The Bones of Valhalla (Purge of Babylon, Book 9) Read online

  “Well, yeah. That, and Riley requested the presence of your company.”

  “He said it just like that, huh?”

  “Just abouts.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “No, but he looked pretty serious.”

  “He always looks serious,” Lara said. She took a moment to breathe in the cool air; it was like stepping out onto the exterior deck at night after the scalding hot shower. “And since when did you start doing Riley’s bidding?”

  Bonnie shrugged. “Well, he is pretty cute. You could even mistake him for handsome, if you were so inclined.”

  “There is that.”

  “And oh, word’s getting around. Everyone’s talking about it.”

  Lara gave her an alarmed look. “About what?”

  “Mercer. People are talking about the radio message that we intercepted earlier.” Bonnie paused and gave her a curious look. “What did you think I was talking about?”

  “The chest.”

  The other woman shook her head. “As far as I know, that’s still just a secret between us. Danny, Carly, and everyone else I’ve talked to has been driving that point home. I think we’re safe on that front.”

  Maybe, she thought, but said, “I’m sure we are.”

  “Have you gone to see him?”

  She nodded.

  “Talked to him?” Bonnie asked.

  No, because I’m afraid. God help me, I’m afraid.

  “I will,” she said instead.

  “I know it can’t be easy for you. I thought he was gone, and then he shows up…” Bonnie gave her a pursed smile. It was probably meant to be reassuring, but didn’t quite get there. “Not that I know what it’s like for you. None of us really do.”

  “It’s okay, Bonnie.”

  “I’ll be honest with you, kid…”

  “Kid?” Lara said, giving her an amused look.

  “Well, you are younger than me.”

  “Not by much.”

  “Still technically younger.”

  Even though I feel like sixty going on ninety.

  “You were saying?” Lara said.

  “I don’t know how you do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Everything.” She shook her head. “It’s like you were born for this.”

  Or maybe I’m just a very good liar, she thought, tossing the towel onto the bed and picking up her gun belt and slipping it on.

  Bonnie watched her from across the room. Lara could tell the other woman had something else on her mind, but for whatever reason she was reluctant to say it.

  “What is it, Bonnie?” Lara asked.

  “If Mercer’s dead, what does that mean for Keo?” Bonnie said.

  The question caught her by surprise, and Lara actually had to take a moment to think about it. The truth was, with everything happening today—Danny and Gaby’s return, the chest, Will—she hadn’t had time to think about anything else. Or anyone else. Not even Keo, who had gone to Black Tide Island to kill Mercer.

  You still alive out there, Keo?

  If Mercer was dead—or as Riley hypothesized, somehow incapacitated—then someone would have had to put him that way. Keo had the motive and the skills to be the culprit. So what did that mean for him?

  She still remembered the last (the last, last) conversation they’d had on the Ocean Star:

  “Don’t be an asshole, Keo,” she had told him. “If you won’t stay with us, if you won’t come back to the Trident with me, at least promise me you’re not going out there just to get yourself killed. Tell me you’ll at least try to make it back, and mean it.”

  “What if I can’t?” he had answered.

  “You can. You just have to make the choice.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay, what?”

  “I’ll do my best. How’s that?”

  She had nodded, and said, “Good enough.”

  So had it been good enough, after all? Had Keo reached Black Tide Island with Erin’s help and done what he had to? Was he on his way back to them right now?

  That last part was a stretch because he wouldn’t know their current location. The last time he had seen them was on the oil rig, preparing to leave. But Keo would know not to go there after last night. So where would he go instead? What would he do?

  “He hasn’t radioed?” Lara asked.

  Bonnie shook her head. “Blaine’s keeping the emergency channel open, but so far there hasn’t been a peep.”

  “With Keo, you can never tell. How many times have we given up on him only for him to pop up again? That guy has nine lives.”

  “So how many has he used up so far?”

  “I don’t know, but let’s hope he has a few left to spare.”

  “Hope springs eternal, is that it?”

  “Have faith, Bonnie.”

  The other woman sighed. “Hey, it’s not like I’m married to the guy or anything. We haven’t even done the horizontal dance. I’m just worried about him, that’s all.”

  “We both are. But Keo can take care of himself.” She picked up her Glock from the nightstand and slid it into the holster. “I need volunteers to relieve Benny and Carrie in a few hours.”

  “Gwen and Jo have already offered. Though from everything I’ve heard, we could have everyone down there and it still wouldn’t do any good. I’ve never actually seen them in person—one of those blue-eyed types—but I was talking to Nate and…” She actually shivered. “I don’t think I want to, after hearing what they can do.”

  “I know,” Lara said, heading for the door. “But the guards aren’t down there to keep him inside the cabin. They’re there to keep people out.”

  They found Riley back on the bridge with Blaine and Hart. Besides her cabin and Zoe’s infirmary, the bridge was the only other place on the yacht that wasn’t constantly filled with people, the din of which faded as soon as Bonnie closed the door after them.

  It was already dark on the other side of the wraparound windshield, and the bright floodlights around the boat were the only thing visible for miles around. She might have been slightly alarmed at how lit up they were (Like a Christmas tree, right, Will?) if not for the fact that the vessel was still moving. Their speed, just as it had been since they left the Ocean Star, was hampered by the refueling ship following closely behind them.

  “You wanted to talk to me?” Lara said as Riley and Hart glanced over.

  Riley nodded. “We just came from a meeting with our people. We had a long talk about what to do next.”

  “That was fast.”

  “I didn’t think we had time to waste. We’ll be at the Bengal Islands soon if we keep on this course.”

  “Okay,” Lara said, and waited for him to continue.

  Riley and Hart exchanged a look. She tried to read their faces, but came up with very little, except that they both seemed uncertain.

  “Guys,” Lara said, “you called me up here. Let’s get on with it.”

  “We’re leaning toward going back,” Riley said.

  “Going back where?”

  “Black Tide.”

  Bonnie laughed. “You want to go back? You’re crazy.”

  “Not with Mercer out of the equation,” Riley said.

  “You don’t even know what really happened to him, or if anything happened at all,” Lara said.

  “Rhett wouldn’t have given the stand-down order if everything was status quo.”

  “But you don’t know that for sure, Riley. This is all just conjecture.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. I’ve been with him long enough—almost since the beginning—to know how he works. And I’m telling you, the kind of order Rhett gave this morning is something Mercer would never have allowed. Or if there was a reason behind it, Mercer would have given it himself. The fact that he didn’t speaks volumes.”

  “You hope,” Bonnie said.

  “I know,” Riley insisted.

  Just like you knew Andy was “all-in” with your mutiny? Lara wanted
to ask him, but she refrained for the simple reason she didn’t feel like arguing the point. It was done, in the past, and bringing it up again wouldn’t have helped either one of them.

  Besides, she wished she could force herself to care about what happened to Riley and his people once they left the Trident, but she couldn’t. She had other things on her mind right now, and the fate of Riley’s group was not at the top of her list of priorities.

  Lara looked over at Hart. “You’ve been quiet.”

  Hart shrugged, but didn’t say anything right away. He might have been the oldest man on the bridge at the moment, but he looked reinvigorated since the Ocean Star. She could almost believe he was in his late thirties, if not for those streaks of gray.

  “No opinions?” Lara asked.

  “I got lots of opinions,” Hart said.

  “So spill it.”

  “The honest truth is, I don’t know. But if there’s a chance Mercer could be gone, and Rhett or someone else is now in charge…” He shook his head. “Maybe this is our only chance to go home. It’s not about the island but the people on it. We left a lot of good friends behind. We didn’t agree with them on the war, about Mercer’s plans, but they’re one of the reasons we ran instead of fighting.”

  “You didn’t want to have to kill your friends.”

  Hart nodded. “If we couldn’t avoid that, I’m not sure how many people Riley could have gotten to sign up for this. I know I wouldn’t have.”

  “But people are already dead, Hart,” Lara said. “Did you forget about Andy? What about the group that came through the Ocean Star with Erin?”

  “And I wish none of those things had happened,” Riley said. “But that’s the past.”

  “So what’s the future?”

  “I don’t know yet. I guess it’ll depend on what’s waiting for us at Black Tide.” He sighed, the decision clearly weighing heavily on his mind. “I told my people about what’s happened, what we think’s happening right now. But I’m not going to force them to do anything they don’t want to. If the majority of them want to stay on course to the Bengal Islands, then that’s what we’ll do. I’m not Mercer. I’m not going to strong-arm people into doing something they don’t want to. I’ll lay out everything we know—everything we think we know—and let them make their own choices.”

  “What if the majority wants to head back, but a few wants to stick to the original plan?”

  “Then I’ll have to do some begging to get the captain of this boat to let them stay on and help them get to where they want to go.”

  “No promises. The deal was to take you all there, not to take one group to Destination A and the rest to Destination B.”

  “I understand.”

  “Wow, democracy on the high seas,” Bonnie said. “Who would have thunk it?”

  “Can I have it?” Riley asked. “Can I get more time?”

  “How long is it going to take?”

  “A day. Maybe two. This is a big decision. Almost as big as when we decided to mutiny.”

  “Two days at the most,” Hart added.

  Instead of answering them, Lara turned to Blaine. “Shut her down. There’s no point wasting fuel until they’ve made up their minds.”

  “Thank you,” Riley said.

  “One day,” Lara said, looking back at him. “I’ll give you one day to decide what you want to do, but that’s it. Make your decision, and this time, stick to it.”

  The Trident was about half the length of a football field—not that Lara ever sat down to measure every inch of it or dug out the manual and looked over the specs. The yacht had seemed endless in the beginning, but that distance shrunk as she familiarized herself with its nooks and crannies. Now with Riley’s people onboard the boat felt endless again, mostly because she couldn’t go a couple of steps without almost walking into someone, or had to go around a throng of civilians blocking the narrow hallways.

  She thought about detouring to Carly’s room to fill Danny in on what had transpired on the bridge, but decided to keep going to her cabin instead. Her friends needed time alone after all those days apart, and she didn’t want to ruin that reunion. They would have done the same for her if Will had come back.

  But Will did come back, remember?

  Except it wasn’t Will. Not really.

  Or, at least, not anymore.

  So what was he then? Something else? Yes. Exactly.

  Something else.

  The realization that Will had been out there all this time left an even bigger hole in the pit of her stomach than when she thought he was dead. Will coming back changed was the most terrible thing that could have happened to her, something she couldn’t have imagined in her wildest nightmares.

  But here it was. Here he was. Down there, waiting for her, maybe wondering why she hadn’t done more than just enter the cabin and looked at the chest before fleeing. And that was exactly what she had done.

  She had fled. Ran away from him. From him.

  You fucking coward.

  You fucking, selfish coward. He deserves better than this.

  Her door was never locked, and except for a Captain’s Cabin plaque (though the Captain had been scratched out and Lara scribbled over it), there was nothing to keep anyone—not even those two kids she had just walked past—from going inside. The fact that no one had yet was a minor miracle—

  Something was wrong.

  She couldn’t explain it, but she knew there was something different about the room as soon as she stepped inside and let the door click back into place behind her. It was pitch dark, with only a small pool of moonlight spilling in from the window on the far wall.

  A second after she sensed it, she smelled it—sweat that didn’t come from her own skin, but from someone hiding in the shadows.

  Someone’s in the room.

  God, she hoped it was someone, because the only other option was something being in the room with her right now—

  She reached for her gun, got her fingers around the grip, and was lifting it out of the holster when the barrel of a weapon pressed against her right temple. The cold contact of the metal against her skin sent a sliver of electricity through her body.

  “Don’t,” a voice said, the sound freezing her hand—and the gun—in place.

  A strangely warm (and large) hand grabbed her right wrist and yanked away the Glock. The cold of the gun barrel abandoned her temple as a tall figure shuffled in the shadows and there was a clack! from behind her as the door’s lock was twisted into place, followed by more movements as her cabin’s intruder traveled the short distance from her side to stand in front of her.

  Despite the semidarkness, she recognized the face looking back at her. She had first seen it on the Ocean Star.

  “Phil,” she said, “what are you doing?”

  He had some kind of submachine gun pointed at her face. She wished she could have said his hand and the weapon in it were shaking, but they were as calm as could be. With his other hand, he shoved her Glock into his front waistband before taking a step back and then, and only then, letting his weapon lower—slightly.

  “Sit down, Lara,” he said.

  “Phil—”

  “Sit down,” he said through clenched teeth.

  She walked over and sat down on the side of her bed and watched Phil walk to the door and lean against the wall next to it. Now that her eyes had adjusted somewhat to the darkness, she could just make out the MP5K with the pistol grip hanging almost nonchalantly at his side. Besides her Glock stuffed into his front waistband, he had only come here with just the submachine gun as far as she could tell.

  “Just the submachine gun?” That’s more than enough.

  “What’s this about?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer her, and instead unclipped a radio from his hip and held it in his left hand, while the right continued to clutch his weapon. A sudden spurt of footsteps from the hallway made him turn his head, but he quickly relaxed and resumed his stance when the noise faded.


  “Phil,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  He didn’t respond or even look back at her. Had he even heard her?

  “Phil,” she said again, louder this time.

  “What?” he said, sounding agitated.

  You’re the one with a gun hiding in my room, asshole, she wanted to snap back, but said instead, “What are you doing?”

  He finally trained his eyes on her, and even without any real light in the room, she could make out the penetrating stare he had pointed back at her. “You know why.”

  “I don’t.”

  “The creature. The ghoul.”

  Oh, goddammit. He knows. He knows.

  “I don’t understand,” she said anyway. “What ghoul?”

  He smirked. “You can stop pretending. We know all about it. The creature you have locked away in a chest down in the engine room.” He sneaked a peek at the glowing neon hands of his wristwatch. “But don’t worry, Lara, we’re going to take care of it for you.”

  “What do you mean, ‘take care of it?’”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Phil…”

  “You shouldn’t have brought it onboard,” he said. “You should have known better. Riley might have made that mistake, but not you. You should have known better.”

  I didn’t bring him onboard. Danny did. He didn’t tell me what was in the chest until after it was already in Gage’s old room.

  Of course, she didn’t tell Phil any of that. She didn’t think it was going to matter anyway. The man with the gun glaring at her from across the darkened room right now didn’t care about the truth. He had come here to do a job, and he was doing it.

  But if Phil’s job was in here with her, then what was happening outside? Because she didn’t believe for a second this was a one-man job. And she had absolutely heard him say, “But don’t worry, Lara, we’re going to take care of it for you.”

  “We.” He said “we.”

  “Was this Riley’s plan all along?” she asked. “Trick me into bringing you onboard with some sob story about wanting to leave Mercer’s war, then take over the boat when we let our guards down?”

  Phil might have chuckled. If he did, it was very quiet and short. “Riley has nothing to do with it. He’s a good man, but he was never really meant for leadership. I could think of twenty people off the top of my head who are more qualified. Still, he got us out of Mercer’s insanity, so we owe him that much.”