Chapter 2
Vaughn Quaye knew her last chance at finding Rayna had just walked out the door.
The mid-shelf liquor burned in her stomach as she gazed at the picture of her sister on her phone. Rayna’s selfie had been one of the less silly ones she’d texted, asking for commentary on which angle and lighting and expression would be best for her new dating site profile. The one with your tongue sticking out, Vaughn had texted back.
I want a husband, not another sex toy, Rayna responded.
Vaughn had responded with the monkey see no evil, hear no evil, say no evil emoji and a few random exclamation points and question marks.
Really though, what Vaughn had wanted to tell her sister was to get off the damn computer and into the real world. Rayna was amazing: kind, funny, hardworking, loyal, loving. She’d find an equally amazing guy in a heartbeat if she’d just put herself out there.
But she’d spent those oh-so important formative partying years raising Vaughn, so she didn’t even know how amazing she was and she definitely didn’t know how to put herself out anywhere.
So instead, she’d trustingly entered all her personal identifying info, plus a semi-sultry, semi-shy angle with her face averted but her gaze direct on the viewer, into some exclusive matchmaker app…and vanished.
Vaughn was almost glad she’d been discharged since it gave her time to investigate Rayna’s disappearance when local police had brushed her off after finding no signs of foul play and no clues to follow up. In fact the sheriff’s deputy had the nerve to suggest that maybe the dating site had worked so well, Rayna was off fucking some horny date-needing stud right now.
That hadn’t been quite how he worded it. And after Vaughn threatened to remove some of his teeth—before or after reporting him to the sheriff, she’d left the choice to him—he’d never even hint that way again. But just as she’d gotten nowhere with the rest of her life, she was failing at this search. Certainly the abrupt closure of the dating site’s resort should have triggered renewed interest in the missing persons case, but though Sheriff Giles—an otherwise gruff woman who might as well have been a drill sergeant back in basic training—had expressed sympathy to Vaughn’s plight, she had also made it clear she was part of a rural law enforcement system that was overworked and underpaid and wholly uninterested. Which left Vaughn to pursue the truth alone.
Hell, Dad would be so disappointed in her. Everything he’d sacrificed for the country, for the family, everything he’d taught her about standing up for what she believed in, and she had nothing to show for it except the whisky she’d stolen from a stranger. She was going to lose what precious little she had left…
The alcohol churned, rising in the back of her throat like a burning scream, and she clenched her hands inside the sleeves of her slightly too-large surplus camo jacket. No, no screaming, no whimpering, no wimping at all. Whatever else happened, she wasn’t going to give up this search.
The lying asshole she’d spotted sneaking around the resort had information. She knew he did—she’d seen it in his strange eyes. His weird, pale brown eyes with an eerie caution-yellow ring around the iris—she’d never seen anything like it; colored contacts, maybe?—were oddly wide set in a lean, pale face dominated by the harsh perimeters of his nose and cheekbones. A fortified face, as remote as the limestone ridges that protected the resort she’d tried to reconnoiter.
What else was he hiding? With his tall, taut, wide-shouldered body showcased in what was, obviously, custom leathers, he was used to women sitting down at his … table, wanting him. Well, she definitely wanted him and that thick thatch of curling brown hair streaked with blond. And when she was done with him, he was going to share his secrets with her—share everything. She hadn’t actually punched the sheriff’s deputy—she wanted credit for that—so she had one to spare.
She shoved out of the chair and spun it back around to position it neatly under the table. She wasn’t going to just let the fucker walk away without—
“Hey, hon. You going to close out his tab?”
Vaughn glanced over her shoulder at the server. “Really?”
The woman shrugged. “He said you’re the type to take offense at a guy buying the drinks and that you owed him one.”
Oh, did she ever… Seething inside, Vaughn dragged out her wallet from her back pocket. National Guard MP pay was barely mid-shelf whisky grade, and now she didn’t even have that to fall back on. When Rayna had tried to get her to come to Montana after the discharge, Vaughn had resisted, not wanting to concede her failure. Living out of her car was keeping down expenses, but here she was paying for three drinks when she’d only had one.
Unfair. And there was nothing she hated more than injustice.
She tipped the server. Wasn’t her fault Vaughn was mostly broke. “Out of curiosity…how well do you know the guy?” She jerked her chin toward the vacant seat.
The server shook her head. “Not at all. He’s been around the last few days. But this is hiking season, so we get a lot of new faces this time of year.” She pursed her lips. “Except he spends too much time playing on his phone to be bear-bait.” Her smile flashed. “Don’t suppose the bears care though. I wouldn’t. No talking required when a guy’s got a body like that.”
Oh great, now she had to factor in dangerous wildlife to Rayna’s disappearance as well as dating site serial killers. Boring base patrols with drunk enlisted men, fender-benders, lost dogs, and the occasional massive sexual harassment scandal swept under the rug was sounding so good right about now.
But that life was over. And she’d done it to herself.
Steeling herself against the bitter memory, she marched to the door. Yeah, she’d made mistakes. She’d mistakenly thought other people cared about justice and doing the right thing. Well, she didn’t need other people this time. She’d find Rayna on her own.
Vaughn paused as the door closed behind her, smothering the cheerful sounds of the jukebox and clinking pint glasses. Beyond the circle of neon lights from the Sunset Saloon bar signs, the night was dark. Of course it was dark; it was night. But somehow it seemed darker than a regular old night.
She tipped her face upward. The Montana Big Sky thing wasn’t just a marketing ploy. The sky was fucking enormous, a black vault arching overhead, speckled with needle pricks of burning white stars.
“I’ll find you,” she whispered.
She rocked forward to the toes of her boots, planning to head toward her car and an uncomfortable night’s sleep somewhere on a quiet road with the driver’s seat tipped back as far as it would go. But at the last moment, the thought of being stuck in that rusted steel casket infuriated her. She did her best thinking on her feet anyway. And she pivoted on her heel to walk back along the small-town sidewalk.
Just as a ferocious orange light lanced out of the darkness, piercing the hole in space she’d been about to step into. With a strangled curse, she threw herself sideways, and ducked behind a pickup only slightly less rusted than her shitty two-door.
Her heart slammed in her chest, hard enough that it might’ve rattled loose some of the scaly red rust under her palm, and all her senses flared as if they’d been dipped in whisky and set alight.
She peered around the headlight of the truck, scanning the night and the quiet street. How many layers of rust were needed to stop a bullet?
She’d been through basic training and advanced individual training and she’d aced the firing range tests, which had made Dad crow with pride, and she’d faithfully absorbed the lessons of combat and evasive maneuvers even though she’d never been deployed abroad. So she felt she had a better than passing familiarity with bullets.
That orange shot had been aimed at her.
And it wasn’t a regulation bullet.
Laser sighting? Tracer round? She risked a rapid glance back and spotted the small, dark hole in the heavy wood of the door where she’d been standing.
A thin curl of smoke spiraled up from the hole.
A burning bullet? But there was nothing embedded in the wood, just that smoking hole. Which would’ve gone through her. Not a laser sighting, but an actual laser beam?
Of course a 31B National Guard MP like her would’ve never been given or even seen an advanced weapon like that. So why was it being deployed against a nobody like her, a discharged nobody at that?
She could make a run for the saloon, but that would put her right back in the line of fire. Out into the darkness then.
Choking back another curse and staying low, she hustled toward the rear end of the pickup. Luckily, the driver behind had nudged another less-rusty pickup almost on the bumper of the first, forming a protective chain of Fords. She managed to duck into the narrow space between the second and a third Ford. With a hand braced on the rear license plate in front of her and the grill behind her, she tensed herself to make a break for it.
She lunged…
And rocked to a halt with a hand fisted in her jacket between her camo-covered shoulder blades.
The collar strangled her scream, and then another hand, wide and ruthless, closed over her mouth.
“Shut up,” hissed a hot, whisky-scented, familiar breath in her ear. “Come this way if you don’t want the next shot through your heart.”
She knew better than to let herself be taken. The chances for a live recovery were vastly reduced if an assailant transported the victim to a second location. As an MP, she’d been on too many domestic violence calls… Well, just better to keep all the evidence confined to one crime scene.
Despite her dispassionate assessment, an anguished cry swelled inside her ribs, wanting to burst out. Was this what had happened to Rayna?
The thought raged in her, fiercer and more focused than any laser. The asshole who took Rayna would pay in blood and pain.
Anyway, his threat must be a lie. With his one hand over her mouth and the other holding her jacket, no way did he have his gun fixed on her. She let her jaw fall open under the force of his grasp. With the minute easing of pressure, she reversed course and bit down. Hard.
She’d start with blood…
The weirdly sweet taste gagged her. With a stifled oath in some foreign language, he jerked back. She spun around, using his momentum, and launched her elbow right at his face.
Adding a serious sideways bent to that strong, straight nose would count as blood and pain.
Instead of rewarding her with a crunch and a scream, he caught the point of her elbow in the cup of his bitten palm. He stared at her. The yellow ring around his irises expanded, eclipsing the ordinary brown.
She froze, her grunt of effort stoppered in her throat. Jesus, he was insanely strong. She wasn’t a martial arts expert or anything, but she’d wrestled in high school, had always been top of her PT class, and still diligently worked out. And he’d halted her mid-swing without even an inch of recoil to absorb the blow.
His eyes narrowed. “I told you—”
The next shot of orange light caught him dead-center in the chest.
Right through the heart, just as he’d warned her.
She caught him as he fell. The helix of smoke rising from his oddly cut leather coat singed her nostrils, almost but not quite disguising a darker, more intriguing scent with an edge of spice—him?
Fuck fuck, she did not have the option of being distracted. As strong as he was, he was equally heavy. Had he been drinking lead along with the whisky? If he had been, he probably would’ve been bulletproof. Or laser-proof—
She knew she was panicking and forced herself to calm. She’d never been in a firefight, but she’d seen TV shows… Fuck calm.
She dragged him backward, away from the shooter, toward the narrow alley two doors down from the saloon. The small storefronts were closed and dark this time of night. Should she have risked a run into the saloon? At least the straight lines of the alley would force the shooter to realign to bring them into view, and she’d have the chance to call 911.
Fuuuuck, he was heavy. She could bench two hundred, but her arms felt stretched, her frantic pulse pounding painfully through her veins.
A few yards just inside the alley, a dumpster provided convenient cover. If she could just make it… Those yards were the longest she’d ever traveled as she hauled him between her stumbling legs, expecting a faceful of lethal coherent light at any moment.
The handle of the dumpster smacked her in the shoulder—yee-ow, that was going to leave a bruise—and with an explosive breath she heaved his dead weight into the shelter of the heavy container even as she fumbled for her phone with one hand and her pistol with the other. The Colt Mustang XSP fit perfectly in her smaller hand and packed even more punch than…well, than her punch. The ribbed grip settled into her palm and sanded down the sharpest edges of her fear.
She covered the mouth of the alley with the pistol, keeping her eye off the phone’s lighted screen as she triggered the emergency call. Couldn’t sacrifice her night vision…
Except the phone didn’t chirp at her. She hazarded a glance down. The screen was a mass of gray analog static. What the fuck? She’d had hella trouble getting even a couple bars worth of connection in this town, but she’d at least been able to see how much the connection sucked. Now…nothing. Well, this was truly fucked up beyond all recognition.
“They’re scrambling you.”
She yelped and jumped sideways away from the dead guy.
Who wasn’t so dead, turned out. The hole in the middle of his chest—the middle of his leather jacket, really—was charred in a thin gray circle, and a trickle of some greenish liquid, almost as bright as antifreeze fluid, leaked down the front. The lush, blond-streaked waves of his dark hair half-covered his face, but through the oh-so-touchable locks, his pupils were constricted to pinpoints, and the strange yellow ring had expanded to almost overcome the brown.
“Who is it?” Her voice cracked, and she tried again. “Who’s shooting?”
He shook his head to clear his hair from his wide-set eyes, just a couple degrees of swivel, as if even that pained him. “Don’t know. But no way will your dirt tech break through the block.”
She grimaced. Dirt tech? It wasn’t the best phone—she wasn’t interested in spending nonexistent money on the latest and greatest when what she had would do—but it wasn’t that bad. “I have to get you to a doctor.”
“No.” With a grunt, he rolled to one side, flattening the hand she’d bitten over the hole in his jacket. There was more of the bright green liquid pooling in the teeth marks she’d left. Shit, and it had tasted sweet. Wasn’t antifreeze allegedly sweet-tasting, which was why pets could get poisoned lapping it up?
Not that she was lapping him up… Fuck, calm, focus. “But—”
“No.” He pulled himself upward until he was sitting sprawled half upright against the dumpster and drew one booted foot inward—even his leather boots looked custom, unadorned, with the same stark efficiency as her standard issue boots but beautifully cut—as if he was going to make an attempt to stand. “It’s nothing.”
She couldn’t imagine how he was still moving. Shock and adrenaline? Was he going to code on her at any moment? “It’s not nothing,” she told him sternly. It was that or shriek at him. “You were shot.”
He eyed her, then stuck his finger in the hole and waggled it. “I believe the closest applicable term is ‘duh’.”
The way he said it, with a faint, exotic burr in his voice, made her think he might be Scottish. That would explain why he was so pale, wouldn’t it? But maybe he was just drunk. Or dying. Or all of the above.
She couldn’t just leave him here under those conditions—well, the Scottish part was fine, more than fine actually—but she didn’t see a choice. “I’m going to make a run for the saloon,” she told him. “I’m not going to abandon you, but I have to bring help—”
“Help never comes in time, or haven’t you noticed that yet? We’re on our own.” He pulled out his phone. It unfolded to the size of a small tablet, and when he waved his finger over the screen, a 3D hologram projected upward. When she gasped in surprise, he slanted a smug glance at her, rolled his shoulders, and continued plinking away at the ghostly projection.
She peered at the arcane symbols in the hologram, her brain whirling faster than the ciphers. She didn’t care that much about technology, but she’d never seen anything like this. “I thought you said we were blocked.”
“I said you were.” He detached a thumbnail chip from the side of the tablet and held it out in his palm. With a sound like a bumblebee, the chip levitated from his hand and whirled away over their heads.
Inadvertently, she ducked, but the chip was already gone into the night. She’d known drones were getting smaller, but that was ridiculous. Who was this guy?
The hologram reformed into a constantly changing view from the tiny drone. It precisely modeled the row of Fords and the empty sidewalk. Even the tinny sound of the saloon’s muffled jukebox came through. Impossible. “Wait. What’s that spot?”
“Heat signature from where the laser scorched the door,” he murmured as he flicked his fingers across the tablet, adjusting something that caused the hologram to flicker and widen. “Fading though. Not what we’re looking for.”
“Jesus Christ,” she muttered.
“No, I don’t believe he is the culprit. Records show he was a pacifist…” The guy peered up at her. “Also, he’s apparently almost two millennia dead.” His brow furrowed. “Ah, I didn’t realize he came back once already, so I suppose it’s possible—”
“Quit joking around,” she snapped.
“I hardly ever joke about who is putting holes in me.” He leaned back. “But neither line of fire traces back to a source. Whoever it was, they’re gone now. They took a chance on the surprise ambush and failed. They obviously don’t want a direct confrontation, so they’ll regroup before they try again.”
“Try again?” She glared at him, even though she knew her emotions were spiking only because of the adrenaline. “Why is someone shooting at you?”
“Because I was in the way?” He tilted his head. “They were shooting at you first.”
She closed her eyes for a split second, dizzy. “Fuck.”
“Ah, is that what you use that antiquated apparatus in your hand for?” The drone returned to hover over his head with a faintly disapproving buzz.
“Ha ha. No.” She huffed out a breath. “I thought you were shooting at me.”
“Are you thinking of putting another hole in me?”
For another second, she hesitated, then admitted, “Not now.” There was something off about him, but he wasn’t the enemy. She didn’t think.
Though the Mustang weighed less than a pound, suddenly her wrist shook. With careful deliberation, she engaged the safety and returned the pistol to the sleek holster under her arm.
“Does it seem coincidental to you,” she asked in as even a voice as she could muster, “that the only two people asking questions about this mysterious dating agency are the two people who just got shot at?”
“In an infinite universe, anything is possible,” he said. When she growled under her breath, he added, “But considering the circumstances and the dimensions of this world…I’d say the chance of this being a coincidence are infinitesimal.”
Her knees wobbled a little, even though she wasn’t the one who’d actually been shot. “Now can we get you to a doctor? And can you get enough bars on that thing to call the cops?”
He clamped one hand on her knee. “I told you, no doctors. And no cops. And definitely no bars.” When he released her, he held out his flattened palm and the drone landed lightly. Sliding it into its slot on the tablet, he tucked the high-tech toy into a side pocket of his jacket. “And if you want to find your sister, you won’t involve any of those useless authorities either.”
Between the loss of her career and Rayna, living out of her car and nearly not living anymore, if that laser beam had found its target, Vaughn felt done with being jerked around. She pinned her fury on the guy at her feet. Emphasis on the jerk.
“And why,” she asked with icy precision, “would I not ask for their help?”
“Because if you do, you won’t have mine. And I think it must be apparent even to your less advanced brain that I’m the only existing link to your sister within your grasp right now.”
Oh, he was within her grasp all right. With an incensed growl, she grabbed his lapels and hauled him to his feet. As heavy as he’d been before, and even though he swayed from his wound, he moved with a lithe, contained strength that reminded her of the special forces guys who would sometimes pass through the base on their way between top secret and nothing-to-see-here.
Not that she thought he was special forces. Or special at all, even if he had taken a bullet—well, laser beam—meant for her. He had the reckless, offhand allure of a guy who didn’t care about anything and didn’t follow any rules. Which she’d never put up with in real life. But these were special circumstances.
“I found you,” she spat. She had to look up at him since he was taller than her by about a foot. “With my less advanced brain. So tell me what you know.”
“It’s going to sound a little hard to believe,” he warned.
“Try me,” she challenged.
His gaze drifted downward. “Oh, I will,” he murmured in a low voice that emphasized the exotic, lilting burr and seemed to make her bones throb.
And then he fell over into her arms.