“You need to get to Chloe’s faster.”
Nick scoffed. Sam threw him a look and said, “We’re already pushing the limit.”
“Yeah, so you need faster transportation.” She outlined the plan she’d already laid out for Quinn. Both guys were shaking their heads before she was halfway through.
“No way,” Sam said. “I’m not leaving you. We talked about that.”
“You have to,” Riley argued. “Quinn can’t handle the drive. She won’t be able to do the transfer if you force her to travel that way.”
A flicker went through Sam’s eyes. “Nick said she can’t fly, either. That’s why they drove to Mississippi in the first place.”
“This is worse,” Nick admitted. “But there’s stuff in that car we can’t just leave, and we can’t take on an airplane.”
Riley stayed silent and let Nick and Sam hash out alternatives, but she knew they’d come to the same conclusions she had. She liked Quinn and hated how much she was suffering, and would want to help her because it was the right thing. But she had deeper motivations. Sam had his own suffering that he would never reveal to Quinn and Nick unless he had to, and Riley knew the only way to end that was to get through it.
She turned to Nick, who stood silently nearby. “You can trust me with your car.” Riley steadily met his piercing stare and held out her hand. Half a minute went by.
“Hell.” Nick bounced the keys on his palm. “I can’t trust anyone with my car. But—”
“I know.” She shifted her hand forward a little. Nick dropped the keys into it, then snatched them back.
“At the airport.”
“No!” Sam held out his hands as if to separate the two of them. “I’m not agreeing to this. We know she’s a target. She can’t drive up there alone.”
“How is anyone going to know where I am?” Riley argued. “There’s no way for Anson to have any clue.”
Nick pulled out his phone. “We’ll get someone else to go with her. We need you for the transfer, man,” he reminded Sam as he dialed.
“Hey, John. Nick. We need a guy.” He briefly explained.
Riley listened tensely. The Protectorate had been stretched thin since she first connected with the Society, so she was surprised when John apparently offered someone to Nick.
“I don’t know him,” Nick said. “You’re sure he’s cool?” He listened skeptically, then nodded. “All right. We’ll meet him at the airport.”
Nick hung up as they spotted Quinn moving slowly toward them, supporting herself with one hand on the brick wall of the building. He dashed over to her, and Riley braced herself.
“This is wrong,” Sam said through a tight jaw.
Riley was less certain of her plan now that she was going to be left alone with a stranger, but she couldn’t let Sam see that. “I’ll be okay.”
He caught her shoulders and made her look at him. She tried to hide her conflicting emotions. If Sam thought she had a single moment’s trepidation about this, he’d never go with them. And he was hurting almost as much as Quinn was. The sooner he got through it all, the better.
“I can stay with you,” he said. “They can fly up, and she can rest. We can do the transfer when we get there.”
Riley shook her head. “You need to be there and ready to do it as soon as she’s able. You don’t want to miss a window, and what if we hit traffic or something?” She patted the roof of the car. “This baby is pure steel. I’ll be invincible. And you know John wouldn’t give us someone we couldn’t trust.”
He smiled, the one-sided quirk of his mouth that flashed a dimple and charmed the hell out of her. Her heart thumped hard once, fluttered twice, and settled back into rhythm.
“Promise me,” he said, “that you’ll be careful. Keep in contact. Take some back roads—be unpredictable. There’s no reason anyone should be able to track or follow you. But just in case—”
“I get it. Don’t worry. I’ll be there before you know it.”
He hugged her and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “I’ll miss you,” he murmured.
Half an hour later, she sat behind the wheel with a steely military type named Tom sitting next to her, watching them all disappear into the airport and fighting the melodramatic feeling that she’d never see any of them again.
…
After landing in Providence, Sam, Nick, and Quinn got a hotel room so Quinn could spend a few hours recovering. Sam called Riley just about every hour until Quinn insisted she was well enough to make the transfer. Her color was better, and she was moving more easily, though she still got out of breath quickly. But they couldn’t argue when she said it was the best she was going to get, and there was no point in waiting.
Chloe fed them a late lunch while Sam and Nick set up the beach chairs and Quinn’s notes. She fussed over Quinn like a grandmother, but excitement vibrated in her voice.
“You know,” she told Sam when he went inside for another of her melt-in-your-mouth orange muffins. “I thought I was glad to be free of it.”
“I remember.” He broke the still-warm muffin in two and popped half into his mouth. When she’d been leeched, Chloe had seen only the silver lining, an opportunity to open her own bakery, which had been a raging success. “God, that’s good.”
She beamed. “That’s exactly what I wanted. I needed to be free for a while, to concentrate on my dream. But I’ve missed it.” She looked out the window to her source, the Atlantic Ocean. It was a perfect day outside, high sixties with the slightest of breezes, the water rolling in long, smooth swells onto the soft sand. “It belongs in me,” she almost whispered, her unnaturally pale gray eyes gleaming in the reflected sunlight.
“Then let’s make you whole again.” Sam ate the rest of his muffin and led Chloe out onto the weathered cedar deck at the back of her little cottage, all raised eight feet off the sand with stilts. The private beach was deserted, and they were shielded from sight by scrubby bushes on either side of her property.
“Sit here,” Quinn said, indicating the chair closest to the water. She nodded at Sam, and he settled into the other chair. Quinn stood next to Chloe and settled her hands on her. “Ready?”
First she healed Chloe as she had Jennifer. Sam and Nick both watched carefully, but the effort didn’t seem to tax her at all. Chloe clung to the sides of her chair, and her jaw flexed as if she grit her teeth, but after a couple of minutes she loosened her grip and relaxed. When she opened her eyes, they held the same wonder Jennifer had displayed.
“How do you feel?” Quinn asked her.
Chloe rolled her shoulders and smiled. “Good. Really good. Full of energy. You know, like healthy.” She settled back in her chair. “I’m ready for the next bit.”
Quinn eyed Sam. “You ready?”
He nodded but tried to hide his trepidation. Quinn closed her eyes, but he kept his open, watching her, ready to stop her if things went bad. Her hand in his grew cold, then warmed, and something wriggled inside him. The residual power, responding to what was coming?
Quinn’s hand tightened, and the conduit opened. Sam had a sense of space, of connection. He braced himself for the onslaught of pleasure.
But the power slid forward into him, cold and sluggish, jagged. It pierced, as if resisting by digging thorns or claws into him. Sam gritted his teeth against the pain. His mind tried to cringe away, to close the conduit, but he forced himself to stay open, not to resist. Quinn tensed. Her brow wrinkled, and Sam sensed her driving it through, into him.