She stirred, then squinted at him through pain-blurred eyes. “Jesus, don’t yell. My head’s killing me.”
He shuddered, groaning her name and holding on to her for a long moment while his heart hammered in his ears. Then he tried to pull himself together, easing away far enough to check for injuries with shaking hands. He was bleeding from his shoulder and his wrists howled where the cuffs had burned him, but she was hurt worse. She had a raised knot on her head that matched her blown pupils, and a through-and-through in her upper arm, the wound wide and angry and weeping blood.
She’d live. But they had gotten lucky.
“He’s gone. I’ve got you. You’re okay. We’re okay.” He said it over and over, not really sure he believed it until he stuck his hand in his pocket and touched the statuette. And for a second he felt a trickle of the power—the magic—he’d tapped into before. He sure as hell hadn’t imagined the way his cuffs had come off, or the way he’d blown Keban off his feet. A guy who could do stuff like that could do anything.
Pressing his cheek to her temple, careful of the sore spots, he tightened his fingers around the statuette, as he said, “I’m sorry about what I said before. I didn’t mean it—I love you. I need you. We’ll make it work.”
But suddenly he wasn’t so sure about that, either. Because if the magic was real, then the other stuff was real, too . . . and what the hell was he going to do about that?
CHAPTER TWO
Present day
Cancún, Mexico
December 5; one year and sixteen days to the zero
date
Reese had long thought that themed wedding hotels were tacky as hell, but she was pretty sure this one took the freaking multitiered, pink-frosted cake.
In case the velvet sombreros and striped serapes plastered on every available surface of the hotel lobby were too subtle, the decorators—and she used the term lightly—had lined the halls with a series of cringe-inducing tropical signs directing her to the wedding chapel. And when she got there, she found the entryway decorated with what she suspected was meant to look like an ancient Mayan temple, but came across as papier-mâché gone horribly wrong.
Inside the chapel, a faux stone archway took the place of the usual flower-and-lattice bower, the aisle was lined with fake palm fronds, the rank-and-file chairs were wearing parrot-hued slipcovers, and the roll-away screen behind the main stage was painted with an art student’s version of Chichén Itzá in its heyday, with the city intact, the ruins unruined, and cartoonish pre-Columbian natives thronging in the foreground, staring at the papier-mâché archway with creepy, goggle-eyed intensity.
Thank Christ the room was empty. It was bad enough she was semi-crashing. Be worse if she walked in and started laughing her ass off during the I-dos.
This so wasn’t what she had been expecting. But then again, the expectations were her own fault: The moment she opened the FedEx to find a plane ticket to Mexico and a request for her to come talk about a job, her brain had gone straight to a tropical fantasyland, complete with umbrellaed drinks and bare-chested bartenders, far from Denver′s drab gray winter.
Hell, it was probably just a run-of-the-mill deal for aging parents who had lost track of a kid and were feeling guilty in the middle of the sib’s wedding prep. Typical locator gig.
But those cases still paid better—and were way safer—than her old job.
Tracking a low drone of voices that said “the party’s over here,” she crunched across the fake palm fronds to where an open doorway led to the reception area. Looking for a little advance intel—run-of-the-mill job or not, it was pretty extreme to fly her across the border just for a meet-and-greet—she tucked herself into the shadows and peered through to where a couple of dozen bodies thronged an open-air dining area.
Then she exhaled in surprise and eased back further into the shadows. Because whatever these guys were, it wasn’t run-of-the-mill.
The twenty or so people, an even mix of men and women, were knotted together on one side of the room, the men in decent suits, the women in an eclectic mix of high-end, with no rent-a-tux’d groom or Barbie-doll bride in evidence. They were all wearing long sleeves, which was weird; it might be shitty with early December back home, but it was still pretty damn tropical down in the Yucatan.
Going into the figure-it-out-fast survival mode that used to be her only option, she scanned the room. Six of the wedding guests—three men, three women—were small and compact, their gestures quick, their eyes always on the move. Four of the six were in their sixties or so and hung together like family or old friends, while the remaining two were younger and new-coupleish: a military type in his early forties holding hands with a thirtyish cutie who had dark hair and laughing eyes. Overall, aside from a strange air of uniformity, those guys weren’t too far off ordinary.
The rest of them, though . . . Whoa. Way not ordinary. Most in their late twenties, early thirties, they were uniformly huge—in height and muscle, with zero flab—gorgeous, and somehow glossy, like the overhead lights bounced off them differently from the others. More, they all held themselves at the ready, their body language saying they knew how to fight and would do it at a split second’s notice.
There were a few exceptions: Two of the women, one blond, one dark, were closer to average size, while a third—coppery dark hair, maybe a few years older than the others—sat at a table, staring vacantly, with a funny half smile on her lips. Beside her sat one of the men; he was huge and muscled like the others, but had his left leg strapped into a high-tech brace and propped on a chair. A pair of crutches leaned on the wall behind him.
None of those details changed the overall impression of deadly competence, though. Not one iota.
Reese’s instincts checked in, making sure she was aware that she might, in fact, be an idiot. Suddenly, accepting the anonymous invite south of the border seemed less like a welcome getaway and more like a dumb idea.
Her new, more cautious self said she should do a vanishing act. But at the same time, another part of her—a trusted part—said that she should stay put. Because what if these guys were trying to locate someone worth saving? She’d seen it before. Hell, she’d been it before.
You can’t help everyone, she reminded herself. But instead of doing a Casper and ghosting it, she hitched her small black carryall a little higher on her shoulder and checked out the setup.
The reception area was an open-air stone patio surrounded by a high, vine-covered fence. An overhead latticework hung with a gazillion fairy lights failed to disguise the fact that the hotel was smack in the middle of a bunch of other high-rises. There was only one door, which didn’t compute, and not just because she was big on backup exits. In her experience, groups like this didn’t let themselves get boxed in. Which meant they had another way out . . . Unless she’d misread them? She didn’t think so. Even while doing the civilized wedding-brunch thing, they practically screamed “paramilitary.” Or maybe something official, with an acronym most people wouldn’t recognize.
She should walk away. Call Fallon. Let the pros handle things.
That common sense sounded awfully thin inside her, though, because the pattern didn’t make any sense. When that happened, she got real curious—and, according to some people, stupidly brave. But some people weren’t there right then, and they didn’t run her life; she did.
So, glad she had stopped at a pawnshop to buy a decent .38 a mile or so past the airport, she stepped out of the shadows and into the doorway, pasted a pleasant expression on her face, and said, “Excuse me?”
Within seconds, every one of them had marked her, eyes flicking to her and then to each other, and there was a subtle shift in the room as some jackets got twitched aside, other bodies got out of the line of fire. The smaller six faded into the background with the exception of the soldier-type, who stepped in front of his girlfriend with an expression of “you want a piece of her, you’re coming through me.” A couple of the others looked over at the table, then away when the guy with the bad leg got big and capable-looking all of a sudden, and a dark-haired woman coasted over to join him.