“The stealth torpedo.”
“I hate that thing.” Dahlia shivered. “We need a boat. Stealing is my specialty. Give me a few minutes and I’ll have transportation. At night, in the bayou, the canals all look the same on the waterway,” she added as a precaution.
“I’ll get us there, Dahlia,” Nicolas promised. He considered protesting as she slipped away to find a boat for them, but decided against it. He had respect for her skills. She knew what she was doing. Maybe that was what worried him the most. If she wanted to slip away from him… this was her territory. She knew the bayou, and she knew the islands. He could find her, but it would take time.
He thought about her tone. Home. Family. Betrayal. He had experienced the loss of his grandfathers and his world had turned upside down. Dahlia was grieving in the midst of running for her life. She had spent most of her life being betrayed on some level, and he was asking her to trust a complete stranger. Not only to trust him with her life, but with her heart.
“Are you going to go to sleep or come with me?” Dahlia’s voice called to him from the water. Few people could sneak up on him without his knowledge, and the fact that she had reinforced his belief that she was a true GhostWalker.
He sat up and searched the river. There was no boat that he could see, but he followed the sound of her voice, walking through the reeds around a narrow bend. The boat lay low on the surface, Dahlia barely a dark shadow sitting in one end. Nicolas lowered the pack into the boat, regarding it with a prejudiced eye. “Are you certain that will hold me? Is it a child’s toy? A raft?”
Her answering laugh was soft and fleeting, but it was there. “Big baby. Get in. It doesn’t make much noise and it’s sturdy. Of course once in a while alligators think they can crawl aboard and share the space. I’m letting you do the navigation, and if you get us lost, I won’t let you live it down.”
The small teasing note in her voice surprised them both. Dahlia rubbed at the mud on her face as she watched him climb gingerly aboard. The shallow boat rocked but didn’t submerge as he settled next to the tiny engine. “You look good with mud all over you,” he observed.
“It’s just as well,” she replied. “I seem to spend a lot more time with mud on me than with makeup.” She turned her head toward the middle of the river. “Get us out of here, Nicolas. I need to be away from everyone and everything.”
In profile, even in the night, he could see the sadness on her face. He reached out and touched her, ran his finger down her cheek. “It will be all right, Dahlia.”
She didn’t answer but settled into the boat and kept her face averted from him. He indicated his pack. “If you’re cold, there’s a jacket in there.”
That earned him a faint smile. “The magic pack.” She opened it and drew out the amethyst spheres. “I think you saved Jesse. Thank you.”
He nodded solemnly. “I think we may have managed it. I never felt that kind of power before. I’ve felt it gathering inside of me, but I was never able to focus it or use it. You did that for me.”
“Did I?” Dahlia spun the set of balls beneath her fingertips, concentrating, her tone vague as if she weren’t paying him much attention.
“You know you did.”
“I know I should be very sick from everything that happened, but I’m not. We used up the energy together. It wasn’t just me. Violent energy is the worst kind. It’s like handling unstable nitroglycerin.” She kept the spheres spinning beneath her palm, staring at them intently rather than at Nicolas. “I’m shaky, but I’m not overloaded. Whatever we did together helped.”
“Energy naturally wants to disperse,” Nicolas said.
“Yes, it’s a law of nature, yet I disrupt it. I draw energy to me like a magnet. I haven’t really figured out precisely how. And I can’t change it or lessen the drawing.”