Falling Light (Game of Shadows #2)(24)

Once she’d climbed back inside, Michael said, “I’m sensing psychic movement in the direction of all the northern towns and cities, especially the closest ones—Petoskey, Charlevoix, Norwood and Traverse City. He’s concentrating on the ports. I’ll bet that all the local airports and landing strips are being watched too. There’s also a concentration of some kind of energy mass on I-75, in the direction of the Mackinac Bridge. He will have set up a roadblock on the bridge.”

Her stomach muscles tightened as a now-familiar sense of dread washed over her. The five-mile-long Mackinac Bridge spanned the Straits of Mackinac. It was the only route they could travel by car to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. A roadblock on I-75 meant they had been correct. The Deceiver did have powerful contacts in the police force. They had already been acting as if he had, but somehow it seemed worse to have their deductions confirmed.

“He’s done all of that already?” she asked in dismay. “It’s barely been twelve hours since we left the cabin.”

Michael shook his head. “I’ll bet a lot of this is something he set in motion earlier. It’s what I would have done if I were chasing someone who appeared to be traveling north on 131. It’s a logical strategy. Work to cut off the exit points, then quarter the area and search section by section.”

They fell silent for a few moments. She asked, “What about that thing you can do—the null space?”

“That will get us farther than we could get without it,” he replied. “But it won’t get us past any roadblocks.”

She stuffed his can of Coke into a drink holder. “I guess this might be the worse-before-it-gets-better part.”

“Something like that.” He rubbed his eyes. He looked as tired as she felt.

“Where are we trying to go, anyway?” she asked. “I keep meaning to ask, but then something happens.”

Michael pointed in a northwestern direction. “Right about there. You know where Beaver Island is?”

“I have a rough idea,” she said. Beaver Island was located almost directly north from Grand Traverse Bay and south of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. If she remembered right, it was barely more than a one-town island. She’d always thought the remote location sounded like the perfect place for a quiet vacation.

“There’s a cluster of smaller islands around it. Astra lives on one of them. We need a boat or a seaplane to get to her. I keep a boat docked at Charlevoix, which is about sixteen or seventeen miles west of Petoskey. I was hoping we could hook up to Highway 31, which follows the coast, and shoot over to Charlevoix to use the boat.” He grimaced. “It might be too risky for us to get to it.”

She rubbed at her temple where a tension headache had begun to throb. “We could always go to Cancun,” she muttered. “You know, try back in a decade or two.”

She knew that the Deceiver would never leave them alone for an entire decade. He would keep hunting until he found and destroyed them. She also knew Michael would never consent to hide while his enemy was loose in the world committing atrocities. And she knew her own conscience wouldn’t allow her to hide for that long either.

She was being truculent and illogical and unrealistic, and she didn’t care. She popped open her can of Coke and glared at it.

He glanced at her. “I was actually thinking about traveling south again. Not as far south as Mexico, of course. But there are smaller towns dotting the entire Michigan coastline, and almost all of them have marinas. Unless he has a good portion of the U.S. Army invade Michigan, there’s no way he can watch all of those ports. All he can do is patrol the water and the coastal highways.”

“Why can’t Astra come to us?” The image of that frail, elderly body stretched on a narrow bed came back to her. She gritted her teeth. “Never mind. She can’t.”

“No, she can’t,” he agreed. “So, south it is.”

He put the Jeep in reverse, backed out of the parking space and shifted into drive. Then he accelerated—directly into a transparent, blurred figure that appeared in front of the Jeep.

Mary cried out sharply, even as Michael slammed on the brakes. He was too late, and the car passed through Nicholas’s ghost.

Mary had accidentally passed through Nicholas’s ghost once before, and she felt it again, that sensation of warmness, of a strong male presence.

And just as she had before, she flashed on a knife rising on the periphery of his/her vision. He/she turned to combat the threat. The knife snaked out, and fiery pain flared at his/her throat. Wetness gushed down his/her front. He/she fell to his/her knees. . . .

Just as quickly as the vision hit her, it disappeared again. She was fully back in her own body, in the parking lot with Michael.

“Jesus,” she said. Belatedly, she realized that she had spilled Coke over her flannel shirt and jeans. She set the can in her drink holder, fingers shaking.

“It’s all right,” Michael said. “It was just Nicholas.”

She stared at him. He looked calm and unaffected. Either he hadn’t passed through any part of Nicholas, or he hadn’t gotten any vision when he had. He pulled into another parking space, unbuckled his seat belt and stepped outside.

She followed him out, walking around the hood of the Jeep to where Michael stood. As she reached Michael’s side, Nicholas reappeared in front of them.