United (The Guardians Book 2) (18 page)

The sun was at its peak in the sky when the trees gradually started to thin.

Zay held a finger to his lips. “Move as quietly as possible,” he instructed, his voice barely above a whisper. “Less trees means less cover. Watch your step and each others backs.”

It was another forty minutes before any of them spoke again.

“I see something up ahead. Something reflective. Could be water,” Ward concluded.

They came to a halt as they strained to see what he was talking about. Gable pouted. As the two shortest in the group, neither she nor Queenie could see a thing.

“You're right,” Cadby agreed. “I think.”

“We need a better view,” Zay decided.

“On it.” Hue removed his backpack and dropped it to the ground. He'd tied a bright blue bandanna around his head earlier, but he pulled it off and handed it to Gable.

“Ew,” she complained, dropping it immediately. “It's damp.”

“That's 'cause I'm all sweaty and manly and stuff.” He winked playfully at her, and then with a catlike grace that left even her impressed, he jumped at a nearby boulder, pushing off with one foot and leaping through the air to catch a high branch of a – veinless – tree. He swung himself up and began to shimmy higher and higher through the impossibly tall tree until the branches became thin and breakable and the rest of the team could barely see him through the leaves. After a moment, he vanished completely, the only evidence of him being there the gentle shaking of the leaves.

Nicky whistled in awe as they all stared up after him. “Guy's got skills. He's like a ninja monkey.”

“I like that,” said Queenie. “That can be his code name. Ooh! We should all have code names!”

When Hue made his way back down five minutes later, the team were in the middle of a heated discussion.

“We're not calling ourselves The A-Team,” Nicky protested with folded arms. “There's already an A-Team. That's just stupid.”

“Yeah, but our A stands for awesome,” Ward said, like it should have been obvious.

Zay shook his head. “I'm with Nick. That's stupid.”

“I think you're all stupid,” muttered Gable, sighing. Queenie nodded.

“What about the Fellowship of Awesome?” suggested Cadby, like she hadn't even spoken.

Nicky snapped his fingers. “Ha! Now that's original.”

“No it's not.” Ward frowned as if Nicky had offended him in a deep, meaningful way. “Lord of the Rings? Ring a bell?”

“Lord of the what now?”

“Seriously? Hobbits? Middle Earth? Sexy elf chicks?”

Nicky shrugged. “Nope.”

“Wow. You need to be schooled, son.”

“Shut up or I'll kick you outta the Fellowship of Awesome.”

“That's what we're calling ourselves then?”

“Uh, guys?” Hue stood watching them, his lips pursed but amusement glinting in his eyes. “Update, anyone?”

Zay waved a hand benevolently. “Go ahead, ninja monkey.”

Hue cocked his head at the name, but he decided to let it go. “It's a lake. Not so big, but not exactly small. There's more rainforest on the other side. I like Fellowship of Awesome, by the way.”

“Can we go around the lake?” Queenie asked.

“Not unless we want to climb some pretty serious mountains. They surround the lake like a valley.”

“Not that I'm dying to get back in the water or anything, because. . .just no.” Nicky shuddered at the idea. “But is it too far to swim?”

“Definitely. Besides, who knows what creepy crawlies are lurking in there.”

“Good point, ninja monkey. How're we gonna get across?”

“There's a small boat. I'm assuming it's what the guards use when they're patrolling the island.”

“Great. Let's go then.”

“Wait,” said Gable, frowning. “Don't you think that's kind of suspicious? That there's just an empty boat sitting right there?”

Zay sighed. “She's right, that does seem too convenient. We need to be cautious, but we also need that boat. We'll split into two teams and approach from different directions. Ward, Queenie and I will go right. Gable, Nicky, Cadby, Hue, you go left. Weapons out, eyes open. Don't stray too far. Stay in shouting distance at all times. I don't like splitting up, even for a few minutes, but it's necessary.”

With a terse nod and no goodbyes, they did as they were told immediately, the two separate groups ducking through the trees. They weren't too far apart; Gable could just about spot the others, their black outfits almost blending in with the dark tree trunks.

The edge of the tree line approached and Gable was beginning to think that they had been wrong, that they were alone after all, when a hard body hit her out of nowhere, knocking the air out of her lungs as she slammed unforgivably into the hard ground.

“Son of a bitch!” Gable wheezed, groping around for her gun, which had dropped out of her hand somewhere.

Not too many people got the drop on Gable. That meant whoever had attacked her was
good
. Much better than the guards from earlier. And there were more, because she could hear the sounds of the others fighting, though she couldn't spare a look.

In that one, brief moment, she remembered her promise to Queenie. But Queenie was with Zay, and he would protect her with his life. If Gable wanted to do the same, she needed to live first.

Her assailant was on her then, his heavy body pressing down on her, the musty smell of his blue jumpsuit assaulting her nose. Reacting on instinct she brought up her legs and kicked, thudding him into a tree. He growled and leaped right back up again, coming towards her with clear, savage intentions. Deciding to forget the gun, she jumped to her feet gracefully and whipped out her dagger. With no time to think as he pointed his own gun at her, she threw the dagger with precise aim, feeling a small moment of satisfaction when it whipped through the air and buried into his wrist like a dart on a dartboard. He howled, dropping the gun and yanking the dagger out of his flesh. It was all the time she needed to attack him with full force.

Despite his injury, he countered every one of her kicks and punches with one of his own. He was built like a bull, and he went at her with all the ferociousness of one.

Somewhere to her left she heard Hue cry out and she let it distract her, just for a second. A second was all the guard needed. Snarling, he rammed his bleeding forearm into her throat, shoving her hard against a tree.

Gable cursed herself for letting him get the best of her like she was a complete novice taking part in her very first fight, just because she'd let herself worry about Hue. That was the problem with caring about people; they caused distractions, and distractions caused mistakes.

“Who are you?” the guard demanded. His face reddened, his body so enraged that a vein was about to pop right out of his forehead. “How did you get to this island? WHO ARE YOU?!”

“Screw you!” she spat. She hooked her hands around his thick forearm, using it as leverage to lift herself up and side kick him in the head. When he let her go and stumbled back, she mercilessly kicked him again, and then one more time until he tumbled to the ground. With lighting fast reflexes, she flipped over and scooped up her dagger, landing in a crouch over him. She held it against his throat so hard his skin pierced, just a little. A tiny bead of blood trickled out of the wound, staining a thin line around the curve of his neck.

“No bodies,” Ward reminded her casually. He was in the middle of his own fight with two guards, though he was more like a cat toying with his little mousey dinner. Standing with his arms folded across his muscular chest, he was smiling lazily as his two guards tried to dance their way out of the miniature earthquake beneath their feet.

“Fine.” Huffing, she dropped the dagger and punched her guy in the face as hard as she could. His eyes rolled into the back of his head and his body sagged against the ground.

Before she could even think about relaxing, something hard and cold that felt suspiciously like a gun pressed into the back of her head. “Don't turn around,” commanded an icy, female voice. “Or I'll be forced to kill you instead of escorting you to the boss.”

“Rookie mistake,” said Gable.

“What is?”

She span quickly and pulled the gun from the female guard's hand, turning her own weapon on her. “Pointing a gun so close to your target. Makes it easier to steal.”

The guard didn't seem fazed. She slid another gun from her waist and aimed it at Gable. “Good job I brought a spare.”

They faced each other, caught in a stand off. Gable was pretty sure she was going to have to shoot the bitch when there was a sudden clunking noise, and the guard dropped to the ground, unconscious.

Cadby stood behind her, his gun held limply between his fingers. “I hit her,” he exclaimed to Gable, staring at his weapon in surprise, like he couldn't quite figure out what it was doing in his hands. “I hit her!”

Gable grinned. “Guess you're tougher than you thought you were,” she teased, squeezing his shoulder as she passed him by to rejoin the fight.

+++

“Twelve guards,” Zay spat some time later, wiping his bloody lip with a feral look in his eyes. The fight had revved him up. “That's far too many. They must know we're here. Or suspect, at least.”

The twelve guards had been well trained. Much harder to defeat than the earlier two. But defeat them they had, knocking most out and tying up the rest. The team were scraped and bruised and sore, but aside from a bloody knife wound on Hue's leg they'd escaped relatively unharmed.

“Question that one,” Gable advised Zay quietly, pointing at one of the guards Ward had tormented earlier. She spotted her fallen gun near her feet and picked it up gratefully. “Take Ward with you, they're afraid of him.”

While they did that, Gable inspected Hue's wound as he sat on a boulder a little way from the others, his leg outstretched in front of him.

“It looks worse than it is,” he told her, though his voice was strained. “I'm a bleeder.”

“Sure, tough guy. You're gonna need stitches but you'll be fine. You'll still be able to move easily enough.”

“Worried about little old me?” he drawled.

“Worried you won't be able to keep up,” she corrected, hoping he wouldn't see through her lie.

“I've had worse, trust me.”

She winked. “Okay then, pants off.”

He kicked off his boots and then, grinning rakishly, he stood right in front of where she knelt and pushed down his pants. They had to be peeled off his bloody leg before he could drop them to the floor. He raised a challenging eyebrow, like he was daring her not to get embarrassed.

It wouldn't be long before he learned that it took much more than a pair of tight, black boxer briefs to make her blush.

Queenie, on the other hand, who had been approaching from the left, squeaked when she saw him, lifting a hand to shield her eyes.

Gable laughed and threw the bloody pants in Queenie's direction. “Go wash the blood off in the lake.” She glanced back at Hue with a smile when they were alone again, shaking her head. “You're bad.”

He shrugged, not at all self-conscious about his near nakedness. It was possible he was slightly less vanilla than Gable had originally thought.

“So tell me about your brother,” she encouraged a few minutes later when he'd sat back down and she'd gotten to work stitching him up. She was asking partly because she was curious, but mostly to distract him from the needle. Stitches without proper anesthetic were a bitch and a half, though he hadn't winced once. As a Tracker, he was probably used to fixing his injuries up on the road. “The one you were thinking about this morning.”

He eyed her wearily, his whole body stiffening with tension. “How'd you know about that?”

“Got a li'l taste of Cadby's super awesome psychic mojo when we were searching for a link to Sacha. Gotta tell you – not fun.”

He nodded slowly, not relaxing, but sagging slightly. His silence stretched on for a while, so long that Gable thought he probably wouldn't answer her admittedly blunt question. It was maybe time she learned some tact.

“Valens was my older brother,” he answered eventually, surprising her. “He was the golden boy of my family. I come from a long line of Trackers, it's in my blood, and he was the most incredible Tracker – everyone said so. They all adored him, practically worshiped the ground he walked on. My parents especially. Then there was me – the annoying, extra kid, you know? The one they hadn't meant to have, because why would they need another kid when their first was already so perfect? They treated me like I was this huge inconvenience. Not Valens though.” He shook his head, smiling sadly. His eyes were far away, lost in memories. “No one loved my brother as much as I did. He was my hero, the one who always looked out for me no matter what. Valens taught me to fight when no one else would bother, to shoot a gun, to hunt, to spot an Outcast in a crowd of thousands.”

Gable suddenly felt bad for bringing him up so casually. “You don't have to talk about him.”

“It's okay. I don't get to talk about him enough.”

“What happened?”

“We were in Pennsylvania visiting Valens for his twentieth birthday. He'd finished Guardian School by then and had been off Tracking with his own team. I was twelve. Mom and dad had even let me come back from boarding school to visit with him. The day before I was due to go back I begged Valens to take me into the woods to practice shooting. Just tin cans – even he wouldn't have allowed me near an actual Dark One, let alone a Stray.

“We were attacked by a vampire. I never realized until you updated us on the Vampire Law, but he must have been a rogue. He came right at me. Valens died saving my life; the sick bastard ripped the heart right out of his chest. Would've gotten me too, but my parents showed up just in time.”

Gable finished stitching and carefully placed a bandage over the wound. Folding her arms over the knee of his undamaged leg, she rested her chin on her fists and looked up at him. She felt oddly comfortable in a way that she didn't with most. Whether it was because of the mission or because he knew loss just as she did, she didn't know. “I'm sorry.”