Heart of Vengeance (Alice Worth #6) - Lisa Edmonds Page 0,106
motorcycle, Lucy had already turned onto the street headed south, following the directions provided by the GPS.
“He smells like tequila and no sleep,” Lucy said. “Pass me one of those protein bars, will you?”
I handed over one of the bars. “It’s five o’clock somewhere, right?”
She sighed. “How do you feel about having him at your back?”
I gulped water from my refillable Hawthorne’s bottle and eyed the box of protein bars. Thirsty, hungry, and achy seemed to be my new normal. “Better than I should,” I admitted. “Though I’ll be damned if I know why.”
Her mouth became a grim line. “Same here. Goodness knows he’s given us little reason to trust him.”
Daisy growled quietly.
“You may trust him, wolf, but I don’t,” Lucy said.
“Do you know what he is?” I asked.
“No, I do not, which is more worrisome than how much tequila he consumes. He sure as hell is something.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Malcolm, you have any thoughts about what Ronan is?”
“I wish I did,” Malcolm said, floating close to the gap between the front seats. “He looks plain-Jane human to me, but he obviously isn’t, so he’s capable of hiding what he is.”
“There could be a lot of reasons for that,” I pointed out. “Not all of them are bad.”
Lucy snorted. “Yeah, not all of them—only most.”
“Some people with special skills just don’t want to be noticed.”
“Touché.”
In my side mirror, I spotted Ronan’s Harley behind us. The rumble of its engine grew as he gained ground on us.
Lucy’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror. She scowled and put her foot down. The jeep accelerated sharply. The Harley closed the distance again. I expected him to pass us, but instead he fell in behind, content—for the moment—to follow her lead. How long that would last, I had no idea. There wasn’t much about Ronan I did know, other than he was leaning hard into the lone-wolf bounty hunter vibe and he knew when to bring a girl a bottle of damn good hooch.
Weaving through traffic at well over one hundred miles an hour, we raced south, hopefully toward Mariela, the scroll, and a door to the Underworld.
21
The apparent center of the graveling attacks was only about a two-hour drive from our motel in Lawrence. Lucy kept the accelerator nearly to the floor the entire way, except for a brief stop for coffee and food.
About an hour into the journey, we passed through earth-spider territory. To Malcolm’s and my disappointment, we didn’t spot any giant spiders. Lucy assured us we should be grateful, but Malcolm pouted.
Something had been bothering me since I woke up—something worrisome I hadn’t thought of until a strange dream last night about Lucy and Charles made me wonder if my subconscious was trying to get me to put something together. The more I thought about it, the more sure I was that I would have figured it out sooner if I hadn’t been so distracted by the weirdness of the Broken World and muddled by sleep deprivation.
Once we were safely past spider territory and on a well-traveled highway, I cleared my throat. “Lucy, did you push me to accept a ride from you when we met?”
Her silence was an answer in itself. She was expressionless. Behind me, Malcolm flitted, his anger prickling on my skin.
“I ask because before we met you, Malcolm and I discussed at length, several times, that we needed to stay clear of military, police, and anyone like that, for obvious reasons. And then minutes later you rolled up in a military jeep and offered us a ride, and I immediately thought it sounded like a good idea.” I turned in my seat to face her. “I need the truth.”
Her hands flexed on the steering wheel. “I was suspicious of you. I wanted to know why you would be walking along a stretch of road infamous for fatal attacks by lotoru and other creatures, in the company of a ghost bound to you by magic I didn’t recognize. You felt out of place, though I had no idea just how out of place you are. Once I saw your wolf, I had to know who you are and what she is, because that’s my job, and because I didn’t want you to get eaten. So yes, I gave you a nudge to ride with me.” She glanced at me. “But after that, I never nudged you again. Everything you’ve done since has been one hundred percent of your own volition.”