Spirit (Blackwood Security, #10.5) - Elise Noble Page 0,36

us. The driver waved an apology and tried to restart the engine once, twice, three times, but it wouldn’t catch. Shades of dump truck flashed through my mind. Was someone up there playing a cruel joke on me? Had déjà vu and Loki put their heads together to screw up yet another one of James’s and my plans?

I climbed out of the jeep, and I was about to send him a “you’re not gonna believe this” message when a voice spoke behind me.

“You need a hand?”

I turned to find a man in a fishing hat leaning out the window of a Toyota.

“Yes, I do. I need to find a cab.”

“You won’t have much luck with that at this time on Christmas mornin’.” Tell me something I didn’t know. “Where are you going?”

“To Fairchild Air Force Base. Do you know it?”

“Used to work there. We both did.”

When I bent forward, I spotted another man in the passenger seat, eighty years old or so, an oxygen tube fastened under his nose. I didn’t know who they were or why they were at the airport, but they had wheels, so I didn’t care.

“I’ll give you two hundred bucks if you’ll drive me there.”

“Be happy to, but I don’t need your money. The name’s Gary, and this here is Harold.”

Harold leaned across to wave at me. “Hey, pretty lady.”

“Gary, if you step on it, you might just save Christmas for a little girl in Virginia.”

He patted the car door. “This fine vehicle’s faster than a deer with a bobcat on its tail.”

It must have been quite an elderly bobcat, possibly with two knee replacements to match Gary’s. I learned all about his life on the trip, and Harold’s too. By the time they dropped me off at Base Ops, I had Harold’s phone number and an invite to spend Christmas with the pair of them if my ride fell through.

But thankfully, it didn’t. I’d barely had time to wave goodbye to the pair of legends before I was being ushered over to a hangar to change into a flight suit, and five minutes after that, I was climbing a ladder into the rear seat of an F-15. A fucking F-15.

Well, I had to hand it to James—he sure knew the way to a girl’s heart.

By breaking the sound barrier, the pilot was able to knock three hours off the five-hour journey, even with a slight pause for mid-air refuelling, and I landed at Joint Base Langley-Eustis at nine fifteen Richmond time. That did leave me the teensy problem of how to get from Langley to Riverley, but of course, James had thought of that too.

I did a double take when I spotted a familiar helicopter waiting, a gunmetal-grey Eurocopter with an N-number I knew by heart. Tell me it’s not… James hadn’t flown his own helicopter in years.

No. It wasn’t.

Jake Harrison glared at me from the pilot’s seat, and I resisted the urge to run to the gate and call a taxi instead. James’s younger brother had been giving me the cold shoulder for the past eleven years because he’d never forgiven me for picking my job over James. I couldn’t entirely blame him for that, but that didn’t make the prospect of being stuck in a cockpit with him for the next half hour any more appealing. Would it be weird if I sat in the back?

“Uh, thanks for coming.”

“I’m doing this for my brother, not for you.”

Nine words. That was literally all he said to me for the entire trip. Which hurt because we’d once been friends. Jake didn’t know the full story of the break-up—that was between me, James, and Black—and even though James had told Jake not to be so hard on me, he just couldn’t help himself. I suppose I had to admire his loyalty.

And also the fact that he got me back to Riverley at five to ten. Kiara was already waiting on the terrace with Sloane, who’d come over to help in Bradley’s absence. At least Jake had a smile for the little girl, and he even entertained her with some fancy low-level flying before he disappeared over the horizon. He wasn’t an asshole to everyone, only to me.

“Thought for a moment you weren’t gonna make it,” Jonah Campbell said.

That made two of us. “The timings were a bit tight, but here I am. So, where do you want to fly to?”

“Can we go over our house?” Kiara asked.

“Sure. You’ll need to give me directions, though.”

I got