Spirit of a Hunter by Sylvie Kurtz Page A

trucks. Not made into a sieve by bullets. Her hands tightened around her ankles and her shaking knees bumped into her nose.
    Sabriel kept on speeding. She couldn’t see what was happening outside the Jeep, couldn’t anticipate his moves.
He knows what he’s doing
. She swallowed hard.
He’s a trained soldier, a trained agent. He’ll keep you safe
.
    The sudden sharp turn caught her unprepared, throwing her sideways against his hard thigh like a rag doll, then smacked her back against the door.
    “Are you all right?” he asked as he hurled the Jeep along a maze of twisty, tree-lined back roads.
    “Just peachy.”
    “Are you hit?”
    She scanned through the cotton numbness of her limbs and shook her head. “You can sit up.”
    She wasn’t sure she could. Her fingers wouldn’t unclamp from her ankles and her spine didn’t seem to have any starch. She was cold, so cold, as if ice water flowed through her veins and chilled her from the inside out.
Normal. It’s been a crazy day
. Tommy taking Scotty. Lying to the Colonel. Being shot at. Her voice croaked up her throat. “We lost them?”
    “For now.”
    Her body finally cooperated and she sat up. She rubbed her arms and could not get a kilocalorie of warmth into her body. “Scotty. We can’t let them get to Scotty.”
    “I won’t.”
    On the main road up ahead, sirens shrieked in the dying afternoon. Blue lights swirled through the bleeding sky in a mottled tapestry of bruises. Nora swiveled her head to look over her shoulder. The Hummer wasn’t in sight. But it was back there, somewhere in that ant’s nest of dirt roads, hunting for them.
    They were trapped.
    And they were still in Camden country. The two police cruisers blocking the road were not there to help them.
    A loose end.
    Forward or back would lead them straight into the Colonel’s clutches.
    He would once again get what he wanted—her out of the picture and Scotty to himself.
    I’m sorry, baby, so sorry
.
    Sabriel swore and steered the Jeep into the trees. Nora hung on to the dashboard as they catapulted onto a barely-there rut.
    In spite of her tight grip, the ride bobbed her like a cork in a fast-moving stream. And like that cork, she had no control over her situation.
    “Tree!” she squealed as Sabriel almost hit an oak.
    “I see it.”
    “Could you slow down?”
    She might as well have spit into the wind for all the good her request did. He kept racing ahead, the sharp cranking of the steering wheel jostling her from side to side.
    “If we crash,” she said, “they get what they want. Us dead.”
    “You want the cops to hold us until it’s too late to find Tommy?”
    “I want to get to the damn mountains and find my son. Preferably alive.”
    Sabriel made a bone-rattling entry into a snarl of bushes and braked to a jarring halt, killing the engine.
    A minute later, the black Hummer crept by on the narrow track they’d left. Sabriel remained unfazed, a statue in his seat, while she turned into a quivering mass of ringing nerves.
    How could he stay so calm when everything was falling apart? They could end up dead before they ever reached the mountains and Scotty.
    “The Colonel’s men tried to kill us,” she said, watching the taillights, red evil eyes, retreat into the darkening woods.
    “The Colonel wants his grandson,” Sabriel said. “And what the Colonel wants, the Colonel goes after.”
    “No matter who gets hurt.”
    Sabriel’s jaw flinched. “Collateral damage.”
    Nora rubbed at the tightness in her throat with one ice-cold hand. “He wants to control Scotty like he controlled Tommy and Anna. And look how that turned out.” Her gaze speared Sabriel’s jungle-green eyes. “I can’t let that happen.”
    In the depth of his steady gaze, she found reassurance. An understanding that went soul deep. For the first time in her life, someone was seeing her. Really seeing her, and not flinching at what he saw there. He knew. He understood. The Colonel had almost broken