Undead for a Day (21 page)

We can’t let them take the Flynns alive
.

She almost reacted, but she forced herself not to. At least she knew which way the wind was blowing—everywhere. Fresh anxiety for Colin blazed through her, giving her something to stay focused on while she tried to figure out what to do. Who was out there? Should she signal them? How?

Or should she take out Ron and the woman? She didn’t know if they were armed with conventional weapons, but she had a lot of moves to deal with that. It was their magical moves that she didn’t know how to fight. So maybe she had to get the drop on them and take them out before they made the first move.

But what if the threat passed? What if this was the safest harbor she had?

Anger rushed through her and she shifted her weight experimentally, to see what effect it had on Ron and the woman. As if sensing that something was up, Ron moved his hand toward the pocket of his trousers. The woman squared her shoulders as if building up her resolve.

Bridget sent her mind into the
jing
state, the place of neutrality and calm.
Jing
was used to make your opponent increase his effort. She had an advantage over them.

The question was, should she use it?

She didn’t allow herself to decide. She simply told herself to make the best move. Her body would know.

Lightning-fast, she executed a knife cut against Ron’s Adam’s apple and just as quickly slammed her heel against the woman’s temple. Neither would be killed, just incapacitated.

The momentum of her actions sent her crashing through the inner wall. She caught herself from falling and found herself inside an abandoned house. Colin was sprawled on the floor, unconscious.

Missing his leg.

Her heart lurched. She rushed to him and fell down beside him on the floor.

“Colin,” she said. “Colin.”

He stayed limp, and in a gut-wrenching replay of her arrival in the graveyard, she checked to make sure he was breathing. He was. His eyelid was withered and sunken again, betraying the absence of an eye behind it.

“Colin, wake up.”

He moaned and waved a hand at her. “Bridge, I’m down. Get out of here.”

She loosened his clothing, searching for an entry wound. “Were you shot?”

“I don’t know. I fell.” He winced. “My leg.”

“They took it,” she fumed. “Your eye too. I’m sorry.”

He swore. Then, as he tried to get up, he groaned and said, “You have to leave me here.”

She grabbed his hand and closed her eyes, willing his leg to grow back. Seeing an eye in the empty socket. She opened her own eyes and checked. Nothing about him had changed.

“Get up.” She grabbed his wrist and let herself fall backwards, forcing him half-up. Then she whirled around and rose, pulling him behind her.

He gasped and said, “Bridge, stop. I’m hurt.”

“Screw that. Get the hell up.” She turned back around and gathered his bulk in her arms. He weighed a lot more than she did, but she had great upper body strength, and she made herself into a tripod as he swayed unsteadily. She wondered what Marica had done with his prosthesis.

Then she looked to the left where Ron and the woman were lying in the debris. She eased Colin against the far wall and ran over to Ron. He was breathing. Digging in his pockets, she found a pistol and something that looked like a hand grenade. Another one. The woman was carrying a knife in a sheath attached to a belt and as Bridget touched it, a vivid image of the woman cutting her throat roared through Bridget’s mind. She almost dropped the knife, but she resolutely threaded it off the woman’s belt and wrapped it around her own waist.

“These two had orders to kill me rather than let me be taken,” she said. “I wonder if everyone else has the same orders.” She looked at him. “How did you get in here?”

“Some guys were carrying me. They put me down and told me they’d be back. I thought I heard a helicopter.” His face was gray. He looked bad.

“Yeah, and my two guys didn’t like whoever’s in it,” she said, continuing to pat down Ron and friend. “I’m guessing it’s the Caracols.”

But there was no longer any helicopter noise. The silence was ominous. Either it had left their air space, or landed.

Colin swore again. “This is all FUBAR. I need a drink.”

“You need an Uzi,” she retorted.

But she found no other weapons and came back to Colin. As she slung his arm over her shoulders, she said, “So, soldier, do we make a stand here or bail? What would you do in Afghanistan?”

“See, the mission’s different,” he slurred. “Our current objective is murky.”

“No it’s not. We want to save our asses.”

“In the Corps, that’s a secondary objective at best.” His eyes rolled back in his head and his arm slid off her shoulders.

“God damn it, Colin,” she said, panicking. “Don’t do this!”

Once again, the image of Jack Stone blossomed in her mind. And she didn’t know what that had to do with her impulse to grab her brother around the waist and drag him toward the door, but she allowed Jack’s face to serve as some kind of beacon. She was aware that she was really hauling ass, even burdened with Colin’s dead weight—
and dead weight is only a turn of phrase,
she reminded herself nervously. Some kind of magical power had come into play.

“Oh, yay,” she muttered, then hesitated at the door. What was going on out there?

Then she heard the woman shouting, “Ron, Ron, shoot her!”

I should have killed them
, she thought. But she could no more have done that than stop performing CPR on Xavier Amaya.

Wait. They’re unarmed.
She brightened a little and turned to look at them over her shoulder—just in time to see something round and shiny hurtling from Ron’s palm directly toward her.

She let go of her brother and made herself into as small a ball as possible. The projectile slammed into the door inches above her head, and exploded, singeing corkscrews of her hair and creating a hole in the wood at least two feet wide.

“Holy shit!” she yelled. Then she unwrapped her arms from around herself and flung them toward Ron and the woman.

A shiny object materialized from the center of
her
palm and shot toward them. She whooped in triumph. Ron yelled something and her bomb-thing exploded in mid-air.

Crap
, she thought, and she quickly faced the door and threw energy at it. It hit the mark; the door shattered. It was night outside. How could that be? It had been day minutes ago.

There was no time for questions. She grabbed up Colin, but this time he was heavier. She tried to work her magic mojo to give herself some added strength. There was a result, but it was mediocre at best. Still, mediocre was better than nothing.

Especially since Ron was lobbing another energy pulse at Colin and her. Only half-standing, she pushed from her heels and fell through the doorway, tumbling off a porch into a sandy patch of grass.

She was all tangled up with Colin. She eased him off herself, found a grenade, held it up to the night sky so that she could verify that it had a pin, and pulled it with her teeth. Swearing, she lobbed it at the doorway as hard as she could just as Ron appeared. His eyes widened.

The grenade went off. The house went up with a fiery concussion that threw her backwards onto her ass. Burning debris flew everywhere and she screamed and covered her ears, throwing herself over Colin.

Only, she didn’t hear herself scream. The world had gone silent. Had her eardrums burst? She looked down at Colin, whose eyes were open, and whose lips were moving. She shook her head and looked fearfully back at the wreckage. Ron and the woman; were they still in there? Were they dead?

She trembled and dry-heaved. Then Colin’s hand was on her forehead, and then he clamped his hand on her shoulder. Hard. He shook her. He was looking up in the blackness, and he was freaking out.

She followed his line of sight. The helicopter was hovering above them.

And Xavier Amaya—who was dead—was at the controls.

Bridget stared in shock at Xavier as he brought the helicopter down until it hovered just inches from the ground. He was wearing body armor and he gestured to her urgently to come to him. It really was Xavier Amaya, olive-skinned and alive, not his fish-belly-white phantom. She read his dark eyes, silently ordering her to get up and climb aboard.

Something slammed into the ground beside her knee—bullet, energy ball?—and it galvanized her into action. She started dragging Colin toward the chopper.
He’s dead, he’s freaking dead
, her mind argued, but resistance fighters on the ground were converging on the helicopter. Shots were ricocheting off the window. Xavier made some kind of hand motion and Colin was instantly so light he nearly floated away. Bridget guided more than carried him to the helicopter. Xavier remained at the controls. He was speaking to her. She shook her head and said—or hoped she did—“
I can’t hear you
.”

He nodded, then made some more gestures, and Colin was aboard. Bullets kicked up sand around her feet as she hoisted herself into the helicopter and Xavier took off. They shot into the black sky. Below, the wreckage of the Art Deco structure blazed.

Colin opened his eyes and said, “Where are we?”

She heard each syllable, and she glanced over at Xavier.

“Fix him. He’s hurt,” she ordered Xavier. “And give him a leg and an eye.”

Xavier frowned, looking puzzled, but murmured in what sounded like Latin—she and Colin had watched a lot of horror movies, and priests were always speaking in Latin to beat back the Devil—and Colin smiled and said, “Oh yeah.” He gestured to his face. “Two eyes?” he asked her.

“Yes. Two,” she said, sagging with relief and giving him a hug, then looking over at Xavier, who smiled.

Bridget crawled up into the chair to Xavier’s right. He glanced over at her and gave her a nod, but his attention was on flying the helicopter.

“Bridget Flynn, right?” he asked her.

She gave him a look. “Yes. As you already know. So, what? You’re back from the dead?”

He smiled faintly.

“I haven’t died yet,” he said.

“I have bad news for you,” she began, but he held up a finger.

“Please, take this,” he said.

Then he reached down to the left and picked something up with one hand. It looked like a crystal ball, only it was filled with purple, indigo, and black swirls that ran into each other, mingled, and glittered. She contracted slightly, putting distance between herself and it. With an air of impatience, he placed it in her lap. It was warm.

“Colin,” he said. “Come up here, please. Put one of your hands on the crystal and both of you, stare into it.”

“Why? What is it? What’s going to happen?” Bridget demanded, making as if to hand it back to him. But he was working the helicopter controls. “I’m not doing anything until you answer a few questions. I saw you die. And you tried to kill me.”

“I would never have tried to kill you.” He glanced over at her. “You were my year wife.”

“I
was
?” she said cautiously. And she wasn’t now? Was she free?

Then the sky lit up with brilliance and he shouted, “Stare into the crystal
now
!”

Something hit the chopper and it lurched to the left. She heard a crack, and then nothing but Xavier yelling at her to stare into the crystal. The rotor blades had stopped spinning, and the helicopter began to plummet through the sky.

“Give me the chair. I can fly this thing,” Colin said, as the copter swooped earthward.

“Stare into the crystal or you’re going to die!” Xavier shouted.

Oh, my God, it
was
Colin’s last Halloween,
Bridget thought frantically. She did as not-dead Xavier ordered, staring at the colors as hard as she could. Deep blue, dark purple, ebony, mixing and shimmering, separating, tangling and weaving and darting and—

“Oh, shit, shit,” Colin said, and she was about to shut her eyes and brace for impact when Xavier grabbed her by the chin and forced her attention back to the sphere.

Something glinted off the windshield, nearly blinding her. It was the blaze of the bonfire in the courtyard of the Amayas’ mansion on Shadow Island. And she, and Colin, and Xavier were standing on the ground, facing the same assembled crowd who were wearing their finery—the dresses, the tuxes, the flowers and the half-masks—whom she had seen on Halloween night. And all of them were cheering and applauding.

The firelight gleamed on the angles and shadows of Xavier’s incredible face. He pressed both his hands on either side of Bridget’s face and leaned forward as if to kiss her. Instead, he said, “
Brava
.”

“What the hell?”

She jerked herself free and took a step toward Colin, who was holding the crystal between his hands. His leg was still there. And so was his eye.

“
Bienvenidos
. Welcome,” said the masked man with the goatee. Xavier’s father, as she recalled. “If you don’t mind,” he added as he took the sphere from Colin and carried it to a small table beside the bonfire. There he set it on a pedestal, to louder cheers and more applause.

A flamenco guitar began to play the same song Bridget had heard the night before. There was so much that was the same—she was even wearing the same clothes. Except…so much had happened.

Removing his mask, Xavier’s father came up beside Xavier and the two embraced. Then the older man turned to Bridget and Colin and said, “Xavier will explain. Once you have decided, he’ll let me know.” He bent forward and kissed Bridget on the cheek. “We won’t be so hasty this time.”

Xavier’s father rejoined the crowd. The same older woman who had danced with him swayed toward him, raising her hands in the air. So did the couple Anita and José. It was like watching a play for the second time.

“Come with me,” Xavier said to both Flynns. “Please.”

He led them around the courtyard toward the mansion. Bridget watched the torchlight play over his tall, lanky frame. She had seen him dead.