Stop stalling.
A deep breath, and then... She heard something. The sound of an engine. In the distance, lights flickered between the trees. But something didn’t look right. They weren’t car headlights.
A motorcycle appeared at the turn in the highway. Then another, and another. In the illumination spilling from their headlights she could see the riders wore leather vests with some sort of patches. Colors, she’d heard them called. Gangs wore them.
A biker gang? Seriously? Someone drove by when she desperately needed help and it was these guys? She stayed crouched down low.
The first rider roared past her. A dozen more filed by after him. Should she ask them for help?
The decision was made for her. The rider in the front slowed, made a U-turn across the highway, and then headed back. He rode up closer to her and stopped. Then he put his hand down to the side and made a backing motion. The other riders came to a stop a few yards away. He killed his engine.
Now what? There was no point in hiding, so she stood. Her calf muscles registered a cramped, painful protest.
He pulled off his helmet and rested it on his thigh. “Need some help?” He stayed seated on his chopper. His hair was dark and short, almost a military cut. His eyes were hidden in the shadows cast by the other riders’ headlights.
He didn’t smile, but his tone was friendly enough. The fact that he wasn’t trying to charm her made him seem somewhat more trustworthy.
At this point, what did she have to lose? “I had a little trouble,” she said.
He nodded. “I can see that.”
“And I can’t get reception on my phone.”
He kicked out the kickstand on his motorcycle and stood up. Medium height. Medium build. Not a huge guy, but there was something imposing about the way he moved, nevertheless. He swung a leg over his bike and started toward her, his heavy boots crunching atop the loose gravel on the road. She was already pressed up against her car or she would have backed up. He finally stopped a couple of paces away from her, reached a leather-gloved hand into his pocket and pulled out a small satellite phone. He glanced at the screen. “Here, my phone’s working.”
She hesitated to close the gap between them. But if he meant her harm, why would he go through such an elaborate act? She reached for the phone, her trembling hand betraying her fear. “Thanks.” The wallpaper on the screen was a black oval with a silver sword in the middle. Beneath it were the words Vanquish the Darkness. Olivia had no idea what that meant. She wasn’t about to ask.
* * *
The woman was in trouble and Elijah could tell it went well beyond her battered car. He’d spotted her crouched by the car, eyes wide with fear, looking like a cornered coyote ready to bolt.
Elijah continually scanned his surroundings, paid attention to small details and saw a lot of things other people never noticed. “Head on a swivel” was the term they’d used over in the sandbox. The practice of looking everywhere, all the time, was a skill he’d first learned in Iraq and later used in Afghanistan. A habit that had kept him alive, and one he didn’t plan to ever lose.
The woman watched him warily while she looked up a contact on her own phone and then punched the numbers into his. He didn’t mean her harm, but she didn’t know that. He’d left his phone on speaker and she didn’t change the setting, so a few seconds later he was surprised to hear a familiar voice say, “Elijah, honey, is that you?”
The woman stared at him, eyes widened. Her jaw dropped slightly. “Aunt Claudia?” she finally said into the phone. “Is that you?”
There was a pause, and then, “Olivia?”
“Yes!”
Elijah could practically see relief cascading over Olivia as her shoulders relaxed.
Olivia. So this was the grandniece Claudia Sweeney had been telling everyone in town about for the past two weeks. The first blood relative to come visit the eighty-year-old woman in as long as Elijah could remember. Of course she was bringing trouble with her. She hadn’t seen fit to visit her great-aunt in the past, which meant she was probably here now because she wanted something.
He watched her shift her weight back and forth, nervously glancing up and down the highway. She was trying to outrun some kind of trouble, which meant she was bringing it to the doorstep of a woman who’d always treated Elijah like family. If her problems caused harm to Claudia, she was going to find herself moving on a lot sooner than she thought.
“Are you already here in town?” Claudia asked.
“Not yet,” Olivia answered. “I’m still on the highway.” She glanced back toward her car. “I’ve had some trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?” Concern was evident in the way Claudia carefully spoke each word. “And why are you calling on Elijah Morales’s phone?”
Olivia turned back to face Elijah and moved the phone slightly away from her face. “Is your name Elijah Morales?”
He nodded once.
“Do you know my great-aunt Claudia?”
“Claudia Sweeney? Yes.”
She knit her brows together. “How do you know her?”
“We’re neighbors. And we go to church together.”
She stared at him, and then turned her gaze to his buddies before finally turning back to him.
“Do all of you guys go to church with my aunt?” She strung out the words, hesitating between each one, as if they didn’t quite make sense when she put them together.
Elijah felt one corner of his mouth twitch slightly upward with the hint of a half smile. Yes, he was well aware that they didn’t look like your typical church group. For himself, he certainly wasn’t pretty as a picture. The scars on his face were small, but people noticed them. Some of his fellow riders looked a little rough, too. He chose his friends based on their character and gave no thought to how they looked to anyone else. But how do you explain that in a few quick seconds to a woman who looks as if she’s on the verge of panic?
You don’t.
He glanced at her car jammed up against a sapling that had nearly snapped in half, and then he looked back at her. “It’s a crazy world.”
She actually laughed. Only once, but it seemed to help calm her. Eventually he would press her a little harder for details on what had happened. Right now he just wanted to help her hold it together, assist her with her car and get her someplace safe.
“Olivia!” Through the phone, Claudia was trying to get her attention.
“I’m here,” Olivia mumbled, sounding dazed.
“Why don’t you hand the phone back to Elijah? Let me talk to him and find out where you are so I can figure out what we need to do.”
“Okay.” Olivia held out the phone to Elijah. “She wants to talk to you.”
“I’ll have your niece on her way as soon as I can,” Elijah said into the phone.
“Would you take me off speaker?”
“Sure.” He hit the button. “You’re off speaker.”
“Is she really all right?” Claudia asked.
Elijah wondered that himself as he started walking around her car to take a closer look. The glow from a dozen motorcycle headlights gave him a pretty decent view. There were the expected scrapes and scratches along the sides of the car that probably came from the rocks and trees once she’d gone off road. But there were dents on the back bumper, too.
“She seems all right,” he said into the phone. “Her car’s wrecked, though. One of us needs to hang up and call Ricky so he can fire up