Last Kiss Goodnight - By Gena Showalter Page 0,120

He was running, determined to make another play for her father. But Jecis reached back and waved his hand, and the air sealed shut, blocking the creature from view and preventing him from entering the circus.

He’ll be fine, she told herself. He’s better off. She didn’t want him near Jecis ever again. Her father would have used the tiger’s wounds against him.

Just like he would use Solo against Vika.

“Home,” Jecis said, and spread his arms.

Vika breathed in . . . out . . . as she looked around, the sights that greeted her caused her stomach to churn with sickness. White tents, Big Red, trailers, games and rides, and performers walking in every direction, setting up for tomorrow’s show. The cold had been replaced by sultry heat, and the mountains with flatlands.

“After you left,” Jecis said, “we changed locations, thinking you meant to bring the authorities to my door. Thankfully, we were only gone for a few days since the little man had approached me and showed me a better way.”

An avalanche of sounds suddenly assaulted her ears, and she barely stopped herself from cringing. Voices, so many voices. Chatter, laughing, arguing. The grind of metal against metal. The squeal of tires. The crunch of stones beneath shoes.

Jecis pushed Vika at Audra. “Lock her in her trailer. I’ll deal with her once my wounds have been bandaged. And if she escapes, I’ll blame you, my darling Audra.” With barely a pause, he looked to Matas and said, “And you. Put the beast back in his cage.”

Thirty-one

Be dressed in readiness, and keep your lamps lit.

—LUKE 12:35

SOLO AWOKE WITH A jolt, panic instantly infusing him. He remembered the cabin, and the fiery skull propelling toward him. But after that? Nothing.

“Vika!” he shouted, bounding to his feet. Where was she? Had the skull gotten her, too? “Vika!”

“Calm down, warrior.”

The Targon’s voice penetrated his mind, and he spun. The sun shone brightly in the sky, and he had to blink rapidly to focus. Through familiar metal bars he could see the otherworlder, his caged neighbor.

Bars. Cage.

Dread beating at him, he looked around. He was back in the cage, he realized. Back at the circus, back in the menagerie. He’d . . . he’d been captured. The rest of the otherworlders were watching him. Some with anger. Some with pity. Kitten, with hope.

“Don’t despair,” she said. “You did it once, something no one else has ever done, and you can do it again.”

They were dirtier than when he’d left them, as though no one had bothered to clean them even once. They were thinner, too, as if no one had bothered to feed them. But at least they were alive.

And he could hear them. Once again, his ears were working. That meant Vika, wherever she was, was once again deaf.

“Where’s Vika?” he demanded of the Targon. “How long was I out?” The landscape had changed. Mountains had been replaced by planes, snowy tundra by red dirt, and trees by rolling wheat.

“She’s been locked in her trailer, and you were out only for the night.”

His relief was so potent, it buckled his knees. He tumbled down, shaking the entire cage.

“She’s your woman,” the Targon said. “You’ve claimed her.”

“She is. I have.” And he would not lose her. Not this way. Not in any way. “Where’s Jecis? Matas?”

A flash of fury in the Targon’s eyes. “They’re setting up for tomorrow’s show.”

It was time for information, Solo decided, time to learn the Targon’s motives. “You hate him. Matas. You hate him more than Jecis, the man responsible for your predicament. Why?”

“Hey, Jolly Red,” Criss called. “You don’t call, you don’t write. You have some nerve showing your face here again. My brothers are coming for me, you know, and they’ll have something to say to you. You just left me behind!”

The Targon held out his arms, and the world just . . . stopped . . . moving, even going silent. Solo frowned—or tried to. Like the world around him, he was motionless. His body felt as though it had been covered by cement, even his arms too heavy to lift. The only part of himself that he had any control over was his eyes, and he kept those trained on the otherworlder.

Only the Targon could move. He stalked to the side of his cage, his lips curling into a smile that wasn’t a smile. “Don’t worry. Unlike you, their minds are on lockdown. They have no idea what’s going on. And did you notice I’m stronger than