Page 42 of Monster Queen Rising

Thaw takes us north at speed.

The drive is long. Thaw drives. I sit with my palm on my chest.

Mary Wylie.

I keep the name the whole way home.

Chapter fifteen

Jen

Rain on the windshield.

"Next name," I say.

"Thirteen hours east. We’ll stop halfway." Dean drives.

The next morning Dean's terminal pulls comm traffic while we're stopped at a rest stop off the highway. Sarah Klein. Twenty-nine, lab tech in Reno, taken from her apartment four days ago and moved twice since. The transport's holed up at a facility we can't breach with two people.

We knew her name. We couldn't get to her yet.

Dean comes back with the coffee, sees my face.

"We're not too late for this one."

He writes the address in the notebook.

I nod.

He drives.

Idaho by nightfall, running toward the eleventh name. Ana Choi. Twenty-eight, librarian in Spokane. They took her from a hospital where she was being treated for a car accident that wasn't an accident, and they're moving her south, and we're an hour behind the whole way.

We catch the transport at a fuel stop outside Twin Falls, barely — Dean reads the plates off a station camera and we come in as they're pulling out. It goes fast and it goes ugly, but it works. Ana Choi gets in our truck with a hospital band still on her wrist and shakes the whole drive and doesn't die.

Ana has a sister in Montana. She gives Dean the address in a whisper, over and over, like she's afraid she'll forget it. We take her there — a ranch house at the end of a long drive, a porch light on at four in the morning, a woman already running down the steps before the truck stops. Ana's out and into her the second the door opens. We don't go in. We watch long enough to see the door close on the two of them, and then we go.

"That's what's supposed to happen," Dean says.

The next name, Janet Reeves brings us into eastern Montana — a schoolteacher who's been watched for four months. We reach her before the Syndicate does. She gets in with a suitcase, a dog, and a box of student essays she couldn't leave, and she listens, and she comes back toward the far house with us, because nowhere else is safe.

We're a day out from home and the last name on this run is the one that goes sideways.

Northern Idaho. Mara Cole. The Syndicate's just minutes behind us when we reach her cabin. We get Mara out the back. Dean at the wheel. Two operatives come through the front and reach the back door before we're out of the driveway, and they put two rounds through the rear window — one into the headrest a foot from Mara's head, one through the rear quarter panel.

We get away.

Mara's bleeding from the head — a window shard, not the round, the cut not deep. Dean drives us clear, no lights, the long way, checking mirrors he's already checked. I have her head in my lap, a flannel pressed to the cut, blood on my hands and jeans and the seat.

"Am I going to be ok?" she says. Her voice is small but calm.

"Yes, you're alive. You're going to stay that way."

She closes her eyes and lets me hold the flannel to her head and doesn't say anything else.

We reach the far house past midnight. Harek closes the cut and feeds her and puts her in a room, and by the time we've handed her off the adrenaline's still in both of us with nowhere to go.

Dean doesn't come inside.