Deadly Intentions (20 page)

“Meow.”

Morgan whirled toward the noise. A black cat sat in the path, her ice-blue eyes blinking at them. She watched as the cat stood up and walked to the wall, then disappeared.

“Did that cat just disappear?” Celeste asked.

“Looks like it.” Morgan walked over to the spot. At first glance, it looked like a solid wall, but on close inspection, she could see that the stone overlapped in one spot. There were actually two walls next to each other with a thin space between. Peering in, she could see the cat sitting inside a tiny hidden niche barely big enough to fit the four of them.

“Come here, quick!” She gestured toward the others who filed over and, one by one, slid into the space behind the wall. The opening was barely big enough for them to squeeze through, but they managed. She just hoped the small opening and overlapping walls would hide them from the guards.

A few seconds later, heavily booted footsteps passed by the opening. The guards were talking in hushed whispers. There was no sign by the tone of their voices or their energy signatures that they even suspected the girls were there.
 

It was a tight fit in the little niche. Morgan felt like she was suffocating. She stepped back to get some breathing room.

“Plink!”

Morgan’s heart skidded—she’d inadvertently scraped a rock loose from the wall and it had fallen onto the floor.

“What was that?” The guard’s voice sounded from a few feet down the hall.

“What? I didn’t hear anything.” A second guard.

“I did. Someone is back there.”
 

Morgan held her breath as the sounds of the guard’s boots scraping the tunnel floor came closer. She braced herself, knowing they would soon be discovered and have to fight their way out. Beside her, she could feel Fiona tense.

“Meow.”

“Oh.” The guard let out a chuckle. “It was just a cat. Get outta here. Go on—scoot!”

“Ha, big bad Roger scared of a cat,” the other guards laughed.

Morgan’s shoulders sagged with relief, but she remained stock still, afraid to breathe.

She heard static. Walkie-Talkies.
 

“Base to Team one … come in.” The distorted voice sounded far away.

“Team one here,” the guard said.

“I’m getting something on the monitor. A disturbance in sector five. Can you check it out?”

“Roger.” The static snapped off.
 
“Let’s go.”

Their boots scuffled off into the distance. Morgan counted to twenty before jostling her way to the opening so she could peek out. No one was in the tunnel.

“It’s clear.” She waved the others out. “Come on.”

“Boy, am I glad we didn’t have to fight them,” Celeste said, looking around for the cat. “I don’t know if we could have beaten them without Jolene.”

Fiona pulled three glowing crystals from her pocket. “Not to worry. I brought some of these crystals. Remember how they helped us fight off bad guys before?”

Morgan smiled, remembering the big fight for the treasure under their house. Somehow the crystals knew just who to target and packed a wallop. But they only had three, and she had a funny feeling they were going to need more than that. None of them really had the fighting power that Jolene did.

“That’s good to know,” Morgan said. “But I’m worried about the disturbance they talked about.”

“It could be the energy shield,” Eliza suggested.

“Or Luke, Cal, Jake and Buzz.” Morgan’s forehead creased with worry. “They could be in trouble and none of them have paranormal skills. We’d better hurry.”

***

Jolene and Mateo spilled out of the elevator at full speed. Jolene eyed the dark corridor to the right. Somehow she knew that was the best way out, but something tugged her attention away.

The door with the rectangular window—the other cell.

Jolene rushed toward it. To her surprise, Mateo was right beside her. She would have thought he would have wanted to head straight down the dark hallway.

“We can’t leave anyone here.” Jolene skidded to a halt in front of the door to the old woman’s cell. “How many people does he have locked here?”

“Just the two of you,” Mateo said.
 

Jolene wondered why he was looking at her curiously as he pushed a series of buttons on a panel beside the door.

The door clicked open and Jolene rushed in, her heart pinching for the poor woman slumped in the chair.

The woman turned her face toward them. Her amber eyes looked up at Jolene in confusion, then they widened as they drifted down to her locket and then back up to her face.
 

Jolene’s heart stopped beating. She felt dizzy with confusion. She’d know those amber eyes anywhere.

“Mom?”

***

The old woman’s eyes filled with tears. She reached out a wrinkled hand and touched Jolene’s cheek.
 

“Jolene? I thought I’d never see you again.”

“You’re alive?” Jolene’s voice cracked with emotion. She whirled around to look at Mateo. “Is this some kind of trick?”

“It’s no trick,” her mother’s voice said. “I’ve been held prisoner here for a long time. I tried to spare you—”

“What happened to you?” Jolene stared at her mother in disbelief. Her mother had only been dead—well, missing—for seven years. She should be in her early fifties, but she looked like she was eighty.

How was that possible?

Her mother ignored her question. She looked around the room with fearful eyes. “It isn’t safe for you. What are you doing here?”

“Getting you out, hopefully,” Mateo cut in. “Sorry, there’s no time for a family reunion right now. You guys can catch up later, but for now let’s get the hell out.”

He grabbed the handles of the wheelchair and hurried into the hall, then down the dark corridor. Stopping about halfway down at an elevator, he pressed his thumb into a small pad on the side. The elevator door slid open.

“Where are we going?” Jolene looked inside the elevator nervously.

“I know a way out.” Mateo looked back at her. “You have to trust me.”

Jolene looked into the elevator then back out at the hall.
 

Did she hear someone coming?

“Jolene, get in,” her mother said. Mateo had already pushed the wheelchair in and was standing with his hand holding the doors open for Jolene. “You can trust Mateo.”

Johanna gave her ‘the look’. Childhood memories instantly flashed through her mind. That look meant she should listen to her mother … or else. A half-smile formed on her lips and she stepped inside.

The elevator whooshed them down several floors and the doors opened to reveal the underground tunnel system.
 

Mateo wheeled Johanna out of the elevator and Jolene followed. She was just starting to think this was too easy to be true when the heart-stopping sound of an alarm split the air.

Chapter Twenty-Six

The shriek of the alarm sent a jolt of adrenalin coursing through Morgan’s veins.

“They must have figured out we breached the energy shield!” Celeste yelled over the din.

Or discovered Luke and the guys
, Morgan thought.

“We better kick it into high gear,” Fiona shouted. “There’s a tunnel off to the right that goes uphill, let’s take that.”

“Okay.” Morgan turned to Eliza. “Are you okay? Do you want us to slow down?”

“Slow down?” Eliza scrunched up her face. “We need to speed things up.”

She took off at a trot in the direction Fiona had suggested. Morgan looked at her sisters, shrugged and took off after her.

The tunnel ran straight for two hundred feet, then turned sharply to the left. The alarm was so loud, it was impossible to hear anything else, which is why they almost ran right into the three darkly dressed guards who were just around the corner.

Eliza skidded to a stop just in time, her face mirroring the look of surprise on the guard’s faces.

The guards held small guns … not the kinds that used bullets, Morgan deduced with a quick glance. No, these guns held something much more deadly.

She watched as they raised the guns.

“The amulets!” Morgan yelled as she held the obsidian amulet out in front of her.

A greenish brown light shot out of the guns toward them. Morgan knew it was some sort of energy … energy she didn’t want to come into contact with. She angled the amulet toward the energy stream and the stream of light was absorbed harmlessly into the black rock. She noticed her sisters doing the same, but the guards kept firing.
 

And then the energy streams dried up … the guns had run out!

Morgan felt a momentary lift of victory until the guards threw the guns to the side and advanced on them. She realized they’d have to fight their way out.

Morgan took a step backward. If she had Jolene’s paranormal abilities, she could just shoot some energy at them, but she didn’t. She did, however, have something else—her intuition. And right now her intuition was telling her that the largest guy, the one on the right, had a weak spot in his left knee.

She lunged forward, kicking out with her right leg aimed at that very spot.
 

“Aghh!” The man crumpled to the ground, holding his knee and rolling around on his back. She’d aimed perfectly.

The screams of the guy distracted the guard in the middle and Celeste moved in with some of her karate moves, giving him a heel kick to the jaw.

The third guy must have had some decent paranormal abilities. Morgan noticed that he could push energy from his fingertips, which he was aiming at Eliza and Fiona. The two of them were successfully fending off the energy onslaught with their amulets, but he was advancing on them.

Morgan noticed that they were slowly being pushed back down the tunnel.

“Fiona! The energy balls!” Morgan ran over in front of Fiona, her amulet thrust out in front of her to absorb the energy stream being directed at her sister. “I’ll cover you!”

Fiona pulled the glowing red ball out of her pocket, swung her arm back and then lobbed the energy ball between the two guards who were left standing.

The guards watched, mesmerized, as the ball hovered two feet off the floor. Its glow lit their faces from underneath giving them an eerie look that reminded Morgan of when she used to put the flashlight under her chin to scare her sisters in the dark.
 

The crystal shattered into a million pieces. Shards of energy flew into all three of the guards and the two that had been standing were knocked to the floor.
 

Morgan noticed it was disturbingly silent. Sometime during their fight, the alarm had stopped sounding.
 

Eliza peered down at the guards cautiously. “Are they dead?”

Morgan shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Who cares?” Celeste held up her palm for a high-five. “We beat them.”

The sweet feeling of victory warmed Morgan’s chest as she high-fived her sisters and aunt.
 

Her momentary happiness was shattered seconds later when she heard footsteps pounding toward them.

“Did you hear that?” Fiona’s face was pinched with concern.

Morgan nodded. “Run!”

They jumped over the lifeless guards and fled into the tunnel.

***

The wheels of the chair got stuck on every stone and groove in the tunnel, making it slow going. Even though the alarm had stopped wailing, Jolene still felt jazzed with anxiety—she knew Bly’s minions were coming for them and they had to get out fast.

In her mind, she brought up the map of the tunnels she’d memorized on the way in, but she couldn’t correlate it with where they were now. She realized they must be in a different section that she hadn’t seen yet.

“Do you know where you’re going?” she asked Mateo.

“Yes, of course.” He rolled his eyes at her. “There’s a passage down there and I have jet skis tied up in a partially submerged cave. I stored them there just in case I needed to make a quick getaway. Lucky thing I brought two.”

“Jet skis?” Jolene glanced at Johanna.

“Don’t worry,” Mateo said. “She can ride one. She’s not crippled. She’s just weakened. I’ll strap her on one of them with me.”

“I don’t get it. Were you planning this all along? How did you know I would be here?”

Mateo turned his velvety brown eyes on her and her stomach flip-flopped.
What was that all about?

“Actually, I hoped you wouldn’t be here. But I’ve been in place here for over a year now, trying to get Johanna out and the jet skis have been—”

“Oh, crap.” Johanna’s words caused him to stop and they looked down at her. She was staring straight ahead down the tunnel. Jolene followed her gaze, her blood freezing when she saw four beefy guards about a hundred feet away and closing in on them fast.

Mateo immediately stepped in front of Johanna to protect her. Jolene stepped out next to him.

The men were running toward them now. One of them pulled a long, thin pen out of his pocket. It looked to Jolene like some kind of laser pointer and he was pointing it right at her.

“Look out!” Mateo yelled.

Jolene thrust her hand out at the floor causing it to ripple like a towel in the wind. The four men went flying in the air, then thudded back to the ground.
 
The laser pointer gizmo clattered on the floor and rolled away from him.
 

Jolene looked at her hand. She’d never been able to do
that
before. Apparently, the red liquid worked pretty well.

Mateo gave Jolene a look of appreciation. “Nice work.”

She looked up to thank him, her eyes widening as she saw another guard making a grab for him. It only took Mateo a split-second to read the look on her face. He turned around, punching the guard who fell to his knees, holding the bloody crumpled mess that used to be his nose.

It was a short-lived victory, however. The four guards who had been knocked down by Jolene’s whammy were struggling to their feet and two more guards were pounding down the tunnel to join them.

They were severely outnumbered.
 

Jolene grabbed the handles of the wheelchair and whirled it around. “We’ll have to outrun them!”