CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
A
t first, I assumed we’d messed up in the eleventh hour, when there’d been no room for mistakes. I drew the line, heard my name, and woke up back in the void with white stretching in all directions.
“Hello?” I called, regretting it. The word distorted and echoed until my voice morphed into something malicious and brittle, cruelly mocking me.
No one answered. When I closed my eyes, my figurative eyes, and tried to pinpoint the construction site ghost, I got nothing. Well, there was something, but instead of a blip on the radar, the entire viewfinder lit up.
I’d get a figurative headache trying to rationalize this supernatural stuff, so I settled in to wait.
And wait.
If traveling within Al seemed timeless, then waiting when lives were in danger, mine included, proved to be eternally agonizing.
My thoughts spiraled into chaos until I reminded myself there was nothing I could do for now. I would wait, if not patiently, then at least quietly without causing undue problems for whatever might be happening outside this bubble.
I’d somehow drifted into a Zen state—which I thought constituted as a nap in my spiritual form—when my awareness shifted, slipping me into the driver’s seat.
The physical world greeted me like an old friend. Despite the lack of warning, the transition happened naturally and much less forceful. My soul knew it needed to return, and so it’d risen to the occasion and took control with ease.
“Willa!” Manuel yelled, probably a little louder than necessary since he winced and continued at a lower volume. “Are you okay? Willa?”
I took stock, wiggling my toes and then my fingers. All limbs and phalanges present and accounted for? Check. “I think so. Is the danger gone?”
It seemed to be. The air felt different, lighter.
“Yes, but… you… Something happened.”
“Oh?” I tried not to sound too interested or innocent. Oblivious, I could do. My time-out in Al even made it believable. “Like what?”
Manuel brushed my hair from my face, wincing along with me when strands tugged and pulled on the mixture of mud, blood, and cuts on the left side. “Strange things. I don’t even know.”
“Your hair floated,” a deep voice informed me. An FBI agent hovered nearby, watching us. He’d been the one trying to shield us before I was sent away to ride out the boss battle inside my head. “The second time, I mean. You passed out twice.”
I digested his words. My hair? Was that why Manuel was playing with it now?
Goosebumps prickled my skin. I tried to listen for the ghost but heard nothing. Maybe whatever he’d done to beat back the malevolent storm had drained his energy.
Either way, nothing pinged on my afterlife antenna.
“I’m Rex, by the way,” the man introduced himself, holding his hand out for a shake.
Manuel took it no problem. Rex then turned to me, which was awkward since I was still halfway on the ground.
Not wanting to rebuff someone who had saved our hides, I reached out to accept, but when I did, a peculiar zap zipped through our hold.
I winced, retracting my hand, but Rex watched me with knowing eyes. His look screamed, “I know something you don’t know.”
I didn’t like it, not in the slightest. Manuel helped me sit farther upright, affording an excuse to break the agent’s intense gaze and create some distance between us.
On my feet, Manuel tucked me under his good arm and tilted in a way that angled him slightly in front.
It was a protective move—a possessive one.
I soaked up the gesture, and my shoulders relaxed a fraction, knowing Manuel would take care of me.
The rest of Veritas’s team, Veritas included, all fanned out around Pierce’s form.
There’d been a lot of blood. Even now, partial segments of it peeked out between the forest of black combat pants and boots. The agents stood on the side closest to us, as if trying to shield the body from view while they conducted their hushed discussion.
One person might have been kneeling down, maybe checking for a pulse or administering first aid.
“He’s alive,” Rex offered, answering my unspoken question.
“Oh.” It was such a neutral reply because I lacked a suitable response. Honestly, I didn’t have much left in me to give a reaction. All night, I’d been chipped away, piece by piece, until the only thing that remained was a hollow shell.
“He’s going to prison, Willa,” Rex assured me. “There’s no getting out of it at this point.”
I snorted. “That didn’t stop him before.”
“Yeah, but the key difference is that we’re in town.
We almost got him the other day, but we have all this evidence now with duplicates.
The locals won’t be able to bury anything because we’ll have backups in case something unfortunate happens to their copies.
My team has your back. He won’t be a free man for decades, if ever.
” He said it with so much conviction that I had to believe him.
Flashing lights speared through the darkness. We moved closer to the edge of the building, watching an ambulance maneuver through a section of fencing that someone dressed head to toe in black held open. It must have been another FBI team member.
The rescue vehicle paused a moment to address the agent before being directed on with a wave. Not far behind that, two local cop cars arrived.
I tensed.
Manuel tightened his grip on me. “You called the cops?”
“No choice, kid.” Rex watched the proceedings with us. “We work with official channels when we’re in town—at least as much as possible. But again, we’re keeping receipts. No more cover-ups, and we made sure that Officers Valak, Bentley, and Reeves would be present.”
Valak and Bentley sounded familiar, and Reeves even more so. Reeves had been the only officer to treat me with any kindness the night they scooped me from the forest and brought me in for questioning, sending me into the pit with an irrational, grieving chief.
“Just so you’re aware, Reeves is the contact who reached out to our local chapter.
He’s the main reason we’re in town,” Rex added.
“He said he couldn’t find much information in the guest log at Vedault that you’d mentioned, but he was convinced you couldn’t fake your adamance that someone had been there to kill you. ”
“Someone,” Manuel repeated. “The chief?”
Rex blinked. “At Vedault? No, the—”
“Hey, what’s happening?” I interrupted, drawing their attention down to the yard.
Rex tilted his head, watching as one patrol car continued through while the other doubled back, returning the way it came.
“Looks like that one will be processing the crash. You know, you’re lucky to be alive after how many times that P.O.S.
hit you. Your Jeep looked like scrap metal on the driver’s side. ”
“Luck had little to do with it,” Manuel added. “If I’d been driving, we’d have died a street from my house in a fiery crash.”
“Yeah, we were on comms the whole time. We heard she was driving. Heard her screaming too.”
Manuel huffed, looking sheepish. “That might have been me. To be fair, I had no clue Willa could drive like Dom Toretto.”
Rex chuckled and glanced at me. “So you’re a driver?”
My cheeks warmed. “Mostly four-wheelers off-road.”
Manuel hugged me against him. “You’ll have to give me a ride sometime.”
Rex waggled his eyebrows but tipped his head to where the action was. The paramedics had reached the second floor with a stretcher. “I should go see if I can help. You two need to get checked out by the medics. Especially you, kid,” he ordered Manuel.
I followed the direction of Rex’s pointed look.
Manuel’s other arm dangled at his side, and trails of blood lined his hand.
“You were shot!” I gasped, recalling the fact a little too slowly. In my defense, my brain was juggling a lot of pieces at the moment.
Rex snapped his fingers, reaching into his pocket.
“Before I forget, here’s your phone. We tracked it to the crash site, stayed long enough to make sure it was actually there and not some glitch, and then moved on.
We had a decent idea of where you were heading, considering there’s only one destination on this road. ”
Luckily the ghost nudged us in this direction instead of running blindly through the forest.
“Thank you,” I said, checking the device over. It seemed no worse for wear.
Rex gave us another nod before leaving.
I turned to Manuel. “I can’t believe you got shot.”
“And possibly a concussion,” Rex added, jogging backwards for a beat and then heading to the middle of the floor to join his team.
I avoided looking in that direction, instead focusing on Manuel.
He caught my questioning gaze. “It isn’t a big deal.”
“Hmm.”
He rubbed his neck and confessed, “I knocked it against the window when the truck crashed into us the first time.” He released me and brought his good arm up to his temple, his fingertips coming away dark and shiny.
The colored liquid lit to strawberry red with every cycle that the emergency lights flashed white.
“It’s been bleeding since we fled the Jeep. ”
“It’ll be a raging headache tomorrow.” My hand hovered over the wound, reminded of what’d happened when I’d mixed our blood together.
What had I done?
Manuel huffed a laugh. “Hell, we get to count on tomorrow. I won’t sugarcoat it. There was a moment there where I wasn’t sure.”
“Hah, only a moment?”
“Morbid,” Manuel teased before getting serious. “Hey, uh, earlier, during all of the insanity, did you call me Manny?”
I shuffled and bit my lip. “Did I? I’m sorry. It was a slip of the tongue.”
He seemed inclined to continue, yet he abandoned the topic. “No worries.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, it isn’t a big deal, but uh, I used to go by that nickname when I was younger. Well, it was mostly my family. I asked people to stop after… after—”
“Willa!” Veritas called, pulling us from the discussion. The man beelined toward us with purposeful strides. “I need to debrief you. How are you holding up? Do you think you’re up for it?”