Chapter 44
FORTY-FOUR
The stuff was all over her. Crusts of sweat salt and various other effluvia fell away, melting like cotton candy. The water was warm enough, if mineral-tasting, and the toiletries smelled kind of familiar—he even knew what soap she liked, for God’s sake.
Standing under hot water, the coffee sinking in and her stomach feeling weirdly distended from the sheer amount of food she’d consumed, Holly had to admit she felt... pretty good.
Which was troubling. She’d been really, really ill. Sick enough to die. And now she felt a bit shaky, but clear and strong in a way she hadn’t since... well, ever. Maybe as a teenager, with her whole life ahead of her and the body and metabolism to meet it head-on.
Funny, her memories of that were darkened, too. As if looking through smoked glass.
She touched her belly, her digging fingertips in. No thrumming, dense vitality like Reese’s muscles; no six-pack, no sinewy heaviness. Which brought up another interesting point.
We didn’t use protection. It hadn’t seemed to matter, since she was terminal anyway and he...
Was that what had... infected her? After a lifetime of being careful. Kind of funny.
You know what else is a real laugh a minute? You’re out here in the middle of nowhere with Reese and his buddy.
Except the word for that was dangerous. A “fellow agent”, huh? It didn’t make sense for the man to have found them unless he was somehow Reese’s friend.
Now that he had backup, would he still drag Holly along? Or would she wake up one morning to find him gone?
“Time for me to start thinking,” she murmured, putting her face under the mineral-smelling water.
She could taste traces of... copper? Other things, a whole palette of earth and stone, fluid seeping underground, filtering through layers and pipes.
Individual drops on her skin, her heart working steadily, the flashes between her nerves tiny lightning strikes building chains of reaction in the dark.
She surfaced with a jolt, shivering even though the water was still perfectly warm. Had she lost track of time?
Mitochondrial DNA... other effects... you heal quicker, more flexible, greater endurance. She’d gotten more over breakfast with Cal than from however long traveling with Reese. You get smarter, too—damn near genius where you were smart before, but you get some blind spots.
What were Reese’s blind spots?
You run, I’ll hold them... the only time I feel human is when I look at you... it’s okay, baby, it’s all right.
The fractured pieces inside her head weren’t helping. They swirled, refusing to coalesce into a reasonable picture. Or maybe she just didn’t like the painting she was seeing?
It took her a while to get dressed. She kept stopping, staring into space, while different bits of memory and guesswork fell together.
But finally, in jeans and a blue sweater that both reeked of newness, Holly had to leave the warm, humid little room with its indifferent, colorless linoleum and ancient fittings.
The guys were at the dinette, and there was a pile of paper between them on the newly cleared, rickety little table. Familiar-looking file folders, and her stomach fluttered uneasily.
Whose are those? Other agents? Other “collateral”? The abduction was still a mess of jumbled pieces inside her head, refusing to settle as well.
Cal pushed his sandy hair back from his forehead. With his broad back to her, he looked just like any other guy on a chair, and if she was still waiting tables she would have thought them businessmen doing an informal meeting.
A sudden realization shook her.
I’m not ever going home again. And I’m not going to die.
Holly stood, a damp towel drooping from her left hand, and afterward she would wonder what she would have said or done if both men hadn’t suddenly tilted their heads, as if hearing something.
She strained and heard it as well—a low mechanical buzz, very faint, but out of place in the snowbound quiet.
“Damn,” Reese said, softly. “We’ve got incoming.”