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eyelids to look through the lashes. Quinn was staring at me. Stone-faced was his natural expression, but I could see that he was deeply worried. Not for me. About me.

"You don't need to be getting sidetracked here." he said. Lewis didn't answer. "We can't get lost in the details. We're in the game now, and you know the stakes. If she gets in the way-"

"Quinn." Lewis's voice was soft, but inflexible. "Get a doctor. Now."

Quinn turned and left. The door clicked shut behind him. Lewis put his hand back on my forehead, and some of the sick throbbing eased.

"A month ago, I could've fixed this in two seconds," he said.

"A month ago, I wouldn't have needed it," I whispered. "Lewis?"

"Yeah."

"When did being the good guys include contracting murder?"

No answer. He was staring off toward the sunset, his face lit with gold and orange.

The saddest eyes I've ever seen.

"Lewis?"

"You don't understand." He didn't look at me. "Rest."

I didn't want to, but eventually, I slept.

With no sense of transition, I was somewhere else. I was limping, although pain was a distant, muffled sensation. My skin was red and abraded, my white T-shirt tattered and filthy, sweatpants ripped and stained.

I limped along a deserted road, one painful step at a time, and overhead the sun kept staring down. No wind. No birds. No sound at all. It was like being in a dead world, and I was dead too, I just didn't know it yet.

Dust hung like talcum powder in the still, dry air, and everything tasted like burned insulation.

I stopped, turned, and looked behind me. A ragged black ribbon of asphalt stretched toward the dim horizon. It was scoured gray in places by the wind, and there was a wreck of a car thrown off to the side. Paint gone. Nothing but junk.

I knew where this was. In the thin shade of that wreck was the body of Chaz Ashworth, and I couldn't be here; this was past, this was long past... Oh, God get me out of here, I don't want to be here... .

Chapter Seventeen

Panic surged along my nerves. It felt both over-amped and slow, dream-terror moving like cold molasses but packing the same intensity as waking fear. I was thirsty, overwhelmingly thirsty, and I ached all over, and I couldn't be here. I had to wake up, wake up, wake...

I turned and kept limping. There was shelter in the distance. A tumbled confusion of rocks that promised darkness and relief from the killing sun.

One agonizing step at a time, whimpering. Crawling, by the time I reached it, my knees and forearms scraping raw on rock and burning on sand.

Time sped up, the way time does in dreams, and I was inside, huddled against the cool darkness, shuddering in relief.

In the dream, my mind didn't know what was coming, but my body did, my nerves were screaming in panic, trying to drive me out of sleep and into the light. Better to die out there, food for ants and vultures and at the end a clean return to the earth, than go into the dark...

But I couldn't stop myself. The part of me that decided to move wasn't the part that knew the future.

I heard the steady, whispering drip of water, and it pulled me on into the shadows. I was too weak to pull water from the dry air; badly injured, I needed to drink to survive.

I crawled for some period of time, don't even know how long; all that mattered was finding the water. Finding something that didn't hurt. I heard the tinkling sound getting closer, and crawled toward it in the darkness...

... and was blinded by a sudden hot flare of light.

"Chill Factor"

Hands. Hands in the dark, dragging me down. The stranger slammed my head into the wall, and things went gray and soft, and in the white flare of his flashlight I saw my burned, bleeding fingers scrabbling at the rock.

Digging for rescue, like the woman in the sand.

What are you doing here?

My throat was too dry to do more than croak.

Who do you work for?

I couldn't see him. He was just a vague shadow behind the light, no particular height, no particular build. A baseball cap and stained blue jeans. The smell of leather and sweat and blood. I knew him. I'd seen him before.

What do you know?

He dragged me over sharp-edged gravel and dumped me facedown in a pool of water so cold it shocked me back to consciousness. I gasped, breathed water,