Page 37 of The Devil's Pair

“OK, no problem,” Holt said and got to his feet. “Anything happen while I was on break?”

“Not one goddamn thing,” Ice said. “Just like every day.”

“It’s weird, right? I mean, I didn’t get the sense that these cult assholes were all that bright, ‘cause Gideon was surely thebrains of the whole operation, but still… I thought for sure that they’d be doingsomething.”

“You and me both, man. The fact that we’ve been sitting here watching nothing is worrying me more than if we’d seen truckloads of guys show up armed to the teeth.”

Holt nodded again. It was true that in most cases, a lack of activity was fine, maybe even desirable. But when dealing with a group of people whose home and leader had both just been utterlyobliterated, it was disquieting that they weren’t rampaging and raging – because it meant that they were probably methodically planning.

And careful, smart, patient planning wasalwaysharder to deal with than idiots running around half-cocked and pissed off and reckless.

“OK,” Holt said as Ice subsided onto the mattress in the back of the van. “We’ll give you a shout if we see anything worth your attention.”

He shut the van door, headed over the small hill to where Declan ‘Cain’ McGuiness was lying on his stomach, binoculars up to his face. Without a single word passing between them, without even seeing what Cain was looking at, Holt turned right around and hauled ass back to Ice. Something was up, and it was significant: he knew that tightness in Cain’s back, understood the unmoving tension in his large body, recognized the focus that was all-encompassing.

He opened the door again. “Ice.”

The MC’s ex-chief-Enforcer got to his feet right away, already locked and loaded. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I have no idea what it is, but Cain is doing that fixed stare thing, the one where his hackles are up and he’s practically growling.”

“Got it,” Ice said. “Let’s go.”

Stealthily, the two men crawled the last few feet over the rise, lowered themselves to their stomachs next to Cain. Right away, the man handed the binoculars to Ice who raised them to his cold blue eyes, already ready to move quickly if needed.

“At last,” Ice breathed to Holt. “Three guys are getting ready to leave the compound, and according to the identities that Elle confirmed for us using my photos and videos, two of them are Guardians from the Utah cult.”

“What are they doing?” Holt asked, narrowing his brown eyes in the fading light, like he was taking aim. “What exactly?”

“Packing up a truck, doing lots of shoulder slapping and hand-shaking with a bunch of other idiots,” Ice said. “So let’s move. We’ll follow them, run them off about a mile down the road, and grab them up. We’ll do it at that sheltered place we found yesterday, just past the big rock formation. Then we’ll head to that abandoned warehouse Cain scouted out.”

“Got it,” Cain said, running his hands through his jet-black hair. “I can’twaitto get my hands on these dickheads. I’ve got somequestionsfor them, boy.”

“Take a number,” Ice rasped. “I’mthe one who's been hiding in the desert for almost three goddamn weeks, waiting for these morons to do something useful.Iget first crack at them.”

“Fair,” Cain conceded, following his brothers down the hill back to the van; he’d been on the job only a few days and he was already dying for his own bed, and a cold beer, and not-fast-food. “Totallyfair.”

**

Almost an hour later, the one assholefinallycracked wide open. Literally.

Ice stood back, rubbed his knuckles, watched with supreme disinterest as a torrent of blood ran down the guy’s face, dripped off his chin, and hit the cement floor in a steadystream. The idiot slumped over heavily, and the only thing that kept him semi-upright and in the chair was the rope binding him to it.

“Jesus Christ!” his almost-equally-bloody friend with the demolished knee – courtesy of Holt’s judicious kick – howled. “You cracked his fuckingheadopen with yourfists, man! What thefuck?”

“Ididdo that,” Ice growled at him. “And I have officially lost my patience with you fuckers, soyourhead is next. Someone better start talking, and I meannow.”

“Shut up!” the guy with the smashed-in nose – thanks to Cain’s open palm – told the others. “Nobody says a goddamnwordto these assholes or the Right-Guardian will kill you anyway!”

“Ah-ha,” Cain said, his dark-green eyes dancing. “So you Desert Bloom boysarein contact with Michael, are you?”

Smashed Nose paused, suddenly aware that he had given these three monsters a piece of information after all, and that they seemed to know far more about the Garden and the Desert Bloom than he’d assumed. Not that they could do much with what he’d said, to be sure, but Michael had clearly forbidden any of them to tellanyonethat he was even alive.

That was when Smashed-in Head fought his way to an upright position and sputtered out: “The Right-Guardian is still in Utah.”

“Shutup!” said the man with the ex-knee. “Stoptalking!”

Without taking his eyes off the guy with the caved-in head, Ice back-handed the loud-mouth smartly, knocked him flat on his back. Flailing and twisting in the chair, the man screamed as his hands bound behind him both broke under his weight.

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