Hannah Jayne - Under Attack

I stepped back. “What are you hiding?”

“What?”

“Why don’t you want me to find Nina?”

Alex’s brows drew together. “I’m not hiding anything and I do want you to find Nina. I want to help you find Nina, but you just can’t go off half-cocked like this. Ophelia is dangerous and—and—for all we know, this could be a trap. You could be walking right into a trap.”

“I don’t care, Alex. I don’t care. I’m not going to risk Nina. I’m not going to put anyone else’s life at risk because of me, especially not my best friend’s.”

“I’m just saying we need a plan.”

I stood nose to nose with Alex, the fury rolling off me in waves. “And I’m saying we have to look for Nina, now.”

“You have to know that out of any of us, Nina is the one best prepared to take care of herself,” Alex said as he followed me out the door.

“Yeah,” I said, taking the stairs two at a time. “But that doesn’t mean she should have to.”

My mind was racing as I sat in the front seat of Alex’s car. “Why Nina?”

“Ophelia wants to get to you.”

“That’s fine, but she wants me, right? She wants the Vessel. We don’t even know where she took Nina. Wouldn’t it be easier for her to have left a note or something?”

“Like what? ‘I’ve got Nina tied to the train tracks, come get her’? I don’t think this kind of thing works like that.”

I gulped. “Tie her to the train tracks? You don’t really think she’d do that, do you?”

“Not unless she has a cartoon hat and a handlebar mustache.”

“This is not a time to joke!”

Alex stretched his arm along the backrest, his hand gently massaging my neck. I squirmed away.

“I know. But going into hysterics isn’t going to help Nina, either.”

I glowered in cross-armed silence until we made it to the police station—which we did in record time. Alex was shrugging out of his jacket when I pressed him down in his desk chair and handed him Nina’s cell phone. He stared at the phone in his palm as though he had never seen a pink Swarovski Crystal–bedazzled Motorola.

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Trace the call!” I screamed. “Dust it for fingerprints. There was obviously a struggle. Nina would never leave her phone under the couch—”

“And she wouldn’t leave it behind,” Alex said, taking the phone.

“Yeah. So go all CSI on that phone’s ass.”

Alex clicked the phone shut and turned on his computer. “Okay, first of all, this is SFPD, not CSI . Tracing takes a little longer than a commercial break.”

I slumped into the red pleather guest chair, defeated. The reality of Nina’s disappearance—and the realization that she was with Ophelia—finally began to sink in. I sniffed, then started to cry. “We’re never going to find her, are we?”

“Okay, got it,” Alex said, clicking shut his laptop and grinning.

“Got what?”

“Come on, Lawson, get moving.” He stood up, shook me out of the chair. “The call came from an address up north.”

I abruptly stopped crying and sprang up. “You were able to trace it? Did you triangulate the cell phone towers to pinpoint their location?”

Alex snatched his coat from the back of his chair. “No. I Googled the phone number.”

Alex peeled out of the police department parking lot with sirens blaring. The few cars on the city roads eased to the side to let us pass, and Alex kept the gas pedal flush with the floor of the car the second we hit the freeway on-ramp. He gestured to the flashing lights and sirens above us as we overtook a Yellow Cab, slow with wide-eyed tourists and their world of luggage.

“These things are so convenient.”

“Let me guess—another perk they didn’t have when you were here last?”

“Something like that.”

We sped down the freeway in silence; Alex hadn’t mentioned the exact address from which Ophelia’s call originated—he didn’t have to. We both knew it had come from my father’s house in Marin County. My heart started to thunder in my throat as we took the Sir Francis Drake exit and wound through the quaint city of Marin, most of its residents barely roused, despite the sunny morning.

“She’d better not hurt her,” I muttered, gritting my teeth until my temples hurt.

“It’s you that Ophelia wants,” Alex said, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. “She’s just using Nina to get to you.”

“Does that mean she won’t hurt her?” I asked hopefully.

“No.”

We turned down the tree-lined street to my father’s house. Alex parked skewed in the driveway and leaned over me in the front seat.

“What are you—”

He popped open the glove box and pulled out a handgun, slipping it into his waistband. He slipped a short-handled knife with a fat blade into a leather sheaf wrapped around his ankle. Then he looked at me.

“Do you still have the stun gun?”

I shook my head miserably. “No. I lost it in the fire.”

He sucked in a breath and then ducked between my legs. I had heard that life-and-death situations made people randy, but personally, I really wasn’t in the mood. “Alex! Now?”

But Alex came up with a small black gun in his hand.

“I always keep a spare,” he said, checking the magazine. He handed the gun to me and pushed the black metal gun box back under my seat.

“Remind me not to use the vanity mirror,” I said as we crept out of the car. “What does it do—launch a hand grenade?”

“No, cyanide powder.”

I wasn’t sure if he was joking, but I made a mental note not to check.

I tried to tuck my small loaner gun in my waistband like Alex had done, but one too many donuts prevented that. Besides, I had the kind of luck that meant I would be shooting off my privates halfway through our daring rescue. Instead, I slipped the gun into my sweatshirt pocket. The butt of the gun was already damp from my sweating palms.

“What are we going to do?” I whispered to Alex as he steered me flat against the garage. “Do we knock?”

Alex’s brows rose. “Really? You ask me if I triangulated a cell phone call to pinpoint Ophelia’s location, and then you ask if we knock?”

“Right. We barrel roll through the front window.”

“No more cop shows for you. I go check it out, you stay right here.” Alex put both hands on my shoulders, pushed me down about four inches so I was mostly ducked into a pittosporum bush, and then repeated himself. “Stay right here. Got it?”

I nodded, though I had no intention of hanging back. Nina was my best friend, and her afterlife was in my hands. She would have happily been sucking on a blood bag and reading an InStyle magazine if I hadn’t come along. I sniffed, feeling the tears start again.

Alex looked at me and softened. “Just stay here. We’re going to get Nina.”

He tiptoed out across the driveway, hugging as close to the shadows cast from the house as possible. He disappeared around a clutch of flowering bushes and I assumed he had gotten onto the front porch, but there was no sound.

I counted to twenty-five and then tiptoed from my pittosporum hiding place, picking my way along the shadows of the driveway, following in Alex’s footsteps. I held the butt of my gun in both my hands, arms outstretched. I couldn’t remember if that was the way Alex told me to hold the gun or if I saw it on Cops , but either seemed good enough so I took a few more tentative steps, letting my gun lead the way. When I reached the front porch it was empty.

“Alex?” I whispered, lowering my gun a half inch. “Alex?”

I scanned the surrounding landscaping for any sign of Alex, and then I noticed the front door was slightly ajar. I gently shouldered it open just enough to squeeze through, and promised myself that should I get out of this alive, donuts were strictly off-limits. Well, off-limits right after my “I survived this rescue attempt” donut party.