Aftershocks (36 page)

Henricksen nodded slowly.

“What?”

He looked up, his eyes haunted. “Lots of blood.”

* * *

Grant approached his shack with a combination of exhaustion and jittery urgency. No matter how much he worked, he didn’t travel in a month as much as he’d traveled in the last week. His body kept sending him signals that he needed to crash for about twenty-four hours. Like now, when he lifted his right foot to go up the steps, and it didn’t go high enough, and he came close to smashing his face into the deck.

On the other hand, his brain sent opposing signals, telling him to run-not-walk to Zoe, calling him a moron for coming back here when she was in Ohio. It kept trying to send him back to the docks for the next boat out.

But right before Henricksen told them they’d lost Zoe’s signal, Grant had been on the phone with his mother. She wanted to see how things were going, if Zoe had contacted him, how they were getting along, wink-wink-nudge-nudge. She’d asked about the package she sent, and at first he just thought she meant the articles she’d faxed and e-mailed before all this started. But after Henricksen dropped his bomb, after Stone fell completely apart and Henricksen led him off to find someplace to pull himself together, her words had come back to him. She’d specifically said
package
. And he hadn’t gotten one. When he called her back to ask about it, she confessed she’d sent him some of Jordie’s old things. Nothing exciting, just some stuff she’d packed away when she cleaned out his room years ago. She’d found it in the attic and thought he might like to have some of it, since she was pretty sure he didn’t have much.

Grant should have dismissed it. It should have had nothing to do with what was going on with Zoe. But instinct screamed at him to get home and find it. He rarely ignored his instincts, and he was tired of being impotent and scared. So he’d flown home.

He managed to get inside the shack and flipped on the light switch, which lit a small table lamp next to his one comfortable chair. A figure moved and he jerked, reaching for a gun he wasn’t wearing. But it wasn’t a threat.

It was Zoe.

“Where is it, Grant?”

Her voice rasped, the sound of someone who had screamed over and over. Like at a concert. Or during torture. It shook with fear but held a core of steel that told him she was on a mission he would not deter her from.

But she was alive.

He dropped his duffel in the corner and tensed his jaw so he wouldn’t yell at her for tricking him. “I thought you were in Ohio.”

“I left.”

“You should call Stone. He’s pretty—”

“
Where is it?”
She shot out of the chair, eyes blazing, hands fisted. But then she swayed and did a vague eye-blink-head-shake thing, and he knew she was as dead on her feet as he was.

“Where is what? What happened? How did you get here? Your funds were almost depleted.”

“Flew. Boat. Credit card. None of that matters.” She drew a deep breath, her spine lengthening as she visibly drew strength from nothing. Her jaw barely moved as she gritted out, “Pat has Will and a girl. Not Olivia, I don’t think.” She inhaled a quick half-sob.

“Olivia’s in Europe.”

Her eyes widened. “What?”

“There was some kind of— Never mind. She’s safe in Europe with her aunt and uncle. Pat can’t get to her.”

She sagged, and he lurched to grab her and help her back into the chair she’d been sitting in.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I mean, it does, but he’s got someone else. And he threatened if I don’t bring it. Two days. Fast—I have to move fast. God, I’m so tired.” She slumped over, her head dropping onto her arms in her lap. But she kept talking. “I took the FBI phone with me to meet with Pat. I thought Henricksen understood what I was going to do and would follow the signal.”

“He did. They were too late.”

She shifted her head in a kind of nod. “I know. Pat smashed the phone. He said you have the key and I have to get it back to him in seventy-two hours—a lot less, now—or he’ll start killing.” She lifted her head. “Please tell me you have it. Even though I might kill you if you do.”

“I don’t. I’ve never even seen it.” But as worn out as his brain was, he was putting three and five together and coming up with eight. Almost. “Did he say how I got it?”

“No.” She sat up and pushed her hair off her face. It was a limp, tangled mess. “But I was thinking about that on my way down here. He thought he was supposed to get it the night I escaped. But what if Jordie got it first? What if he got the totems but hid the key, and Pat never knew until now? The person he was supposed to meet with might have told him he gave it to Jordie.”

Grant stiffened. “And he told you
I
have it.”

She nodded, but then flattened out her hands, palms up. “But why?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I think I know. But I’m not sure how.” They might have been watching his mother, or maybe somehow listening to her phone conversations or hacking her e-mail. Somehow, they’d determined that she’d sent a package here and assumed the key was in the package.

The problem was, he didn’t have one. Of course, he’d been gone for five days. When he traveled, the mail carrier shoved his regular mail through a slot next to the door. He went over and crouched to dig through the bin that caught it all.

“What are you doing?” Zoe got up and trudged over, pressing a hand on his shoulder as she leaned to watch him.

“Looking…” He pawed through the junk and bills and coupon flyers. Nothing. Starting again at the top, he methodically pulled out each piece of mail until he found what he was looking for. A pinkish slip with his name and address scrawled in one box…and his mother’s in another.

“What? What is that?” Zoe plucked it out of his hand and backed up so he could rise. Her eyes flew over the paper once, twice, three times before she looked up, her mouth falling open. “She had it. She sent it to you.”

“Maybe.”

“We have to make sure she’s okay! What if they tried—”

He held up a hand. “She’s fine. I just talked to her a few hours ago. She mentioned the package, which I obviously hadn’t gotten yet. That’s why I came down here instead of staying at the FBI office in Ohio.”

“Where’s the post office? How do we get this?”

He rasped out a humorless laugh. “Zoe, it’s nearly midnight. We can’t get it until morning. And we both need to sleep.”

“I can’t. I only have hours—”

“Neither of us can do anything if we keel over.” He’d have included himself regardless, just to convince her, but he was almost as desperate as she was. “Sleep, Zoe. We’ll go to the post office first thing in the morning and then take it from there.”

“We should talk about—”

“No.” He nudged her toward the bed. “Sleep. Non-negotiable. We’ll figure out what comes next after what comes next.”

She managed a chuckle and sank onto her side, adjusting the pillow, her eyes already closed. “I hate that I understood that.”

“You probably hate more that you could have said it.” He settled next to her, back to back, and matched his breathing rhythm to hers. “It’ll be okay. I promise.”

A little murmur was all he got back. She’d already fallen asleep, which was good, because it was a promise he didn’t know how the hell to keep.

Chapter Seventeen

Zoe burst from deep sleep into bright sunlight, her sharp intake of breath lingering on the air. She blinked, frowning up at the tin roof until her brain caught up. Morning. Grant’s. Alone. She sniffed. Coffee?

A rustle of paper and scrape of a box on wood made her sit up. Her shirt and jeans were twisted on her body and her face felt stiff, as if she’d been crying in her sleep. She threw off the blanket and eased her aching muscles out of bed. Grant didn’t look up from where he stood at the table, lifting packing paper out of a box.

“You went without me,” she accused. Her throat rattled, making the words husky. She rubbed sleepy sand out of her eyes.

“I didn’t want to wake you. It didn’t take long, and there was no point in both of us going.” He crumpled the paper and tossed it toward the trash can, missing by several feet.

“Well, hold on. Don’t start digging yet. I have to…” She rushed into the bathroom and straightened herself out, taking care of urgent business before washing her face and pulling her hair back into a rubber band. “Okay,” she called, opening the door. “I just have to get some—” She stopped short. Grant held out a mug of coffee. “Get some of that. Thank you.” She wrapped her hands around the mug and inhaled, easing closer to the table as the world perked up around her.

He removed a few battered books from the box and set them on the table. Zoe tilted her head to read the spines. Hardy Boys hardcovers and a copy of
The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew
. One of her favorites as a kid.

She watched him remove a soft old baseball shirt, a trophy, and a glove from the box, and bit her tongue to stop herself from urging him to hurry. A tingle went up her spine, and when Grant drew out a roll of leather, she almost cried again. The key.

“Oh, thank God,” she breathed, reaching a tentative hand toward it. She didn’t really want to touch it, but couldn’t help herself. Was it real?

“Hold your horses. We’re not sure yet.” He cleared some space, letting the rest of the twisted packing paper fall to the floor. She stepped closer as he untied the leather thong holding the roll in place, then gently laid it out on the table. The leather had darkened over time, the markings harder to see than in the picture Zoe’d found, but they were the same. Four squares connected in a diamond pattern by filigree chains, with a few symbols in the center. After seeing the totems at Will’s house and again at Pat’s shack, she recognized the symbols. They were small images that were carved on the totems. The ones on the key were angled, as if pointing to each of the squares the totems needed to be placed on.

The drawing she’d found had been incomplete, though. There was writing across the top and bottom, a language she didn’t know, and she wondered if that was what was supposed to unlock the supposed powers of the totems. Like a chant. But then she remembered the girl, and that Pat thought there was a ritual involved. And the burden of what she had to do descended on her. She sat with a sigh.

“I don’t know how to do this,” she told Grant.

“Do what, exactly?”

She flicked a corner of the leather. “This. Do I take it to Pat so he doesn’t kill Will, then convince him to let him and the girl go? He won’t do that. Will, maybe, if he doesn’t think he needs him anymore. But he needs the girl. Or
a
girl.”

Grant crouched in front of her. “You don’t need to do any of it. I have a team gathering. You just tell us where you’re supposed to go and we’ll do the rest.”

It was tempting to simply let him take over. But the risk was too high. “I can’t stay here, and I have to travel alone. He had people follow me down here. I couldn’t get away to call Henricksen to tell him anything. PB even went into the bathroom with me so I couldn’t borrow a cell phone from a stranger.”

“I called Henricksen this morning,” Grant told her. “So they know what’s happening. And Kell, who was devastated when they found the house where you were was empty.”

“God, Kell.” She rubbed her face with her hands. “He’s got to hate me.”

“No, he doesn’t. He’s crazy in love with you.” He stood and rolled up the key, replacing all his brother’s other things carefully in the box. “So here’s the plan. You and I are going to meet up with Kell, who will take you to an FBI safe house while I go connect with my colleagues, who are all eager to kick ass and take names and under fewer restrictions than the FBI. We’ll go to your meeting spot and extract Carling and the girl, then hand them off to the FBI, who can clean up whatever mess we leave behind while we melt into the wind. ’Kay?”

He made it sound so easy. “What about Pat’s tails?”

“Where are they?”

“I don’t know.” She waved a hand at the beach. “Watching.”

“They’ll expect me to go with you. Rhomney won’t care. He’d be glad to have another person to use as leverage. Don’t worry, Zo, the plan will work.”

She finally nodded, reluctantly. She should see this through to the end, but didn’t know how without getting in the way. The idea of going into hiding with Kell was almost more frightening than going back to Pat and Freddie. She’d lied to him,
again
. And how were they going to handle being alone together with nothing to do? All the questing and running and adventure stuff had been sufficient distraction from their main problem, but if they had hours to kill, she’d have to face the reality of what came next.

It wasn’t just that Kell didn’t know her past. She’d changed over the last week. Grant fed a fierceness in her that she’d packed away when she went to college, like everything her abduction had touched. That part of her wouldn’t be buried again. She wanted to be whole, to embrace everything she was, whether the influences that carved her were good or bad.

So which man would accept her that way? Grant had at least witnessed some of the carving and hadn’t expressed any doubt in his belief that they belonged together. But how could she assume Kell couldn’t love her without giving him a chance to try?