“Solina!”
I popped the lock, and Val flung open the door. “What happened?” I scrubbed my eyes and peered into the darkness behind him. “Where is everybody?”
“It’s gone to hell.” Val scrambled into the driver’s seat. He riffled through the glove box and flipped down the sun visor.
“What are you doing?” I crawled over the center console into the passenger seat. “What do you mean it’s gone to hell?”
“Helen’s guards were waiting for us when we got there.” Val leaned down between his legs and rolled up the floor mat. Then he reached over and rolled up mine.
Well, duh! I didn’t say. “What happened to Thorin and Baldur?”
“They’ve been taken. I’m going to get you out of here if I can find the keys.”
I had the keys but wasn’t going to give them to Val without getting the full story from him first. I scrutinized the darkness again, looking for signs of pursuit. “Are they chasing you?”
“No, Thorin and Baldur got ahead of me. I stopped to take a piss. By the time I caught up, they were already out. Helen’s guards had used something on them. They were knocked out.”
I threw open my door and jumped out. “So, you think they used a tranquilizer? Like they were wild animals or something? Is that even possible? It’s so, so… absurd.” The Valkyries had done the same to me, but I was mostly human, and they had wanted to take me alive. Helen would most likely prefer to dispose of Thorin. Baldur, however, she would keep, so maybe drugs made sense, for the time being. I had to get to Thorin before Helen changed her mind and utilized something deadlier, such as Odin’s spear.
Val leaped from the truck and jogged around to my side, using his body to block my forward progress. “C’mon, Solina. We’ve got to get you out of here.”
“We can’t leave them.” I shoved past Val, went to the Yukon’s back end, and opened the rear hatch to dig through stacks of luggage and a toolbox. Eventually, I found a tiny LED flashlight in a roadside emergency kit.
“They’re big boys.” Val positioned himself in my way again. “They can handle themselves. They knew the risks. Thorin would want us to leave.”
“If the roles were reversed, he wouldn’t leave us behind.”
Val stiffened, and his voice took on a harsh edge. “He wouldn’t leave you because any time you’re at risk, he’s at risk. He protects you out of pure self-interest. If you think he’ll love you for this…” Val didn’t finish the thought, but I got his meaning.
Not for Val, but for my own sake, I paused and thought about my motives. If my softer feelings for Thorin, whatever they might have been, were inspiring my actions, then I had to stop. Val was right. I couldn’t risk my life on the expectation of receiving some future preference from Thorin. My motives had to be mine alone.
I wouldn’t go out of my way to help Baldur find Nina, but I wouldn’t feed him to Helen, either—same for Thorin. My reason for going into the desert was no longer about participating in a simple treasure hunt for a pot of gold I had no desire to find. My motives were now about the lives and deaths of people I cared about—circumstances that did not tolerate apathy. “That’s not what this is about. It’s about right and wrong. If they die because of my indifference, that would be wrong.”
Val shook his head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s a compound full of armed men up there. Thorin and Baldur took out a handful of them barehanded before someone put them down with a dart gun, as if they were beasts. How do you expect to do any better than them?”
“I cannot stand by and let someone die simply to save my own hide,” I said. Losing Thorin meant losing my greatest ally against Helen. Val had demonstrated strength and fortitude when it suited him, but his chances of defeating Helen on his own inspired little confidence in me. He needed Thorin as much as I did.
Val gritted his teeth. “You are the stubbornest, most pig-headed—”
“I’m going, Val. Stay here or come with me and do your best to keep me safe.” I held up a flat palm in his direction. “So help me, if you stand in my way, I will char your ass.” As Val dithered, I went in for the kill. “I would do it for you, too. I wouldn’t leave you behind if they had taken you.”
In the glow of my LED flashlight, Val’s eyebrow arched. “I wouldn’t ask you to save me.”
“I’d do it anyway.”
Val’s lips thinned, and his nostrils flared. He folded his arms over his chest and glared at me. When I didn’t back down, he finally nodded. “Okay. But at the first sign of trouble, I’m grabbing you up and throwing you over my shoulder. You can burn me to ashes if you want, but your life comes first.”
Security lights illuminated several guards on patrol inside an industrial compound made up of seven or eight large corrugated-metal warehouses. The sentries—all toting mean black rifles—walked the inside perimeter of a huge chain-link fence topped by three strands of barbed wire. Crouched in the darkness behind a convenient patch of prickly desert vegetation, Val and I watched the guards stroll back and forth along the fence.
I pulled my hood up and balled my hands together in my hoodie’s kangaroo pocket. The desert was surprisingly cold at night, and it smelled of dust, horse manure, engine exhaust, and wood smoke.
“Did you learn anything useful about this place before you came back to get me?” I whispered to Val.
He motioned farther down the fence line. “I don’t know where they’re being kept. The place is full of guards, so whatever we’re going to do, we gotta do it fast.”
“How did Baldur and Thorin get past this fence and all those guards?”
Val peered at me from the corner of his eye. “They have their ways. Ways not available to you, unfortunately.”
“Can you get through the fence? Without being caught?”
Val put a hand over his heart and huffed. “You offend me.”
“We need a distraction,” I said, ignoring his theatrics. “You got a holocaust cloak on you?”
“A what?”
“Never mind. Something big-go-boom would be good. Something to draw the guards’ attention away from the fence long enough for me to get inside.”
“There’s a propane tank next to the rear building. See it?” Val gripped my shoulders and turned me in the direction he wanted me to look. Next to an outlying building, illuminated by the security light’s yellow glow, sat a familiar white tank.
“Yeah, I see it,” I said.
Val turned toward the warehouses and studied the patrol’s movements. “You can handle the flame part. Once that thing blows, I’ll slip around and try to help Thorin and Baldur.”
I heaved a groan. “I don’t know, Val. I’m pretty pooped. I haven’t eaten, and I’ve slept like crap.” Actually, I trusted my fire, but I wanted to save it for a dire situation, not use it up on a special effects show. Besides, Val had deserted Thorin and Baldur once already. I didn’t want to give him the chance to do it again.
Val huffed. “What other ideas do you have?”
