THE RISK OF LOVE AND MAGIC (17 page)

“When I couldn’t reach you . . .” Vera closed her eyes and steadied herself while Nadine kept patting her hand. “I was terrified I really was on my own. And I remembered what he did to Mama and how he’d turned you into little more than a slave to his obsession, and I knew I had to do something. I simply couldn’t keep playing safe.”

Magnus ignored the questions in Conan and Dorrie’s eyes, shook his head, and kept his attention on the sisters. He’d interrogated men before and hadn’t cared one way or another if he’d caused them pain. This was different. This was very personal. And he hurt just listening. For the sisters, it had to be excruciating.

“I persuaded a friend to take me to Topaz for a weekend so I could just ask around a bit,” Vera continued. “That’s where the Academy is, way out in the Valley.”

Topaz.
Magnus made a mental note to look it up, but he assumed it was just another little desert town, population 500.

“And?” Nadine asked with a hint of impatience.

The unresponsive robot the general had created was starting to crack, Magnus realized with interest.

“And nothing,” Vera said with a shrug. “The Academy is off the beaten track. The townspeople know nothing except that it occupies an old ranch. There’s a bit of resentment that they apparently buy supplies elsewhere, but it’s not as if the Topaz grocery keeps anything except dusty tin cans.”

“So you decided to quit school, run off to a nowhere town, and
what
?” Nadine asked, definitely losing some of her cool.

Magnus started stroking Nadine’s hand the way she’d stroked Vera’s. “And scare Nadine out of hiding, right?” he asked the kid.

Vera shrugged her skinny shoulders. “I thought if Nadine was still alive, my leaving school would catch her attention, but mostly, I wanted to find some way of talking to those kids. I couldn’t do it from the city. I tried. I went out there a few times on weekends, but I couldn’t get close, and I was afraid someone in Topaz might notice me.”

Magnus could practically feel Nadine forcing herself to relax. The woman practically vibrated with emotions.

How the devil had she kept all that steam pent up for so long?

“I need a map,” Nadine announced. “How far were you staying from the Academy?”

“Victorville is about half an hour down the road.” Vera tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear and nibbled her sandwich worriedly. “When I was visiting Topaz on the weekends, I started feeling like someone was watching me. And then I was sure someone followed me from Topaz back to Irvine. I got nervous. I didn’t have much money, but a friend had an empty house in Victorville. As long as I had to run anyway, it might as well be to do something useful.”

Magnus squeezed Nadine’s fingers and stepped in very carefully. “How did you hide in Victorville?”

“I was afraid to use my student name if someone really was tracking me. I made up a new name, only I couldn’t get a job without ID. That’s when I volunteered at the charter. I couldn’t let Jo-jo torture sensitive little kids,” she said anxiously, pleading for understanding with her eyes. “So I kept biking the trails around Topaz, hoping I’d learn something.”

“And?” Nadine asked.

Vera rubbed her knuckles across her brow, then lifted her gaze to Nadine and Magnus. “I found a new grave in a creek bed near the Academy. It wasn’t adult size.”

Nadine couldn’t believe teachers would kill kids, but she winced as the room exploded in outrage, both silent and vocal. She hadn’t realized how
sensitive
she was to emotional assaults. She’d been insulated against them most of her life.

She’d been a
sensitive
kid. She’d blocked a lot of it—because her mother had shielded her from psychic trauma. Not until her mother was gone had she needed to hide behind computers. So many things would have made more sense had her mother lived!

Nadine squeezed her eyes shut and realized she was also squeezing Magnus’s hand. In some manner, he shielded her, too. She wanted to lean into his big shoulder and make the world go away.

Her conscience wouldn’t let her ignore children in trouble if she had the ability to save them. The world wasn’t going away anytime soon.

“You reported the grave?” Magnus asked in that deep voice that resounded through Nadine’s insides.

“To the police, anonymously,” Vera said, voice wavering. “I’ve been living in terror ever since, not certain what to do. I’ve been afraid to go back to classes. I’ve not seen a word in the media about anyone discovering a grave. It was awfully near the school.”

“He’ll have tapped the local sheriff’s office,” Nadine said into the silence. “That’s what Jo-jo does—surrounds his facilities with a network of phone tapping and computer hacking. If one of the teachers tweets a concern, he’ll know about it—if his new IT person is as good as I am, anyway.”

“Having that kind of information builds a stronger wall around the school than a fence,” Conan said with a frown. “Of course, if the teachers discovered the surveillance, they could just drive away.”

“He’ll have security cameras near the school to see that happening,” Nadine pointed out. “And if anyone knocks out the camera, he’ll instantly have people blocking the road. The location was not chosen lightly.”

“Yeah, once when Dorrie and I tried getting into Adams Engineering, security was all over us in seconds,” Conan said with a degree of rue.

Nadine winced at the thought of either Dorrie or Conan being trapped in the general’s sticky web. She hadn’t meant for anyone else to get involved.

But she couldn’t abandon these people who had helped her so much. They had no idea of the danger they were facing. Worse, she was starting to realize that—even though she couldn’t shut down the general’s network as she’d hoped— she might actually have insights that could help. And that she couldn’t run forever.

She hated the idea. Just as she was starting to enjoy a taste of freedom, she felt trapped again. When would she ever escape to have her own life?

She shoved Mad Max’s hand aside and stood up to pace the room.

Magnus rose with her. He opened the sunroom door, and she gravitated outside into the chilly sun. He threw the blanket still lying on the lounge chair over her shoulders.

“Stop hovering,” she said crossly.

He leaned against the cabana and crossed his arms.

“The others won’t follow me out here if you’re here,” she said aloud, grasping his purpose in hovering.

“No guarantees,” he agreed. “But if I tell them to back off, they will. You’ve got to understand Dorrie’s position. As far as she’s concerned, the general and his sons have hunted her family, killed her mother, and nearly killed her. She wants the general strung up on a hot wire. And what Dorrie wants, Conan will provide. Adding that bit about the kid just gave them more reason to escalate the search.”

“We don’t know
anything
,” Nadine asserted, just because she could.

“Totally agree,” he said with annoying pragmatism. And then he waited.

Nadine wanted to bash him over the head with a lawn chair. “You’re waiting for me to tell you what we need to do, aren’t you?”

“Reading my mind,” he said laconically.

She flung a pool noodle at him.

“There are probably balls and floats in the cabana. Want me to blow them up for you?” He flung the noodle into the heated pool.

She paced the fenced-in area, dodging chairs and umbrellas, staying on the opposite side from Mad Max. The man made her crazy. Crazier. If he wasn’t around, she’d grab Vera and run, she knew she would.

But like a mammoth boulder, he was there, and he wasn’t going anywhere. And he was telling her he would stay by her side and support her in whatever she wanted to do.

He was putting her in charge, not telling her what to do.

That much freedom was damned scary. Oh crap. How did people do this?

She hugged her elbows, but the universe wasn’t providing answers. Vera was frightened. Nadine knew that much. She had to protect Vera.

But her sister was a nurturer who needed a real life, one that involved finishing school, getting married, having pets and children, being happy. Could she do that in Costa Rica under an assumed identity? Provided Jo-jo hadn’t learned the name they’d forged, because inventing a new passport wouldn’t be easy without his network.

Damn, damn, and double damn.

“With your genius and Conan’s team, you have the general trumped,” Magnus reminded her.

“That depends on the quality of my replacement. Vera first,” Nadine insisted. “We don’t know if he’s discovered her new identity or if she’s just scared for nothing.”

“All right, we’ll start there. Dorrie’s cousins are security experts. Conan has a detective team. If you have any suggestions of how to infiltrate the general’s security, we can search his databases as well as doing whatever it is they need to do to check from Vera’s end.”

That’s what he really wanted—access to the general. But now that she had Vera safe, Nadine no longer cared what they did to the menace. Her childhood hero had died long ago in her head. She was still wrestling with the shadow of the respectable military man left behind, but she was getting stronger. Ideas that her brain had suppressed had started surfacing.

She was afraid, but that didn’t mean she should run and hide any longer, she realized, drawing a deep breath. Backbone—she needed to straighten her backbone and face reality.

“I’ve given Conan all the ISPs and passwords I can remember,” she said, thinking her way through this new task, “If nothing has come of them, I doubt anything else I recall will help. Even the networks I accessed at Woodstar will have been changed by now. It’s SOP. I hadn’t counted on Jo-jo finding someone as good as I am.”

They both digested that thought. Jo-jo had the names of every
extraordinarily gifted
person related to Nadine and every other California Malcolm. One of the names on that list could easily have her talents.

“One step at a time,” Magnus reminded her. “We’re safe here for a while. Let the others go to work. You and Vera catch up. You no longer have to do it all.”

Nadine sagged. The burden she’d carried had been heavy, but without it, she had no purpose. Magnus crossed the tiles to wrap an arm around her waist, and she finally leaned into him.

“I’m afraid I’ll become an empty, purposeless shell,” she whispered.

He made an inelegant noise. “That’s not possible. Your battery simply needs recharging. Let’s fix margaritas and throw a remember-this-ISP party. I bet Vera can help.”

The tension in the room was nearly visible when they returned. Even the dog leaped into Vera’s arms to wait expectantly.

Nadine didn’t have the necessary words to say she’d stay and help.

Magnus crossed the room, pulled down a large bottle of alcohol from a shelf behind a bar, and said, “Margaritaville.”

For reasons beyond Nadine’s comprehension, that broke the tension.

***

Magnus mixed drinks and watched as pens flew across paper and fingers across keyboards while Vera and Nadine attempted to summon all the names, databases, and server locations that they remembered in connection with Adams. Magnus figured he was no help in this. That was okay. He had been a bartender in college. Once they came up with places to look, he could knock down doors. Until then, he could mix drinks.

“Mr T needs to go outside. I’ll be back in a minute.” Vera stood and the dog leapt into her arms. She carried her pet toward the kitchen. Jack fell in step with her.

“Did you have pets when you were kids?” Magnus asked Nadine, watching the pair depart.

“No, the general was allergic. We found a kitten once and hid it in the back yard, but it grew up and ran away.” Looking for all the world like a stereotypical geek in her black-framed glasses, Nadine didn’t look up from the flashing screens on her computer.

“Then maybe she’s had a dog at college,” Magnus decided, watching Vera through the window as she talked to the dog and set it free on a patch of lawn.

Dorrie looked at him oddly, then watched the window, too. “Didn’t she say it was a stray she found in town? She certainly has a way with animals if she can make it obey after just a few days in her care. Yorkies are usually kind of hyper.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking, but I don’t know much about dogs.” Magnus chopped another lime and dropped the slices into the pitcher.

The Yorkie was gleefully leaping over Vera’s outstretched arms, while normally dour Jack actually grinned at the performance.

Finally realizing the conversation had taken a strange turn, Nadine glanced up to see what they were talking about. She shrugged. “She told me earlier that her dog doesn’t like fish but misses her fluffy toy. I guess she’s just entertaining it like one would a kid.”

Dorrie frowned.

Magnus opened the door and whistled. The dog didn’t even glance his way. Jack did.

“Ask Vera what other tricks the dog knows,” Magnus called.

Conan came to stand beside him while Vera lifted the fluffy animal and talked to it, nose-to-nose. “The dog had a tracer in its collar,” Conan said quietly. “I didn’t want to scare Nadine into running. Jack didn’t have time to dispose of the collar properly, so he left it under some bushes. If we’re lucky, some poor jerk will pick it up and put it on their animal.”

Outside, Vera set the dog down, twirled her hand, and the Yorkie tumbled over, played dead, then leaped up to dance on its hind legs.

Magnus swore under his breath. “Remember what I told you about the chips the fucker planted in their heads?”

Conan cursed. He reached for the glass door, but Magnus steadied him, throwing a glance back to Nadine who was dividing her time between watching them and dumping data into the computer.

“Nadine’s a hair’s breadth from a meltdown. We can’t drown the dog.” Magnus turned to Dorrie. “How much do you know about dogs? Can they really do tricks like that for a new owner?”

“I have friends with Yorkies. They’re high-strung. I’ve never seen them do anything they didn’t want to do. That’s about all I can tell you. Why? What’s wrong?”

“I think she’s talking to the dog,” Magnus said, keeping his voice composed.