Page 93 of Carry on Wayward Son

Koa was on the ground beside the Bronco.

Fuck. Oh, fuck no.

I darted forward, pressing my hand to his side and felt it rise and fall, slow and heavy, and found the small bare patch where the dart had gone in. Tranqed, not dead. Coming up out of it slowly, his eyes half-open and unfocused, a low, confused sound coming out of him as he tried to make his legs work and couldn’t. He knew. Even mostly under, he knew she was gone, and he was trying to get up and go after her, and his body wouldn’t let him.

“Easy,” I told him, my voice not entirely steady. “Easy. I’ve got it.”

The driver’s door had been pried open. The metal was bent where something had wrenched it past its hinge, and the seatbelt hung cut and empty.

And on the road, a few feet from the open door, lay a knife.

I crouched over it. One of hers. I recognized the make, the balance of it, had watched her bury its twin in plywood this morning, a hundred years ago. The blade was wet. Dark and wet along its length, and more of it pooled small on the asphalt beneath, and it wasn’t hers, because she’d been belted in and the blood was out here where she’d been dragged.

She’d gotten a piece of one of them. She’d fought. Of course she’d fought. She’d have fought with everything her life had built into her, and it was all right here on the road in front of me: the cut seatbelt and the pried door, and the bloody knife she’d dropped. It hadn’t been enough. All of it, every hour of training, every knife and every form and every reflex she’d hammered into herself so that no one would ever take her again, and the right people with the right plan had taken her anyway, off a dark road, in the time it took me to let my father pay for dinner.

The thing I’d been holding down tried to come up. The full size of it, the panic, the image of her in the dark in their hands, the place every part of me wanted to go.

I put it away.

I crouched on a dark road over her dog and her bloody knife, and I put the panic in the box where it belonged, because panic didn’t get her back and the cold, clear, operational thing did. I was going to need every piece of that now.

I pulled my phone out. Called Sawyer first.

He answered on the second ring. “Jace⁠—”

“Shut the ferry down. Right now, tonight, every run. Nothing leaves Hatterwick. Not a boat off our docks, not a charter, nothing you can reach. Layla’s been taken, and I need this island sealed.”

The noise behind him cut out, a door closing. “Taken.” Not a question. Sawyer didn’t waste time on disbelief. “I can stop our boats inside five minutes, and I’ll lean on the marina to hold private craft. Coast Guard’s the gap. I can’t ground a plane.”

“Get Daniel on the Coast Guard. He can push it faster than anyone.” I was already moving back toward Koa. “Then get to Sutter House. Come ready.”

“On it.” He was gone.

I called Rios next.

“Willa reached me, I’m rolling toward Sutter House,” he said. “Talk.”

“Coast road, four miles north of the village. Spike strip across the road, her Bronco’s wrecked in the dunes. Koa’s darted but alive. Driver’s door pried open, seatbelt cut.” Flat and fast, report cadence, facts only. “There’s blood on the scene that isn’t hers. She fought, she got one of them, they took her anyway. Gone twenty, twenty-five minutes. Sawyer’s shutting the ferry down and putting Daniel on the Coast Guard.”

A beat of silence. “Halston.”

“Halston.” I had no doubt. He’d recognized her at the party. He’d been patient. He’d waited for her to be alone, and tonight she’d handed him the opening. “Sutter House, twenty minutes. Bring everything you can put your hands on. We’re not waiting on the SBI, and we’re not waiting on warrants. I know where she is.”

“You don’t know that yet.”

“I know it.” I crouched and got my arms under Koa, a hundred pounds of half-conscious dog, and lifted him toward the truck because I wasn’t leaving him on the side of the road. I wouldn’t leave her knife either. “I’ve known where this ends since the party. Twenty minutes.”

I hung up.

I got Koa into the cab, laid him across the back seat. He made a sound and got one paw under himself and gave up, his eyes finding me, confused and stricken and trying to tell me something I already knew.

“I’m going to get her,” I told him. I yanked the spike strip off the road and retrieved her knife, the blade still wet. I held it for a second in the wash of my headlights. “I’m going to get her back.”

Then I got in the truck and drove.

Forty-Eight

LAYLA