“Zeke Riley Vasic Aden Sherwood. Quit fooling around and show yourself. Yeah, I got your message, but I didn’t run. Suck it up. If you don’t come rocking out of the black center of this foul place, this second, you stubborn pretender, I’ll...I’ll. I’ll think of something, because I’m never letting you go another day, another hour, without telling you how much you mean to me.
“I’m in love with you. I know it now. It’s a roar inside me and it’s changed who I am. Made me who I’m supposed to be without always playing a part. And that means you can’t die. Because you’re in love with me and this is our time. It’s finally our time. You come back to me, right now. You hear me, Zeke. You come back to me now.”
The only thing that heard her was the craven stillness of a crystal cold night, and parts of her partition exploding into dust.
She wiped her eyes and got back in the truck. The phone was on the seat beside her. She should call Tres. The knowledge she’d have to admit to fucking up and losing Zeke was a worse betrayal than the crime she’d come here to prove herself against. She would never recover from it. She bounced her palm on the horn, let it blare for the hundredth time. She’d wake the whole state of New Mexico if she had to.
It changed nothing.
And the sat phone had no signal, something out here blocking it.
It would be lighter soon, easier to search. She started the truck. She kept the canyon on her right. There was no way Zeke could cross it. But drugged up, not knowing up from down, he could walk straight into it. It was what Orrin was banking on.
Another hour ticked past in an agony of indecision, the sat phone signal blinking on and off again. To get a signal and call for help, to double back, to pick a different line, to broaden the search, to lay on the horn.
To despair, to scream and cry and curl up in a ball and let her panic overwhelm her.
To push forward, to keep trying, because it was what her heart called on her to do.
She doubted it when she saw it. A shape on the ground, a flash of color other than the desert sand. She altered her course and stamped on the gas. The figure moved, lengthened, wavered, an arm up to shield against the headlights.
She was already shouting his name before she got out of the truck.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Zeke saw the pickup coming miles off. It was the first real thing other than earth and sky, the state of his body and the inside of his own fears he’d seen and heard in a while.
They were coming back to finish off what the drugs had come close to doing. They were coming back to make sure he never did.
There was nowhere to hide out here. He’d come to his senses within stumbling distance of a canyon steep enough it was labeled death. He was thirsty enough to want to drink his own blood, sore, cold, cramped. His teeth hurt, his jaw. His socks were shredded, his feet cut up. He had a headache that made him feel unsteady, but he was sober, the effects of the drug fading to a bruise of jumbled memories. He’d meet this new threat standing tall.
He knew the moment the pickup spotted him. Its speed jacked up, the trail of dust it raised got thicker. He didn’t know how long he’d been out here, how long the drug put him in a fifth dime
nsion of weirdness. If it was even the same night. The sky was starting to lighten at the edges, but dawn was still a long way off. It’d been maybe six or seven when they pushed him off the pickup.
Rory would have hidden away somewhere until Tres could come get her. He couldn’t bear to think about what might’ve happened to her if she hadn’t.
He couldn’t bear to think about never seeing her again. Never holding her, never telling her the truth. Maybe it was better this way, less tangled. Less of a burden to her.
Fuck that. Fuck, everything hurt, and most of all his snap-frozen heart. His shirt was torn and so was the skin on his chest, as if he’d been trying to claw it open and massage his own heart back to life. If there was any way to talk his way onto that truck and back to Rory, he’d find it, pay any price or die trying.
He planted his feet wide, let the pickup come to him, headlights blinding him. He braced to leap aside, hoping his reflexes were up to it. The truck stopped, the warmth of the engine coming at him in a wave of diesel fumes. There was a moment of stillness where he squinted at the cab, and his breathing stalled, then the driver’s door swung open and a pair of booted feet went to the ground; the rest was a blur as the figure stepped into the light, shouting, and made for him at a run.
He let go an agonized groan, called Rory’s name and flung his arms wide to catch her, to be fucking reborn in the shape and the sound of her.
Her momentum made him stumble, almost lose his footing. She held him up, her hands a fury of pats and strokes, making him feel solid again by her touch alone. Words he couldn’t process flooding from her mouth.
“Stop, Aurora Rae, stop.” He coughed, cleared his throat. “I’m okay. I’m okay.”
“You scared the shit out of me.” She quit fussing and hugged her warm body close to his. He could feel her trembling, or maybe that was him. It might be the ground shaking for all he knew; his grasp on reality was a fragile thing. How the fuck did she find him?
“Yeah, this was extra,” he said.
She laughed, a hiccup, half sob, half outrage. “Did they hurt you? Are you all right?”
His turn to babble, to run his hands all over her. “I’m not hurt. I’m fine, now that I know you are.”
He loved her, he loved her. That much was clear and real and eternal. He bent over her, and her hands came up, fingers exploring his face, before she put her cheek to his and said words he never thought he’d hear. “I’m in love with you. Completely, joyfully, endlessly.”