Falling Light (Game of Shadows #2)(12)

A pause. He released a heavy, exasperated sigh. “Where the f**k is my brain?”

She lifted a shoulder and gave him a wry look. “It’s with the rest of your body, which is seriously injured and exhausted.”

The glance he gave her said quite clearly that he didn’t consider that an excuse. “I know for a fact he’s got ties to the police, and to the FBI, and other organizations. And of course he would have noticed the make and model of this car, along with the license plates. I’ll try to counteract that.”

“By doing what?”

“I can project a kind of null space around us so that people will tend not to notice us.”

She blinked. “A null space?”

“It’s a kind of energy—a spell if you like—that encourages the mind to look elsewhere. But it doesn’t really turn us invisible, so to be on the safe side, we still need to ditch this car and get a new one. Do you know how to get to Petoskey?”

She nodded. “I’ve been there before. The route I took was Highway 131 until it reaches 31, which follows the shoreline of Lake Michigan. Is that okay?”

He grunted. “That’ll do. Wake me before we get there. We’ll need to change vehicles before we go through town.”

“Okay.” She blew out a breath. “Can you at least try to rest while you do that null space thingy?”

He nodded and settled back into his seat. She listened as his breathing deepened, but his hand never moved from her neck and she could tell that he wasn’t quite asleep.

Then she sensed something coming from him, a strange kind of subtle energy. She meant to focus on it, but then her thoughts slid away to something else and she forgot.

They continued to travel north in heavy traffic. People were getting a head start on Memorial Day weekend. She hoped it would make them even harder to spot.

The orderly procession along the highway produced an illusion of normality, and the late afternoon sunshine made her sleepy. She sipped her black cherry Gatorade and chewed her lip as she thought through what she and Michael had discussed.

The Deceiver could have been in touch with his various police contacts by cell within minutes of leaving the cabin. It was logical to assume he had, so she had to believe they were now fugitives from the police. Did he have enough political clout to get the authorities to put an APB out on them?

He aspired to take the Presidency, so if she were a betting fool, she would bet yes, he did have that kind of clout. Their continued freedom might hinge on whether or not a police cruiser sighted their vehicle, which was why Michael couldn’t let himself fully relax.

She gritted her teeth and put it out of her mind. There was nothing she could do about it. She had to concentrate on handling the challenges right in front of her. She just hoped that the null space that Michael was projecting . . . that strange energy coming from his lax body . . .

Her mind slid away again. What was she thinking? She just hoped the heavy traffic helped to camouflage them somewhat from their pursuers.

How had the Deceiver found Michael’s cabin? What had given them away? Would they ever find out? If they didn’t know how they had been discovered, how could they prevent it from happening again? How could they ever stop moving, even when they reached Astra?

Despair threatened to engulf her. They were already tired and wounded, and now they were fighting to meet up with an old woman who looked like she was at death’s door. What if all three of them became fugitives?

She realized this was the first time she’d had to think in private since she had escaped from her would-be kidnappers a few days ago in northern Indiana. First she had been too shocked to absorb the enormity of what was happening. Then Michael had found her, and events had hurtled forward at a breakneck pace.

A few days ago, she had been a different person, a person who questioned herself but did not think to question the reality she lived in. That Mary Byrne had suffered from disturbing dreams and the stress of knowing that in some fugitive, mysterious way she did not fit into her life.

That Mary had argued with her ex-husband and worried about losing her own sanity. She had bought a chocolate shake and had left town for an afternoon’s outing. When her concept of reality had undertaken a radical, irreversible shift, so too had her sense of self, and that Mary Byrne had died.

As she had described once to Michael, she felt like she had lived in some kind of painting all her life. The painting had so much color and detail, it seemed as if it should have made sense, should have been real. But then somebody either smashed the frame or she had fallen out, and she couldn’t go back to live there any longer. The painting was two-dimensional, and she didn’t fit, but she barely understood this new reality either, or how to survive in it.

Or maybe she, like the painting, had been a two-dimensional creation, more illusion and memory and the reflection of other people’s expectations than reality. Some aspects of her core nature lingered. She had an innate gentleness, her moral code, her artistic appreciation and healing abilities, but all her illusions had burned away. Michael had described her as being “bent.” She thought of herself as crippled, not quite twisted into an aberrant existence, quietly subsisting as a shadow of her true self.

She thought of the shabby little house she had rented, her ivory tower, now burned to the ground by the Deceiver. All of the minutiae that had comprised her earlier human life, the mementoes and photographs from her family, her quilts and paintings and clothes, had been destroyed.