Page 19

CHAPTER 19

Costa picked himself up from the position he had ended up in, flung behind the copilot’s seat and curled up in a ball against the bulkhead. It wasn’t what he had been trying to do, but as it turned out it hadn’t been a bad way to go through a crash.

“Di—” he began frantically, and then he had a double armful of naked, clinging Diana.

“You’re okay,” she gasped, holding on to him. “You’re okay. Are you okay?” Half detaching herself, she began patting his face frantically. Costa winced as she found a bruise he hadn’t even noticed.

“It’s okay. I’m okay.” Now it was his turn to start patting her down, running his hands across her bare shoulders. “Are you okay?”

“I think so,” she gasped.

Her pupils were dilated. She looked half frantic, hair wildly tangled in a mess hanging in her face. She was gorgeous and vividly, wonderfully alive.

The kiss happened with no warning and perfect coordination. They both moved at the same time, she flung her arms around his neck and he once more had a warm, wriggling armful of naked Diana, now kissing him frantically.

They kissed for a few moments with the abandon that only a shared “We’re alive!” experience could bring.

This was interrupted by a throat-clearing noise from further back in the plane.

Costa reluctantly broke free of the kiss and turned, rotating his body so that he placed himself in front of Diana.

Farley was sitting awkwardly on the floor in the cabin, face bruised, cradling what looked like a broken arm.

“We’re alive,” he said dazedly.

“No thanks to you!” Diana snapped. Then she looked down at herself and rolled hastily off Costa, to his regret. “Where are my clothes?”

“I think they probably flew out of the plane while we were in midair,” Costa said.

He took off his shirt and draped it around her shoulders. Diana gave a nod of thanks.

“We’re alive,” Farley said again.

“You’re under arrest,” Costa told him.

“He had a gun,” Diana said.

“I’ll look for it and keep an eye on him if you want to go back and see if you can find any of your clothes.”

Diana nodded, started to step forward and then jerked her foot back. “Where’s the other one—Jim? Did he fall?”

“Yeah. Fell out the side,” Costa said succinctly.

Jim had been trying to kill them, so it was hard to feel too sorry for him. But the man’s whipped-away scream as he vanished out of the open cargo door would still stick with Costa for a while.

As would the sight of naked Diana flying the plane, her concentration riveted and her hands locked on the controls. She had been glorious.

While Costa groped around for Farley’s gun, Diana made her way past the men and then abruptly stopped. Costa turned to look and saw that late afternoon desert sunlight was spilling into the interior of the cabin. The side was torn completely open. The floor was tilted slightly and half buried in sand on the open side.

“I can’t believe we’re alive,” Diana murmured, picking her way back along the row of seats.

“That’s what I keep saying,” Farley mumbled.

“Why don’t you stop saying it and shut up.” Costa finally found the gun wedged under the copilot seat. He turned around to cover Farley with it.

Farley looked back at him with a dazed expression. He’d gotten banged up badly in the crash, more than either of them, from what Costa could tell. He had been tumbling around loose in the back, probably just trying not to fall out the open door. He was lucky to be alive.

Given that he had tried to kill them, Costa wasn’t entirely sure they were lucky he was alive.

Diana came scrambling back in a hurry, a pair of jeans slung over her arm and very distractingly naked apart from Costa’s shirt. “Found my pants,” she said, “and we need to get out of here now . There’s dripping aviation fuel back there, and I can hear something electrical fizzling. This machine might be a fireball at any time.”

Costa cursed and grabbed Farley by his unhurt arm. “Get out!” he snapped at Diana, but she got hold of Farley on the other side, and together they manhandled him through the open side of the plane, trying to avoid ragged ends of metal.

Together, in an awkward and unwanted three-legged race, they stumbled away from the machine. They had barely put some distance between them and it when there was a terrific Whoomph! and a fireball rolled skyward, along with a wave of heat that sent all three of them sprawling.

Diana rolled over and sat up, plastered in sand. She looked back at the burning plane. “Well,” she said, “heck.”

“Eloquently put.”

Diana shook out her jeans. “I’m just gonna brush some sand off and put these on. Don’t mind me. No peeking,” she snapped at Farley.

“I think he’s in shock,” Costa said, helping their prisoner sit up. Farley’s eyes were wide and glassy; he’d jarred his broken arm in the fall.

“Too bad for him,” Diana declared. She was bent over, brushing sand off the naked curve of her ass. Costa managed, barely, to suppress an offer to help out. “You know, he was under orders to throw us out of the plane if they didn’t like the answers to our questions.”

“I figured it was something like that.” Costa looked at Farley and stifled a sigh. “Dangerous as he is, he’s also pretty badly hurt. I’m going to get him into the shade.”

He put an arm around Farley’s bulk and helped him sit down behind some boulders, out of the direct sunlight. Diana joined him a minute later, barefoot in jeans with Costa’s shirt draped loosely and beautifully around her naked torso.

“I lost everything else, but I do still have my keys and multitool,” she said, extracting it from her pocket to show Costa. It was a tiny one, little more than a cheap toy, but the blade looked functional. “What have you got?”

“Wallet, phone, keys. Oh, that reminds me.” He took out his phone, checked for a signal, held it up, and shook his head. “No dice. We’re too remote.”

Diana looked down at Farley. “He might have some idea where we are.”

“More or less. Now we just need to get him in shape to talk.”

Diana glanced up at the sky, already pinking with the earliest tinges of sunset. The plane was still burning, smudging the clear sky with smoke. “Before it gets any later, I think I’m going to shift and look around a little, see if I can spot any nearby roads or towns. I can’t fly for long distances, but I can do short hops and see more than we can from the ground. Sound good?”

“Yeah, it does. Go for it. See if you can find any water while you’re at it, because that’s going to be our biggest problem shortly.”

Diana shed her clothes in a neat pile, giving Costa another pleasant glimpse of her lean, strong body, and then collapsed into her roadrunner shape. She looked up at him with her head tilted to the side to view him without her long beak in the way, then spread her wings and took a few running hops to a short, gliding flight.

Costa crouched beside Farley. “Come on, man, let’s take a look at you.”

Farley was badly banged around, but he seemed more shocked than seriously hurt. There was a long stripe of bruised swelling on his temple that suggested a concussion, a number of bruises and abrasions, and the broken arm, which was the worst injury Costa could see.

As Costa probed him lightly, Farley seemed to rally a bit. Now and then, Costa looked up at a flicker of wings and caught a glimpse of Diana, or at least, the bird he presumed to be Diana. There were a number of other birds around, small songbirds and game birds drifting back after the plane crash scared them off. He decided to take this as a good sign that there was both water and game habitat around, which boded well for their odds of survival.

“What do you shift into?” he asked Farley as he checked over the man’s broken arm. It was a slight breach of shifter etiquette to ask directly if you didn’t know someone well, but he figured they were considerably past the point where it mattered now.

After a moment, Farley answered sullenly. “Wolverine.”

“What do wolverines eat? Predator, right?”

“Scavenger, mostly,” Farley said after another pause, as if contemplating how the information might be used against him. “We’re somewhat omnivorous as well. Why are you asking?”

“Because I figure the best way we can get through the night is in our shifted forms. We’ll be insulated against the cold and capable of feeding ourselves.” Costa hesitated too, but it wasn’t as if Farley wouldn’t know both of their shift forms shortly anyway. He’d already seen Diana shift. “I’m a boar, so I can eat just about anything. I figure if no one comes looking for us, we’ll make it through the night while shifted, and then work out what next.”

Farley made a slight gesture with his injured arm and winced. “I’m not going to be able to walk like this.”

“You don’t have to. At least you’re not a horse or something that’d really be in trouble with a broken leg. We can probably bring you something to eat.” Costa wondered how much effort they really wanted to go to in keeping the guy alive, under the circumstances, but just leaving him to die in the desert was certainly not a thing he was prepared to do. “While we’re waiting for Diana to come back, how about you answer a few questions?”

“What sort of questions?” Farley asked warily.

“Who you’re working for, what your plans for us were, that sort of thing.”

“Do I have to?”

“Obviously I can’t force you. But let me remind you that at the moment you’re dependent on us for survival, and also, the more you cooperate now, the more lenient the SCB is going to be later.”

Farley glowered and rubbed his forehead with his uninjured hand. “SCB—that’s basically the shifter FBI, right?”

“More or less. And you’re not who we’re after. You’re a small fish. You roll over on the big fish and we’ll give you immunity as long as you’re willing to work with us.”

“I’m not sure that metaphor makes sense,” Farley said, regarding him from narrowed eyes.

Costa put the gun carefully out of Farley’s reach and sat down beside him. “You’re definitely smarter than the average thug.”

“I’m not a thug, I’m a pilot,” Farley said shortly. “Thornburg pays me well for doing discreet work. That’s all.”

“Oh really? Discreet work like tossing people out of planes?”

Farley opened his mouth to respond, then shut it as Diana landed in a flurry of feathers. She shifted human and reached for Costa’s shirt, while Costa turned a vicious glare on Farley.

“Look and die,” Diana said before Costa could say anything, picking up her jeans.

“I’m not looking,” Farley said hastily, gazing at the sky.

“Our friend here was just telling me what he does for Thornburg,” Costa said. “But first, what’d you find?”

Diana shook her head, buttoning up the shirt over her breasts. “There’s nothing man-made at all, except some very old, falling down structures on the other side of the sand pit that I guess used to be part of a mine, and an old dirt road. I guess we can walk out on it if we don’t get a better option, since it must go somewhere, but we must be days from anywhere on foot. I did find the spring that the animals use, so we can head over there when we need to. It might be a bit of a walk.”

Shadows were climbing the sides of the valley around them, and the sky was flushing pink. Costa guessed they were about an hour out from darkness, if not less. Dusk didn’t last long in the clear desert conditions.

“I was thinking we’d shift tonight anyway,” he told her. “We’ll get through the night okay, and we can find things to eat. I told Farley we’d keep him supplied with scavenging rations if he cooperates.”

“What is he? Let me guess, a skunk,” Diana said, scowling at him. She sat down crosslegged, graceful as always, tucking her bare, sandy feet under her legs.

“Wolverine,” Farley said reluctantly.

“Now that we’re all on the same page, let’s get back to your tale of woe,” Costa said. “And then we can get settled for the night. Or head out to find dinner, in the case of those of us who are crepuscular foragers.”

“That sounds absolutely disgusting,” Farley said.

“Crepuscular means active at dawn and dusk,” Diana supplied. Costa gave her an impressed look. She leaned forward, elbows on knees. “Okay, so what do you do for Thornburg, anyway?”

“I’m a pilot,” Farley said.

“Who occasionally pushes people out of planes,” Diana said.

“Could you stop mentioning that?”

“As the guests of honor at the freefall party, do you blame us?” Costa snapped. “Also, this is not exactly what I would call cooperating.”

“I’m trying!” Farley retorted. “Look, okay, so there were a few of us who did ‘special’ jobs for Thornburg.” The air quotes were audible. “Mostly me and Morty—the pilot you were investigating, the one who died in the Chiricahua crash.”

“How do you mean, special? All expense paid trips to the desert floor without a parachute?”

“No!” Farley said sharply. “It was just off-books transport of people and cargo. Mostly people. But the whole point was to get to the other end in one piece.”

“For the shifter fighting rings?” Diana asked.

“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised you know about that. Yeah, I transported fighters, and also cargo and supplies. Thornburg basically is, or maybe I should say was, running two separate businesses. There’s the legitimate charter business, handling flightseeing, cargo runs and whatnot. Then there’s the off-books shipping business that was mostly me and Morty.”

“I got the impression when we were talking to the ground crew that the other pilots know some people working for Thornburg get choice jobs and others don’t,” Costa said.

“Yeah, well, he pays us good because we’re risking our licenses by doing an end run around the rules.”

“And what about our late, great friend Jim?” Costa wanted to know. “How does he fit into all of this? He’s not a pilot.”

“Thornburg has a few other guys who would go along on some jobs. Private security. He’s one of those.”

“Ah,” Costa said. “Security. Are we talking to keep people off the plane—or to keep them on?”

Farley didn’t quite look at them. “Little of both.”

“You mean kidnapping?” Diana asked, leaning forward. “Like V—like your friend told us about, Costa?”

“Sounds like it,” Costa said grimly. “You know, Farley, that immunity offer may not remain on the table, depending on how actively you’ve been aiding and abetting a series of felonies.”

Farley straightened up, holding his injured arm awkwardly against his chest. “Look, have you ever been involved in something like this? It’s a slippery slope. First you take a few shifter-related jobs for a surcharge. The boss isn’t a shifter, but he knows about us, so Morty and me, we handled the shifter-type work, dealing with shifter clients who were more comfortable with a shifter pilot. And we got paid a little extra. Then Thornburg goes hey, I got a more sensitive job for you, and I know you can handle sensitive jobs. So we do that one, and the money’s really good, and soon you start feeling like it’s all okay, you know?”

“Yeah, until planes start falling out of the sky, and passengers start falling out of them,” Costa said. “Do you have any idea what happened to your buddy Morty? That wasn’t just a regular crash, was it? Know anything about it?”

Farley sighed.

“Knowing Morty, he probably grew a conscience. See, that’s the other thing, the deeper in you get, the more the boss reminds you that as long as we all work together, nothing bad happens to anybody. But he does have connections. People like Jim come from his connections. So no, I don’t know what happened to Morty, because I kept my head down and didn’t go out of my way to find out what happened to Morty—understand?”

“Coward,” Diana accused him.

Farley’s face twisted in anger, but then he leaned back against the boulder and just looked tired. “Yeah, probably. Maybe I should’a walked a while back. But it’s a good job, good benefits, and the extra money can send both of my kids to good colleges and fund my mom’s retirement. We never had much, and now we have a better life. I guess that’s the other thing Thornburg counts on. My wife is disabled and can’t work, so without me, they wouldn’t have anything.”

“You have kids?” Costa said quietly. “How old?”

“Ten and thirteen.”

“Tough ages,” Costa said. He looked at Diana, then up at the rapidly purpling sky. The sun had slipped away while they were talking, and the night’s chill was rising. The burning plane had died down to a flicker, the smoke smudge vanishing in the darkening sky. “Well, Farley, I can’t say I approve of your life choices, but I promise you I’m going to do my best to make sure your kids get their dad back.”

“ We will,” Diana said. “But you’re going to help with our investigation once you do.” She paused. “Just one thing. You didn’t help burn down anyone’s house lately, did you?”

“No!” Farley said.

“I didn’t think so, but I had to make sure.”

“Whose house burned down?” he asked, looking at her.

“Mine. Because people who I guess are Thornburg’s ‘connections’ are after me.”

“There’s a chance they’ll be after you and your family too, so we’ll make sure we arrange protective custody for your wife and kids once we’re back to civilization,” Costa said. “And in the interests of getting back safe and sound, or in your case safe and sound-ish, I think we should all shift now. Here’s what we’ll do—you stay here, as a wolverine, since you’ll have trouble walking on three legs. We’ll go out foraging and bring you back something to eat. Also water if we can, though you might have to get there on your own in the morning. We don’t have anything to carry it in.”

Farley nodded earnestly. “I just appreciate you guys helping me. I’m sorry about all of the—you know.”

“I’m glad the you know didn’t go any farther than it did,” Costa said grimly. “Because I can guarantee you wouldn’t be getting our help if anything had happened to either of us.” He stood up and picked up the gun, sticking it into the waistband of his jeans. “Okay, we’ll be back in a little while with whatever we can find. Need anything in the meantime?”

Farley shook his head. “I’ll be pretty comfortable here as a wolverine, I guess. There’s some dry grasses. It’s not bad.”

He squirmed a bit, trying to get some of his clothes off, then shifted abruptly into a large hump of dark brown and paler fur that snorted and shuffled around on three legs. Eventually, he curled up awkwardly in a nest made of his discarded clothes.

Diana and Costa walked up the hill. She picked her way carefully, wincing now and then.

“The barefoot thing is gonna be a problem if we have to walk for any length of time,” Costa said softly.

“I know. I was thinking I might shift and have you carry me. Or scout ahead as a bird.”

She looked back. Below them, the valley was cloaked in shadow; only the mountains rising above it still caught some light. They could make out the location of the crash by a few glowing patches where the metal had been heated by the fire. The smoke would have been conspicuous in the daytime. But they had precious little time for it to be seen before the rapidly advancing darkness, and by morning it would have dissipated.

“We’re in trouble, aren’t we?” Diana said, low.

“Not nearly as much trouble as we’d be in if we weren’t shifters,” Costa pointed out. “We can get food and survive out here just as effectively as the animals we shift into.”

“You’re being very optimistic about that. I’ve never actually hunted as a roadrunner, and do you see any wild pig tracks around here? Because I don’t.”

“Okay, let me rephrase that. We can survive until people come to find us. As humans, I’m not sure we could make it through a couple of days, especially since you have almost nothing to wear. As animals, we’ll be fine in the short term. Uncomfortable, but fine.” He stopped at a cluster of boulders with a nice view of the valley. “Let’s leave our stuff here, tucked underneath. It’s not precisely that I don’t trust Farley, but, well, I don’t trust Farley. Especially if he gets the gun.”

“You think he’d betray us? We’re his only chance of getting out of here alive, hurt as he is.”

“I’m not going to take the chance if I can help it, no. In fact, let’s stash the gun separately from our clothes. Wolverines have a keen sense of smell, so we may as well not make it too easy for him.”

They undressed in the deepening twilight. By now enough of the light had gone from the sky that Costa could just barely make out the pale movements of her limbs.

Diana laughed quietly.

“What?”

“Finally got your clothes off, and I can’t even see you.”

Costa moved a little closer to her. “You can touch me.”

He was aware of Diana moving closer in the near-dark, and felt the swift brush of her fingers, first on his upper arm, then sliding across his collarbone and down his chest. The night was growing swiftly chilly, but his shiver had nothing to do with cold.

“You’re very ... furry.” Her voice sounded thick as her hand moved across his chest, brushing against the thatch of hair.

“Good for keeping warm.” He touched her arm cautiously, barely making contact, moving his palm down her silky skin.

She let out a soft little gasp. The awareness of their shared nakedness was a palpable thing in the dark between them. Costa felt her sway toward him.

And then she jerked away. The hand lifted from his chest, leaving him feeling the night air’s chill acutely in that spot.

“I’d better go hunt up a lizard or two before they all go to to ground for the night.” Her voice was breathless, and he was aware of a swift movement and then the skittering footsteps of a roadrunner darting away.

Costa sighed.

This is going to be torment.

He shifted. The cool night air was suddenly comfortable, filled with tantalizing smells. Costa moved around a little, getting used to his shift form, and picked up the gun in his mouth. He trotted uphill a little way, navigating mostly by smell and sound, and found a place to stash the gun where he figured that Farley would, at least, take longer to find it than in the pile of human-smelling clothing they’d left behind.

There was swift movement near his leg, a flurry of wings, and a light weight landed on the bristled hump of his shoulders. Costa would have smiled if his mouth had been set up for it.

Instead, he grunted and set off into the night. He could smell the water Diana had mentioned, as well as the tempting scent of the green things that grew near it.

After a little while, Diana hopped down and ran alongside him. By daylight they must have looked like a ridiculous pair, the odd couple animal buddies in the latest Disney animated feature.

But it was very nice to have her there, as he got used to the scent and sounds of her as a roadrunner. And he accepted her presence as the oblique gesture of support that it was.