“Relax, dude,” Thunder said in a voice that was so annoyingly calm, Voodoo curled his fingers into fists.
“Don’t tell me to relax,” he snapped as he started running again. There was no way he was relaxing until he had Indigo safe and sound in his arms.
“We wound up taking different routes to get to the same place. I'm standing right above her, but there’s a drop of probably thirty feet or so between us. She’s down the bottom by the river, I'm way up here. The way you guys are coming, you're going to join me, not her.”
“Damn,” Voodoo muttered. He’d wanted to be able to hold his girl, but this meant it would take them a while to find a way to get down to Indigo. Especially since they couldn’t all leave her at once, one of themwould need to keep watch so they could pick off any guards that might find her.
“We’ll figure it out,” Steel assured him. “Let’s just get you to her first.”
Nodding his agreement, he was less than a minute out now until they’d reach Thunder, and Voodoo pushed his body harder, making it go faster.
Maybe thirty seconds later, they came out of the tree line to find Thunder standing there, looking down at Indigo below him. She was so close he could almost feel the phantom brush of her in his arms.
Skidding to a stop, he looked down and spotted her. Her thin body was on her knees, looking up at the top of the cliff like it was the only thing keeping her upright.
“Voodoo,” she sobbed his name when she spotted him, and he wasn't too macho to admit that his eyes blurred with tears at finally having eyes on her again.
“Right here, honey, I'm right here,” he murmured, dropping down to his own knees as he locked his gaze on her, unable to look away for fear that she would disappear in the blink of an eye.
“I knew you wouldn't leave,” she called up to him. There was so much faith, so much trust in those simple words that a sob of his own lodged in his throat.
She trusted him.
There was no better gift Indigo could give him than her trust. After everything she’d been through, every person who had let her down time and time again, he knew she had been convinced that she would never hand over her trust to another living person ever again.
Yet she had.
Him. She’d chosen to hand that trust over to him, and Voodoo vowed in this moment that he would never make her regret that decision. He would never let her down, never give her less than she deserved.
“Never, honey. Never. I would never leave you behind. I was tracking you the whole time. Was there when they put you in that car, drove off behind you, killed as many of them as I could before I met up with these guys, and we started tracking you.”
“Burning man is out here somewhere. He was close last time I heard him,” she told him.
“Who’s burning man?” he asked, assuming it was the driver, but he needed to know if someone else was tracking her as well.
“He did this to me.” She waved a hand at the marks on her chest. He couldn’t make them out from his location, but he remembered seeing them earlier. “Burned me. I don’t know his name. But, Voodoo,” she said anxiously, pushing up to her feet, “he was there. Dr. Gardner. I saw him. He told me they were going to use me as bait to get all of you back. He’s at that building, the one they took me to. You have to go and get him. I'm … I'm okay. I can wait here. I’ll be okay. You need to get to him before he can leave, get away again.”
The way she said it shattered his heart. Indigo one hundred percent believed that knowing Dr. Gardner was nearby would cause him and his team to leave her behind, go and kill the scientist first, and then come back for her, even knowing that someone was nearby hunting her.
“We know, honey,” he told her. “And we’ll get him, but not before we have you with us where we know you’ll be safe.”
“But—”
“No, Indy. No buts. You first, then him,” he said firmly.
Maybe he felt it more than saw it, because with the distance between them and the eerie green light of the night vision goggles, it was harder to read her expressions, but he knew it was joy, relief, disbelief, gratefulness, and something deeper, something closer to love, that crossed her face.
But then from one heartbeat to the next, things changed.
Indigo’s eyes widened as her gaze shifted to something that only she could see.
Then she screamed, a bullet cracked through the night, and he had no idea if it hit her or not because she stumbled backward, falling into the river behind her, the water quickly washing her away.
January 25th
1:11 A.M.
Cold.
