Page 90 of Pride, Prejudice, & Pretense

Taking out the revolver, she prepared herself. A muzzle flash would reveal her location if she opened fire, and there was practically zero chance that she could see to squeeze off—let alonemanageto squeeze off—three accurate shots before she took return fire. She might be able to shoot one of the three and then move, but she would not be able to move fast, and she’d lose track of the other two as she moved.

Closer.Closer.

A loud spit. She jerked, ducked. The man nearest her, the leader, seemed to sigh and then crumpled into the underbrush. He fell sideways, and his body rolled a distance back downhill. As he rolled, Lizzy heard, "Fire, from our six!" It was the woman's voice, no whisper this time.

Another spit. This time Lizzy could tell the sound was from behind the other team, farther downhill. The woman in the middle fell into a grave of underbrush. No movement.

The man on the far side, the one who'd been fighting the briar bush, was running.

Spit.

Spit. Spit.

The man went crashing away from them, but Lizzy did not hear him fall. The sound of his running receded. The shots seemed to have missed.

She heard heavy breathing from down the hill, climbing. A wide figure loomed up out of the darkness, wrapped in black, hooded. It took Lizzy a moment, but she realized the figure was wearing night vision goggles beneath the hood. The figure held a gun, silenced, but it was pointed in the direction of the fleeing man, not at Lizzy.

A science-fiction creature. AStar Warsextra.

The figure eventually turned and lowered the gun. At that point, Lizzy, blinking, stunned, could just make out the fringe of a bright floral skirt extending below the hooded jacket, the tops of tall rubber gardening boots almost meeting the bottom of the skirt.

"Agent McDougal?" she whispered breathlessly, doubting.

The figure pushed back the hood with her free hand and whispered in response, "Hey, Agent Bennet! Like I said,thisis the real world."

It was Karen in night vision goggles.

Chapter Twenty-Two: Edges

She stepped closer and studied Lizzy through her goggles, her head tilting, quizzical. "Killer camouflage, Agent Bennet."

Lizzy zipped up Wickham's coat. "Indoor maneuvers."

Karen grinned below the goggles, the effect macabre and humorous at the same time. "Do tell."

Lizzy had finally recovered enough to remember the first team from the cabin and the last member of the other team that Karen had ambushed. Ignoring the pain in her side and her feet, she grabbed Karen's hand. "C'mon, hurry! Two men"—Wickham?—"maybe three coming from behind me.”

"Oh, I didn't know…" Karen confessed quietly as she turned. Then she tugged on Lizzy's hand. "Let me lead." She pointed to her face. "Goggles."

"Right," Lizzy said as she sidestepped to let her rescuer slip past her. Much as she wanted to know how Karen had ended up there, now was not the time for conversation. She stopped by the body of the man who'd been nearest to her, rolling him over and frisking him. She found what she wanted, a walkie-talkie, and turned it off.

"Good thinking," Karen said. They moved on.

Karen led her downhill more quickly than she expected, moving quickly and silently even in the boots and on the rocky, bushy ground. They loped along, Lizzy attending to Karen’s steps and mimicking them.

After ten or fifteen minutes, Karen stopped them behind a small, tight clump of pines. They stood still, listening, and she scanned behind them uphill. Shaking her head, she faced Lizzy. "Can't see anyone. We can rest here for a minute. It's still a distance to my car, and it was a long climb up here. Want to turn on the walkie-talkie, see if we hear any chatter?"

Lizzy fished the walkie-talkie out of her coat pocket and, careful to make sure the volume was all the way down, turned it on. Then she turned the volume up slightly. A faint popping and crackling was audible. For a moment, she thought that was all there would be, the electronic Rice-Crispy sound.

But then a voice.Wickham."I'm coming, Fanny…Charlie…whatever your name is. I will find you. I will fuck you. And I will strangle you as I come inside you."

Her mask was gone, and so was his. The true Wickham.

She felt close to the edge of the world.Close to the edge.

Turning off the walkie-talkie, she looked at Karen, whose alarmed expression had immediately softened into sympathy. Her sympathy disclosed to Lizzy how fraught and haunted her own expression must be.

"The…indoor maneuvers?" Karen asked carefully.

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