Afterglow Read online

  “Thanks for stating the obvious,” he wryly observed.

  “I meant that he’s hardly in a position to be in the know, Rand. I think we should find a place to stop and rest for a few hours, and then catch up with your guys.”

  “No. We’ve all wasted too much time. I’ll let them follow that lead. They’ll call when they have him. We can decide how to handle it from there. My father won’t know about the present application of Rapture, but like you, he knows this drug inside and out. He could have a puzzle piece you don’t know or don’t remember, and maybe he can give us a better, more direct lead. I’m sick of fucking zigzagging all over Europe like a pull toy. We need to get proactive and find a way in the back door.”

  She opened her eyes and straightened. “I’m all for proactive and kicking some butt. What’s the plan?”

  “I have a friend who’ll charter us a private plane on the QT. I don’t want to hit the large airports in case they’re being watched. With face recognition software, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Interpol could be on our asses.”

  She rubbed her hands up and down her arms as a shiver of foreboding chilled her. “No argument there. How many cars do we have to steal between there and here?”

  “This one should do it. It’s only an hour’s drive to Fontainebleau. I haven’t spotted a tail. I don’t think the police are following us. If they were, they’d’ve hauled our asses in for questioning by now. But going to an airport and trying to take a commercial flight would up the ante.”

  The roads were clogged until they broke away from the city and left the lights behind them. Eyes gritty, she curled on the bench seat, fixing her gaze on the hypnotic beams of the headlights as they traveled very fast through the gathering darkness.

  Rand was a terrific driver, and she’d always felt safe with him. In a car, that was. Her emotions hadn’t been safe with him at all.

  He surprised her with his next question. “How are your parents?”

  “Golfing, comitteeing, and being normal,” she said with a smile, angling her body and stretching out her legs. “They’re going to Bora-Bora next month.” Charming people, her parents. Both college professors, they loved but didn’t understand her.

  “What’s their take on this sixth sense of yours, or did you somehow manage to keep it a secret from them too?”

  “Here’s an idea,” Dakota murmured, eyes still closed. “Let’s do our best not to make inflammatory statements until we’ve both had twelve consecutive hours of sleep.”

  “Fair enough. How do Dr. North and Dr. North deal with their only child’s superpower?”

  “They went through denial and isolation from my birth to age seven. Anger from eight to about twelve. Bargaining in my teens, claims of clinical depression—theirs, not mine—in my early twenties. They skipped right over the acceptance part of the program. No A’s for their daughter’s superpower, that’s for sure.”

  “That sucks, Dakota.”

  “They love me. They just don’t understand how I see the numbers. They just don’t get it. Or believe it. Or understand it. It’s not scientific or rational. I accept their issues, and we don’t ever talk about it.” She turned her head on the seat back. “In light of the connection between Zak Stark’s near-death experience and the advent of his skill, I think I had something similar when I was about two. I got encephalitis, and they told my parents that I’d died in the ER.”

  She shrugged. “There’s no way of knowing if I’d had the GPS sense before that. I don’t ever remember not having numbers streaming through my head. I had no idea what they were.”

  “What’s it look like?” The curiosity in his voice was a far cry from the disdain she’d been hearing in his tone since Monte Carlo.

  “The numbers? They appear as a string, no indications of latitude or longitude, no north or south. Just a long string of numbers on a never-ending loop. I’ve learned to switch it on and off, because when I was younger I’d see dozens of numbers if I was on the playground, or if I touched anything and everything. Eventually I was able to sort the wheat from the chaff and focus on just one … stream. The numbers are bright, for want of a better word, and when I see them they’re superimposed over whatever is in my field of vision. Layered over everything.”

  “Annoying?”

  She shrugged. “Just my reality. I’ve never had it any other way.”

  “How did you figure out what the numbers were?”

  “My parents tried to pretend to themselves that I was a child prodigy instead of a freak, and that I was seeing some sort of mathematical equation that they never could figure out. But when I was five or six, our dog was stolen. I was devastated and cried for hours. Then I found his collar in the backyard near the fence, and the numbers changed almost immediately. That time when I told my father, he got out a map. One of my school friends had taken Snoopy, claiming the dog had followed her home. I never liked that girl.”

  “They were still in denial, even though you started that early?” Rand shot her a quizzical look, then turned his attention back to the road. The trees lining the road were becoming more dense. Beech, oak, and pine, black silhouettes against the night sky.

  “It took a couple more years and a bunch more ‘coincidental’ finds to bring them around to the fact that, like it or not, understand it or not, it was a part of me. They showed me how to use a map, and eventually my dad bought me a handheld GPS for a birthday.”

  An oncoming car’s lights illuminated Rand’s face as she turned to look at him. He didn’t look annoyed, just curious. It was a start. “Did you go to Zak and ask for a job?”

  “No. I hadn’t seen him since—” Since Rand had told her to go to hell. “For about a year. After I got out of the hospital.” She cleared her throat. “The lab fired me, and I was unemployed for a while. Then there was a string of abductions of high school girls about a year ago. Five girls were taken as they walked home from school in the space of a couple of weeks. As soon as I heard about the case, I went to the local PD and offered my services.”

  “Let me guess—they didn’t believe you could do it, and/or they thought you were the one doing the kidnappings.”

  “Both. But eventually I persuaded them to give me a shot, and they let me hold the last girl’s cell phone. I found her in Olympia within an hour.”

  “Dead?”

  Every now and then another oncoming vehicle’s lights would illuminate Rand’s face, making him look a little demonic, and grim. “No. Alive. My talent only works if the person I’m trying to track is still alive. The men had been holding her in a hunting shack in the mountains. The cops arrested both of the assholes and found the bodies of the other four girls buried on the property. The girl’s parents went to the press, Zak’s wife saw the newscast, and they contacted me. He and Acadia took me out to dinner and offered me the job.”

  “A waste of your education, don’t you think?”

  “I didn’t lose what I learned just because I do this instead of being a chemist. Actually, the two jobs can work well toge—why do you keep looking back?”

  They were in the boonies between towns, nothing but fields and trees on either side of a two-lane road. A handful of vehicles traveled in either direction, lights on. The interior of the truck lit up as someone tailgated them.

  She straightened, half-turning in her seat. “Is someone following u—” Oh, dear God. Rand had his gun in his hand. It looked huge and menacing. A quick glance at his face showed that so did he.

  “For the last fifty kilometers.” His voice was calm, but she could read the tension in the lines of his body. Her pulse sped up as he slid down his window. Warm wind blew her hair around her shoulders, it smelled of grass and pine trees.

  “Put your shoes on and tighten that seat belt.”

  “I don’t want to sound like Pollyanna, but they’ll question us, we’ll explain the situation, you’ll show your credentials, and they’ll let us go—right?” She slipped on her shoes, and turned, arm braced on
the seat back to look out the rear window. There were several cars’ lights behind them. She looked back at Rand, his features illuminated by the dash lights. She wasn’t sure he was even listening to her. Eyes narrowed against the glare in the rearview mirror, he looked intense and focused.

  “Okay, yeah, we were at the bank, but surely all it’ll take is a few questions. They’ll know we aren’t bank robbers. Except—damn it. All those people died. So they’re not just going to question us, are they? They’re going to haul us off somewhere for serious interrogation.”

  The thought scared her to death. The laws in Europe were vastly different from back home. Rand would know this better than she did, thanks to his father’s experience with the Italian police.

  She started mentally tallying everything she owned, in the event it needed sold for her legal defense. There wasn’t much. She’d sold her condo and was in hock up to her eyeballs, thanks to a gazillion dollars’ worth of medical bills. She rubbed her arms through the thin windbreaker. “Are you going to stop?”

  He had his gun hand braced on the lower curve of the wheel as he drove. “No sirens or lights. I don’t think that’s Interpol or the local cops on our ass.” His tone was grim, and he cast another glance in the rearview mirror. His thigh flexed as he applied more pressure to the accelerator. The car shot forward as if jet-propelled. Someone honked loud and long as they passed. The trees alongside the road whizzed by at blistering speed in their headlights.

  She frowned. “If it’s not the police, then w—”

  “Tighten your seat belt and hunker down.” In case she didn’t understand the “hunker down” part, he put his gun hand on her crown and shoved.

  “Holy shit, Rand! Both hands on the wheel!” Dakota slid lower in the seat, her head sliding below the headrest.

  He’d just wrapped his fingers back around the wheel when the truck was sideswiped with a loud crunching of metal and a bone-jarring shudder. A blare of horns from other cars trying to avoid being sideswiped by either the attack car or the truck reverberated in the night wind.

  A metallic bang-bang-bang and the accompanying muzzle flashes indicated bullets hitting the body of the truck. The blast of answering shots fired from Rand’s gun made Dakota’s ears ring in the close confines.

  The bad guys volleyed back, a burst of gunfire peppering the steel body of the truck in a cacophony of bangs and metallic whines set her teeth and nerves on edge.

  With a grinding, almost animal-in-pain sound, the car scraped down the driver’s side. Their wheels squealed as Rand fought to stay on the road. “Fuck.”

  He could say that again.

  He fired several more shots through his window, which were answered with several from the other car. Dakota saw the muzzle flashes in the darkness, and waited for a bullet to hit one of them.

  No bullet through the brain, just the jolting impact of the other car slamming into them again, immediately accompanied by the shatter of breaking glass. The force jarred all the way down her spine as the truck slewed across the road with a high-pitched screech of the tires. “Son of a bi—”

  “What?” She raised her eyes to try to see what was happening.

  “Stay down!”

  She buried her face in her lap. Something exploded through the window beside her, showering her with chunks of shattered glass that glimmered like diamonds on her clothing and hair in the lights of oncoming traffic. She squeezed her eyes shut and wrapped her arms over her head, bracing her feet on the floorboard as the car swerved and bumped over something, then swerved again. Blaring horns and squealing tires made her picture the drivers slamming on brakes and wrenching their cars out of the way of the careening truck.

  Rand cursed again as the heavier vehicle slammed once more into the rear on the driver’s side, pushing them partway into the ditch running alongside the road, a two-foot drop. The truck tilted dangerously, and Dakota grabbed the door handle and braced her feet.

  “Don’t worry,” he yelled. “I’m still a member of the PDA.”

  “Public displays of affection?” Dakota yelled back, voice muffled by her lap.

  “Professional Driving Association.”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s the bunch that doesn’t give disability insurance, right?”

  “I’ve done dozens of high-speed chases. Just keep your head down. I’ll lose them.”

  This wasn’t a movie stunt where he had two or three rehearsals and several takes from different angles to make it look realistic. Rand wasn’t going to lose them if they were attached like Velcro to the side of the truck. “Tell the director to yell ‘cut’ anytime soon.”

  The shrubs and tree branches in the ditch slapped the truck’s body as he accelerated. The other vehicle body-slammed them from the rear, then again, shoving them forward toward a stand of trees visible in the cone of their headlights.

  Another bullet whizzed through the truck, leaving the rear passenger window shattered, and the windshield with a vast spiderweb crack that made visibility difficult. Dakota dug her nails into the fake leather armrest on the door to prevent herself from shrieking every time the other car slammed into them, every time they got off another shot. Not for herself, hell, she’d be happy to scream her head off like a girl, but she didn’t want to distract Rand, who was doing a masterful job.

  He knew how to handle a car, thank God. However, when he’d done his job, he was working with other stuntmen. Not some homicidal maniac determined to kill him.

  The truck lurched and bumped back onto the tarred road just shy of the trees, only to be hit again from behind. Her head snapped back. She didn’t know what she could do to help. Shut up and not distract him was the best she could come up with.

  She didn’t know when she’d lifted her head from her knees, but if she was going to die, she’d prefer looking death in the eyes. She pulled the belt tighter across her body, keeping her head low but her eyes firmly fixed on the road illuminated in the headlights.

  Rand’s fingers were white as he clenched the steering wheel, then gave it a vicious tug that had her grabbing the dash with both hands as he swung the truck in an arc that left it pointing at their attackers—head-on.

  No. No. No!

  Aghast, she realized that far from slowing down, Rand was aiming straight for the other vehicle, a large black sedan with tinted windows, the front fender crumpled, one headlight shattered. A lethal Cyclops that Rand was going to play chicken with.

  “Brace!” With a flip of his wrists, he sideswiped the attack car, sending it skating across the road into an oncoming vehicle. Horns blared, lights tilted and dipped as the two cars spun out of control.

  He floored the truck, did a wheelie, and kept going. Dakota smelled burning rubber. She pulled herself upright and turned to look behind them.

  “I think you shook them.” She swallowed. “You shook m—oh, damn it to hell! Here they come.”

  “See ’em.” He had his foot hard on the accelerator. The truck shook and rattled with the speed. But this wasn’t an Indy 500 race car. It was an old truck. The car behind them looked new, shiny, and heavy. And very, very determined.

  He waited until they were inches from the bumper, then wrenched the wheel again, spinning the truck into a screeching, bone-rattling one-eighty. Dakota saw the other driver’s face, his eyes wide as the two vehicles passed within inches of each other. Rand fired a shot, but they were traveling so fast Dakota had no idea if it found its mark.

  “Got a hairbrush in that bag?”

  Dakota slung the bag on her lap and rummaged through it. She leaned over, giving him the boar’s-bristle brush without question.

  “Here, stick this in there.” He handed her his gun. “And this.” His wallet and phone.

  Dakota tossed everything into her tote and zipped it.

  “Give it here.” He took the bag, shoving it between his seat and the truck door. Not a particularly safe place to stash it.

  “Slide over here, and hold the wheel.” He manipulated the seat control and the
seat slid back, giving him more legroom.

  She had to undo her seat belt to accomplish that. Probably not a smart move under the circumstances. She slid across the cracked vinyl seat until she felt the heat of his body through her clothes.

  “Eleven and three.” He unbuckled his belt, then curled his warm hands over her freezing fingers to make sure her hands were where he wanted them. “Hold tight, they’ll ram us again. Keep going straight.”

  Wind coming in the broken windows whipped her hair into stinging strands across her face. She had a death grip on the plastic steering wheel, her knuckles ghost-white in the near dark. She kept her eyes on the road, ignoring the trees and shrubs whizzing by in her peripheral vision. Rand contorted his body across her lap, thrusting his arm between her knees and down to the pedals to wedge the brush … somewhere. The truck’s speed dropped so dramatically that the bad guy’s car skimmed their bumper, then kept going right past them. Dakota had a glimpse of two men in the front seat, and then they were once again plunged into darkness.

  “Get on my lap.” Rand pushed against the door with his shoulder, then contorted to get his leg bent enough to give it a solid kick.

  Horrified, she turned to look at him. “No wa—” He gave her a steely look in return. “You’re insane!”

  He finally managed to pop the driver’s-side door open, and Dakota saw the black ground rushing below in the wedge of the open door as her bag flew out and disappeared from sight.

  “Damn it to hell, that had all our stuff—” Oh no, oh no, oh no. Before she could retreat to her side of the seat, he grabbed her under the arms and lifted her onto his lap, facing forward, squeezed between his unyielding chest and the hard steering wheel. The truck swerved and danced across the road, and she had to grab his leg with one hand to keep her balance.

  “You can’t do this,” she shouted over the crunch of gravel beneath the tires. The wind whipped her hair around them in a twisted tangle. “Rand, for God’s sake. This isn’t a movie set.”