“Aaaarrrgh!” Drake shouted. He raised his tentacle and snapped it down, making a loud crack.
The coyotes watched impassively.
“I need to hide,” Drake said. It was a shameful thing to admit. “I have to hide until night comes.”
Pack Leader tilted his head and in his mangled speech said, “Human hunter sees. Does not smell or hear.”
“Brilliant observation, there, Marmaduke.” It was true: Brianna was not a coyote. She couldn’t smell him or even hear him unless he was pretty loud. He just needed a way to stay out of sight. “Okay, get me a place where I won’t be seen until dark.”
“High place with deep cracks.”
“Let’s make it quick, before they get around to sending your friend Swift Girl after us.”
The coyotes did not dawdle. They took off at a quick lope, moving with a sort of relentless fluidity around obstacles. It was uphill at first until they topped a rise. There Drake saw the barrier within a quarter mile.
He stopped and stared.
It was as if his master was reaching up from far underground with black claws. Like he was reaching to grab and then envelop this unnatural world with thousands of fingers.
It should have been inspiring. But it made Drake uneasy. This was the same black stain he had seen begin to spread into the gaiaphage itself.
It was a reminder that maybe not everything was right with the Darkness. It was a reminder that this mission was not born out of the gaiaphage’s ambition alone, but out of fear.
“Move,” Pack Leader urged anxiously. They were partially silhouetted atop the bluff. Drake ducked low. He could see the lake spread out below. If he could see, he could also be seen.
Drake hurried along behind Pack Leader, disappearing quickly amidst a maze of fallen rock and rain-etched bluff.
He had to suck in his breath to squeeze through the crack they’d found for him. One of the advantages of hanging out with coyotes: no one knew the terrain better.
There was no room to sit, barely room to stand. But Brianna wouldn’t find him; he was confident of that.
And he could see a narrow slice of the lake, a few boats, and a sliver of the sky.
Night was coming on.
OUTSIDE
NURSE CONNIE TEMPLE swallowed the Zoloft. It worked better than Prozac for her, left her less tired.
She chased it with most of a glass of red wine. Which would make her feel tired.
She turned on the TV and clicked without any real interest through the movies on demand. She wasn’t in her trailer. She was at the Avania Inn in Santa Barbara. It was where she regularly met Sergeant Darius Ashton.
They had started going out months earlier. He had shown up at one of the Friday cookouts. And soon after that they had realized that they would need to keep their relationship secret.
Connie heard the familiar knock. She let Darius in. He was short, only a couple of inches taller than she was herself. But he had a thick, hard body decorated with tattoos and scars he’d brought home from Afghanistan.
He had a six-pack of beer in one hand and a sheepish grin. Connie liked him. She liked the fact that he was smart enough to know that part of the reason she was with him—not all, just part—was that she was using him for information. He had lost most of the sight in one eye, so Darius was never going back to combat. His current assignment was to Camp Camino Real. He had been assigned to maintenance. He had no direct access to anything classified, but he heard things. He saw things. He hated his job, and if he couldn’t be a combat soldier he was determined to leave the service when his enlistment was up.
Basically Sergeant Darius Aston was killing time. He liked killing that time with Connie.
Connie sat on the bed drinking red wine. Darius drank his third beer and flopped in the chair with his feet up on the end of the bed, toes occasionally playing with hers.
“Something is up,” he said without preamble. “I hear the colonel threatened to resign.”
“Why?”
Darius shrugged.
“Is he out?” Connie asked.
“Nah. The general choppered in. They had a chat that could be heard from some distance. Then the general choppered out, and that was that.”
“And you have no idea what it was about?”
He shook his head slowly. He hesitated before he went on, and Connie knew there was something big coming. Something he was leery of telling her.
“My sons are in there,” Connie said.
“Sons? Plural?” He looked sharply at her. “I’ve only heard you talk about your boy Sam.”
She took a deep pull at the wine. “I want you to trust me,” she said. “So I’m telling you the truth. That’s how trust works. Right?”
“That’s what I hear,” he said dryly.
“I had twins. Sam and David. I guess I liked the biblical names back then.”
“Good strong names,” Darius said.
“They were fraternal, not identical. Sam was a few minutes older. He was the smaller one, though, by seven ounces.”
She started again and was surprised to find that her voice betrayed her with a wobble. She powered through it, determined not to get weepy. “I had postpartum depression. Pretty bad. You know what that is?”
He didn’t answer but she saw that he did not.
“Sometimes a woman, after she gives birth, her hormones go seriously off-kilter. I knew this. After all, I’m a nurse, although not much lately.”
“So there are pills and all,” Darius suggested.
“There are,” she confirmed. “And I kept it together. But early on I formed this … this fantasy, I suppose. That something was wrong with David.”