likely position divided by airspeed gave us five, four, three—
“Duck,” I said to Tabitha, and tackled her under the surface.
Even with almost all the powder off the pool, the concussion hit the water like someone had cannonballed in next to us.
I pressed my hands and feet against the slimy, sloping bottom, keeping myself down with Tabitha flattened under me. A flash of red and gold rippled across the surface along with the blast, and the algae-coated cement vibrated against my palms as the earth shook.
Then everything was blackness and cold.
I kept us under until Tabitha squirmed against me, which I took as a communication she was desperate for air. I let her up, and we broke the surface into a hellscape.
Tabitha immediately took a heaving breath that burst into a cough. The air was clogged with smoke and ash. I looked out over the lawn to find everything from the patio furniture to the buildings had been—disintegrated. Smoking piles of rubble marked where structures had collapsed, small fires here and there. In a few places, the crumbled remains had big enough chunks left to form a mound with the odd timber poking out, but mostly it was just … gone. The grass had been seared off, leaving nothing but charred soil.
A haze of ashy dust, combined with the gray-black darkness—now much more complete without the outside floodlights—made the whole scene recede into unreality. I realized too late that even so, I could see clear across the lawn, and I lurched back, the water sloshing with my movement. But the corpse of whatever animal had attacked us had been burned off the face of the planet along with everything else, and there was no sign of its human companion. Even the other pools had been blasted so hard on the surface that they were now only half-full of lapping water.
Holy shit.
Tabitha was still hacking. We needed to move. We might be in a remote area, but police had to be on their way—this had not been a small display.
I looked around again as I slopped out of the pool onto soot and rubble and gave Tabitha a hand up. This, I thought, had been somebody showing off.
* * *
TABITHA DIDN’T get her breath back until we were beyond where the line of trees had been. The cypresses had been spared the worst of the blast, so they were still in the shape of trees—but mostly not upright ones. Many of them had been splintered along the base of their trunks by the concussion, and the perimeter looked like a forest graveyard left by haphazard loggers. We finally found the back side of the iron fence, and I boosted Tabitha over before climbing the bars myself.
Fatigue made the effort less agile than when I’d entered.
Stay alert, I ordered myself, but the directive was hard to follow, even with my stamina. How many villains were out here tonight? Which of them might be watching for escapees from this dramatic showcase? Too many shadows, hemming us in …
But though every rustle and whisper made my senses jangle, we got out to the street without any more surprises.
My phone definitely wasn’t functional after its dunking, and I had no idea where Pilar had gone off to, but I decided the most likely rendezvous point was her car. I turned to lead Arthur’s daughter back in that direction.
But Tabitha had used the pause to breathe and cough, and now trotted up next to me. “Wow,” she gasped now. “Wow. That was—that was awesome.”
I stopped so fast she tripped trying to match me and spun to face her. “What?”
“I just mean—what you did! That was so, like—wow!” She goggled at me. “What just happened?”
The whole bloody night felt like it crashed down on me in that one instant. After everything—the dog and Teplova and the ghosts from my past and fucking D.J. and explosives, and Tabitha thought it was awesome?
“You interfered with my work to find your dad, that’s what happened.” I nearly snarled the words in her face.
Her expression crumpled. “I didn’t mean—wait, he wasn’t, Dad wasn’t in that—”
“No. I don’t think so.” I started walking again, fast, and she hastened to keep up.
“You don’t think—”
“No.” The wellness center was definitely tangled up with Arthur’s kidnapping, but rather than being one of the abductors, Teplova seemed to be a victim here as much as we were. I thought it most likely we had a common enemy. Or several common enemies.
Besides, except for Dr. Teplova, the center