Abandon The Night (4 page)

10:00 A.M
.

Something odd is happening. There are reports of very strong earthquakes in Phoenix, LA, Dallas and Vegas, Denver, St. Louis…everywhere. And at the same time, dark gray clouds are rolling in here. Looks like a nasty storm coming. I find it very disconcerting and a little bit creepy that it should come on the heels of massive earthquakes. Devi and I are surfing the Net on our laptops, looking for updates.

Noon

The ground is trembling here, in southern Nevada. Are we having an earthquake here? The Internet is down. Cell phones are dead. TV too.

Something very frightening is happening.

—from the diary of Mangala Kapoor

“You did it again.”

Quent opened his eyes. He had no idea how long it had been…had he slept for hours or minutes?…but he didn’t care. Zoë’s voice, husky from disuse, and, he hoped, pleasure, was always welcome.

Because that meant she hadn’t slipped off into the night.

The room was dark but for the glow of the small lamp he always left burning when he exited the place. The curtains were drawn tightly enough that he couldn’t tell if a seam of daylight might play around the edges or not.

She lay next to him, propped up on one elbow, her breasts shifted slightly down toward the bed, tempting him with their perky nipples and smooth, feminine curves. Zoë and Quent weren’t touching, but he could feel the warmth of her body, and the slightest dip in the mattress from her insubstantial weight.

“Right,” he replied and half sat up, dragging a hand through his still-damp hair. It tended to curl up when it became wet and then dried on its own, leaving him resembling a messy teen needing a haircut.

This wasn’t the first time Zoë had mentioned the fact that he pulled out just before—or, hell, in this case, right as—he came.
Bugger it.
Quent wasn’t sure how to explain to a woman who lived in a time when the human race had been so destroyed that it was considered almost criminal not to procreate as much as possible, that
he
came from a time when a responsible man didn’t have unprotected sex with a woman he wasn’t married to…and even then, it was fodder for discussion.

And, quite frankly, it wasn’t something he wanted to talk about now.

“Are you going to keep doing that?” she persisted.

Quent felt a strange discomfort trickle through him, leeching away the remnants of his pleasure and satiation. “Probably.” He really fucking didn’t want to talk about this.

But then the memory of their previous conversation about this very subject, and how he was trying to keep her from getting pregnant, flooded his mind. She’d said something along the lines of,
Oh, I never thought about that the other times.

The other times.

What fucking other times?
Before she started making these night-time visits…or since?

Angry all over again, he added, “At least if you get pregnant, you’d know it wasn’t me.”
Probably, anyway.

“Yeah,” she said after a moment, as if she’d had to think about it.

Quent’s belly tightened. Time to change the bloody subject. Back to something he could handle.

But before he could, she beat him to it. “You never thanked me for helping you find your friend who was kidnapped. The Corrigan woman.” She looked at him sidewise, eyes slanted meaningfully.

Quent released a short laugh on a gust of breath. “Right, then, what the hell do you think
that
was?” he said, spreading his hand to encompass the twisted sheets and clothes strewn over the floor.

She smiled back at him, sending another pang of lust twining down past his belly. “I thought you were just hot-damn happy to see me.”

That too.
But he was damned if he’d say it.

I never thought about that the other times.

The other times.

Right. He was a nice little shag when she was in Envy, and that was just fine with him. A little cork pop, keeping the tubes lubed, and he was fine with that. Keep it simple and easy. And when she left to go wherever the hell it was she went when she disappeared, he could care less what she did.

“Shame on me for not thanking you properly,” he told her with a sly smile, “for helping us to find Sage.”

If Zoë hadn’t seen Sage being abducted from Envy a week ago by a bounty hunter who worked for the Strangers, they might not have found her as quickly and easily. That was, in fact, how Quent had come to be in possession of Zoë’s latest arrow. The one that now lay on the floor, hopefully forgotten.

He reached over and stroked the pad of his thumb over her nipple. It hardened and the dark rose areola gathered up prettily beneath his touch, tempting him to taste her again. She arched slightly toward him, and he leaned forward to kiss the side of her neck. How could she taste like cinnamon all the time? Spicy and sweet and a little salty…

She moaned softly, and he felt the lift of her pulse beneath his lips.
Yes, indeed.
Then, reluctantly, he pulled away. His mouth anyway; he kept his hand in place, gently cupping the weight of her breast. There were other things to talk about.

“We did find Sage,” he told her, wondering if they would actually have a bloody conversation. “In Redlow.”

“Yeah, I saw that she was back. She’s getting some from the smokin’ guy with the ponytail, isn’t she?”

The smokin’ guy with the ponytail was Simon, of course. Even Quent could admit that Simon resembled a Hollywood actor, with his sculpted features and the long hair that some women seemed to find attractive. “I could grow my hair longer,” he offered, gently tweaking Zoë’s nipple. “Wear it in a queue.”

She snorted and, to his surprise, reached to brush her fingers over the unruly mess of his hair. He realized with a start that he couldn’t remember her ever touching him except with demand, when they were going at it.

Except for that very first time, when she caressed his cheek.

“You’d be a lot damn safer if you cut this shit off. Or at least shorter.”

“Safer? You mean so you won’t be able to pull on it when we’re fucking?” He resisted the urge to close his eyes; her fingers, gentle on his scalp, felt so good.

She looked at him in exasperation. “You’re blond, genius. The
gangas
go after blondes. Didn’t I fucking tell you to wear a bandanna to cover it, so I wouldn’t have to save your ass again?” Quent laughed and she narrowed her eyes, realizing he’d been teasing her. “Dumb blonde,” she added. And gave a sharp little tug on a curl.

Then he sobered. “When we found Sage, we also found Remington Truth too. Sort of.”

Only recently had Lou and Theo Waxnicki and their Resistance learned that Remington Truth, a former leader of the U.S. government’s National Security Administration, had also been a member of the Cult of Atlantis. A variety of clues had helped them put the pieces together that the
gangas
, who came out only at night and called for
“Ruuuth…ru-uthhh…”
were really calling for Remington Truth, searching for him by order of the Strangers. The fifty-some-year-old Truth had had blond or silvery hair, which explained why the
gangas
abducted anyone with light hair.

As for brunettes and redheads…they were simply mauled and torn apart if caught by a
ganga
.

Quent, with his honey-colored hair was apparently blond enough that the simple monsters thought him a candidate to be Remington Truth…and that was how Zoë had come to rescue him.

A fact that she continually reminded him.

Zoë eased back and sat up, all remnants of teasing or flirtation gone. Her velvety eyes grew serious. “Holy hot damn. And you just now fucking decided to tell me?” Then she crossed her arms under those delicious breasts. “You sort of found him? What the hell does that mean?”

“Right. Well, apparently, the Remington Truth that the Strangers—and the
gangas
—have been searching for since the Change is dead.”

“So they’ve been looking for a dead man for fifty damn years?” Zoë gave a little rusty laugh. He saw a flash of dark humor in her eyes. “Fucking boulderheads.”

He couldn’t have said it better himself.
Gangas
were not only brainless, but so awkward they couldn’t climb anything but low stairs.

“We’re
told
Truth’s dead, though we don’t know how long that’s been the case. This is according to his granddaughter…whose name, interestingly enough, is also Remington Truth. Same really blue eyes, but she’s got long dark hair—no wonder the
gangas
were confused.”

That bit of information was just as interesting to Zoë as it had been to Quent and his friends, if the way she straightened up was any indication…although he wasn’t exactly sure why. Did she realize how badly the Strangers wanted to find Truth? Did she know that the Strangers had feared the man for some reason? That was why the Resistance was so intent on trying to find him—whatever the Strangers feared could only be a benefit to the Resistance. If they found it first.

“His granddaughter,” she said, eyes narrowing in thought. Or suspicion.

“Or so she claimed, before pulling a gun on us and disappearing. I’m not certain how much credence we ought to give her statement.” Quent felt a wry, humorless smile tug his mouth. “You might also find it interesting that, after she slipped away, she forced your friend Ian Marck to drive her off at gunpoint.”

He watched her reaction closely. Aside from being a bounty hunter who worked for the Strangers, Ian Marck could also quite possibly be one of Zoë’s “other times.” The big Slavic-looking blonde and Raul, his father, had kidnapped Jade to fulfill a bounty for one of the Strangers, so he was already on the Resistance’s shit list—and when Quent learned that Zoë was acquainted with Ian, that had just bumped him up a few notches.

“My friend, huh?” she repeated. The expression on her face gave him nothing, of course. She was just as practiced as he was at hiding his thoughts. That was probably how he’d managed to live eighteen years with Parris Fielding without being killed.

So, he pressed, “Wasn’t he the guy you went to talk to at the festival last week?” After she’d been making eyes at Quent from across the room. Very promising eyes, full of blatant invitation.

“You mean while you had your hands all over that blond chick’s ass?” Zoë returned coolly. “You looked pretty busy, plastered against her on the dance floor. Wonder how she felt about you eye-fucking someone else over her shoulder, genius.”

“It was you I was looking for,” Quent said before he could think.
Fuck. Knobhead.
Then, to try to salvage the moment, he gave her a burning smile. “I figured you’d be hot to retrieve your arrow again.”

Zoë looked at him and for a moment, he couldn’t read her expression. Then she smiled in a way that set his blood to boiling and surging, and reached down between them…to where he was already tightening and lifting in response. “Damn straight.”

And the next thing he knew, the low light blotted out as she moved toward him, pushing him back onto the bed, her slender, calloused hands very busy.

When he woke, she was gone.

And so was the arrow.

“I want to go back to Redlow,” Quent said, looking around at his companions: Wyatt, Elliott, Jade, Fence, Lou, Simon, and Sage—the usual suspects. The only person missing from their cartel was Theo Waxnicki, who’d declined to join them because he was in the throes of a computer project…and most likely because he didn’t particularly like to see Simon and Sage together. “Remington Truth might be gone, but she left in a hurry. We might be able to find something helpful she left behind.”

Half-filled cups of coffee and tea littered the table, along with empty breakfast plates. The group sat in Lou’s favorite quiet corner of one of Envy’s communal restaurants—which was more like a cafeteria with one or two entrees each meal—that served most of the population. Since most of the living spaces or homes taken over by Envyites were simply hotel rooms, none of them had access to full kitchens. So through community service and coordinated scheduling, meals were provided in the restaurants to any resident of the city who regularly contributed to the community.

Despite the fact that Quent’s body felt loose and sated from a very busy night, something ugly and heavy had settled in the pit of his belly along with the omelet he’d just eaten. He didn’t know what it was, and he had no intention of spending time trying to sort it out. There were other things to attend to.

Like finding Remington Truth, and, more importantly, Fielding.

Maybe after he hacked the crystal from his father’s body Quent would feel normal again. Although what the fuck
normal
would be for him now was a mystery.

He’d been raised with limitless resources and the ability to fall back on anything from his name to his billions of inheritance. Now he was simply Quent. No skills, no resources, nothing to offer this stark, simple world where money and celebrity status meant nothing.

Wyatt was nodding in agreement with Quent’s conclusion. He set his coffee cup down with a little clink. “I’m with you. I need something to do besides sit around here. We can take Dantès back with us. Maybe he’ll lead us to her.”

Dantès was Remington Truth’s ferocious-looking dog, who had become attached to Wyatt when he figured out how to release him from the guard position she’d left him in.

Lou was also nodding in agreement. “Excellent idea. You can search the things she left behind—see if there’s anything there that might help us.”

“And Quent’ll be able to tell if any of it belonged to Truth—the old mofo, not the hot piece of ass who pulled the gun on you,” Fence said. He was, of course, trying to hold back a chuckle, his impossibly straight and white teeth wide in his face and dark eyes dancing. “Wish’t I’d been there to see you all walking into that frying pan,” he added, his suppressed chuckle squeaking a little bit.

“Yeah, it was a real party. Crazy woman fucking took a shot at me,” Wyatt said flatly.

“You sayin’ she was a little quick on the trigger?” Fence replied jovially. “Better her than you, eh, brother?”