Chapter 10

The four of them were on their third flight, this one taking them to England, and now they had a doctor on board to boot. Veni watched as the latest addition to their group worked on her mother. Veni sat close by, holding her mother’s hand. “Will she be okay?” she asked the doctor, for at least the tenth time.

The doctor nodded and smiled at her, patiently explaining, “It’s just the drugs. She’s sleeping them off,” he stated reassuringly.

She sat back at Reid’s nudge and looked over at him.

Reid murmured, “Give her body a chance to let the drugs run their course. She’s in good hands.”

Veni nodded but kept casting wary glances toward the doctor.

Finally Reid grabbed her gently by the arm and tucked her closer. “Maybe you should get a nap.” She glared at him, but he smiled back. “When you were drugged, you just slept it off, so no need to worry.”

“Yeah?”

“Right now, that’s what your mom needs to do. We’ll get her fully checked out, now that we know that this is mostly due to the drugs. Once we hit England, you’ll be taken to a hospital as well to get checked over even further.”

“Maybe we should have stopped somewhere else,” she argued. He gave her a pointed look, and she winced. “I know. I know. I’m the one who insisted on coming straight here,” she murmured. “I just wanted to get some distance from that nightmare.”

“And you are. We got you back here, and you’ll be just fine,” he said, “and so will she. Right now, all we need to do is give her a chance to sleep.”

Veni groaned and laid her head back against the seat and closed her eyes, but her head kept rolling from side to side with the turbulence. Finally he nudged her gently and whispered, “Come on. You can get a little closer than that.”

She half smiled at him and curled up against him, his arm around her shoulders, then let her eyelids drift closed. “You sure she’ll be okay?” she asked, this time barely a whisper.

“I’m sure.”

Something in his tone she didn’t quite like though. She didn’t recognize it, didn’t know what it meant, but there was just that… tone. She lifted her head to face him. “Do you think we’re being followed?”

“Followed? No, not necessarily,” he replied, a bit too carefully for her taste. “A little hard to do when we’re up in the air, but are we being tracked? Absolutely.”

She stared at him in horror, holding out her arms. “Do you think they put trackers on us?”

He shrugged. “We’ve checked your mom, but we haven’t done a full check on you, and we probably should,” he admitted. “Mostly the doctor’s check on your mom made me realize that it was possible, particularly when you both were sleeping so much, while captive.”

She winced. “Of course that would allow them to figure out what we were up to at every step.”

“Exactly. I suspect that could also be why you were struggling to get messages out.”

She frowned at him. “I didn’t even consider that,” she admitted. “I was thinking it was the drugs, or the place where we were being held. I… I…” She stopped, completely flummoxed. “Why wouldn’t I have thought of that?”

“Because it’s not what you do,” he stated calmly. “You’re not expected to know all the nuances of this kind of nightmare. Why would you? You live on the other side of the veil.”

“And yet now I don’t have a choice, since I’m on this side.”

“But you don’t have to stay here. You can have a nice calm, peaceful life, once this nightmare is over.”

“Can I though?” she argued. “My mom is pretty insistent that I work with her and that I do the work that she wants me to do.” At that, he turned to her, his gaze sharp. She shrugged. “It’s about the only thing we’ve ever fought about.”

“She believes pretty strongly in what she’s doing, doesn’t she?”

“Absolutely. And I… I know why. I get it. Obviously a tremendous amount of science can be developed, if we can get the stem cells that she’s working with to accept healing energy. However, it’s not just stem cells. It’s all kind of cells…”

“As in, everything that lives has cells,” he interrupted, thinking of the implications, truly understanding the stakes now.

She nodded. “Then potentially her work could move forward at a much faster pace.”

“Sure, but at what cost?”

“That is where the problem comes in,” she said, with a wry look in his direction. “Not everybody particularly cares about that aspect.”

“Yet they should. She’s your mother.”

“Yeah, but she’s also a very dedicated scientist,” she noted. “I have never not known who my mother was. Still, I love her dearly, and she’s been the best person ever in my world.”

He nodded. “We’ll talk to her about it all, when and if we ever get out of the air. We’re on our third plane, and I’m feeling a little stir-crazy myself,” he shared, with a small smile in her direction.

She nodded. “I need a shower. I need food.… Yet I know I insisted that we continue on the trip as fast as we could, and that was mostly my panic speaking.”

“It was also the best answer in terms of our own ability to get you both to safety,” Reid noted. “So none of us were arguing. You can have a shower in a little bit. That’s hardly the be all and end all of your world right now.”

She laughed. “You’re just lucky I’m not high maintenance.”

He flashed her a bright grin. “High maintenance doesn’t really cut it in this field.” He chuckled. “You are what you have always been,… you.”

“Why did we lose touch?” she asked, looking up at him, with a frown.

“Because I would continue in this field, and you didn’t want anything to do with it.”

“Yeah, that didn’t work out so well though, did it?” she asked, shaking her head. “I mean, seriously look at how it didn’t work out.”

“Maybe, yet you needed to go your own route, maybe develop what you could do, so you would know and are at peace with your decisions, then move on from there,” he suggested. “You didn’t want anything to do with this before. I’m sure this captivity nightmare has affected you in some ways, and I’m certainly not trying to push you into anything. However, if you have abilities that you can develop, then maybe you should reconsider.”

She gave him a blank look for a moment, and then he smiled, tucked her head closer, and added, “But you don’t have to decide anything right now. Maybe down the road—and only if you want to.”

“It would allow me to keep working with my mother,” she conceded, yawning.

“But that doesn’t seem to be your calling either.”

She shook her head. “No, it isn’t, and yet I don’t know what I really want.”

“You have time to figure it out.”

She snuggled in closer and whispered, “I forgot how nice you were.” She caught his wince and chuckled. “It always amazes me how people don’t like to be told they’re nice.”

“Guys don’t like to be described as nice,” he clarified, flashing her a wicked grin. “We prefer ravishing, devastating, handsome, even cute, but nice?… I don’t know.”

She looked at him strangely and said, “But nice is what absolutely everybody really wants.”

“Maybe,” he acknowledged. “And yet, in order to find nice, maybe people need to be nice, and I see much less of that in the world.”

“That’s because of the world that you’re living in,” she pointed out. “It never even occurred to me when I was calling out for you that you would be doing this,” she shared, with a wave of her hand. “Yet apparently it’s what you do now.”

He nodded. “It’s exactly what I do now, and I’ve been in it for quite a while. Once I realized what I could do, I… I couldn’t let it go. I had to develop it more and more, but still… I struggled.”

“Interesting, but you were very gifted.”

“Maybe, yet apparently, from what I’ve read and heard, people do better when they’re not alone at it.”

She frowned at him. “What difference would it make?’

“Something to do with a ground, something to do with that extra boost of power when you need it.” He shrugged. “It’s one of the reasons why I will work with Terk after this.”

“Right,” she said, “that interesting person you keep talking about.”

“Exactly. I thought maybe you’d already spoken with him.”

She straightened up and looked at him. “When would I have done that?” she asked in amazement.

“I wondered if he was the person you talked to in your head that one day, but Terk said it wasn’t him.”

“I’m starting to wonder if maybe… I was completely off my rocker.”

He smiled. “Even if you were, that stress alone would have been enough reason to break the barriers the way you did.”

She slumped back against him. “But it does certainly bear thinking about, if I can talk to somebody else like this,” she said. “Yet my biggest concern is that it’s not somebody I want to be talking to.”

He just nodded and didn’t say anything.

She sighed. “You used to do the same thing when we were in college.”

He looked at her in surprise. “Same thing?”

“Yeah, you would just give me that look, as if to say that I would work it out on my own eventually.”

He burst out laughing, getting glances from the others on the plane.

Veni sighed. “I was always the butt of the jokes.”

“Good Lord, how could you possibly have felt that way?”

“I don’t know. It just seemed that way,” she muttered. “Don’t forget. At that time I was dealing with parents who were having a lot of issues. I was young and lashing out more than I needed to,” she admitted, thinking back. “College was a pretty wild stage for me.”

“I remember that you were definitely into enjoying it. I never really enjoyed college quite as much as you did.”

“And yet it wasn’t so much that I was enjoying college itself, as much as it was getting me away from my stressful home life,” she clarified. “My parents hadn’t come to a full divorce at that point in time. Even now I’m not sure whether they have done the paperwork to legally dissolve the marriage or will just stay separated forever. I ended up with my mother because you have to live with somebody, until you are on your own,” she said in misery. “And that’s another problem with the divorce. Which parent the kids choose to live with is usually the one they’re closest to, yet they always feel like they’re betraying the other parent. There’s just no winning in a divorce.”

“Depends on how the family handles it, I think,” he suggested. “Granted, there are good and bad choices, but not making choices can sometimes be worse.”

She couldn’t agree more. “The end result was that I didn’t have much of a decent relationship with my father. Whether that was my fault or not, I don’t know.”

Just then a yawn overtook her ability to talk, and he tucked her in a gentle hug and whispered, “Forget about it for now. Just get some sleep. It will be a while before you recover, and you need to relax.”

“I’m getting that impression,” she muttered, “although I was hoping I would snap out of it really quickly.”

“You might, but no way to know. Still, we’ll get you fully checked over once we land, and that’ll be an ordeal in itself. Get some sleep while you can.”

She winced. “We could just skip that part.”

“Nope, we can’t,” he declared. “We have to ensure that you didn’t come home with anything that shouldn’t be there.”

She shuddered at the thought. “Thanks for stopping me from being able to sleep now for a while.”

At that, he gave her another tug against his arms and reminded her, “You’re safe now. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

And, for the first time in a long time, she believed it. She whispered, “Good, because I don’t think I can take too much more of this.”

“I mean it,” he stated. “We’ll connect with MI6 here soon, but first you need to get some sleep, so you’re ready for the ordeal coming up.”

“And it’ll be an ordeal, won’t it?”

“We must know everything that happened to you, how it happened, the people you may or may not have seen, all of it,” he detailed. “And these are questions I would be asking you myself, if you weren’t quite so exhausted. So take the opportunity while you have it and just crash for a bit.”

She let herself physically relax and then tried to shut down her busy thoughts, once again appreciating the safety of his arms. She’d expected a rescue attempt but certainly not by him. Yet she had to admit feeling a great deal of comfort in seeing a familiar face and somebody with whom she’d had such a great connection before. That he was here and had answered her call for help made it even more important. She understood what he said about developing her skills, and maybe it was time to do something about that, but how could she do that, and her mother’s work too?

Was there a way to do both?

She was not sure at this point. Knowing her mother, Veni didn’t think so. Still, her heart heavy and her thoughts tumultuous, she drifted off into an exhausted sleep.

*

Reid looked overat the doctor, who was monitoring Veni’s mother. “How is Natalia?” Reid asked.

The doctor nodded. “She’s holding, just needs to sleep it off. I’ve run a couple scans on her, but I don’t have anything as high-tech as what we have back home. We’ll need to get that level of equipment just to ensure no tracker is on her.”

“Of course,” Reid muttered. “Let’s hope there isn’t. It would be nice if we could catch a break on this.”

“You caught lots of breaks. You rescued both women from the Russians,” the doctor noted in wonder. “That will go a long way to keeping MI6 off your back.”

Reid laughed. “That’s the hope.” He looked over at Anders. “Will you stay in England with us?”

Anders nodded. “I will for a little bit, until we’ve got this wrapped up for sure. If something is still outstanding here, we need to sort it out before we get too far along,” he muttered. “Levi told me to stick around for as long as I need to, and I’ve heard from Terk on it too. He mentioned he would appreciate the extra time from me, so I’m in England for a bit. I’ll give you at least a day.”

“I’ll take it,” Reid agreed. “Not sure what we got going on here, but Veni seems to think that she’s not out of danger. At least her system hasn’t calmed down yet.”

“I think that’s probably pretty normal too,” Anders replied, as Veni slept soundly in Reid’s arms. “She seems to have taken to having you here.”

“I think it’s more about seeing a familiar face. She’ll get pretty feisty, pretty quick, particularly if we decide we’ll have to keep her hidden for a while. She’ll want to find her new life and jump right into it.”

At that, Anders stared at him in surprise. “She doesn’t realize that there’s still a lot of danger in her world?”

“I’m not sure that she does,” Reid stated. “At least nothing I’m hearing from her is giving me that impression. It’s a concern.”

Anders winced. “That would be too bad because honestly it’ll be a while before she’s completely free. Even then I’m not sure that complete freedom will be in the cards for either of them. If you think about it, there will be quite a hue and cry over their disappearance.”

“Yep.” Reid nodded. “It kind of depends on what MI6 had set up for them in the first place, and that should kick into effect, now that we’ve got them back again. Anyway, that’s what I’m hoping, but… you and I both know best laid plans and all that.”

Anders laughed. “Isn’t that the truth,” he muttered, as he stared out the window of the plane. “I do see land coming up. So, with any luck, we should be landing within another half hour, and we can get some more answers. So I’ll grab twenty minutes.” And, with that, he settled back, crossed his arms over his chest, and closed his eyes.

Reid wished he could do the same, but it would be hard to maintain his hold on Veni. Yet he took a few deep breaths and just let the world disappear around him in order to catch a little bit of peace and quiet for whatever was coming. No way he would leave Veni in the lurch for whatever was coming up ahead, but she had to understand that having signed up for whatever help they could get from the UK government meant that the government would want help in return.

Not everybody liked paying the piper on the other end of something like this. Plus it could very likely require that both women remain hidden for quite a while, until MI6 confirmed things were okay again, something neither Veni nor Natalia would likely be very happy about.

Reid turned his head to study her mother, to see just how Natalia was doing, but there appeared to be absolutely no change in her facial expression at all. She was out cold and had been for a long time. Reid caught the worry on the doctor’s face, and the doctor didn’t like anything much about this either, as if she’d been under for too long. That would be Reid’s take as well.

With any luck they could get Natalia into a proper facility and run a bunch of tests and find out if anything else was going on. Reid held Veni close, as they started their descent. When they touched down, he gently woke her up, smiling at the confused look on her face, as she stared up at him.

“Yep, it’s me.” He chuckled. “And the circumstances have changed, but not a whole lot. We are coming in to land right now.”

She shifted upright, blinking to look around, and muttered, “That’s good though. This is England, right?” But her tone was uncertain, as if she still wasn’t too sure as to what had happened.

“Yes, we’re coming into England now,” he confirmed. “So all is well.”

“Maybe,” she muttered, as she stared around at the lights coming up on the runway below them. “You’re sure it’s safe, right?”

“It is safe here at the moment,” he replied. “An escort waits for us down there.”

“Great, as if I wanted to announce our arrival to the world.”

“The escort will be MI6, not exactly a public announcement,” he clarified, with a note of humor.

She shot him a look and then nodded. “I know. I’m sorry. I sound very ungrateful, don’t I?”

“This is as good a time as any to get your grateful hat on,” he warned, “because there will be a lot of questions coming up.”

“Do I get a shower and some food?” she asked again.

“You will, but maybe not as quickly as you want.” Her shoulders slumped at that, and he gave her a reassuring hug. “But we’ll be fighting to get you what you need. So just chill, and we’ll get there.”

“I’m more worried about my mother,” she conceded, her gaze going to the sleeping woman. “She’s been sleeping way too long.”

“Maybe, but the doctors will sort that out within a few minutes.”

She nodded. “Then I want to go to the hospital first.”

“Oh, don’t worry. That’s exactly where you’re going because we also have to put you through a couple tests to ensure that all is well.”

“I’m fine,” she stated immediately.

He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter what you say. You’ve been held captive for several days, and people need to ensure everything is okay.”

She groaned. “I really won’t like this next stage, will I?”

He smiled. “You’ll be fine.”

She hesitated, looked at him sideways, and asked, “Will you stay with me?’

He frowned at that. “My job is to hand you over to MI6.”

“Great,” she muttered. “Like a piece of meat, huh?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” he replied gently. “That’s certainly not the way I would look at it.”

“No, but it’s the way I’m starting to look at it,” she muttered, staring away. “It would be better if you could stay with us.”

“Better, why?” he asked.

She hesitated and then answered him. “I would feel better. I don’t know these people. I don’t know anything about them, and, for all I know, I’ll be led right back into another trap, and I’ll never get out of it this time. If you were there to help me, I’d feel a little more confident that at least someone is working for our best interests. I can’t be sure that anybody else here is.”

Anders studied her with interest, then asked, “Do you have any particular reason to feel like you can’t trust anybody here?”

Frowning at his question, she shrugged. “Just the fact that I don’t really trust anybody right now.”

“I can understand that.” Anders nodded, then looked at Reid. “It’s up to you, if you want to make that call,” Anders suggested. “You can probably make it part of the deal.”

“I will,” Reid decided, “and we’ll see what MI6 has to say about it.”

“Maybe let Terk know where we stand too,” Anders added. “Terk can pull a lot of strings for you.”

With that said, as soon as Veni sat up, Reid pulled out his phone and quickly sent Terk a message. Just landed. Veni is adamant that I stay close, that she doesn’t trust any of the people coming into their orbit right now.

Terk sent back a quick message. Understandable, so stay close.

“My orders are to stay close,” Reid told Anders and Veni.

At that, Anders grinned at them. “Easiest orders ever.”

She smiled broadly. “Even if you’re just doing it for my sake,” she teased Reid.

“There is no just for your sake,” he said. “You and I have been close friends, even when geography and time separated us. So, when you got into a hell of a lot of trouble, I’m happy to help any way I can.”

She squeezed his hand. “Good, because I’m really not sure what’s coming at me now,” she murmured, her tone worried.

When the airplane door opened, two men stepped on board, their gazes assessing, and when they saw both of the women, there was clearly a certain amount of relief. For the one agent, it was almost as if a checkbox had been ticked. “Both women are here. Good. Let’s go.” He turned to look at Reid and Anders. “We’ll take it from here.”

Anders smiled. “You’ll take it from here, but you’ll take it with us.”

The lead agent frowned. “My orders are to take them to the hospital.”

“That’s great.” Reid stood up. “My orders are to stay close to both of them. So I guess, we will all go to the hospital.”

The lead agent obviously didn’t like this situation. “We’re MI6, and these women are now under our jurisdiction.”

“That’s nice, and I’m part of Terk’s team, Guardian Security, and these women have not been released from my care,” he snapped.

A standoff was happening, frozen for a long moment, until the lead agent replied, “I’ll have to check with my boss.”

“You do that,” Reid stated. “We can wait.”

He glared at him and motioned at the man who came with him. “Stand guard.” With that, he turned and stepped outside.

Reid looked over at Anders, who shot him a smile. Anders whispered, “These guys will take everything from you if you give it to them,” he muttered. “So don’t give an inch.” His tone was low enough that the other agent couldn’t catch his words.

As far as Reid was concerned, this was standard protocol. Still, as long as he had orders from Terk, that’s where he drew the line.

Veni squeezed his fingers intently, almost hugging him. She was so close, her nerves stretched, her own pain and stress coming to the fore.

He wrapped his arms around her. “It’s fine. This is just politics.”

She nodded but didn’t say anything, her gaze watchful, her body tense.

He kept her close, an arm around her, waiting for the lead agent to return. When he stepped back inside the plane, he shot one look at both men and snapped, “You’re to accompany us.”

“We probably should have just told you to contact Jonas,” Anders noted.

The lead agent nodded, yet with disgust. “Yeah, that would have helped.”

Reid chuckled. “We do this all the time.”

“Yeah, we do too,” the agent stated, “but rarely with as much difficulty,” shooting Veni an odd glance.

At that, she stiffened and glared right back at him. “If Reid isn’t coming with me, I’m not going anywhere.”

“He is coming, so there is no need to discuss it,” he muttered.

And, with that, she smiled. Still holding his hand, she and Reid disembarked, while the doctor and Anders gently secured her mother on a gurney, ready to transport. Once on the tarmac, Veni was ushered to a nearby vehicle, but she refused to get in, not until she watched her mother get loaded into an ambulance. She turned and looked at Reid.

“It’s fine,” he muttered. “We’re heading to the hospital now too, right behind them.”

“What if we aren’t?” she asked, her tone suspicious.

“I will get you to the hospital,” Reid promised. “We’ll check in on your mother. Don’t worry.”

She sighed. “Yeah, well, it seems that suspicion will be my bedfellow for a long time right now,” she muttered. “It’ll take a while before I learn to trust again.”

“And it’s never a bad idea to double-check, to ensure that everything happens the way you need it to happen,” he suggested. “Your mother’s care and your own well-being are paramount, so let’s get you both to the hospital.”

She sighed.

He finally ushered her into the back of the vehicle, and they sat here, waiting until the ambulance had secured her mother for the trip. When the ambulance proceeded to leave the tarmac, they fell into line behind it.

Anders rode in the front seat of the vehicle. He looked back at her and smiled. “Okay?”

“Better, at least,” she murmured.