Page 3

“I’m only looking for your brother,” Bethan repeated in the same steady tone. “I don’t mean you any harm.”

“What is harm?” Iyara asked bitterly. “You’re too late for that.”

The door was wrenched open wider then.

And suddenly there were guns in Bethan’s face.

“What are you saying? What does she want?” a male voice was yelling in a completely different language from the one Bethan had just been speaking.

Hands grabbed her, roughly. She let them drag her inside, protesting ineffectually. Mostly so they would yell louder as they slammed the door behind her, trapping her in the boarded-up ruin of a row house. Then they shoved her roughly toward the ground.

Bethan went down on her knees and lifted her hands in the air, cowering a little while she did it. Because they expected her to cower. And likely wanted her to so they could feel big and bad. That made it an excellent opportunity for her to take a quick sweep of her surroundings.

“I don’t know what you want!” she cried out, making herself sound shrill and scared. “I’m only here to deliver a message. Why does that take three guys? With rifles? What did I do?”

“Received,” Jonas clipped out in her ear.

“Shut up,” one of the men with a rifle aimed at her face snarled. He shoved the other woman down on the ground next to Bethan, and from the corner of her eye, Bethan could see that Iyara really was cowering. “Tell me what you said to each other or I’ll start shooting.”

“I have a message for my old friend,” Bethan protested. “How could I know she wasn’t here alone, the way I expected?”

The man before her bared his teeth at her. “What is this message?”

Bethan glanced at the woman beside her, then grinned widely and incongruously at the man towering over her. “Well. It’s our high school reunion. I take my duties as a reunion chair very seriously, and insisted that someone come out this way to see if everybody’s favorite prom queen could make the trip.”

She heard someone on the comm unit laugh. The man in front of her, however, did not so much as crack a smile.

“Do you think I’m a fool?” he snarled at her. And then, less amusingly, the barrel of his rifle was there against her forehead. But that was a tactical mistake on his part. “You think I don’t know exactly why you’re here?”

“I already told you why I’m here,” Bethan argued, and the barrel of the rifle dug deeper into her forehead. Hard enough she knew it would leave a mark.

“Understand that he will hurt you,” Iyara murmured next to her, in the language the man did not understand. “Badly.”

“Tell me what she’s saying!” the man screamed at Bethan. “Tell me where her brother is!”

Bethan risked another glance at the woman kneeling beside her. Iyara was shrinking there where she knelt, but there was a certain set expression on her face.

Bethan understood in a flash that these men had gotten no information out of Iyara, sister to the scientist they were all after. And that the only reason they hadn’t shot Bethan on sight was because she appeared to speak the same language that the woman did and they figured they’d use Bethan to get what they wanted.

Too bad for them that wasn’t how this was going to go.

“Why can’t you understand her?” she asked the man with the gun at her head, and cowered a little bit more, on the off chance he might think she really was scared. “Out of the three of you, not one of you knows how to communicate with her? Why would you come all this way, then?”

“In position,” Jonas said into the comm unit.

“You have ten seconds,” the man with the rifle to her head snarled at her. “Then I’ll shoot your head off.”

“Is that smart?” Bethan asked him. “You don’t know what she told me. And it sounds like you can’t ask her.”

The barrel jammed into her forehead. Harder. “Then you both die, bitch.”

Bethan blew out a breath.

“Ten,” the man said. “Nine. Eight.”

“On his three count,” Jonas said.

Bethan had the stray thought that she liked his voice in her ear.