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“Can you stand?”
“Yeah, of course.”
The bravado was lost quick as he shifted off the back bumper and lurched into her. Gathering him up, she helped him over to the front passenger side, belted him in, and raced to get behind the wheel.
She should have known, she thought as she started the engine and put them in drive. Things never stayed on the level for very long with them.
Hitting the gas, she had a thought that she should stay up here and just find one of the access hatches into the lab. She could take him directly to the doctors that way—except no. After the showdown back in the spring, C.P.’s security team had sealed all the tunnels that ran from the mountain’s flanks into the lab. The only way to enter now was through her house, which was like Fort Knox.
She had no choice but to take the long way home.
The trail they’d used to go up to the summit was the road-like one specifically cut and maintained to ensure access of heavy machinery to the highest elevation. She’d been the one to insist that the Wolf Study Project, which was responsible for the acreage, create the emergency access for use in the event any hikers were injured.
And now she was using it for just that purpose. Not that Daniel was a hiker.
“The headache’s getting better,” he said as he sat up a little higher in the bucket seat. “I don’t know what it was.”
“Okay, but we’ll still hustle on down.”
He turned his head on the rest and looked at her. “Well, there’s one piece of good news.”
“What’s that?”
In his best Arnold Schwarzenegger voice, he said, “It’s nought a toomah.”
Lydia blurted out a laugh. “That’s not funny.”
“Sure enough is, and we have the scans to prove it.” He smiled at her. “Hey, maybe one of the undisclosed side effects of carboplatin is a sense of humor. I’m going to try some more jokes out. Knock, knock.”
Lydia pumped the brakes to keep them from gaining too much momentum. Then she jerked the steering wheel to the left to avoid a rock in the middle of the lane.
“Who’s there.”
After a pause, he said, “Guess not.”
“Guess not who?”
“No, I mean, I guess not on the jokes. I got nothing.”
She glanced over at him and smiled. “We’ll work on it together. Take a master class in jokology.”
“Sounds good.”
When she looked back again, he had closed his eyes and parted his lips. And for a split second, shepictured him in a bed somewhere, maybe in their room at C.P.’s, maybe in the clinic, his lids shut, his breathing slow, too slow.
Until it stopped altogether.
As her mind spun out over old familiar terrors, she distracted herself by thinking of the way her life had been before, her days spent counting and monitoring the wolf population on the mountain, dealing with the WSP board—which C.P. Phalen had been head of—filing for grants for money. Dealing with her boss. Working with Candy, the receptionist. There had been stress, of course, but nothing like what Daniel was going through. Things had been so much simpler then, back before her boss, Peter Wynne, had been killed… by their veterinarian. Who had been working with C.P. to test the Vita prototype on the wolf population—and prepared to betray them all.
At least until he had gone to the resort site across the valley to set an IED, so he could pretend to blow himself up and take off for parts unknown.
She and Daniel had come up on him and stopped him.
After which he had gone home and blown his own head off with a shotgun.
Between one blink and the next, Lydia remembered walking in on him.
“It’s going to be fine,” she blurted, unsure exactly what she was talking about.
