Page 50 of Into Darkness (Night Prowler 6)
“Really? What happened?”
In response to Lu’s question, Honor’s face flushed. Keeping her gaze averted, she said simply, “I saw something I didn’t like.”
Lu got the distinct feeling this was a topic of great importance for getting a better idea of what made Honor tick. Trying for an offhand tone, she asked, “Nothing too serious, I hope?”
They’d reached the crest of the hill, and Honor scanned the landscape below with a sharp eye. Her gaze fell on Beckett, playfully chasing Sayer around the trunk of a tree, and her lips thinned. “Not really, in the scheme of things. But to my ten-year-old self, it felt like the end of the world. The end of my world, anyway.”
Lu sensed the anger and pain behind those words, and knew instinctively Beckett was the cause. Taking a risk, she asked tentatively, “Does he know?”
Honor’s head whipped around, and she glared at her. “Even if he did, he wouldn’t care,” she hissed, two blotches of color staining her cheeks. “He doesn’t care about anything but himself!”
They stared at one another a moment, Lu watching as Honor struggled to compose herself. “But you care about him,” she said. “Don’t you?”
The ice was back in Honor’s eyes. The stone beneath their feet crackled with a thin gloss of frost. “Don’t ever say that to me again.”
Lu reached out for her sister’s arm. “Honor—”
“Shut your trap, Hope!” She shrugged off her touch, stepping back.
“Stop calling me Hope, will you? My name’s Lumina—”
Honor shouted, “You can call yourself Puff the Magic Dragon if you want, but it doesn’t change the fact that your name is HOPE!”
“Fine,” sighed Lu, tired of this. Would they always be fighting? “Please refer to me as Puff the Magic Dragon from now on. And I’ll call you Smaug.”
Honor’s icy glare narrowed. “What the hell is a Smaug?”
Lu folded her arms across her chest. “Ever read The Hobbit? No? Well, Smaug is the dragon in the story, described as ‘a most specially greedy, strong and wicked wyrm.’ I think it’s appropriate.”
Honor’s eyes widened. Her voice rising, she said, “A worm? Did you just call me a worm?”
Lu was just about to retort, “Don’t forget the greedy and wicked part!” but a faint, odd noise distracted her. She looked to the sky, listening hard.
“What is that?”
Honor heard it, too, her gaze fixed on the horizon. “I don’t know. Nothing good, though.” She stepped closer, pressing her shoulder against Lu’s, the argument forgotten.
They stood there together in breathless, rigid silence for a moment, every sense open, their ears straining to filter out the wind whispering through branches, the birds singing in the trees, and Beckett’s faint laughter, a teasing echo that had the blood again rising in Honor’s cheeks.
The steady whop-whop-whop of blades cutting through air, the mechanical noise of gravity being beaten into submission . . . Lu knew that sound.
Together, Lu and Honor whispered, “Helicopter!”
They shared a look of horrified comprehension, then bounded down the hill at a flat-out run.
SIXTEEN
By the time they reached Beckett and the rest of his group, they’d all heard the helicopter, too. They stood in the long shadows of the pines, faces upturned, tense and silent. Magnus was nowhere to be seen.
Sayer, the petite, raven-haired girl Beckett had been chasing around the tree, said nervously, “We should get back into the caves.”
Beckett nodded, still looking at the sky. “Yes, you should. Take Kali and North with you. Dash and Oz, make sure the girls get inside, and let everyone know we’ve got Enforcement on our tails. Get battle ready.”
“Enforcement?” whispered a horrified North. She was taller than Kali and Sayer, just a few inches shy of Beckett’s height, with almond-shaped green eyes that dominated her face. “How do you know it’s Enforcement?”
“Who else would it be?” said Beckett, then pointed suddenly, his face hard. “I was right; look.”
Cresting a jagged black range of mountains in the distance was a trio of black helicopters. They turned, following the line of the peaks, and even from where she stood, Lu could see the bright yellow sun emblem painted on their sides.
