Chapter Fourteen

Locking my hand in his, Asher dragged me through the snow and out the door. “The Shift still isn’t answering,” he said. “We have to get back to the window. I’m not sure you left me enough juice to wipe that many officers, and I am not letting you go to prison tonight.”

I ran beside him, breathless more from fear and the fact that he was touching me than exertion. “I thought Izan’s methods sucked, but I’d take him over Baku’s motivational techniques any damn day. And what about the people we left back there? They’re not going to have a clue what happened, are they? What if they get blamed for our damage? And two of them are dead.” At least the cops wouldn’t see the snow. It was like wraith ashes, I supposed, so it made sense that nobody but us guardians could see it.

“We can’t help them. Now move!”

I moved. Stumbled, bumped into him at least a dozen times, but I hauled butt and kept up with him. Go me.

Once we reached the broken window, I hesitated, afraid he’d pull another hero dash, but he shoved me up onto the ledge and gave a don’t-even-start-with-me glare. By the time I stepped over the jagged sill, he’d climbed up after me. I let my pent-up breath go and shimmied onto the outer ledge. Kyle, Iris, and the artifacts were gone.

I called out to the Shift again, but it was like nothing was out there but sky and stars.

Dozens of cruiser beacons flashed over us in the muted light hazing the sky. New York’s finest scurried around the streets below like roaches. How had Baku blocked out the sound like that? And how had he strangled Asher with his energy? Could I do that with mine?

“Dammit, Asher, this isn’t going to work,” I whisper-shouted. “Look at them all. There’s no way we’re making it all the way over to the scaffolding and down to the ground without being seen.”

“We’ll make it; just go. And if you hadn’t done something so utterly stupid and come after me, you’d be back at the facility by now like you should be.”

I tried and failed to burn his face off with my stare before shuffling along, stopping every time a light swept over me. “My ‘utterly stupid something’ worked, didn’t it? How many times have I saved your ass now? Three times? And how many times have you thanked me for it? Yeah, that would be zippo, pal.” I felt like a jerk for reminding him, but I didn’t apologize for it.

As I made it to the scaffolding, the entire bank of fluorescent lights inside the museum turned on and eclipsed the emergency lighting, spilling two thousand watts out the window.

Asher flattened himself against the stone on the far side of the last window separating him from me. It might as well have been another hundred miles, and a gauntlet of police with guns still stood between us and freedom. I lay against the scaffolding platform boards, trying to ignore the sick stabbing in my stomach that told me the king had beaten me after only two hours of our apparent race to be badasses.

An elbow appeared through the broken window to Asher’s left. A radio crackled. Low voices, sharp and precise. Telling the cops below to look up, having spotted the broken pane, no doubt. Bad to worse.

Lights flooded up from the street. “Do not move,” some guy shouted from the ground, and my imagination was sure I could hear guns clearing holsters. Many, many guns. Yep. Totally FUBAR.

I lifted my head and found Asher staring at me. “What now?” I asked.

“How the hell should I know?” he shot back. “You’re the one with all of the bright ideas.”

“Oh, so now you’re finally getting mad. Be thankful you’re not pushing up daisies. Now shut up, so I can think.”

A gun in a double-fisted grip slipped through the broken window to Asher’s left. “Come on back inside,” an officer with a gruff edge said with over-the-top lighthearted calm. “In or down, you’ll still find a heap of trouble.”

Oh crap, oh hell, oh damn. The cop leaned out the window, pistol trained on Asher, raising an eyebrow when he spied me lying on the scaffolding. I swallowed a frantic giggle, so I wouldn’t blurt anything out and get us killed, and slowly raised my hands.

A commotion followed by heated voices rose up inside. Asher and I stared at each other, and he shrugged.

“I’ll take it from here, Officer…” A man with a British accent said from inside the window.

“McConkey,” the one holding the gun said. “And just who the hell are you?” There was a pause, and then he said, “Christ. What do the feds care about a pair of local psychos?”

“They’re wanted in connection with a rash of crimes across the country, including kidnapping and murder. In fact, I’m sure the officers you sent to search the museum will soon be back with news of the remaining Manhattan Psychiatric Center patients you’re missing, some of whom have probably not survived their ordeal. Now, if you’ll step aside, my partner Agent McIvers and I will take it from here.”

What? Asher had murdered wraith-infected people to expel their wraiths, before I came along, but those deeds had been covered up, so how did the Feds even know about that? So now we weren’t just headed up the river to the cop shop but to the freakin’ FBI headquarters. Had I broken a mirror or something?

Officer McConkey dropped the f-bomb, sighed, and disappeared from the window. A second later, another guy wearing what appeared to be a blue Walmart suit covered by a beige trench coat took his place. The man smiled, and holy crap, he looked just like the guy who played Thor, Chris something-or-other, but without the beard. He had medium-length brown-sugar hair, only his eyes weren’t straight mortal blue but sporting a jade star over a circle of ice.

A thrill of hope took a dash through me. He was a sentinel, one I’d never seen before. Asher stared first at the Thor lookalike, then at me. His raised brow suggested he didn’t know the guy either. What the hell was going on?

Thor winked at me. “My name is Agent Phillips. Come along quietly now, and nobody else has to get hurt, yeah?”

Thank bloody hell. I didn’t care where he’d come from. If he was part of the Mortal Machine, I had to believe Izan had sent him. When I climbed to my feet, Asher said, “What are you doing?”

“Getting out of here,” I whispered. “What do you think?”

“We can’t trust him. I don’t know him.”

“You know what he is, and we’re not exactly swimming in choices at the moment. We’re being thrown a bone here, so unless you have a better idea, we go with the cute Fed.”

He frowned harder, and I wished I hadn’t said that last part. “You’re mine to protect,” he growled. “Why can’t you let me just once?” That same ferocity from our first encounter with Baku spilled out of him. Afraid someone would cap me before I could reunite him with her, no doubt. He seemed to realize how much pain he’d revealed to me again, shaking his head while his expression faded to blank. “Forget it.”

I didn’t mean to keep stealing his manly thunder, but now wasn’t the time for that conversation. “We’ll talk about this later. For now, I’m making this call, and we’re going.”

“Jesus. This is such a bad idea,” he said as I shuffled back along the ledge to him.

“It might be, but my gut’s telling me this is our way out. Do you trust me?”

He seemed to stare into my soul before saying, “Always.”

I swallowed to clear the sudden tightness in my throat and motioned toward the window and Agent Phillips. “After you. I’ll be right behind you, and when I say that, I actually mean it.”

One corner of his lips quirked up in a grin before it flattened again. He sidestepped to the window, waiting until Agent Phillips moved out of the way, and hopped down with his arms in the air. I followed him, not as afraid of the circle of gun-toting officers as I might have been five minutes ago.

“We need to check you for weapons, and then we’ll be taking you back to Albany,” Agent Phillips said in that sexy British accent and then read us our Miranda rights. “If both of you would be so kind as to assume the position against the wall there, my partner and I will pat you down.” What was in Albany? I guessed an FBI office.

Said partner turned out to be Kyle dressed in a pair of suit pants that were at least a couple of inches too short on his long legs, exposing his white sneakers, and a white dress shirt that could have fit another of his skinny frame in it. Had he raided someone’s backyard clothesline for that stuff? He appeared uncertain, giving a subtle shrug when our eyes met.

Phillips must have found him and Iris after they’d made it to the ground, but where was she? A quick search of the crowd didn’t turn up any purple hair. Where had Phillips gotten the badge he must have shown to prove he was a Fed? Or was he really working for the FBI, hiding in plain sight in the true reality? Marcus had destroyed the former Machine sixty-five years ago, and some of the current guardians had woken up one day in the facility, wondering how they’d gotten there. Could Phillips be a survivor from that massacre?

Not that it mattered. If we weren’t surrounded by nervous cops, I might have hugged the guy for saving our bacon.