Desert Devil (Old School Book 5) Page 2

  “That’s a dramatic story.”

  She tipped her chin up in a request and challenge. “Give me two more minutes before you tell me you don’t believe me.”

  He sat back.

  “My visions tend to use dream symbolism.” She rubbed her arms. The diner’s air-conditioning was barely coping with the heat outside, but remembering the vision chilled her. “My visions aren’t merely visual or auditory. The important ones have an emotion attached. In this vision…you were going to die. The raven saved you.” She leaned forward. “Rest, it’s going to happen soon. There was too much urgency to the vision and how it’s goaded me on. You’re in danger.”

  “I am, now that you’ve found me.”

  She frowned. “I won’t tell anyone.” She sighed, achingly disappointed by, yet resigned to, the suspicion in his brown eyes. “But you’re not going to believe me. Time will prove that—if you’re alive to test my honesty. Rest, I don’t know why you dropped off the face of the Earth and it’s none of my business. I won’t bother you. I won’t contact you, again.” Making the promise hurt. As a woman, his harsh rejection punished the fantasies she’d stupidly allowed herself to dream while travelling here. And then there was the history between them. Not just as adults. Of all the kids who’d passed, and continued to pass, through her parents’ home, he’d been the one she’d trusted the most. That he couldn’t return her trust hurt.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” she said impulsively. “I’ll leave right now, if you put the pendant on and promise not to take it off for a week.”

  His dark gaze finally moved from her face to the pendant lying on the table in front of him. He turned it over thoughtfully.

  “It’s a plain crystal,” she said. “It’s not a beacon or anything. It’ll keep you safe.”

  “If I wear it.” He straightened the silver chain that held it.

  “If you wear it, I’ll leave. No questions asked. I’ll forget you’re here.”

  The corners of his mouth indented at that promise, either from irony at knowing how impossible her promise was to fulfil or because somewhere hidden in him he also felt the wrongness of there being no ties between them.

  Or did he hear the pain in her voice?

  He looked up abruptly. “Okay.” He lifted his hat, looped the chain over his neck, and tucked the black tourmaline crystal beneath his shirt. He stood, placing money on the table. “Don’t come back.”

  She brought the coffee cup to her mouth, instinctively attempting to mask her expression. The coffee tasted bitter as Rest walked out.

  The atmosphere of interest and amusement with which the waitress and other three diners had observed Donna and Rest died, replaced by shock and discomfort.

  Donna quickly turned back from watching his departure. She’d warned herself not to expect a gracious welcome. After all, he was trying to hide and she’d chased him down. But she’d never anticipated his utterly final dismissal.

  Didn’t he remember…?

  She shook her head sharply, and added a tip to the money he’d left to cover their coffees and whatever he’d eaten before her arrival. Then she left.

  Rest drove out of town with the crystal staying stubbornly cold against his chest. He had the windows of the pickup down and a hot wind blew in. He braked in a cloud of dust and pulled the crystal out from beneath his shirt. When his fingers touched it, he realized that it had warmed with his body heat. The cold sensation was something deeper, something Lt. Wayne Liu would have said had to do with Rest’s malfunctioning heart chakra.

  But the lieutenant was dead.

  “And I’m next.” Or so Donna said. Rest shoved the pickup back into gear and accelerated toward the ranch. Even in the vast distances of the West, it wasn’t possible to outrun your thoughts—or apparently, your past.

  Donna. Prettier than ever, determined, and…hell’s blood, he recalled her eyes stricken with his rejection but trying so hard to hide it.

  He pounded the steering wheel.

  No one took rejection well, but Donna had lived it for too many years.

  Rest had witnessed it before, which was why it ripped and twisted his guts that he’d meted out that rejection, again.

  In many ways, she was her parents’ greatest victim.

  His frown intensified as he turned off the road, onto his own land. He’d traded a witch a week’s portal travel for the wards that protected his home, but he couldn’t detect them. They weren’t his kind of magic. If Donna had confronted him at his ranch, would the wards have let her in? The briefing he’d given the witch had been to set the wards to keep out all evil and all who intended him harm.

  Donna wouldn’t mean him harm, but she could be used by the same people connected to the government whom her parents served. It would be a smart tactic to lure him out. He’d cut ties with everyone from his former life. Now, he lived quietly on the outskirts of Tedium, occasionally trading ranch work for help with his project those times when a job was beyond one man’s ability.

  Yet the sight of Donna and hearing her say she’d had to find him, had exposed the falsity of his claim that he didn’t look back. If she’d needed help, he’d have given it, risking everything.

  There were few people in the world that he cared about. Donna had been one of them from the time she was a cute kid with a goofy sense of humor that she’d concealed from her parents. He respected what Ellen Keats did for the foster children who passed through her home, including him, but that didn’t mean he’d missed her impatience with her own daughter. The result was that Donna had learned not to push for attention in the family. Ellen always made it clear that the foster children needed, and perhaps she’d even inferred that they deserved, her attention more than her own daughter.

  On his last visit to the Keats’ house, Rest had sat down to dinner with them and with the two brothers they’d been fostering, a thirteen-year-old wizard and his year-younger brother. Donna had been eighteen. She’d looked around the large kitchen and he’d seen the walls closing in on her. So when she’d asked him if he’d go for a walk with her along the river “because I know I can’t run alone at night in Washington”, he’d said yes. And he’d said yes, too, when the boys had pleaded with big puppy eyes to join them.

  Donna hadn’t begrudged the boys joining them. After the walk, while the brothers stumbled upstairs for showers and bed, she’d smiled and thanked him. “They’ll remember this. A Ranger hero explaining the training and telling them stories of military adventures. Thanks, Rest.” She’d stood on tiptoe, kissed his cheek sister-fashion, and vanished upstairs.

  He’d stood there a moment, proud of the choices he’d made. The army had given him a chance to escape his childhood and his magical talent—or so he’d thought, then.

  He got out of the pickup and slammed the door. Hell, but he was tired of his paranoia. If 13OPS had sent Donna to lure him out of hiding, they’d chosen the right bait. However, it didn’t make sense. If they’d sent her, then they already knew where he was and there was no need for game playing. They could just drag him out.

  Meeting Donna—and sending her away—had stirred up thoughts and emotions he’d buried two years ago, working till physical exhaustion let him sleep. Guilt and the thought of how much more he could cost people had ridden him hard till he’d found a kind of peace here in the Arizona desert.

  As far as he knew he was one of only three couriers alive. There was Donna’s dad, Tony Keats, who worked for the American government and its allies, and turned a blind eye to things that Rest refused to accept. Then there was Blossom. She lived in Hong Kong and worked for business and organized crime, and very possibly, for the Chinese government. Anyone going after Blossom had to have a death wish. Too many powerful people owed her and relied on her portal travel. They would defend her to the attackers’ death.

  Which left Rest. He was independent and unaligned, and that made him vulnerable—or at least, people thought that made him vulnerable—to intimidation. For two years, the easiest solution
had been to drop out of sight. People had to find him before they could threaten him.

  Donna had found him. If she wasn’t involved with 13OPS, how had she gotten his photo for her finder talent friend to locate him?

  He swore as he strode toward the old ranch house.

  The hurt in her eyes when he’d told her to go and not come back cut at him. He’d done it for her. If his paranoia had even the slightest element of truth and she’d arrived in Tedium through some manipulation of the military or government that had owned him, then he had to make it clear that she was unimportant; that she couldn’t be used as a weapon to control him and his courier talent.

  He’d done what he could to protect her. Now he had to be alert to any newcomers to town or trespassers on his ranch. If he had to run, he could do so in a second.

  But what if she hadn’t lied or been sent here to entrap him? Maybe he had slipped into paranoia and no one pursued him. Could she be a seer?

  He knew so little about them. While seers weren’t quite as rare as courier talents, 13OPS and others would be equally keen on controlling one. Donna would have had valid reasons for hiding such a talent from her family—and being sent away to boarding school might have enabled her to do so.

  If she had seen his death in a vision, what should he do? He had weapons, but his only magic was his courier talent, and that couldn’t defend him against a demon. Did he hang his hope on the pendant he’d promised to wear?

  He took off his hat, slapped the dust from it against his thigh, and hung it on a hook by the front door. He had a commitment to keep. Deciding how to respond to Donna’s unexpected intrusion into his new life—and how to lockdown his own turmoil surrounding it—had to wait ten minutes. He collected his gear from the spare room that served as his office, opened a portal and stepped into it.

  People he couriered complained about how strange the Path between portal entrance and exit was for them, but he couldn’t comprehend it. To him, the Path was a simple tunnel, vast and silvery, as if spun from a non-sticky spider web. It bounced faintly when he jumped on it, but was otherwise stable. Tony Keats’s training had helped Rest to focus his talent and identify the exits he needed to use for his clients’ various destinations. The more often an exit from the Path was used, the clearer it showed in the spider web tunnel.

  Rest had only used the exit to the old colonial house in the Punjab countryside a dozen or so times, but already the thread he needed to pull to open a gap in the Path shone a pale green. He stepped through the gap and into India. The dreamy light of dawn washed a faint golden color over a stone fountain. Fish swam languidly in the shallow pool, undisturbed by the portal opening. Wide verandas enclosed the courtyard, deep with shadow. Jasmine and fragrant herbs scented the air.

  Larry Gordon loped out of the house. The billionaire was in his late sixties, rangy and weathered. He’d spent his life investigating life’s mysteries. The odder they were, the more interested he was. Now that he was retired from the tech world, the brilliant computer scientist had turned his intellect to an ancient puzzle.

  “Right on time,” Larry greeted Rest happily, before turning his head and shouting back toward the dining room. “Hurry up!”

  His two assistants got stuck in the doorway, both rushing to respond to the imperative hail.

  Larry, meantime, buckled on the belt Rest handed him. By now, all three were familiar with the procedure for portal travel, and the other two men grabbed their belts and cinched them swiftly.

  Rest checked that the lead ropes, which were actually leather straps, linked securely to the hooks on the left side of their belts. Rest had borrowed the idea from Tony Keats. With his former team, he’d trusted their commonsense and hadn’t roped them. Moreover, they’d needed to be free to act independently immediately on exiting a portal. Civilians were different.

  In the confusion of the Path, civilians generally panicked, and whether they were mundane or magical made little difference.

  Larry was mundane, as were his two young assistants. They were really bodyguards who doubled as extra hands and strong backs to carry all the equipment Larry brought with him on these expeditions.

  “Water?” Rest asked. He refused to babysit his courier clients, but at the same time, he wasn’t going to transport them to a desert and leave them without sufficient water through the heat of a long summer’s day. There were canteens attached to the men’s waists, but they weren’t enough.

  “In our packs,” the assistants answered in unison.

  Rest readjusted his grip on the end of the strap that linked to Larry’s belt. Tony Keats had always worn a belt the same as his courier clients and fastened the lead rope to it. But Rest refused to be harnessed. The strap had the same kind of loop as a dog’s leash and he slipped it over his wrist and gripped the leather.

  The three men shuffled in anticipation.

  Rest walked forward into the portal and kept walking steadily along the Path. The thread he needed to exit into a remote arid region of Kazakhstan took a little finding.

  Larry had based himself in the Punjab region of India to enjoy a more favorable climate and supply route, while matching the time zone for Kazakhstan. Since Larry had the money to employ a courier, and the connections to reach Rest’s agent and hire him, it made sense to stage the expedition this way. Larry spent his daylight hours pursuing his quest along the ancient Silk Roads, and his nights analyzing his finds and recovering from the blistering heat in comfort.

  His two assistants’ stolid personalities suited them to portal travel. Since they couldn’t rely on their senses, they simply followed Rest’s initial instructions and walked forward with their eyes shut. When their senses returned to them, they knew they’d exited a portal.

  Larry, himself, bounced along happily even within the confusion of the Path. In fact, it fascinated him as much as the puzzle waiting for him in Kazakhstan. Yesterday, he’d found the remains of what he believed to be an old temple. Today, he was returning to continue exploring it. Although he had no magic of his own, he’d used his wealth to purchase some powerful and useful enchanted objects to help him in his search.

  Rest grasped a faded purple thread and opened the gap to the sand-smothered grounds of the old temple. His three clients followed him through the portal.

  A roar akin to someone opening the door of a furnace engulfed them. It was as if a dragon inhaled.

  A massive creature formed of fire reared above them. Its eyes were black holes, but its mouth was crimson with golden fangs, and those teeth were on full display. The creature seemed ready to eat them.

  “Back!” Rest shouted.

  But the three men weren’t his former team. They weren’t trained for magical combat or even prepared to encounter a situation that required it. They stood frozen.

  The portal behind them shuddered. Rest staggered under the hit. The creature wasn’t attempting to eat them. It was devouring Rest’s magic instead.

  If it succeeded, they’d be stuck in the remote Kyzylkum Desert without transport. And that was the best scenario. Rest didn’t know if he’d survive the violent loss of his magic. If this was the demon Donna had seen in her vision, he had to assume he wouldn’t.

  He reacted instinctively, pulling on his connection to the portal he’d opened and to the Path itself. It seemed freaking insane to turn his back on the creature of fire and magic, but he had no weapons with which to fight it. His magic was that of a courier, not a wizard. Darius might have blasted the thing apart, but Rest could only retreat.

  He tugged violently on the lead rope, and that woke Larry’s two assistants from their transfixed horror. They picked up the older man between them and turned to follow Rest.

  It was only seven steps to return to the portal.

  Seven steps. They’d exited too fast, and that was his fault. He’d become complacent doing courier work for civilians. Two years ago, he’d never have been so reckless.

  On step one, agony struck him in a flashing burn across his back
.

  On step two, he dropped to his knees. The creature was sucking the magic from him and he was fighting to hold the portal open while under him the ground shook.

  One of the assistants extended a hand to haul Rest up.

  The creature lunged and sunk a fang into Rest.

  Rest screamed as the spectral fang pierced his back and sank deep. It went right through him and scraped the black tourmaline crystal hanging from its silver chain around his neck.

  A demonic shriek tore the heavens open.

  Rest’s magic flooded back to him. He steadied the portal, dragged the other three through it with him, and sealed it shut. He had a momentary glimpse of the temple ruins and sand spiraling in a mini-tornado, before the silver safety of the Path embraced him.

  If he’d been alone, he’d have collapsed there. As a courier, the Path strengthened him. But the other three men needed the normal world. He hauled them forward, ignoring how they lurched with the double blindness of terror and the Path’s confusion. All that mattered was that they moved. Finally, he reached the green thread to open a gap to the Punjabi colonial house. He opened the portal into the courtyard and they spilled out in a disorderly fashion.

  The two assistants sat down on the stone rim of the fountain still linked by the lead rope, and Larry, perforce sat with them. He leaned forward, bracing his hands on his knees. “What was that?”

  Rest decided that the fact that the older man could ask the question meant that he’d be okay. “I intend to find out.” He dropped his end of the lead rope and stepped back through the portal into the Path.

  Chapter 3

  Donna drove as far as Route 66 and stopped. Without the obsessive need to find and warn Rest the exhaustion of a long day of travel caught up with her. She decided not to admit that she was also heartsick. He hadn’t just turned his back on his old life. He’d specifically kicked her out of his new one. She might never learn what happened to him.