Royal (Terk’s Guardians #9)

Chapter 4

J anna stayed flat on the ground, as footsteps raced toward her, with Calum half beside her, half on top of her, making sure she didn’t move. She heard voices behind them screaming in Russian. She understood enough that the shooters were sure they’d hit somebody and were coming in to check. She didn’t move at all. When Calum was roughly picked up and dropped off beside her, and then another set of hands grabbed Janna to see if she was alive, she knew almost instinctively what Calum would do, as soon as they dropped him.

She watched it happen in slow motion as Calum rose up, almost as if a ghost on the wind, and wiped out the man who had reached for them. Meanwhile Rick came out of the shadows and took out the second man. She didn’t know what to say, but there was no time to talk, as she was quickly jerked to her feet and told to run. She ran straight ahead, not having any idea where she was supposed to go, but any place was better than staying where she had been.

No more gunfire sounded, and, when she was tackled from behind, she lay flat, hearing Calum say, “Stay still, just don’t move.” She didn’t. She froze, her heart slamming against her chest, her breathing coming out as if heavy diesel exhaust.

Finally it all calmed, and Calum whispered, “Okay, we’re in the clear.”

She opened her eyes and whispered back, “How the hell can we be in the clear after that?”

“We took them out,” he said, his tone harsh, as her eyes widened. “No, we didn’t kill them, but when they wake up, they’ll wake up mad and with a headache, and that’ll just piss them off. We have to get the hell out of here in a hurry.”

And, with that, she was helped to her feet again and noted they were in a forest, hidden for the most part. “We need wheels,” she muttered, looking around.

“Yeah, you got some?” Calum quipped.

She looked at him and nodded. “Yeah, some in that barn over there. I just don’t know whether they run or not. The energy tells me that mechanical logic, a car, is inside, but I don’t know whether it’s functional.”

He looked at her, then over at Rick, who holstered the additional weapon that he’d garnered and slipped into the barn. When they heard a car start seconds later, Calum looked back at her, both eyebrows raised.

She shrugged. “I have an affinity for things, mechanical things.” His astonishment was complete. She added, “Yeah, just don’t tell anybody, will ya?”

He snorted at that. “Are you kidding? In the kind of work that we do, that’s huge.”

“No, it’s not,” she countered. “I just find some of this stuff, but that doesn’t mean I know how to drive it.”

But the barn doors opened, and the vehicle came toward them, slow enough that she could tell it was Rick.

He unlocked the door and said, “Get in.”

She quickly crawled into the back seat of the vehicle. As the door shut, and they moved forward, she sighed with relief. “Thank God for that,” she muttered.

Rick looked at her. “How did you know the car was here?”

She glared at him. “I get it. You don’t trust me, but I’m not here to try and kill you. I’m here to try and save Royal.”

“Sure,” Rick conceded, “but that vehicle was behind closed doors.”

“Apparently she has an affinity ,” Calum repeated in a mild tone, “for mechanical things.” Rick stared at him, and Calum shrugged, then added, “Look. I’m not arguing the point. I’m just telling you that we have seen some pretty wild and crazy things from energy workers, and, if she can do that, I’m grateful because, right now, we needed the wheels, and we wouldn’t have any chance of finding these, particularly in the dark. We wouldn’t even have looked inside a barn.”

“Probably not,” Rick agreed. “We would have just picked up the pace.”

“Exactly. Now picking up the pace is one thing, but we’re here on the road now, so it’s all good.”

“It’s probably the vehicle owned by one of those guards who just shot at us,” she noted.

Calum nodded. “That would make sense. And, if they’re smart, they’ll wake up from their very long sleep in the cold and realize that their vehicle is gone and come up with some excuse for why they failed at their job,” Calum shared.

“And could just simply steal another vehicle from somebody else to keep themselves out of trouble,” she noted.

“Don’t worry about it,” he muttered. “They won’t get shot over this.”

“Maybe,” she muttered, “but they’ll certainly throw us to the wolves, won’t they?”

“Maybe,” he admitted. “I mean, they have to do something to justify their mistake. However, if they’re found to be completely incompetent by letting us go or letting us slip away from them, that won’t look good on them either.”

She didn’t say anything to that but settled back. “At the next intersection, take a right,” she said.

They didn’t say anything but did take the next right. As she sat here, she could sense Royal’s energy. “Something shifted,” she stated, leaning forward. “Take the next left. He’s on the move.”

“What do you mean, on the move?”

“I don’t know,” she snapped. “I’m just saying that Royal is on the move. He’s not where he was. I don’t know why. I don’t know how. Yet he seems to be moving, and fast.”

At that, Calum pulled out his phone and quickly called Terk. When the voice came through, albeit full of static, he asked him about Royal. Terk’s response was grim.

“Yes, they have escaped. They’re on a road about 250 miles from you, heading in your direction. You need to be heading in their direction, which means taking the next left.”

As that’s exactly what Janna had just said, so both men looked at her, one through the rearview mirror and one by turning in his seat.

She shrugged. “I don’t care if you trust me or not, but I won’t do anything to hurt Royal, not at this point. I also don’t understand what’s going on with his energy and the energy of the person beside him,” she shared. “That is very suspicious.”

Terk replied, “The twins are sending them a lot of energy. The problem with that is, it’s wearing down our healers, and they can’t keep it up. The young man who’s with Royal is quite severely ill, and only because of the twins is he functioning at all.”

“ Great .” Janna groaned. “The healers need to keep that energy for themselves and for their babies.”

“They know what they’re doing,” Terk noted, his tone calm and soothing. “Believe me that I won’t let them do anything to hurt the children. Neither will they exert themselves.”

“I know,” Janna admitted, “but it doesn’t always happen quite so easily as you say it does.”

He laughed. “As you well know, we can do a lot of things that we never tried to do until we’re tasked to do it,” he pointed out, “just like you finding that car.”

“Yet you know I’ve had an interest or an ability for mechanical things,” she replied. “It doesn’t always help though.”

“No, it sure doesn’t,” Terk agreed. “What matters is having the right team in place to do the job.”

“I’m not right for your team,” she snapped. “You know that. Besides, yours is a government team, so I won’t even touch it.”

“We’re not a government-backed team anymore,” Terk reminded her. “You’re still thinking with your old history. You need to stop that and move forward in life.”

“Right,” she murmured. “as if that’ll happen.”

“It can,” he said, “but that really depends on whether you’ll let something that’s really important to you slip through your fingers again.”

At the again reference, she glared at the phone. “ Thanks for that.”

“Hey, no point in pulling punches,” he muttered. “It’s important that everybody knows where everybody stands in an op like this.”

She sat back and sighed. “Maybe so, but I don’t know where I stand with Royal, so it doesn’t make a helluva lot of difference. I’m doing my best and trying to keep him alive. I don’t really know what I’m doing, but I’m sending him as much energy as he can use, but yet I realize the person with him is in bad shape.”

“He’s in very bad shape. I’m not even certain we’ll get him out of there alive. That will be very hard on Royal because he isn’t aware how much other people are utilizing their energy to keep his friend alive. At some point in time it may not be enough.”

“ Great , so we’re bringing back a corpse.”

Silence came on the other end at first. Then Terk responded in a low tone, “Agreed. It is possible. In which case we will drop the body. As you and I both know, that body is not the same as a soul. While the family might want to have his body for closure, we can’t risk lives to make it happen. So our focus is to try and get two healthy, two alive males out. Barring that option, getting a live one out is still better than watching them both die in a Russian prison.”

And, with that, he was gone.

*

Royal kept driving, staring down at the gas gauge, completely aware that he didn’t have too much more gas in the tank. As he came upon road signs, he started to smile. “Looks as if civilization may be up ahead.”

But there was absolutely no sign of life out of Bruce beside him, and how Royal hated that phrase. Yet every time he tried to call out to him and talk, no response came. He needed a set of wheels that he could steal and jumpstart quickly, then move his friend into, so he could get them out of here. The fact that other people were out there trying to help was incredible, but they were still hundreds of miles apart.

They weren’t here, not right now. They weren’t able to give him a hand at this moment, and that meant that Royal had to do this himself. A small town was coming up, but, if anybody saw him, regardless of his Soviet uniform, it was still very obvious that he wasn’t a local, not one of the maybe fifty people who lived here. That was a problem. He couldn’t exactly go in and steal a vehicle without people knowing about it, and, if only two vehicles were in front of a store, neither would be a good thing to steal either.

He pulled around to the back of one of the mom-and-pop stores and found a small truck there. He parked the prison rig beside the truck, then got out and moved Bruce over. After hot-wiring the truck and pulling out, moving as fast as he could, Royal was beyond grateful that the tank was at least half full.

Half a tank wouldn’t get him as far as he needed it to, but it would get him somewhere. He didn’t have enough money to fill up—or at least he didn’t think so. Bruce had the money on him, courtesy of the prison guard. Still, Royal didn’t know exactly what that would buy when he got to a gas station. He would have to figure it out coming up to the next town or village. Still, he had hit civilization and was thankful for that. As long as he could keep moving, that was a huge help.

He also didn’t have a phone. They had taken the first guard’s cell, but Royal hadn’t had a chance to even log on and see where he was, see if there was a GPS, or see if he could even utilize the phone at all. What he needed was Bruce awake and functioning. He reached over and gave his buddy a shove, but he got no response. Bruce lolled in place, his body moving back and forth with the motion of the car. “Shit,” Royal muttered.

The last thing he wanted was to be caught with a dead body, if that’s the way this was heading. And, of course, it’s the way it had been heading since forever. Whether he could get Bruce out of this nightmare was the question, and it took everybody’s assistance to make it happen thus far. Royal just wasn’t sure Bruce would make it all the way. Royal called out for Terk. “You still there?”

There was a faint affirmative in his head.

“Do you know where I am or where I’m going? I only have so much gas, and I need a destination to head for.”

All he got was Keep moving. I’ll contact you.

Royal groaned at that but kept driving. When a moan came from beside him, he glanced over to see Bruce looking over at him, pain in his eyes, and his skin almost looked ashen. That worried him. “Hey, you’re awake.”

Bruce shifted in his seat and looked around. “This is a hell of a lot different.”

“Yeah. Do you even remember that?”

“Vaguely,” he muttered. “God, I just remembered the prison, and that seemed like forever ago.” He shivered inside his heavy coat.

“Hunker in and warm up,” Royal ordered him. “We do have some help coming, and I did switch out vehicles and just dragged you in and moved your sorry butt over,” he explained, with a snort. “You’re welcome.”

“Thanks for that,” Bruce muttered. “I can’t say I would have appreciated being left behind.”

“No, we’re not doing that. Yet we’re not out of danger by a long shot. As far as I know, I got away with this vehicle, but no way to know how far we get until somebody comes up behind us. I want to make another switch if I can, not to mention that this one doesn’t have a ton of gas.”

“Oh, yeah, gas is important. I don’t think we have enough money to buy gas.”

“You want to take a look at what you got and see what we have in terms of assets?”

At that, Bruce checked his pockets and nodded. “I have $47 here, so that might buy us something. Food would be nice.”

“It would, though I’m not sure our stomachs could handle it,” he noted, his tone serious.

At that, Bruce nodded. “I get that. I did find a couple granola bars. Do you think we could handle that?”

“I’m willing to try,” Royal replied, staring at the granola bar in Bruce’s hand. “Is there just one?”

“No, two.”

And, with one each, they quickly opened the packages and started eating. “Also we have cold coffee in this thermos. It was warm, but it’s cold now.”

“Yes, but it’s a liquid, and no doubt we’re probably chronically dehydrated.”

They split that, amazed at just how much better even that little bit made them feel. As they came up to another small town, he pulled around to the back of another store and cased out the vehicles. Finding an SUV that looked as if it could go the distance, he parked beside it, hopped out, checked the dash, managed to get it going. Fortunately it also had gas.

Since it was fully fueled, he nodded over at Bruce, who made the switch on his own, collapsing inside the car, even as Royal started backing out. “God, we’ve been awfully lucky so far,” Bruce managed to get out.

“Yeah, and I think part of that is due to our friends.”

Bruce looked at him in surprise. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know how much of this I believe,” Royal began, “but it seems to me that either I’m hallucinating or we have somebody helping us with camouflage.” He mentioned Terk’s name, watching for a reaction. When Bruce looked at him blankly, Royal explained, “He’s the guy who was in that government operation, where their own government turned around and tried to kill his whole team.”

Bruce frowned. “I don’t think I remember hearing about that.”

“Yeah, well, if you were in the navy, you heard about it,” Royal stated. “I think the CIA did it or some such unit. God, it was such a nightmare. Everybody was pissed off. It was a classic case of killing our own team to keep them quiet or some bullshit like that,” he muttered.

“That sucks,” Bruce muttered. “but I may remember something now about a guy named Terk . That’s not a common name.”

“Apparently Terk’s got a helluva lot of tricks up his sleeve. Either that or I’m losing my mind.”

Bruce shuddered again and sank back against the seat cushion. “While we’re on the road again, are you okay if I crash?”

“Yeah, you can crash,” Royal said, “but first do you want to see if you can get into that phone?”

“I tried,” he muttered, “but it’s got a password on it.”

“Of course it does. Go ahead and sleep then,” Royal suggested. “If you can’t get into the phone, I can’t tell where we are anyway.” And, with that, he took a look at his friend, surprised to see Bruce already out cold. But Royal’s own belly was full, and he had another vehicle that had gas, and, so far, they didn’t have anybody behind them. So how very lucky they had been.

He was starting to realize that this was a case of far too much good luck, without some otherworldly help. So, he was pretty sure that Terk, whoever this guy was, literally had been helping them. And that went a long way toward making this a hell of a lot brighter day for him. And, with renewed hope, Royal sent out a message to Janna. Thanks, sweetheart. I don’t know where you are, but I hope you’re safe. Please stay safe until we can get together, and then we need to talk .

When a voice came through his head that he recognized, he almost hit the brakes in shock. But it sounded, dammit, just like Janna, as she whispered in his mind.

Royal, just know that I’m trying to get help to you . Stay strong. I know you’re hurt. I know you’re hurting, but we’re getting there. Honest, the cavalry is coming, and, this time, with any luck, it’s coming for you and your friend .