Thank God. “Cordell, I can’t get ahold of Dom. Two Darkbloods are chasing my brother Corey. He’s not a sweetblood, so I don’t know what the hell is going on. He’s north of Tacoma heading this way on I-5. We’ve got twenty or thirty minutes tops before he gets up here unless they take him out on the freeway.”
“Holy mackerel, they’re usually not that bold.” She heard his fingers clicking away on a keyboard. “They prefer to work in the shadows. Your brother should be safe enough if he stays on the freeway. Here, lemme send Dom an emergency text message. Oh, great.”
“What?”
“Right now, Dom’s on Bainbridge Island in a small pocket with spotty cell coverage, but as the data lines run on a separate system...” Mackenzie fidgeted as he rambled on and on about text messages getting through when a call cannot. “Look,” he said as if she were in the room with him. She imagined he was pointing to the screen. “DeGraff’s team is down south and Foss is up near the Canadian border. If your brother can stay ahead of them, maybe he can drag it out until we can get to him.”
She told him about the gas situation.
“Damn, that doesn’t give us much leeway.”
“If I can get him downtown, can he come here?” The words flew out of her mouth almost as fast as she could form them. “Dom said once that this place is cloaked. I don’t know how that works. Would my brother be able to find it? Would the Darkbloods be able to follow him inside?”
“He’d never find it. Neither could you if you were outside.”
“What if I brought him to the loft?” Mackenzie brought a hand to her head, trying hard to control her desperation.
“Won’t work. It’s cloaked, too,” Cordell said.
“What if I got him close? Would you be able to uncloak it to let him in?”
“The only way we could do that is if he’s far enough ahead of them when he gets close. We’ll need at least ten minutes to safely drop the shields and get them back up. And even then, I’d need Dom’s authorization code.”
If Dom hadn’t been able to get far enough away from the Darkbloods chasing them the other night to uncloak the place,there was no way Corey would be able to do it in his piece of shit car. She’d have to figure out a way to stall them. The beginning of an idea brewed in her head.
“I’ll be in touch,” she said and slammed down the phone.
She rubbed her temples when she felt a slight vibration inside. Dom.
It’s the only way. He's my brother, Dom. I can’t just stand by and let him be captured by those monsters like our father was. I love you. I’ll be careful, I promise.
She wasn’t sure how much of her thoughts he’d be able to pick up on from this distance, but what she did know was she needed to get the heck out of the loft before Dom was able to contact Cordell. He’d likely give him instructions to lock her up again. Then her brother, with no one to help him, would meet with the same fate their father had. And Stacy. And Martin.
After double-checking that she had Cordell’s number on her phone, she ran out of the loft and took the stairs down to the building lobby, not wanting to wait for that ridiculously slow old elevator.
“Corey, how are you doing?” she asked as took the stairs two at a time. “They still behind you?”
“Yeah. They dropped back a little, but they’re still there.” He sounded more confused than worried, but at least he was doing what she’d told him.
“Where are you now?” she asked.
“Going past Fife.”
Damn. Still too far away. She startled the security goon at the front desk when she flew into the lobby.
“Wait, wait,” he yelled.
She ignored him and ran for the exit. As she burst through the door onto the sidewalk, a shock of static electricity shot through her body. “What the—” She spun around, but the doorshe’d exited through was gone. All she saw was the side of a building.
Outside her house, the street looked quiet enough, but she asked the driver to circle around to the alley just to make sure. Except for Mr. Marsh’s beat-up green Mustang propped up on jacks and the iridescent eyes of a cat on the prowl, the headlights illuminated nothing else.
She paid the driver and climbed out, but when she turned to ask him to wait until she got inside, he drove away, oblivious to the fact that she hoped to God a pair of Darkbloods weren’t lurking around for her.
Pulling out the specially loaded Ruger from her purse, she took a deep breath and watched the taillights disappear around the corner. The textured grip fit tightly in her palm, giving her some measure of comfort.
Yes, I can do this thing. I must. Now hustle. Get in, get out, get Corey.
If only it wasn’t so dark. She stepped onto an overturned milk crate and reached over the ivy-covered fence to unlatch the gate. Neighborhood kids must’ve busted out the bare bulb on the Marshes’ toolshed again. The gate clicked shut behind her, and a lonely-sounding dog barked in the distance.
