Maya gave a throaty laugh. “Course he backed off.”
Doc leaned back, blinking as the wind blew dust into his pale eyes. “You think it likely that the villains will attempt to follow me?”
“Guess so, Doc.” She stood suddenly, brushing the little tabbies from her skirts. She stared across the small kitchen garden, with its neatly tilled rows of vegetables. Coming toward them was a very large ginger cat, stalking between the cabbages, tail held high like a bright orange beacon.
“Here comes Mehitabel,” Maya said. “Way she’s moving tells me that we’re about to have us some company. Best go get hid where I showed you, Doc.”
KRYSTY WAS SITTING UP sipping at a bowl of oatmeal with some wild honey stirred into it. She was still very fragile, but the draining effect of using the Gaia power to save her life was gradually wearing off.
She had sat and listened while Ryan took her quickly through everything that had happened since she became unconscious, explaining why it became necessary for the ailing Doc to flee from Hopeville.
“Couldn’t you have tried…tried to get at the weapons? Mebbe it would have been easier. Safer?”
Ryan had argued against that idea, pointing out that Wolfe only needed a feather of an excuse to set in the balance to justify murdering them all. And the odds were way too long against them. It was just a question of waiting a while longer.
Now the wind was rising, making the flames of the big central fire tear sideways in streaks of red and orange, rattling a loose shingle on the roof.
J.B., as taciturn as ever, stood and peered out through the dirt-smeared window. “Some folks putting up storm shutters,” he observed.
Dean was on his bed. “Cover for escape?”
Ryan nodded. “Possibly. Need to be a sight worse than this. Now, if there was to be another shaker, then it might give us a chance.”
OWSLEY LED his sweating men up the narrow side trail. To his frustration they hadn’t been able to find any definite tracks of the old man, but he felt confident that they had trailed him down to the cottage of the mad old cat woman.
“Hey, in there,” he shouted, lifting his voice over the soaring wind. “Bitch! We know you got a guest, and we fucking want him out here. You got just thirty seconds to come out with him, or we come in and we come in hard and heavy. Do some damage and mebbe some hurting of your cats. And you. Thirty seconds, witch, and your time starts now!”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Doc could hear the shouting.
He was crouched in a sweet-scented linen chest of carved walnut and cedar. Maya had told him that it had once belonged to her great-great-great grandmother, taking it back way before the long winters and the horrors of skydark. The acanthus pattern around the lid was deeply polished, and the ornate key turned smoothly in the oiled brass lock.
The woman had led him, holding his large hand in her slender, dry fingers, up a twisting cupboard staircase, into a low-beamed attic. It was crowded with antique items of furniture, many of them so old that they actually took Doc back to his childhood, some two hundred years ago.
There was a beautiful mahogany credenza and an elegant pedal harmonium, made in Woodstock, with ivory knobs and keys; a sideboard so big that Doc guessed it had to break down into smaller constituent parts, unless they’d originally built the attic around it; a round table, beautifully veneered, with a pie-crust edge and a single, central claw foot.
And the linen chest.
At first it didn’t seem possible for Doc to coil his length into it, but Maya removed some fragile sheets from it, and he was able to hunker down. Cramped and stooped, he heard the key turn in the lock.
For a passing moment Doc felt the frightening taint of claustrophobia, sucking in a deep breath, wondering just how airtight the old chest might be. And just how long that remaining air might last him. With an effort he controlled his respiration, fighting against the sudden temptation of a violent coughing fit. He’d seen enough of the sec men to figure that they wouldn’t deal kindly with Maya Tennant if they found out that she’d been sheltering the object of their anger.