Exhaustion claimed Carlie. She plopped down onto her makeshift bed, pulled the lightweight quilt over her shoulders, and dropped off faster than she thought possible.
A while later, she woke up. She had no idea what roused her, but she opened her eyes, her heart beating a frantic, furious pulse. Instead of her cozy quarters, she found herself in Dante’s vision of Hades.
Tongues of flames licked toward the roof, the walls, her nest of hay. Smoke made it hard to see—worse, to breathe. The billows swirled before, beside, behind the flames.
“Oh, Father…dear God. Your will be done.”
As she finished her scrap of prayer, she heard Dan’s yell.
“Hang on, Carlie! I’m coming for you.”
Everything went black.
THREE
Bit by bit, sound penetrated the thick, heavy darkness around Carlie. People jabbered, but she didn’t understand a word. A rushing noise whooshed behind the chatter, and the smell of a barbecue gone bad stung her nose.
Then she remembered the fire. She remembered the meal, the Millers, the bombed apartment. Did Tony’s slimy buddies get the farm, too?
She groaned. Everywhere she went, disaster and devastation followed.
A man called her name. He demanded that she breathe deeply. He commanded her to wake up. He ordered her not to die. “Come on, come on, come on!”
Carlie fought her heavy eyelids and tried to sit up.
No dice.
She needed someone to help her. The elephant who sat all over her body had to find a new seat, and the pins that held her eyes shut had to go.
But help didn’t come. At least, not the kind she wanted. Instead, she was lifted upward, through the air, a frightening experience eased somewhat by the firm support at her back. A woman spoke, but Carlie still couldn’t make out the words. Then she was poked, prodded, jostled, lifted, lowered, and then—finally—breathing wasn’t quite so hard anymore.
A weird wail started up, and Carlie fought against the weight of her eyelids. After a superhuman effort, she got them pried apart and wished she hadn’t. What she saw stunned her. Faces hovered just above her, weird gadgets hung beyond the faces, lights blinked, things clinked, and everything jerked and jolted to the tune of the ongoing wail.
“Carlie? Can you hear me, Carlie?”
She tried to answer, but her throat wouldn’t work. She tried to nod, but her head wouldn’t move—that scared her, so she tried to talk one more time.
“Don’t,” the female voice said. “Just blink if you can hear me. You have an oxygen mask over your nose and mouth, and that’ll make speech difficult.”
Oxygen mask! She blinked up a storm, but couldn’t ask the million and one questions that buzzed in her head. What had happened between Dante’s Inferno in a Mennonite barn and…where was she now? A hospital?
“Good,” the woman said. “You can hear me. Let me explain a few things for you.”
In a clear, soft voice, the woman told Carlie how Dan had axed a hole in the old, brittle wood walls of the small barn then dragged her out before the entire structure went up in flames. She’d passed out while in the burning building, and the Millers had called for the ambulance, which was now on its way to Lancaster General Hospital. The EMT wound up her explanation by insisting that Carlie was lucky to be alive.
But Carlie didn’t call it luck. She called it another of God’s many mercies. She couldn’t quite see a family like hers as any kind of luck, other than maybe the worst.
But where was Dan? Did he get hurt?
Carlie couldn’t stand the thought of her shadow being harmed because of her. But she couldn’t ask, and her head weighed about a ton. Her eyelids drooped again, and she slipped off for a nap.
Green and purple cows and orange and blue nails danced through her dreams.
“How much longer is she going to sleep?” Dan asked, frustrated.
Dr. Wong retained his calm. “We don’t know, Agent Maddox. It depends on how she reacts to pain meds, plus a number of other variables.”
“I have to get her out of here.” Dan began to pace. “They nearly got her this time.”
“This time?”
“That’s why she’s in the Witness Protection Program.” When they’d first brought Carlie into the hospital, Dan had no alternative but to reveal his identity and their situation. It was the only way he could get adequate protection for his charge.
“Then I’d better not ask you more questions.”
Relief felt good. “I appreciate that. And I appreciate the care you’re taking with her.”
“It’s all in a day’s work,” the young doctor said with a grin. “I’ll alert the rest of the staff. I’m sure they’re dying to know about Carlie’s vast and professionally serious extended family.”
“Thanks.” Dan hadn’t known how he was going to disguise the crew his boss, Eliza, had sent. The doctor’s understanding would go a long way in keeping things under some kind of control.
“But, Mr. Maddox?” the doctor said. “You yourself need to rest. You took in a big wallop of smoke, almost as much as Carlie did. And those burns of yours can get infected very easily.”
Dan shrugged. “It’s all in a day’s work.”
“Tripped up by my own words.” Dr. Wong punctuated his words with a wry grin. He tapped his forehead in a salute, then turned and left the room.
Dan returned to his sentry post on the nasty green pleather chair next to Carlie’s bed. But his patience wasn’t much to write home about, and before too long, he paced again from the foot of the bed to the large window that looked out on congested traffic.
“Noooooooo!”
The ear-splitting scream shocked him still for a moment. Then he spun, ran to Carlie’s side, and found her scooted up hard against the headboard, her legs bent at the knee, her medicine tree tipped partway over the bed.
Horror contorted her beautiful features, and the slight smudge of soot under her right eye, one the nurses missed when they’d cleaned her, added to the atypical, weirdly tough-girl look she now wore.
“Get out of here!” she yelled. With her non-IVed hand, she scrabbled through the pile of sheets and blanket at her side. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what she wanted to find, who she wanted to summon.
“It’s okay, Carlie. It’s me, Dan Maddox. You’re fine. The hospital and I are taking good care of you.”
A bulldog expression replaced the horror on her face. “I don’t know what your game is, bub, but you’re not Dan Maddox. He has gorgeous blond hair. You don’t have any.”
Something in Dan leaped when she admired his hair. But it soon settled down thanks to reality. “Carlie, it is me. They shaved my head because so much of my hair got singed when I went after you in the barn.”
She wrinkled her nose, and drew close. “You sound like Dan, but you look a little alien, kind of like that weird guy on the bottle, that Mr. Clean on TV commercials.”
“Gee, thanks. I’ve always wanted to make a beautiful woman think of floor cleaner.”
“Now I know you’re not Dan Maddox. He’d never tell me I’m beautiful. He’d call me trouble, a pain, crazy and who knows how many other snotty names.”
What could he tell her? That he had to force himself to think