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“Only one half as fucked. I do not have time to explain the defense systems. You!” Val stabbed a finger at Aaro. “Get Zia from the kitchen! And you!” He rounded on Lily. “Wake Rachel from her nap.Run!”
The tension in Val’s voice propelled them like bullets from a gun.
Rachel was not pleased to be woken from her nap, but Lily flung the child’s squirming body over her shoulder. Even with panic to help her, it was a good thing the kid was so small. She snagged Rachel’s sneakers and sprinted through the house, yanking the child’s coat off the hook outside the garage door. Val was strapping a white-lipped Tam into the back of a black eight-seater van. Alex was at the wheel, engine growling. Zia Rosa sat in the front passenger seat, clutching her purse, staring back at Tam, lips moving as she babbled a litany of prayers.
Lily leaped in, tossing Rachel onto the seat. The vehicle surged forward before she slid the door shut. She got the whimpering Rachel strapped into her booster seat. The conversation came into focus.
“…is too small for a hospital,” Val was saying. “We will have to go to the hospital at Rosaline Creek. Take the Moss Ridge highway north at Junction 13. Twelve more miles north. Go fast.”
Aaro obliged. Gravity slammed Lily back into her seat as the minivan’s powerful motor roared.She strapped herself in.
Tam’s eyes were closed. Her lovely face had that stiff, immobile look, like marble. As if she were bracing herself for something.
“Is she…” Lily stopped, swallowed. She didn’t even have the nerve to finish framing the question.
Val would not meet her eyes. He stared at Tam, clutching her hand, his other hand resting on her belly. “We will see,” he said.
“Mamma?” Rachel twisted around, too. “Are you sick?”
Tam managed a smile for her daughter. “I’m fine, baby.”
Rachel studied her mother. Those big dark eyes were old beyond her years, much like Sveti’s. “Is Irina fine?”
Tam flinched. “We’ll see, honey. Can’t talk now. Be still, OK?”
Rachel wrapped her arms around her knees and began to cry.
The van careened at ninety-five an hour down the winding two lane blacktop, squealing around the hairpin turns, swerving around the odd oncoming logging truck. Lily’s eyes stung.
She wrapped an arm around Rachel’s thin, trembling shoulders.
Rachel grabbed her, and hung on tightly.
CHAPTER25
“Drive faster! We have to get there before they do!”
“I know that, damn it!” Hobart cursed as the car fishtailed on the rain-slicked asphalt. “Calm down! This will be tricky, but it’s our chance, to show him what we can really do! To prove ourselves!”
But Melanie was too involved in her funk to respond to his pep talk. She clutched the headphones attached to the laptop to her ears, connecting her to the audio coming through Rosa Ranieri’s phone.
“You know what happens if we fuck up, right?” she quavered.
“Melanie, this is not useful right now—”
“King will Level Ten us. And we will dig our own graves and slash our own fucking throats.” Her voice was shrill. “Because he hates us, now.” Her voice dissolved. “He just h-h-hates us.”
Hobart glanced at her, dismayed. She’d been his pod-mate since babyhood, and he knew her weak points like his own. When she was stressed, she moped. She’d hidden her depressive tendencies from King in the testing cycles, but she couldn’t hide them from her pod-mates.
The situation was critical. They’d barely slept in the three days they’d been ensconced at Cray’s Cove. Steele’s home was impregnable without an army, and there was no sneaking up on it by stealth, either. They had to wait for an opening, chewing their knuckles while the clock ticked, feeling King’s disapproval like a cold fog curling all around them. They tried to get some sleep, spelling each other for half-hour naps from time to time, but they mostly relied on the pick-up drugs.
The car that had left a couple hours before, full of McCloud wives, had been the first opening, but they’d been unable to take advantage of it, with King’s imperative of stealth and guile. King should have sent them a dozen agents for backup. They could have stopped the car, killed the young man, taken the women and the baby hostage, and had a strong card to play. But they were being punished with an impossible task. But just maybe, that impossible task had become possible.
The electrifying news they collected from Rosa Ranieri’s cell gave them no time to prepare, to plan. Tam Steele was rushing to the hospital emergency room. Lily Parr was with them. It was never going to get any better than this—if they were brilliant, and quick as a snake.
If. He glanced over at Melanie’s wet eyes and trembling mouth. Damn. That was a big if, with Mel in such bad shape. He wished he could call King, and get him to give Melanie a Level Four pick-me-up like the one King had done for him. He’d taken care not to tell Mel about that. She was shaky enough already. No time. “Take your patch, Mel,” he ordered. “You need it. I already took mine, before we left the hotel.”
“We’ll slit our own throats,” Mel moaned. “We may as well have gotten gassed with the other shredders, back on cull day. It would have been better to end it then. Instead of us busting our asses, for years, for nothing. For him to just hate us. I can’t stand it. I just can’t—”
