No, Gio was much more than a client. He was more already, and she was now thinking ahead to days spent in each other's company, sleeping in the same room. There was no privacy in the tiny cabin.
I'm not made of stone,she thought, and then had to smile at herself. Giowasmade of stone—some of the time.
But he was no stone statue as a man. She could still feel, as an intense full-body sense memory, his warm strength as he held her. He would be a tender and courteous lover, she thought, but she also wanted those powerful hands to lift and hold and manhandle her.
Get it together, girl.She wiped a hand across her face and looked up, reflexively scanning the horizon, as she had done every few minutes since they had been here.
At the height of the afternoon, the sun blazed down full bore. The air in front of the old fence seemed to shimmer.
Wait, no—that shimmering was something else entirely. This was no heat-haze or mirage.
"Gio!" she called softly through the cabin's open window, low but urgent. "Gio! They're here!"
GIO
Gio lurchedupright at Max's low, alarmed call, then nearly fell back down on the blanket. He had a splitting headache, and his limbs were weak and trembling.
Ofcoursethe enemy would come now! The worst possible timing ...
But it wasn't necessarily chance. If he was right that the cult had some way of observing him, then of course they would attack when he was collapsed and weak. He'd given them a perfect opening.
Or maybe they just really were that lucky.
They weren't stupid, he reminded himself, and they learned from their mistakes. The cultists had tried frontal assaults before, as well as poison. There could easily be something new this time, especially if they guessed that Gio had a plan of his own.
Just as this thought occurred to him, he glimpsed a shimmer in the corner of the dark hut.
"Max!" he bellowed, reaching for the tranq pistol. "They're in here too!"
The new portal was tiny and low to the ground, just big enough for a hand to appear for an instant, thrusting a canister through. The portal winked shut before he could take aim, and the canister began spewing smoke.
Merda!
Adrenaline helped wash some of the exhaustion out of his body. He sprinted from the hut as smoke billowed out of the open doorway, nearly colliding with Max on her way in.
"Gas," he got out.
They both ran to a safe distance, then stopped to look back. Max had the rifle in her hands.
"They started to come through by the fence," she said. "Then it stopped. Decoy?"
"Apparently," Gio said grimly. As the adrenaline ebbed, it took his energy with it. His hands were shaking again. He steadied them through sheer effort. He wished now that he had taken the time to eat while there was an opportunity.Some magician-hunters we are."I guess we're not the only ones who thought of grenades."
They had closed back-to-back without words needing to be spoken, and now each of them could cover half the field of view surrounding them. Gio noticed that Max had moved to the location of one of her equipment caches from last night—if he recalled correctly, this one contained a grenade and some spare darts—and the toe of her boot was touching the rock that covered it. He had thought she was being slightly paranoid, or at least over-prepared, to have made little caches of equipment everywhere around the cabin, so they would always be near one. Now he could see that she had recognized, before he had, the logistical problem of bringing the offensive fight to an enemy who could come from any direction.
The smoke billowing from the door of the hut had faded to a few wispy tendrils, dispersing quickly in the dry wind. Gio caught an occasional faint whiff of a sweetish smell that made him dizzy even this far away.
"Knockout gas," Max said. "They might be waiting for it to disperse and then come through to pick you up." She was in constant motion as she spoke, her head swiveling to scan the horizon. The rifle was held ready in the crook of her arm, and she alternated between keeping her hand by the trigger and dropping it to finger the loop of steel cable at her belt.
Gio held the dart pistol as Max had drilled him in target practice. Right now it felt like Army basic training had been a very long time ago.
"Any idea what they'll try next?" Max said out of the corner of her mouth.
"No idea, they could come from—there!"
The ground near them had begun to erupt like a blister. Both of them stared at it, Max in bafflement and Gio in a growing, worried consideration of what he was looking at.
The lump of rock swelled until it finally erupted into a crude, vaguely human shape, slightly taller than a person and far more massive. It had huge, humped shoulders, dangling gorilla-like arms, and stubby horns projecting above its rough approximation of a face. Crumbling pebbles fell off as it lurched to its feet. The sunlight was bright enough to wash out the dull red glow of its eyes and the runes on its skin, but Gio knew that in darkness, it would glow like a car's taillights.
