Page 55 of I Dream of Danger
Jon was in contact over the comms link. He was making good progress fitting a new rotor head. Mac was giving a hand and he estimated he could be in the air within the hour.
Maybe, just maybe, he could get to Elle and save her from whatever danger she was in. But there was no one in the world who understood the underlying principle of the universe—shit happens—better than Nick Ross. He wouldn’t feel anything like relief until he had Elle with him, in his bed, in Haven. Surrounded by a mountain and sensors and tripwires and drones up the wazoo. And once she was in his bed in Haven, he’d keep her there for the next week. Maybe more. Not only to bed her, but to feel her, touch her, reassure himself that she was safe and with him.
And she’d stay that way for the next hundred years.
But first, he had to find her.
He had no idea what that distress call was about, but it had been potent. A blast of pure terror. He’d woken up, heart pounding with fear. Up until about an hour ago, Nick would have said he didn’t know fear, but now that was a lie. Sheer bone-chilling terror had infused every cell of his body when he’d received the blast in his head.
Nothing like that psychic blast had ever happened to him before. Well, except for Catherine somehow reading through touching him that he’d lost Elle and mourned her. Which made sense because Catherine had the gift of reading people, and missing Elle was in his blood and bones, not just in his skin.
As far as he knew, Nick had no gifts beyond strength, a good aim, and an ability to fight. Certainly nothing woo-woo. He’d fought and worked like a dog for everything he had, no ‘gifts’ at all. So receiving that blast from Elle had been completely off his radar.
It wasn’t a dream and it wasn’t craziness. It was definitely Elle who’d contacted him, no question. The blast had had Elle in it, unmistakable. Fear, yes, but gentleness and smarts in a mixture that was simply her. He hadn’t questioned it for one second.
So here he was on the interstate going as fast as humanly possible to get to her.
Traffic was getting intense on the approach to Palo Alto, requiring all his attention, when Jon’s voice sounded in the comms button behind his ear. “Yo man,” he said. “Check the drone monitor.”
Nick glanced down to his left and froze.
Fuck!
Faint lines moving toward the motel, almost invisible. The men on the screen were wearing stealth combat gear, but Haven’s drones combined IR and thermal imagery that made visible what would have escaped the drones’ technology if the two sources hadn’t been combined. Four men, moving slowly and carefully down the street where Elle’s motel was. The street was dark—every other streetlight was burned out. When they were still, the men disappeared, but when they moved, he could see—just barely—their outlines. They moved like fighters. That and the fact that their signature was mostly cloaked was enough for him.
They were operators and they were dangerous and they were out for Elle.
He checked the GPS and saw that he was five minutes out. Jesus. He moved the accelerator stick to its maximum power and shot forward, leaving a wake of startled cars behind. As he zoomed down off the interstate ramp as fast as the vehicle could go, straining forward as if he could personally make the hovercar go faster, he kept checking the drone monitor.
Three of the men disappeared into a dark spot by the side of the road that was clearly bushes. One man pulled off his face mask and his head bloomed bright red in the thermal images. As Nick watched, he pulled on a windbreaker and made his way across the street, a shimmering red man shape, head twisting, checking the road for traffic.
There was none. The place was deserted. It looked like the motel was half deserted too, to judge by the empty parking lot. And whoever was in that motel, including Elle, would be no match for the four trained men, who would converge if they discovered Elle was staying there.
Nick studied the maps, calculating a trajectory that didn’t include roads. He didn’t need roads, he just needed a path that didn’t have barriers over one meter high. He could do it, just, in hover mode. Haven had rules against using hover mode in densely populated places. Hovercars were military secrets. He and Jon had liberated two hovercars from a base in Nevada and appropriated them for their use. They were particularly useful in winter on Mount Blue when the roads were snowed in. Using hover mode in towns would raise interest and maybe alert military authorities and that was the last thing they wanted.
But this trumped everything. Danger to Elle? No question.
Nick switched to hover mode and pressed the stick forward to maximum speed. He had seen a path, but it ran through backyards and between houses. He’d leave a trail of broken branches and disrupted flower beds behind, but he didn’t give a shit. Arrowing his way to Elle took every ounce of expertise he had and then some, like slithering down a rubble-strewn mountainside at top speed, but he had no choice.
Though he was moving at top speed, taking insane risks, he always kept an eye on the drone monitor. He was two streets down when he saw the lights in the lobby of the motel dim and a figure with a flame red head appear in the doorway. The thermal image cooled as the man pulled his balaclava back on. When he gestured, three ghost images crossed the street.
Fuck fuck fuck! They were homing in for the kill!
Not if he had anything to say about it.
By the time they entered the lobby, Nick was at the corner of the cross street. The hell with security. He braked hard and abandoned the hovercar where it was. Who cared if anyone saw it? The only important thing now was Elle, Elle, Elle. The thought that he’d lost her for ten years and that he might find her now, dead body already cooling, made him break out in a sweat.
His heart was pounding, which was a good thing and a bad thing. A good thing because it meant more blood to the extremities, together with a decent dose of adrenalin, which would speed up his already-fast reflexes and shut down pain for a while if he got shot.
A bad thing because above 120-125 beats per minute, fine motor skills began to degrade. He was going to shoot to kill and he wanted to hit was he was aiming at.
The only way to slow his heartrate down was to breathe deeply and force it down. He and Mac and Jon had trained for this, though what they did you couldn’t train to do, you had to be born to do. Training only took natural abilities up a notch.
So he spared a second, two, for deep breaths and a conscious tamping down of his body’s fight readiness.
Then he ran.
Just as he took off, he could hear a murmur from the open door of the hovercar. Jon’s voice. Well whatever it was Jon had to say could wait because Elle had about a minute left to live.
