Chapter 18

It wasn"t safe for me to keep talking. They were better at this than I was. It was their day job, after all.

When I fell silent, the enemy did too.

My ears strained to pick up any useful bit of noise. Nothing.

How many men was I up against? One or two?

I wanted to believe it was only one, but I still wasn"t sure of our next move. A lot depended on what the weather decided to do.

If the rain stopped before dawn, he"d move in fast. On a heavily overcast night with no moon, the overwhelming advantage shifted back to him. He"d be able to move invisibly in the dark with the help of his goggles. Only one team would be playing blind—ours.

That scenario was bad enough. But what if he"d called in reinforcements?

Then we"d face hopeless odds.

My heart sped up. I did a deep-breathing exercise to slow it the fuck back down.

Our re-capture was only a matter of time.

Maybe more time than you think.

Even if he had phoned home, reinforcements wouldn"t arrive for hours, maybe days—the time needed to realize the first team couldn"t take care of business alone plus the time needed to scramble a follow-up.

One guy wouldn"t want to wait all that time beneath a tree. He"d have to sleep sometime—and if we were quick enough, quiet enough, we might even be able to get away and cause him even more trouble.

No. He wouldn"t wait. He was bringing the war to us.

The rain hovered at that halfway place between mist and drizzle. Thanks to the heavy cloud cover, we hadn"t seen the moon, much less the stars. Noah was so close that I tingled from my keen awareness of his body heat. Yet the darkness was so deep I couldn"t see the expression on his face.

"You might as well make it easy for yourself." The voice was much closer now. "Come on down from that tree. We"ll talk face to face."

"We can talk just fine from here," I said.

"You"re going to have to come down sometime."

"Make me."

He sighed noisily. A fake put-upon sigh. "A man could begin to lose patience. Listen, kid. You can"t win this war. We have tranquilizer guns. I was willing to give you a little time to see sense, but you"ve injured two of my men. One more aggressive action, and I"m shooting you down."

"Oh, come on. Make it a little believable." I could belly laugh too. "You don"t want to explain to the boss why their prize quarterback is dead."

"Fuck sake, son. Do you think we"re idiots? There"s no need to make you dead when we"ve got rhinoceros tranquilizers."

I didn"t have to ask Noah. We both already knew they had drugs.

"You think I"m bluffing? Ask your friend if I"m bluffing."

Noah squeezed my arm. He didn"t need to. I"d already decided not to react. But it felt good.

When I kept not saying anything, the silence stretched out. All this time, and we were only hearing the one guy. It was still weird. The first guy, yeah. I was pretty sure I took him out. He dropped like a rock. But the second guy was conscious and swearing from the hit.

Until he wasn"t.

Something happened, but what?

Were we really up against just one guy?

A guy who tried to trick us into saying something we shouldn"t. That didn"t work. So he packed in the psych play in favor of going back to the original plan.

Get those fucking kids out of that fucking tree.

"What happened to the other guy?" I asked Noah. "What"s he doing?"

"Which other guy?"

"Wait, what?"

"It isn"t just one guy being weird and quiet. It"s two. How long can you really knock a guy out cold by throwing a can of peaches at his head?"

Noah was figuring out the same things I was. If nothing else, the two of us were in sync.

"That"s what I was just thinking," I said. "We"re weirdly lucky he stayed out this long."

He puffed out his cheeks. Blew out a thoughtful breath. "Whatever the deal is with that, it won"t be going on forever. We wait too long, the others revive, and we"re up against three guys again."

I couldn"t think of a thing to say.

"One way or another," Noah said, "they"ve got us, haven"t they?"

"Never." I had to speak emphatically, because you always have to speak more emphatically when you know it"s a lie.

Noah snuggled up to me but didn"t contradict me. There was another, briefer silence.

We got in some good licks, but we"re in real trouble here.

Before we surrendered—if we surrendered—we still had this moment.

Wrapping my arms around him, I kissed him squarely on the mouth. A kiss wasn"t a lie. It was the truest promise there was.