Tommy Nightmare(105)

“Oh, I see.” His forehead wrinkled briefly. “Would you mind showing me some identification?”

“It’s in my purse.” Darcy sat up and pointed at the empty chair. “Wait. It was right there.”

The hotel manager looked at the empty chair. “Where, ma’am?”

“Oh. Shoot.” Darcy looked around the room, but she didn’t see it anywhere. “I think that Mexican angel might have taken it.”

“A Mexican angel took your purse?” the maintenance guy asked.

“Yeah. But they’re coming back. They’ve only been gone a minute. Or maybe an hour. I forget. They’ll be back, though.”

“Ma’am, if you cannot provide identification, I’m very sorry to say that you must come down to my office, where you can wait for the police,” the hotel manager said.

“Police?” Darcy was getting worried now. This sounded serious. The golden fog over her mind began to lift. “Wait. My purse has to be somewhere.” Darcy heaved herself to her feet and looked around the room. She checked under the bed, and in the bathroom. “It has to be.”

“There is also the matter of the quite sizable bill you’ve accumulated,” the hotel manager said. “Upwards of nineteen hundred dollars. Given the circumstances, I am afraid my employers would require me to accept only cash.”

“I don’t have money like that!”

“Then perhaps you should not have chosen The Mandrake House for accommodations in Charleston. I must insist you come now and wait for the police.”

Darcy moved to gather her things, but she didn’t seem to have any. No purse, no suitcase. And how had she ended up in Charleston, anywho? Where were those people who claimed to be angels?

Darcy didn’t understand what was going on, but clearly she was in big bunches of trouble.





Ashleigh held tight to Tommy as his bike roared up I-26, the fastest route out of Charleston and away from the whole mess. A convoy of green trucks, the National Guard, flowed into the city on the inbound lanes of the interstate.

She felt exhilarated. Seth had escaped a bit faster than she’d wanted, but besides that, the night had gone extremely well. She knew how Jenny would react once she got cornered. Ashleigh just hoped the scientists got her captured before the soldiers caught up with her. They could keep Jenny locked up and out of Ashleigh’s way for years and years, maybe for the rest of this lifetime, if she was lucky.

And poor little Seth would be all alone, too. Ashleigh wished she really had killed him, but it just hadn’t been in the cards tonight.

Best of all, any trouble would stick to Darcy Metcalf, not to her. She was just Esmeralda Medina Rios, the lovely girl from California who’d stayed in the background and kept her hands clean of everything.

And Tommy wasn’t so bad. He was very acceptably attractive, and she understood how to use him. He was frustrating because he could resist her power. But he wasn’t the brightest bulb, and she had fragments of several lifetimes of memories over him. She could press buttons he didn’t even know he had.

His power made him extremely useful, and it even amplified her own. They had conquered empires together, here and there across space and time.

She held him tighter. It was good to be alive again, without all the hassle of gestation and birth and infancy. She had a nice new body she actually enjoyed, a new identity, and the whole future ahead of her.

Ashleigh began to think over her options.





Chapter Forty-Seven


Alexander drove only a mile and a half before parking outside a small airport with only one runway. He lifted her from the car to carry her in his arms again. He left the keys dangling in the ignition and the doors unlocked.

He opened a spiked wrought-iron gate with a keycard, and then carried her inside, toward the long hangar building.

“I think I’d rather walk now,” she said.

“As you like.” Alexander set her down.

“Where are you really taking me?”

“I have a place down in Mexico,” he said. “Near the beach. Good spot to lay low for a while, let your trail get cold. Let them run out of steam.”

“For how long?”

“Weeks. Months. It’s the only safe choice.” He opened a small door at the end of the hangar with the keycard.

“I can’t do that. My dad…”

“He’s going to be fine. I told you.”

“But I have to let him know I’m okay. And Seth. Well, maybe not Seth, but at least my dad.”

“You can send him a postcard,” Alexander said. “Tell him you’re in Chicago, or Seattle. I can have somebody mail it for you. But that’s it. You’ve got Homeland Security all over you right now.”