“How much assurance do you think that is?” I asked flatly. “She’s better off dead here than in the Basement.”
Her eyes widened slightly and this time when I shook my head, she kicked me again. I was lucky to be a chimera or my ribs would’ve been sore for a month. “I like you, Misha. I really do. I always have. You’re special and brilliant and quirky and one of the most amazing people I’ve ever known, but if you try to shut me up one more time, the next kick will be to your face. It’s a pretty face too. I especially like your eyes . . . fox green, but a fox that would never eat a chicken or clean out a henhouse. A vegetarian fox. You have nice teeth too, probably a killer smile. Try to not make me kick it in, all right? If I want to talk to the psycho, I’ll talk to the psycho. And since you won’t tell me anything, the psycho is my only other option.”
This time it was me opening and shutting my mouth, and not at a shake of the head, but at the lift of a sandaled foot. “Psycho,” she said, realizing I was going to obey the Foot of Doom, “what the hell is going on? You’re government, I can tell. I’ve worked government contracts before. You’re too megalomaniacal to be a cop or a crook and too egotistical to be another country’s spy. So who exactly are you? CIA? FBI? Or my first guess—Homeland Security. That’s it, isn’t it? You have the attitude. Didn’t you asses ever bother to think Homeland sounds a lot like the Fatherland or the Motherland and none of those things worked out too well for Germany or Russia?”
If Raynor had pulled the car over and pistol-whipped her, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Fortunately, dealing with Jericho and his successor had taught him patience; either that or he was impressed. I knew I was. She was like a force of nature—a whirling pastel-colored verbal tornado cutting down anything in her path. Then there was the Basement, a worse punishment than any pistol-whipping, shooting, or roadside torture.
“I’m all of those things, little girl.” I saw the reflection of his grin in the rearview mirror. “But I’m also more. You might say I’m a government agency of one. The blackest of ops and every conspiracy nut’s worst nightmare. I’m going to take your boyfriend here, who now happens to be my personal property as everyone else who could lay claim is dead, and I’m going to torture him at great length, brainwash him, turn his mind and soul inside out until he does exactly as I say. And if that doesn’t work, I’m going to put several bullets in his brain.” There was the grin again, colder and sharper with anticipation.
“Being that he’s actually worth something to me in the monetary sense and you are not worth a dime,” he continued on with Ariel, “you might want to think twice about what I could do to you. I can find an off-ramp, a deserted road, and carve the tongue right out of your smart-ass mouth. That would shut you up. Of course, once I get started, it is difficult to stop. We all have our vices.”
I’d thought Raynor was smart, and he was, and from his files I knew he did love interrogation. That might have been his problem. He was used to torture, used to victims already put through more than any mind or body should have to suffer. He was used to the broken.
Ariel was not broken.
She was an adamantine spirit who’d just been told the best she could hope for was a miserable death here or something worse in someplace called the Basement. You didn’t need to be a genius to figure out it was better to die quickly than pick behind what was beyond those two doors. You didn’t need to be a genius, but she was one.
A genius who took yoga.
She raised her hips off the seat, lunged forward, wrapped her long legs around the metal extension of the driver’s headrest, and proceeded to do her best to choke Raynor to death. Having had a tracheotomy, he was down by ten points already. He couldn’t scream through his mouth and he couldn’t scream through his speaking valve either. Her knees—damn sexy knees—covered that completely. I could see her thighs ripple with muscle as she tightened the grip.
The fact that I was looking at her thighs while the car was careening across the interstate was not my fault. Her skirt was short to begin with. Now it was up around her waist as she did her best to save our lives. The saving-our-lives part should’ve distracted me from her panties, tiny and green with pink bows on each side, but it didn’t . . . and were those rhinestones glittering below her navel and disappearing under her panties? I had the feeling I now knew what “vajazzled” meant.
That was when the car hit the guardrail and flipped. There wasn’t anything I could do to prepare myself, chained as I was, except for bracing my legs against the floor. My head slammed against the window, then against the seat in front of me. I hung upside down briefly, the cuffs tearing at my wrists. My skin gave way where the metal didn’t. Abruptly we were back upright. Outside I saw tufts of dried grass and I guessed we’d gone completely over the rail and down a mild embankment. Raynor was unconscious and Ariel was now in the front passenger seat. Whether she’d been thrown there or had climbed didn’t matter. She was making the most of the moment.
“Where’s the key?” she demanded, her skirt fluttering back down into place. For the second time in days I was damning gravity. “Misha, this is an escape, okay? Stop looking at my ass and tell me where this son of a bitch put the key to your chains.”
I avoided the ass issue—there was no correct comment for that. If I was looking at her ass, then I was too perverted to care about saving my life, and if I wasn’t looking, then she’d want to know why I wasn’t looking. I went with the simple truth. “I don’t know. I was unconscious when he put them on me.” More like three-fourths dead, but we didn’t need to go into that. “Check his suit pocket, then his pants pocket.”
“Oh, fun for me. Having to stick my hand next to a psycho’s wienerschnitzel.” She searched his suit jacket pockets first and found nothing. “Wonderful,” she snapped before gamely going into his pants pocket. “Whoops, I was wrong. Not a wienerschnitzel. Closer to a cocktail weenie. Doesn’t it figure. Massive ego, teeny weenie. Ah ha!” Triumphantly, she held up the keys, reached across him to undo the childproof locks to the doors, and had me unchained in less than three seconds. “Don’t look so worried, Misha.” She wrinkled her nose. “I’m not an S&M queen. I worked as a magician’s assistant one summer. I can also hold my breath for three minutes under water. You wouldn’t believe how popular that made me when I turned eighteen.”
I could imagine all right and now wasn’t the time for it, but for once my body didn’t obey me. I found out it was not impossible to run with an erection, but it was somewhat uncomfortable. We headed away from the interstate. No one was going to pick up two people hitching for a ride at four in the morning and I didn’t want to run into any police. That was a complication to avoid. I hated leaving Raynor alive, but if I had been the killer I refused to be, I couldn’t kill him in front of Ariel anyway. That would be a much bigger complication than the police.
That meant we ran. If only two hours had passed since Raynor had kidnapped me from the motel in Springerville, we were still in Arizona. All we had to do was find a phone and have Stefan and Saul come get us. However, in the ambient light of a sickle moon, it looked as if we were in a popular Arizona attraction, the Petrified Forest. There weren’t a lot of phones there. Petrified or otherwise.
Chapter 10
Ariel leaped over fallen stone tree trunks with as much grace and style as if it were an event in the Olympics and she were being judged. All tens. She also didn’t stumble a single time. Considering we were away from the highway lights and going by the limited light of the moon, that was impressive. I didn’t stumble either, but chimeras had excellent night vision and mine had only become better as I matured, the same as everything else.