods. This was the path he was born to follow. A path into life, no matter the cost.

When he opened his eyes, Candy was standing right over him, the barrel of her pistol inches from his forehead. In his arms he could feel Joey’s breaths, each more fragile than the last.

Evan stared up the barrel at Candy. “After you kill me, clamp this artery.”

Candy said nothing.

He said, “Please.”

The end of Candy’s pistol trembled ever so slightly. Her face contorted.

Evan looked back down at Joey. After a moment he sensed the pistol lower. Candy eased back from view. He barely registered the sound of the SUV driving away.

Joey jerked in a few shallow breaths. She raised a hand to his cheek, left a smudge of blood under his eye. He sensed it there, a weighted shadow.

“I see you,” she said. “You’re still real.”

As he heard Tommy’s truck shudder to a stop behind him, her eyes rolled up and closed, and her head nodded back in his arms.





75

The Blackness to Come

Evan’s hands rested in his lap, covered with blood.

Crimson gloves.

Tommy drove through darkest night. Los Angeles was well behind them, Las Vegas well ahead.

They had handled what they’d needed to handle.

“I know you’re emotional,” Tommy said, “but we gotta think straight.”

Evan said, “I’m not emotional.” His voice shook.

“This is next-level shit,” Tommy said. “We gotta go to ground. A few weeks, minimum. See what shakes out. I got a ranch in Victorville, completely off the grid.”

Evan stared out the window. The blackness sweeping by looked like the blackness before and the blackness to come.

Tommy kept talking, but Evan didn’t hear him.

*

Candy McClure sat on the carpet of her empty safe house, knees drawn to her chest. Past the tips of her bare feet, her phone rested on the floor. It was after midnight, and yet she’d felt no need to turn on the lights.

She had no idea how long she’d been sitting like this. Her hamstrings and calves ached. Even her Achilles tendons throbbed.

She was having what more poetic types might call a crisis of conscience.

The Samsung might ring.

Or it might never ring again.

If it did, she had no idea what she’d do.

It was one of those wait-and-see things, and she wasn’t really a wait-and-see girl. Or at least she didn’t used to be.

What was she now?

The phone vibrated against the carpet, uplighting her face with a bluish glow. The Signal application, presenting her with a two-word code.

It was Van Sciver.

Somehow alive.

She found herself not answering.

An unanswered phone seems to ring forever.