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Yes, yes. She was trying. Some things took a little time, a little subtlety. Movement rustled the trees along the road. The backup?
If this soldier would just cooperate . . .
“I have a truck full of groceries to deliver.” She insinuated truth into her sentence and pushed harder. “Open the gate, please.”
The soldier blinked at her with bleary eyes. “Can’t. The lockdown command was already sent. No one goes in or out until Adam Thorne clears it.”
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She’d think a whole lot better without the gate in her head. She pushed hard on the soldier. “Well, is there another way to get in?”
He swayed on his feet. “Lockdown.”
The second soldier approached. “Sullivan, you’re relieved of duty.”
Rose guessed her time was up. The gate would just have to wait, and so would the girl it wanted her to deal with. Rose would think her entry through and then come back. Maybe sneak through the woods and climb over the wall. For now, though, it was better to go back than wait and find out what a wraith was and what the backup was going to do about it. She wasn’t too excited about being shot at from all sides.
“Mike!” the soldier shouted, as the one outside her truck window fell to the ground. Minds were such delicate things.
’Course the road was too narrow to make a three-point turn easily. And she couldn’t very well back down the mountain with the hulking cab behind her. She’d go right off the edge and that would be the end of Rose Petty. Nobody wanted that.
“Let me see your hands!” the soldier shouted at her. More soldiers in strange armor approached the vehicle from the front, angling in groups of two on either side. That was about ninety seconds, all right.
For Pete’s sake, this was a bother.
Her bad hand twitched. All right, all right. She’d just have to do this the hard way.
It was late afternoon by the time Layla led Talia around the outside of the west wing of Segue’s hulk. Once Talia had put a baby in Layla’s arms, she hadn’t wanted to give him up again. Both children, Michael and Cole, were little lumps of wonderfulness, so soft, so perfect. The fit in her arms, the sweet smell of their skin—it was its own kind of magic, and she’d been utterly caught in the spell.
She’d spent so much time with the babies that Layla had had little more than a peek at the pile of research Talia had amassed on her behalf. At the top of the stack was a tablet labeled Jacob Andrew Thorne, wraith. And here Layla had thought Adam’s brother had died in a tragic boating accident. Interesting reading, she was sure. She’d have snatched it up if not for the little tickle of panic about the shadow on the Segue building.
Talia. The babies. The shadow had to come first, before something else happened.
The photo op took them outside of Segue, down the grand front steps, and to the left, along the foundation. Kev and company followed close behind as protection. Adam frowned down at them from the veranda, one baby strapped in some kind of carryall on his chest, the other in a stroller, which he rocked back and forth. Mr. Thorne Industries in the role of dad. She almost snapped a picture of him like that, for Talia.
Layla’s neck goose-bumped with the memory of the flying wraith, but she pressed on, leader of the pack. As soon as she rounded the corner of the building’s base, the storm of darkness crowded her sight. She reeled back a few steps, cringing, while the rest of the group looked at her . . . yes, as if she were crazy.
“You don’t see it.” Obviously. Or they wouldn’t be standing so close to the shadow.
Talia looked up, squinted, flicked her gaze around. “Where exactly am I supposed to look?”
Hello? It was everywhere. Layla took a deep breath. “Do you see any shadows?”
“Little ones. Under the windows?” Talia’s breath came in a puff of cold air.
“No. A big, black blotch covering half the building. God, I can even feel it.”
Talia gave her a sorry expression. Polite, but not believing.
“It’s there,” Layla said and raised the camera. It was a Nikon D40. Nice, but not as good as hers. “That shadow has been bugging me since I snuck into your woods.”
“Layla, I know Shadow,” Talia said. “If there were anything unusual here, I’d see it.”
Uh-huh. Layla would have to explain. “When I was a teenager I got into a kind of live-in prep school for disadvantaged youth. Northfield.” She found the manual mode on the Nikon and set the exposure for maximum contrast. “Took a photography class. The teacher explained about perspective. How every person has a different one. How we all see things a little differently.”
“Doesn’t make sense,” Kev said. “A camera will catch whatever it’s pointed at.”
Typical response.