“No!” Jules cried.
“Shut up, bitch,” he growled.
It was all Trent could do not to grab his weapon and take aim at the bastard’s head as he walked toward the group. “I can’t promise that.”
Rolfe wasn’t listening. He was already thinking ahead, past his negotiated exchange of prisoners. “We’ll need the helicopter and the seaplane. That’s part of the deal.”
“And go where? Roseburg? Or Medford? Come on,
man, Spurrier’s in no condition to leave, much less fly,” Trent said, trying to reason with a maniac. “Give it up, Eric. It’s over. Spurrier needs medical attention ASAP or he won’t make it, and Zach’s singing like a bird, naming names, giving all of you up.”
Missy shook her head. “No way,” she said. “He … he wouldn’t.” But there was a seed of doubt in her high-pitched voice.
“Way.” Trent was still walking forward, ignoring the slight shake of Jules’s head, the fear in her eyes.
“You know that he’ll do anything to save his own skin. He’s got a father or an uncle or someone in the family who’s a lawyer or a judge. Anyway, he’s already demanding to speak to the DA. Wanting immunity so that you can all rot in prison for the rest of your lives.”
“Trent’s lying!” Missy cried, desperately disbelieving.
“I know.” Eric wasn’t bullied.
“How do you know?” Ortega demanded, sending a worried glance to Rolfe. So Ortega was the crack in the armor. Good. The anxious boy licked his chapped lips and his nerves were evident in his drawn face. “Zach could turn.”
“He wouldn’t!” Missy was insistent as a bit of wind kicked up, ruffling her hair.
“Don’t let this loser rattle you,” Eric advised.
Trent’s eyes found Jules’s, and he saw the terror within, knew she’d read his mind that he was going to take Rolfe out.
No,
she mouthed.
Rolfe grinned. “I guess we’re at an impasse, aren’t we?” He shifted the barrel of his gun away from Jules and aimed directly at Trent’s head. “Too bad. I kinda liked you, Trent.”
Trent reached for his gun.
Craaaak!
A rifle shot echoed through the canyon.
Jules screamed.
Rolfe’s head spun. Blood sprayed, red spatter on the snow-white ground. Twirling, dropping his weapon, Rolfe fell into the snow, blood and gray matter darkening the pristine ground.
“What? No!” Missy shrieked, her eyes rounding. “Eric! No! Jesus Christ, what have you done?”
Trent jerked his pistol from the back of his pants.
Behind him Deputy Meeker, standing near a skeletal oak, turned the muzzle of his deadly weapon from Eric’s dead body to aim at Roberto Ortega.
Nell screeched in pure terror. Stumbling, she ran through the snow heading toward the clinic, her hands bound behind her, her hair streaming in the clear night.
With no hostage in front of him, Ortega was an easy target.
“No, oh, God, no!” Missy was out of her mind with panic.
Jules dived into the snow, falling on Eric’s rifle, picking it up behind her, trying with frozen, awkward fingers, to aim the gun at Missy.
Roberto Ortega saw her and lifting his rifle to his shoulder, pointed its deadly barrel directly at Jules.
“Watch out!” Trent yelled, running forward, pistol in hand. Aiming at Ortega, he sailed through the air, landing on Jules and covering her body with his own.
Ortega squeezed the trigger.
Trent fired.
Blam!!!
A shot whizzed past Trent’s head, missing him by a hair’s breadth.
Squealing in pain, Ortega went down.
Out of the corner of his eye, Trent spied Shay, spinning, leg in the air, catching Missy’s chin and sending the blond girl’s weapon twirling, end over end, into the air.
Only wounded, Ortega lifted his head, and with his elbows buried in the snow, aimed his weapon at Trent. “Die, bastard!” he snarled, squeezing the trigger.
Trent rolled, pulling Jules with him into the drifts.
The bullet went sizzling through the snow, missing them by inches. In a second, still covering Jules’s body with his own, Trent lifted his good arm and took aim with his pistol.
Roberto, struggling to stand, pulled the trigger again.
Blam!
Ortega went down in a heap, his shot going wild, his blood oozing dark against the snow.
Meeker was running forward, the sight of his weapon now trained on Missy Albright as she struggled to climb to her feet in the slick snow. Shay, breathing fire, dancing on her toes, hands still uselessly cuffed behind her back, was ready to kick the living hell out of her.
“Don’t even think about it, bitch!” Shay snarled, her eyes bright with hatred.
“No …” Missy started to argue but took one look around, to Roberto gasping for breath and Eric obviously dead. “Oh, God,” she whispered, defeated. Tears slid down her face as she crumpled, disheartened, to the snow. Curling into a fetal position, snow clumping in her hair, she whispered, “This is all wrong. It’s not the way it was supposed to be.”
“Too friggin’ bad,” Shaylee said.
The other soldiers in Spurrier’s sick little army, Takasumi, Slade, and Donahue, stared at the muzzle of Meeker’s gun and the bodies littering the snow. One by one, they dropped their weapons and raised their hands. Takasumi was stoic, Slade defiant, and Kaci Donahue shaking, her teeth chattering so loudly they rattled. “Don’t shoot!” she yelled. “Please, please! Don’t shoot!”
None of these three, the second tier of soldiers, it appeared, had gotten off a shot, nor been part of the action.
Thank God. If they’d started shooting, the outcome of this battle might have turned out far, far worse.
As far as Trent was concerned, they all deserved to face a judge and long prison terms.
Thank God, Jules and Shaylee were safe. Finally. He rolled to one side, looking down on Jules, her dark hair fanned in the snow, her face pale in the moonlight. “Are you okay?”
“Depends on what you mean by ‘okay.’” She managed a bit of a smile, then looked toward her sister. Tears filled her eyes as she saw that Shay was alive and unhurt. “Have I ever been okay?”
“Never.”
“Didn’t think so.” She pushed herself to a sitting position where she could see the damage. “Such a horrid waste,” she said as if to herself, then to Trent, “I could’ve taken care of myself, you know. You didn’t have to tackle me and pin me to the ground.”
“Maybe I wanted to. Couldn’t control myself.”
“Give me a break.”
“I think I just did!” He winked at her as sunlight began to stream over the mountains, the long-awaited dawn chasing away the night.
“Okay, okay, so you saved my life,” she mocked, somehow pulling herself together. “I suppose now I’m on the hook of owing you for the rest of my life.”
“You got that right.” Trent gave her a squeeze with his good arm, helping her to her feet. He spied Meeker, still training his gun on the group of TAs who had survived. “We okay?”
“Yeah. These are good kids,” he mocked. “They do what they’re told and right now, they’re cuffing each other. Just like I ordered.” Sure enough, he was standing close enough to the group so that they wouldn’t run and make a break for it, while watching them place handcuffs over their
peers. He’d already collected their weapons and stood over the rifles and handguns.
Trent asked, “So why didn’t you stay put, safe at Stanton House, huh? What the hell were you thinking?”
“That maybe I could help. If you haven’t noticed I’m not all that great about just sitting around when there’s trouble.” She shook some of the snow from her hair. “Your turn. What the hell were you thinking, taking off and trying to take down Spurrier?” she said.
“Actually he was taking me down, I just got lucky. But what I was thinking was just one thing. That if we ever lived through this nightmare, I was going to make damned sure that I never lost you again.”
“Oh, yeah, right.”
“Seriously,” he said, sunlight catching in his eyes.
“Funny, I was thinking just the opposite,” she teased. “I told myself that if I had any brains at all and if I got through this and saw you again, I should run the other way as fast as my feet would carry me.”
He arched a skeptical brow. “I’d catch you, you know.”
“Oh, I know.” She buzzed his grizzled cheek with a quick kiss. “In fact, Cowboy, I was counting on it!”
“Save me,” Shay groaned as she approached, nearly stumbling over Eric Rolfe’s dead body. She glanced down at him and her expression turned dark. “Serves you right, bastard,” she said just as Flannagan, astride Omen, burst across the lawn.
The black horse plowed through the snow, sending up a spray of powder. Behind him, the entire herd ran wildly through the grounds, kicking up more snow, dark legs flashing, eyes bright.
“What the hell?” Trent said, but got it. In desperation, Bert Flannagan had come up with the harebrained idea that a stampede would stop the ensuing attack. Eyes bright, Flannagan held a gun in each hand and the reins in his
teeth, like some damned Hollywood version of an anti-hero riding to save the day.
Like an avenger from hell, he headed straight for the weak group of TAs who were surveying the bloody scene, then climbed off his horse and scooped up all their weapons.
“Hey!” Meeker said. “Leave everything. We got it.”
Flannagan did as he was told and eyed the small cluster of remaining TAs. “Guess I missed the action,” he said.
Trent said, “A day late and a dollar short.”
“Always these days, it seems,” Flannagan said, stuffing his pistols into holsters and eyeing the carnage as if he were sorry not to have been a part of it.
Meeker looked at the vigilante. “You’re in time for clean up.”
“My luck,” Flannagan said unhappily.
“Who would have thought?” Jules whispered as she eyed the bloodied snow. Ortega, still alive, was whimpering.
“I’ve got him,” Flannagan said, no doubt a trained medic, though Jordan Ayres, the nurse, dressed in a snowsuit, had left her post in the clinic and, with a bag in hand, was hurrying toward the injured students.
Trent inspected the body of Eric Rolfe. The kid was dead, staring sightlessly upward, his face still showing signs of the hatred that had burned deep in his guts. Trent wondered what had happened to the boy to make him such easy fodder for a homicidal fanatic like Spurrier. Had Rolfe been hard-wired wrong from birth? He reached into the stiff, frozen pockets of Rolfe’s jacket and discovered a set of keys to the handcuffs.
“Here we go.” Trent planted a kiss on Jules’s forehead as she rubbed her wrists and took the key to Shaylee, who, now that she had no one to kick to hell and back, was breathing hard, staring at her sister in disbelief.
“You and the cowboy? Really?”
“Looks like.” Jules hazarded a glance at Trent. No man on earth had the right to appear so damned sexy, especially after the hellish night they’d just endured. Quickly Jules unlocked Shay’s wrists. “How about that?”
“Yeah,” Shay said rubbing her wrists and managing a fake, unhappy grin, “How about that?”
Jules hugged her fiercely. The sky was lightening rapidly now, the sun chasing away the stars and reflecting on the churned snow. “God, I’m glad you’re okay.”
“Me too.”
“I was afraid … really scared that they had …” She swallowed hard, the words hard to say. “I mean I thought they might have killed you, too. When I saw Maeve I was sure there were others and you …” Jules blinked hard, tears burning her eyes.
“Hey. I’m okay.” Shay said. “But I told you this place was sick and twisted. You get it now, right? So why don’t we get the hell out of here? Take me home.”
“As soon as I can,” she promised, swallowing the lump in her throat. “As soon as I can.”
Shay was nodding to herself, the aftereffects of being held at gunpoint, in fear for her life, taking hold. “Good. That’s good. I have to get out of here. Hey, why don’t you give me those,” she said, indicating the small key that unlocked the cuffs. “I’ll spring Nell.”
“Sure.” Jules handed her the keys.
“First things first, though.” Shay marched up to a whimpering Missy Albright, pulled a pair of handcuffs from Tim Takasumi’s hands and clipped the cuffs on the taller girl herself. “Serves you right, you bitch!” Shay said, giving Missy a push, then catching her by the pockets.
“That’s enough!” Meeker ordered and Shay, fists clenched, grudgingly backed away.
“I hope you get what you deserve,” she said to Missy, then took off after Nell as Trent draped an arm over Jules’s shoulder and hugged her close. “Once a rebel,” he said, watching Shay, “always a rebel.”
“Are you talking about Shay?” Jules asked. “Or yourself?”
He smiled. “Both.” Then he kissed her forehead.
CHAPTER 45
Hours later, Jules relaxed a little. She and Trent had ended up in the school’s cafeteria where they were drinking coffee while still trying to figure out some of the loose ends that hadn’t yet made sense.
At least her sister was safe.
Shay, along with Nell Cousineau, had been taken to the clinic to be checked for injuries by Nurse Ayres. Afterward they were to meet with their counselors to help them sort through their war-torn emotions and the trauma of being held hostage, their lives continuously threatened.
As far as Jules knew, Shay seemed to be handling the situation, at least outwardly, for the moment. Nell, however, was an emotional wreck, might be scarred forever, and was under the watchful eye of Rhonda Hammersley until her parents could arrive.
Meeker, with the help of Flannagan, Taggert, and Burdette, had locked the offenders in the clinic, the new makeshift jail. Ayres helped with the wounds. Eric Rolfe was dead, Roberto Ortega clinging tenaciously to life, Spurrier fast slipping away, the leader no more.
Earlier, from her suite at Stanton House, Jules had
watched as a sheriff’s helicopter was able to land long before the roads were cleared. Detectives Baines and Jalinsky had already taken both Trent’s and her statements and were in the process of interrogating Spurrier’s followers. The sheriff and a few deputies, who had arrived via helicopter, were talking to the students, taking statements one by one in a long, grinding process.
Through it all, while the detectives were going over the crime scenes of the stable, clinic, campus lawn, and retrofitted fallout shelter, Jules and Trent had pieced together what had happened.