"I haven't been keeping up with it, but I used to have a steady hand. Are you sure you don't want it?"
Dane shook his head, hastily buttoning the guard's shirt. "He's got a billy club and I'll take that. I'm a lot stronger than you are, and that's not a man-woman thing, it's a shifter thing. Remember that if you have to fight these guys."
"Yeah, okay," Mira murmured, checking the load in the gun. She recalled how easily they had manhandled her around. She also remembered how gentle Dane always was with her, and now she understood that he had been trying not to overwhelm or alarm her with his strength.
He was like them, butnotlike them.
"They wanted me to help them find you," she said, realizing with a sudden jolt of alarm that she hadn't warned him yet. "I didn't tell them anything."
"I know. Don't worry. We just need to—"
There was a sudden pounding on the door.
"Hey, Bill, you in there?" a gruff voice called through the door. "We got a red light on the board, and—"
Dane didn't hesitate. He wrenched the door open, hauled the astonished guard into the room, and slammed him headfirst into the floor a couple of times.
"Guns for both of us, I guess," he remarked, stripping the man of his weapons. The walkie-talkie on the second guard's belt was now squawking, and Dane reached down and turned it off.
"We'd better move," Mira said. "Which way do we go?"
"Not sure," Dane said. "I don't have an exit strategy. You can't swim."
"Not a few hundred miles in freezing cold water, that's for sure."
"Maybe we can steal a boat."
"What about a helicopter?" Mira asked. "I know they have them here. I came in one."
"We'd need someone to fly it."
"Me," Mira said. "I can fly it."
Dane gave her a look of pure surprise.
"I forgot," he said, his voice wondering. "You said that to me at the beginning, didn't you? You're a pilot."
"I mean, it's been years," she said, embarrassed. "Hopefully it's like riding a bike."
"That's a myth, by the way," Dane said. He cracked the door open, looked both ways down the hall, and nodded to her to follow him.
"What? How do you know?"
"Because I didn't ride one as a kid, I mostly just swam. But I did learn how," Dane said. He cleared a stairwell door and then preceded her into it. "When I was really young." His voice was hushed, with pauses to listen. "Tried as an adult. Fell right off."
"Thanks, that's exactly the confidence boost I needed. Well, let's hope flying a helicopterisn'tlike riding a bike, then."
Abruptly the door at the bottom of the stairwell slammed open and a couple of men burst in. Dane fired down at them. One of them jerked and fell. The other started to retreat.
Dane leaped over the railing—Mira gave a cry of shock—and jumped a full story straight down on top of him. By the time Mira had run down the stairs to him, both of them were subdued.
"You're like a superhero," she exclaimed.
Dane started to answer, but was interrupted by the sudden wail of a siren.
"Alarm?" Mira asked over the noise.
"Yeah. Someone must've found Tweedledee and Tweedledum upstairs. You know how to get to the helos?"
