Page 45 of Smoky Lake

He sucked in a breath. “You think she has the omegavirus?” Now that he looked more closely, he saw that her dark skin was flushed with heat, as if she was burning up inside.

“I don’t know, but it’s a possibility.”

And then another horrifying idea struck him. “Do you think that’s what the syringe was for?”

Their eyes met and held. This whole situation had just gotten even more frightening, if someone was going around injecting people with this thing.

Ani started shaking her head, as if trying to bring them both back to sanity. “No. That’s impossible. It wouldn’t be instantaneous. Viruses don’t replicate that fast. She must have gotten it some other way. The point is, even if we didn’t have the virus before, she could have just exposed us. We can’t go back to Firelight Ridge.”

He jumped to his feet and paced around the suite again. “Dr. Christianson said it’s not airborne.”

“But we’ve both touched Sergeant Thomson. We carried her in, and I’ve been tending to her. The other thing is that Dr. Christianson doesn’t know everything about it. It’s a virus that hasn’t been seen in hundreds of years, maybe thousands. It could have multiple means of transmission. We have to assume we’ve been exposed.”

Ani made a really good point, much as it killed him to know he couldn’t go back and check on Lachlan yet. “I wonder if they did this in order to expose us,” he said slowly, staring down at the sergeant. “Maybe she’s just collateral damage.”

“Why would anyone do that? That’s insane. We have nothing to do with any of this.” Ani looked suddenly overwhelmed, her eyes huge, her face paling.

Gil could have kicked himself. Terrifying Ani even further wasn’t going to help anything. “You’re right, I see no reason why they would. I’m being a suspicious bastard, it kind of goes with my profession.”

“Well, maybe Lachlan’s right and you need a new profession.” She shook herself out of her moment of shakiness. “Sorry. That just threw me for a loop. Right now, I’m glad you’re in the protection business. So what now, if we can’t go back to Firelight Ridge and we can’t stay here?”

“I think we should find Victor,” he said after a moment. “He dragged us both into this thing, he owes us some answers.” The rest of his thought went unspoken.

If he’s alive.

21

“She’ll be fine, right?” Ani couldn’t stop worrying about poor Sergeant Thomson. All she’d done was try to keep them safe. Now the unconscious woman was on her own in a Blackbear hotel room while she and Gil ran for the hills. Help was on its way, but it still went against all her doctor’s principles to abandon a patient.

“You said she needs a hospital. Dr. Christianson will know what to do. She knows more about the virus than we do.”

She pulled her baseball cap, which had come from the hotel’s lost and found, over her face and slouched deeper into the passenger seat of the 1999 Chevy pickup that Gil had purchased for eight hundred and fifty dollars.

He’d noticed it on their way to the Wagon Wheel, parked for public view with a “for sale” sign in the window. Talk about thinking ahead. Luckily, the Wagon Wheel had an ATM machine in the lobby so they didn’t have to take time for a trip to a bank.

She just hoped the rattletrap vehicle didn’t fall apart before they got out of Blackbear. Its struts were shot, there was a hole in the muffler, but overall, it seemed to blend in with a certain genre of Alaskan vehicles.

“You really think Victor is back in Fairbanks?” she asked Gil, who wore a golfing visor that he’d plucked out of the housekeeping cart. Their hope was to slip away from the hotel without being noticed by either the military or whoever had attacked Thomson.

“I don’t know, but it’s a good place to start. We can check his office at the university, see if anyone’s seen him. Hell, maybe he’s even been back to his house.”

That made sense. As much as anything made sense right now.

I’m going to protect you. That part makes sense. I like the smell of your hair, too. That makes sense.

The memory made her smile, then sigh. It felt like so long ago that they’d been snuggled in Bob’s little cabin, another lifetime. And yet it was just…yesterday? She couldn’t even keep track anymore.

“Have you tried to call him again?”

“Yup, a few times, both his cell and his home phone. Got nothing.” He glanced in the rear view mirror again. He kept doing that, she noticed, watching for anyone following, or any sign of danger. Always on guard, Gil McGowan.

“You should get some sleep,” he said, glancing over at her. “You never did get that nap you were craving.”

It wasn’t exactly a nap that she’d been craving. But she was beyond exhausted by now, so she tilted her seat back and did her best to ignore the rusty suspension and deafening engine noise.

Gil set a hand on her thigh, just above her knee. Its warmth offered comfort, and its weight grounded her. She sighed and let herself drift into a dream.

But it gave her no rest, because it was a chaotic, vivid dream filled with violent images. A bullet caught Sergeant Thomson in the chest and sent her tumbling off a high-rise building. Victor was locked in a cage, clawing at the bars, foaming at the mouth. He ripped at the skin on his own face. Bloody gashes opened up. Then he was out of the cage and running into the Blackbear airport. She saw herself as if through his eyes, saw her own long dark hair, her sadness. Help me. Help me.

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