“I’m not going back to Virginia until I know Reg is safe. I gave my word.”
“No problem. There’s an Agency jet sitting on the tarmac out at the airport with its engines hot and two more agents aboard for backup. I’ll let you walk on and buckle him in, if you like.”
“How are you and I getting back?”
“Military chopper.” Engler smiled slightly. “O’Dell’s private stock. You’re getting the royal treatment.”
“O’Dell’s little joke, giving me the royal treatment to my own firing squad.” Meg mustered up a rough smile. She looked at Rafe for a moment, then walked across and held out her hand. “Well, Mr. Blackhorse, it’s been…instructional. I won’t say it’s been a pleasure, exactly, but I appreciate your help. And I’m sorry about your…arrangement with the other party. Give him my regrets, will you?”
To her surprise, Rafe actually smiled. His hand folded around hers, warm and incredibly gentle. “It has been a pleasure, Special Agent Mary Margaret Kavanagh. Like I said, you’re one of a kind.”
“CIR Specialist Mary Margaret Kavanagh,” Meg said with a sigh. “And I meant what I said about appreciating your help, even if it wasn’t exactly what you intended. I’ll keep all your advice in mind. In case I ever need it again. You ought to think about billing O’Dell for your in-field training services.”
His fingers tightened slightly, encasing hers in gentle warmth. “You take care of yourself, Agent Kavanagh.”
Then he drew his hand from hers slowly, letting his fingers linger on hers for a moment before releasing them completely.
She nodded again, then just smiled and gathered up her suitcase, glancing around the room to make sure she had everything. Carlson was helping Reggie get his things together in the other room, and she could hear them squabbling already.
She walked outside with Engler, taking a deep breath of night air.
“Hey. You. Engler.”
Rafe’s voice caught Engler just as he was opening the door of his rental car for Meg. He stiffened and Meg saw his hand move fractionally toward his weapon.
She looked around sharply. Rafe was just standing there, tall and calm-eyed in the moonlight, hands loose at his sides.
Engler turned slowly. “What?”
“Tell O’Dell she did just fine out here. Handled herself better than most men I’ve seen with twice the training.”
Engler looked as surprised as Meg felt. She stared at Rafe in amazement.
“She stayed one step ahead of me for almost a week, and when I did catch up to her, she drew down on me like an old-timer, cool as water. Tell him that.”
“Yeah, okay.” Engler looked at Meg with renewed respect. “I’ll tell him that.”
Rafe nodded, then touched his forehead in a lazy salute, his eyes holding Meg’s. “S’long, Irish.”
“I…yeah…” she stammered, feeling suddenly flustered for no reason. His gaze was as warmly intimate as a caress, as though they’d been sharing a lot more than barbed threats half the night, and she sensed more than saw Engler look at her curiously. “I, um…so…long.”
“Well, if that doesn’t beat everything.” Carlson had joined them in time to hear the whole exchange and was standing there with his mouth open, watching Rafe stride away. “Meg, you just got a five-star recommendation from a legend! Man, wait’ll O’Dell hears about this!”
Chapter 4
Mary Margaret Kavanagh was still on his mind three weeks later.
And Rafe was not happy about it.
It was irritating as hell to be thinking about her at all, for a start. But to have her on his mind here, up on Bear Mountain, really ticked him off.
Until now, he’d managed to keep the outside world from intruding up here. His fortress from reality, his sister had called it. She’d used a lot of phrases like that once, shouting them at him as though trying to pierce armorplate with words. But it wasn’t a fortress, just a quiet retreat from the clamor and clang of a world that seemed increasingly irrelevant.
Up here there was nothing but him and the sky and the wind and the mountain itself, its granite roots planted deep in the planet’s heart. It was silent, save for the moan of the wind and the occasional scream of an eagle, and as clean as bone, scoured by that ever-present wind.
Everything was reduced to its simplest form, all softness and artifice and weakness gone until only the core remained. Even the stunted trees had been stripped of nonessentials until they were more like polished stone than living things, gray and hard and elemental, all but unkillable. Tree-thing at its most fundamental level, like the rock and the sky.
Like him.
It had saved him, this mountain. Like the rocks and the twisted trees, he’d been scoured down to his most elemental self until all that was left was hard and pure. He’d come up here almost two years ago intending to kill himself. Eight months before, he’d drunk himself into a stupor and had stayed that way, trying to blot out the memories. But it had never worked. And finally, too exhausted by guilt and pain to go on, he’d decided to stop even trying.
He’d had some plan, he supposed, although he’d never been able to remember it. Later, he’d found the unloaded pistol where it had dropped from his bourbon-numbed fingers, so maybe that had been it. Whatever he’d planned, he’d managed to screw it up, too drunk to put thought into action. Instead, he’d fallen into a pile of boulders near the summit and had lain there for days, drifting in and out of consciousness, soaked by rain and heavy dew at night, burned dry by an unforgiving sun during the day.
He still had no idea how long he’d lain there. Long enough to kill most men, he suspected. Long enough to kill him had he not been so pickled in bourbon. He remembered licking dew from stone, the taste bitter in his mouth. Remembered waking once and seeing clumps of blueberries hanging just above him, growing where no blueberries grew. Knowing they were nothing more than a hallucination, he reached up with fingers that seemed unattached to his body and picked them and ate them, the juice as sweet as wine. Remembered finding apples. Like the blueberries, they were out of place and out of time—it was spring, not fall, and there wasn’t an apple tree for a hundred miles in any direction. But, hallucination or not, he ate them and they were sweet.
He remembered watching the slow spiral of an eagle as it hung in an updraft a hundred feet above him, giant wings unmoving. He talked to it; he remembered that, too. Babbling things he’d never spoken aloud before, shouting his rage to the sky. He remembered screaming threats to God and man alike. Remembered retching dryly for hour after hour, stomach cramping so painfully he could hardly breathe as the wind and sun worked eight months of cheap booze from his system. Remembered weeping finally, exhausted and empty and at the end.
He’d simply let go then, he remembered. Content to lie there and drift into a final sleep, relinquishing control to whatever forces had kept him alive that far. Something had been there, with him, at the end. Real but not real, just a presence half-seen, a Spirit Warrior keeping silent, still watch. And thus watched, he’d slept finally, slipping down into that kind of deep, dreamless renewing sleep that had eluded him for the better part of a year.
He’d awakened just before dawn, chilled to the bone, and had sat up slowly, sober for the first time in months. Everything was still, the crystalline air so pure and cold it hurt to breathe. The sky was the color of skim milk, still dotted by stars and streaked with peach in the east, and he had sat there, shivering uncontrollably, and had realized with surprise that he was alive. Purified inside and out by wind and rain and sun, as smoothed and polished and hard as an obsidian blade.
The sun had risen, warming him a little, and he’d gotten unsteadily to his feet, feeling as delicate and untethered