Page 104 of Guilty as Sin
She wanted to ask him when he’d thought of those, but she didn’t. She put the goggles on instead, and the darkness outside turned a bright green, the fence and shed standing out as if she were standing in a differently-colored daylight. Jace had the truck’s lights off now. He pointed, and she saw. A barely visible, glowing shape moving off to the left, all the way past the chicken coop.
Jace had picked up the shotgun, and now, she unholstered her weapon. The moment she did, her mind flipped the switch from anger to action. Jace had turned off the overhead light, and when he opened the pickup’s door silently, dropped to the ground, and didn’t close the door again, she did the same. Then she was following his pale, glowing form, getting his hand signal at the edge of the fence.
You go right. I go left.
She did it. The goggles were heavy, trying to drag her head down, and she had to resist their pull to look up. The wind was blowing up here, sighing and singing in the evergreens, and as they moved through the dark, she heard the yip of a coyote, coming from someplace close. An answering cry, then an eerie wail. She kept going, turning her head every few steps to keep track of Jace.
Around the shed, and the figure came into view again, together with a sudden flurry of small forms. The chickens. And from the right, the pack of coyotes in full bone-chilling howl.
Jace was already there, grappling with the figure near the coop, and she heard nothing but the wind, nothing but the coyotes. She saw somebody else, though, in the distance, then heard something like a rasp of wood, then a crash. She was running, stumbling, her depth perception thrown by the goggles, and she was there. Her hand on the person’s arm, pulling it out and up behind them. “Police,” she said, barely realizing she was saying it. “You’re under arrest.”
A solid figure. A man. He was twisting, trying to get out of her grip. She started to shout. “On the gr—”
She thought for a long moment that she’d been Tased. A shock of pain, then another one. And a third. She kept her grip on the man but was stumbling away, and the pain continued.
“Shit!” the man yelped. “Holy mother—”
Another sting, and Paige saw them. Hundreds of tiny bright-green specks.
Bees.
She was still hanging on desperately, but she couldn’t kick the man’s legs out from under him. Her gun hand had gone up to ward off the bees, and she forced it down and shouted, “Get on the ground! Now!” Then somebody else was there, knocking the man in the back, shoving him to his knees.
Jace.She said, “Bees.Bees,”and he said, “I know. Back off. Go get the woman. She’s on the ground. Hold her there.”
Paige’s face was swelling. She could feel it. Little lumps of fire on her cheek, her upper lip, her ear, her neck. A buzzing in her ears, the cackle of chickens, the wailing of the coyotes. She was wading through a nightmare, going toward a pale-green figure rising to her knees, getting a foot in her upper back and kicking her to the ground.
“Stay down,” she ordered. “I’m armed.” She dropped down herself, planted a knee in the woman’s back, and called out to Jace, “Got her.”
“Got him,” he called back. She heard another wail, now. Far off, fading away, then coming closer, and the coyotes had stopped. A siren. The police, finally.
Jace was moving toward her, shotgun in one hand, dragging somebody by the arm with the other. “On the ground. Now,” he told the man. He hesitated a moment, and Jace said, “If you don’t do it, I’ll hurt you.” He sounded exactly like he meant it. The man obeyed.
Paige said, “We’ll keep them here until the cops come,” and Jace nodded.
“Did you get stung?” he asked.
“Yeah. Five times? Ten? Not sure. Felt like a lot. You?”
“A few times. He was knocking the beehive apart, I reckon.”
She was feeling the pain now. In fact, her face was on fire. Jace said, “Are you allergic?”
“No. Just sensitive. I’m OK. It’ll swell more, that’s all.”
Silence beneath them, but when the red-and-blue lights were finally visible, the siren turned off, the woman beneath Paige began to struggle once more, and Paige said, “Staydown,asshole,” and kneed her in the back again.
The woman gasped. “You littlebitch.”
Oh, yeah. This was going well. She called out across the yard, “Paige Hollander and Jace Blackstone. We’ve got a couple intruders here. Light us up.”
No answer, but a minute later, Paige’s vision was split into starbursts of pain, and she recoiled. Jace was grabbing at her, and after a moment, she realized why. He ripped the goggles off, and she gasped, shut her eyes, and tried to breathe.
She didn’t hear the person approaching until he was almost there. “Police. Drop your weapons and get on the ground.”
She did it, and so did Jace. Right down into the dirt. She said again over the throbbing pain in her head, “Paige Hollander and Jace Blackstone. We have intruders.”
“Hands over your head,” the voice said. “And tell me again.”
