Malcolm and Ives 02 - Trouble With Air and Magic (31 page)

That he was actually believing their brothers might be alive and under the desert because a Gypsy woman said so was incredible enough.

Dorrie dropped to her knees and was crawling on the rocky sand. Conan stayed back to direct traffic around her. If his vibrations disturbed her, he didn’t know what all his people and trucks would do, but he couldn’t let her go in alone. Wherever
in
might be. A week ago, he would have just sat back and humored her. Right now, he so desperately wanted to believe she felt something, that he couldn’t define whether he was terrified or excited.

The Hummer arrived first. The rest of Dorrie’s family scrambled out and waited. Cho started jogging toward them.

Jack, the bodybuilder, crouched down and sifted pebbles while watching Dorrie. Tom, the other bodybuilder wearing glasses, sniffed, grimaced, and muttered
kimchi.
But he evidently didn’t have the associations with cooked cabbage that Conan had, so he didn’t make the same connections. Dorrie’s psychic pilot cousin Francesca merely studied the chain link blocking their path and looked blankly at the setting sun, presumably waiting for more mental telepathy.

Tall lanky Cho, the Finder, was the first to reach Dorrie near the guard station, if that’s what it was. No one had stepped out to confront them.

The trucks with four-wheel drive rolled up, forming a line Conan assumed was the outer perimeter of their search. His team would know how to locate the coordinates that Dorrie’s psychic cousin had provided. Modern technology combined with ancient skills—Conan shook his head in disbelief. Cho was walking in circles. Dorrie was crawling across the circles. Conan doubted he’d ever live this down if they failed.

He could be sacrificing the best tracking team in the country and the lives of dozens of kids in hopes of finding Magnus. Conan thought he might have a better understanding of how Dorrie had felt standing on the edge of that cliff and watching her life slide into the ocean.

“We can’t dig into tunnels,” Oz growled near his ear.

“Can a helicopter crash be faked?” Conan returned, distracting his brother with one of the many problems Dorrie’s insane theory presented.

“Sure. Dozens of different ways.” Oz the brother morphed to Oz the producer in five seconds flat. “You’re thinking the government fell for faked footage? Or that the pilot took the ’copter below radar?”

“Whatever works. I didn’t try to hack files marked Top Secret. But you’re saying it’s possible?” Conan watched Dorrie edge her way closer to the shed, oblivious to everything except the ground she crawled on. He stiffened and instinctively started after her.

“Easier if digitalized, but a good pilot can pull off impossible stunts,” Oz said, following. “Nose dive at water and pull up at the last minute, clearing the water until they’re out of range.”

“Depending on the machine, Bo could do it,” Francesca said, catching up to them and joining the conversation as if she’d heard every word. “He has a better than average ability to judge coordinates and the angles of waves and ground. The illusion would work better if someone dropped an explosive into the water where it appeared the ’copter went down.”

“They’d have to set up their own deaths for that to work,” Conan reminded them.

Dorrie’s scream ended that discussion. Before his disbelieving eyes, she disappeared from sight. Conan took off at a run.

Chinese cellar danger.
Damn!

Dorrie thought Conan’s agonized roar might be the last thing she ever heard. It cut her to the quick more surely than the trauma of slamming into the hard ground. Had low-key, mild-mannered, stoic Supergeek cried his pain because of her?

Or had he been hurt?

She forced herself to calm down and assess the damage instead of scrambling to climb back out.

It was dark down here. Her tailbone ached from landing hard in a cascade of rubble. More dirt and sand continued falling from the hole she’d created, so she eased to one side. Her injured shoulder hurt like hell, but all her parts apparently moved. Cho was shouting overhead, so she was probably the only person who had been stupid enough to fall through the earth. What in hell had she fallen into?

A roar of rotors drowned out any further shouts.

The earth shook and dirt poured through the hole she’d just moved away from. Dorrie dodged underneath a more secure ceiling and tried to think as the earth’s energy went haywire.
What in the world
…?

The ground rumbled and groaned. This was no earthquake. She hastily scrambled farther backward, searching the darkness for explanation. Light broke through a widening crack in the wall to her left, exposing a long, narrow tunnel beyond. The worst of the roar seemed to come from that direction, but the noise echoed too much for her to be positive. All her senses spun with the tornadic
chi.

Terrified, she glanced back to the hole she’d fallen through, wondering if she could climb out. A rusted vent cover swung loosely by one hinge, explaining her tumble. Her weight must have collapsed the deteriorating metal. Only, the cement ceiling was twice her height and she couldn’t reach it.

Even as she watched, a rope descended, and she breathed a sigh of relief. Conan’s men were prepared.

Looking as gray as the sand sliding in with him, Conan swung down to join her. No sunset over a blue ocean could look finer than his sweat and filth caked whiskers. Dorrie staggered up and nearly fell into his welcoming arms. His strength supported her. Not realizing how much she was shaking until now, she wrapped her arms around him and drank in the familiar smell of his skin.

His
chi
synchronized with hers, and the world steadied. She never wanted to let this man go.

His curses were music to her ears. The thundering roar from the tunnel prevented coherent speech. She stiffened at what was almost certainly a gunshot.

Conan must have heard it, too. Glancing down the tunnel, he hurriedly lifted her from the ground and toward the hole overhead. She tried to grasp the swaying rope, but the shaking ground caused it to slip away.

With a torturous, metallic groan, the crack widened in the wall further along the tunnel. Even though she’d finally grabbed the rope, Dorrie stared in astonishment.

The widening fissure revealed a cement room at the end of the tunnel. Light poured from overhead as a door in the desert opened. A small, lightweight helicopter lifted upward through an opening in the earth. Her heart thumped erratically. Frantically, she prayed it was Bo behind the instruments.

More gunshots. She managed to cling to the rope as someone above tugged it upward. The shaking ground completely confused her sense of the earth’s energy. She had no idea who was above. But she knew Conan was just below.
The tunnel could cave at any second.

Hands grabbed hers, dragging her upward into a barrage of shouts and gunfire. She sprawled in the dirt as Cho signaled one of Conan’s team and dropped the rope again.

Dorrie hastily scrambled away from the edge so as not to weigh it down while Conan climbed out. She saw a shooter in combat camouflage by the utility shed. The soldier was
shooting at the helicopter
. The machine swooped, turned, and taunted the gun-bearing guard, distracting the gunman from Conan’s men and their vehicles. The Humvee was already in motion, insanely aiming for the back of the shack.

Conan crawled up beside her, throwing his big body on top of her. Not until that moment did Dorrie realize she was shaking as much the ground was. Conan’s energy stabilized her, and her thoughts quit whirling. The scene almost started to make sense.

The Humvee slowly pushed the shack over. The shooter dodged the collapse, running closer to where Conan and Dorrie lay sprawled.

Bullets shot dirt and pebbles not two feet from her nose—and right at Conan. Dorrie could scarcely grab a single thread of the rotating energy around her, but she pushed her own energy out there, and the next bullet bounced harmlessly. She couldn’t do this for long, but the helicopter dived over the shooter’s head like an irritated wasp, diverting the panicked shooter into aiming at the sky.

Conan shoved her face into the ground and covered her head. But finally—she’d seen enough.

She recognized the shooter in camouflage
. The kid who had shot at her at the office had survived whatever she’d done to him. He’d learned to shield against
dim mak.
And now he was trying to take down her weaponless friends and family.

Oh Lord, she didn’t want to do this again. She didn’t want to kill.

For once in her life, she had to step outside of her head, develop a backbone, and
act.
She didn’t care who the damn hell the shooter was or wanted, she wouldn’t, couldn’t, let him hurt anyone else, not if she could prevent it.

Dorrie grasped the trembling ground, concentrated her energy, focused it into her hand, and with a surge of fury, tumbled Conan off sufficiently to raise her arm.

The pebble she flung hit the camouflaged soldier squarely in the chest. David versus Goliath.

The powerful surge of energy she sent with it drained her.

***

The shooter collapsed like a deflated balloon.

Conan could scarcely believe Dorrie had taken down an armed soldier with a
pebble
.

Then Dorrie slumped under him. He was pretty damned certain she hadn’t been hit by bullets. The blasted woman had done it again, exerted every ounce of her strength—this time saving an entire troop of people.

The helicopter hovered and landed in a swirling storm of dust. Since the occupants weren’t shooting at them, he could hope they weren’t bad guys, because there was no shelter out here.

While chaos ensued at the guardhouse, Conan rolled off, and pulse pounding, pulled Dorrie into his lap. She was so damned
small.
And delicate. Her head of unruly hair lolled against his shoulders, but her eyes snapped open the moment he lifted her, and relief flooded through him.

“
Dim mak
,” she whispered. “He could die. Find out why.”

Looking concerned, one of his team ran up with the first aid kit. Conan shook his head at him. “Ammonia?”

With the helicopter’s engines shutting down, he could actually hear the medic say “smelling salts” followed by “faints at the sight of a bullet, does she?”

That was so far from the truth that Conan couldn’t even begin to find a way of explaining. He just shoved the ammonia shaker under Dorrie’s nose.

She gasped, sputtered, and shoved the container away.

Around them, the vehicles with his team raced for the utility shed. The Humvee finished crushing the shed before speeding toward Dorrie, bypassing the helicopter as if it were irrelevant. Or they knew the occupants and weren’t concerned about them.

Once the low-slung vehicle squealed to a halt, Jack and Tom leaped out, along with Francesca. Sunglasses-wearing Cho was already hovering nearby.

Dorrie’s family knew more than he did about the helicopter occupants, but not about Dorrie.

“She needs food,” he told them. “Give me anything you have on you.”

Francesca peeled a nutrition bar. The medic produced chocolate.

Past them, Conan spotted Oz watching worriedly while keeping Pippa safely locked in a truck. Her screams of fury could probably have brought down the helicopter if necessary, but they may have also flattened every man on the ground. Conan almost smiled as Pippa whacked windows and raged and Oz kept clicking the electronic locks shut.

He supposed, if the helicopter was dangerous, Oz just had to let Pippa loose. If they ever planned another such exercise, he’d bring earplugs for his team.

Conan signaled that he and Dorrie were okay and returned to feeding her.

“Bo,” Dorrie insisted, grabbing the rest of the bar from her cousin and feeding herself. “Take me to him.”

Did that mean her brother—and maybe his—were in the helicopter? Conan glanced anxiously toward the demolished shed where the shooter had gone down. His team was cautiously emerging from their vehicles. The helicopter had landed closer, and the occupants were at the guardhouse already.

He recognized the tall, broad-shouldered man dragging the struggling shooter off the ground.
Magnus was alive!
Conan let the relief wash over him as his big, bad brother dangled the gunman like a human punching bag.

The more slender helicopter pilot plowed his fist into the shooter’s gut, and Conan exchanged a look with Francesca. She nodded in wordless agreement—reading his mind?—confirming the fist wielder was Bo.

The rest of Dorrie’s eccentric family took off at a run toward the helicopter.

“Go tell big brother the man he’s holding could be dead shortly, and he’d better get some questions answered first,” Conan suggested.

“With all that pent-up testosterone to release, do you think they’ll listen to me?” Francesca asked.

Since his entire team and Dorrie’s cousins were now circling the fight and cheering Bo on, Conan understood her concern.

“Tell Bo his little sister used
dim mak
for him, and he’d damned well better listen to her for a change.”

Francesca’s eyes widened but she rushed to convey the message.

In his arms, Dorrie glared at him. “You just told the world I murdered a man.”

“He’s still alive and kicking,” Conan said with unconcern. “Your brother will be blamed for his internal injuries if he dies. I dare you to try defending him with your guilty conscience in a court of law.”

She shook her head and closed her eyes. “I don’t know why I love you. You’re the most annoying creature who ever lived.”

Stunned, Conan merely hugged her closer.

She
loved
him? Obviously, she’d rattled her brains. She’d remember that he was completely unlovable once he got a steak in her.

***

Dorrie settled for a McDonald’s hamburger this time. There weren’t a lot of choices in the desert, and the local roadhouse had been too crowded and noisy by the time the team had descended upon it.