"Radio?" he asked, and I gave him a thumbs-up. "Ley line?" he asked next, and I hesitated, reaching out, finding the barest whisper. It would be enough.
"I'm good," I said, and Ivy's eyes tightened at my word choice. I still had my splat gun, for the Turn's sake, and I wasn't going to hide upstairs with Dr. Cordova. "Don't hang around on my account," I said, and he peered down the dark hallway as Jenks rose to check out the upper shaft, flying right through his previous light trail. He really was amazing, when you got right down to it, and I wondered why they'd stuck him with me.
Glenn snapped another glow stick, and a cold, sickly green light joined Jenks's pure glow. Glenn handed it to me, and then checked his watch. Wings clattering, Jenks dropped back down from the upper shaft.
"What are you still here for?" he said snarkily as he hovered at my shoulder. "We've got this. Go on!"
"Jenks, if you want to go with Ivy, I'm good with that," I said, thinking he'd be of better use with her than sitting at an air shaft with me.
"Hell no!" he said, landing on my shoulder. His wings stopped, and it grew darker. "I'm staying here. You never know. They might come this way."
Glenn nodded sharply, checking his watch again. "Okay. Sing out if you see something. Channel seven puts you through to me alone. You know where the dial is?"
I bobbed my head, and Jenks swore at me when my hair hit him. "Thanks, Uncle Glenn," I said sarcastically, wanting to know why he'd arranged for no Inderlanders at the take zone. He'd be griping about it if it was Dr. Cordova's idea, so clearly it was his own - and a faint feeling of mistrust slipped into me.
Behind him, Nina was beginning to look impatient. "I can hear them," Nina whispered. "Little men, like mice in the walls. We need to go."
"Yeah, go," Jenks said, as clearly unnerved by her comment as much as I was.
With a last nod, Glenn turned away. Ivy and Nina followed, and in three seconds, the sound of their steps faded. In another three, they turned a corner and the light from Glenn's glow stick was gone.
I exhaled and leaned against the wall, listening to the silence and breathing in the scent of fear that was more than forty years old. Slowly I recognized the draft pulling my hair up. Tilting my head, I turned the earpiece down and slid to the floor. "How long till they move on them?" I breathed.
"Fifteen minutes, sixteen seconds," Jenks said from my shoulder.
I was silent, then crossed my arms and shifted my weight to my other hipbone. "We're not going to see any action, are we?"
"If you go by Glenn's prediction, not a fairy's chance in a pixy garden," Jenks said. "But I wouldn't be here if I didn't think they were going to screw it up and send them our way. The bastards are going to run, and it won't be for the back door."
"That's what I think, too." I smiled in the dark and waited.
Chapter Twenty-four
The green glow stick that Glenn had left me made Jenks look like a tiny, sickly wraith as he sat on my knee with his legs pulled up, mirroring me. It seemed colder now that I wasn't moving, and my back was to the curved wall as I sat beside the ventilation shaft, my shoulder bag next to me. The draft was pulling the stray strands of my hair up and back. I rolled the glow stick between my palms as I listened to the sporadic radio chatter. I had the speaker cranked since it wasn't in my ear, dangling down my front so Jenks could hear it, too. The conversations revolved around HAPA: who they were, what they were capable of, how many times they'd evaded arrest. I should've been listening, but I was thinking about Trent's charms.
"You okay?" Jenks asked, his wings glittering like they held water drops.
I smiled, remembering how beautiful his wings were close up when I'd shrunk down to help him through the first difficult day after his wife died. "Thinking about Trent's charms," I admitted.
Jenks scowled, his angular features pinching as he picked at his boots. "Yeah? That Pandora charm he made you almost killed you. You should've let me bury them in the garden."
I dragged my shoulder bag closer, peering down at the blue and gold pins. It was hard to tell the difference in the dim light, but I shoved two paralyzing charms in my right boot, two blinding charms in my left.
"Oh God. You're going to use them!" Jenks moaned, and I moved my knee wildly until he took off.
"I'll look pretty stupid if I need them and I don't have them," I said, wiggling my foot until the cool metal warmed and their pinch vanished. I wasn't one for organization, but even I knew that leaving loose charms rattling in a bag wasn't a good idea, and as Jenks pantomimed hanging himself, I gathered the rest, slipping them into a zippered inner pocket of my shoulder bag where they wouldn't interfere with my reach for the splat gun. I still didn't know what the tiny ring Trent had left me did, and I looked at it, remembering what Jenks had said about his boys. Trent had simply forgotten. That's all.
"Do I have time to make a call?" I asked, leaning over to get my phone out of my bag.
"What? Right now?" Jenks dropped back down to my knee, his expression disgusted. "Seriously, Rachel, it was sweet and all that he made you charms, but are you willing to trust your life to Trent's maybe skills?"
The memory of watching him preparing to break into the Withons' high-security compound and steal his own daughter filled my thoughts. It wasn't how good he had looked in that black thief outfit, every line of muscle showing, or the obvious preparations he'd made, all the way down to getting me to help him get there alive. It was his confidence, his desire. I'd seen it under the arch before it fell, in the Arizona desert when he summoned Ku'Sox, and in a stupid little bar in Las Vegas when he didn't want to leave to get our car. I'd seen it yesterday afternoon when he helped me with Al. He was trying to be what he wanted, and he really . . . wasn't half bad. For some weird reason, I trusted him. God help me.
If he got me killed, I was going to be pissed.
"How much time do we have?" I asked Jenks again, my pulse hammering as I turned my phone on, praying I'd get a signal. One bar. It might be enough, and Jenks was silent as I scrolled through my recently called numbers and hit Trent's.
"Enough if you're quick about it," Jenks said, his expression worried. His wings moved fitfully as he stood, his back almost to me as a show of his ambivalence.
"I just want to know," I said as I tossed my hair from my ear and put the phone to it.
It rang three times before it was picked up, and I fidgeted while Jenks pouted. I didn't know what I was going to say, a feeling that was compounded when the line clicked open and Trent's very muzzy voice murmured, "Rachel? Mmm, hi."