She jumped to the cabin and grabbed their medium-weight coats-not the heavy parkas they used in the Yukon, but something good for winter in New Prospect.

He was still staring at the phone.

"Let's go to the car," she said. "Unless they just happen to be at one of our jump sites...."

He nodded and vanished. She jumped to the garage and found him opening the passenger-side door. His phone chirped and he said, "Good. Got the map link. It'll take a minute to load."

The car was out on the road when he said, "South, but still moving."

"To the interstate?"

He shook his head. "I don't think so. They're not moving fast enough to be on the state road. More one of these little guys west of the state road." He tilted the phone to show her.

She stepped on the accelerator and headed down Thunderbird Road at twice the posted speed limit, keeping her eye open for pedestrians, cars, and patches of ice.

Davy kept his eye glued to the phone, texting the code word again. In a carefully mild voice he said, "If you crash the car, we won't be able to get to her, even if we jump out of the car before impact."

Millie snarled, "Find her! Leave the driving to me."

She took the next right, a commercial road running in the right direction, and ran two yellow lights in succession.

"The airport. Looks like they're headed for the airport."

"We have an airport?"

"Private, I guess, but they could still fly her out."

She ran a red light fifty feet in front of a cross bound semi. The driver honked angrily, but the truck was already far behind.

Davy didn't say anything.

THIRTY-FOUR.

"What were you thinking?"

With the loop of wire securely around my neck, Jason let go of my arm. "So, this is the one? The boys said it was someone bigger."

Hyacinth glanced at him and then back at me. "Probably her father, though the flying stuff is new. I have my doubts about that."

Jason snorted. "Yeah. Crazy stuff. But I can tell Dmitri you got what you wanted?"

Hyacinth nodded. "So far. The finder's fee will be paid. But don't go away. She's only the start."

Jason frowned. "Dmitri didn't say anything about more."

Hyacinth smiled. "Call him. Tell him to talk to Mr. Fowler. There will be compensation."

"Huh." Jason took out his phone and stepped out the door, closing it behind him.

There was a moan from the corner and I tried to turn my head.

"Don't!" the man behind me said, tightening the wire.

Hyacinth pulled something from her coat pocket, but I couldn't even see it until she tilted it and it caught the light.

"Steel guitar strings. Very strong. Very thin. Available everywhere. These are D strings. A great compromise between strength and cutting." She smiled. "I don't know if you can do what your father can, but try it and you've got a good chance of leaving your head behind. Okay, so it may not be complete decapitation, but it will, at the very least, crush your larynx and cut your carotid arteries."

She walked closer. "Let's say you can't jump. If your dad or mom grabs you and tries to jump away, the result is going to be the same." She flipped a switch by the door and overhead fluorescents came on. "You wanted to see who was moaning?"

Caffeine was in the corner, though it took me a moment to recognize her. It was her voice, whimpering when the light went on, that let me identify her. I couldn't tell from my usual clue, her black roots, 'cause there was enough blood in her hair that I had trouble even seeing the blonde part. She was duct taped to a metal folding chair. Where her face wasn't bloody, it was purple.

"Why'd you do that?" I blurted out.

"You think we did that?" Hyacinth shook her head. "No, no. This was Jason's work. Apparently he has a very strict no-termination policy. Caffeine wanted to quit her employment. She was in this condition when Jenkins and I arrived."

The man behind me sighed and said, "No names."

Hyacinth shrugged. "Right. Sorry." She walked over to Caffeine. "Now, the young lady was very responsive to our questions. She doesn't know if you can jump or not, but she did talk about some specific encounters that make me suspicious." She narrowed her eyes. "But you aren't the big man they said took them to the pit."

She walked back to me. "It wasn't the reports of teleporting that got me here so fast. My, umm, employers have offered that reward for info for years. They've gotten reports from everywhere, from all sorts of gangs and syndicates and cartels. It's the drugs, I think. People sell drugs, they do drugs. They see things. We kept following leads and they came to nothing."

She leaned closer, studying my face some more. "It's really uncanny. You're almost like a clone of her. Except the nose."

I've got my father's nose.

"We scrambled the jet when we heard the description of the pit. No one has ever described that before. That got my attention." She gestured toward the other room. "When the boys talked about being dropped into the water," she shuddered, "that struck a chord. Your dad is very fond of that one."

It runs in the family.

"So, can you jump?"

I didn't say anything.

She raised her hand like she was going to hit me.

I ignored her hand and looked at her eyes.

Her raised hand visibly shook, like she was restraining herself. She shook her head, and lowered the hand, then reached into her coat and pulled a zippered nylon case from an inside pocket. When she opened it, I saw capped hypodermic needles and drug vials.

Oh, shit.

"We'll find out, soon enough. We learned a lot from your father, but he pulled that trick at the end, with the water. They didn't see that coming."

She took the cap off one of the hypodermics, inverted a vial, and stabbed up through the membrane in the cap. "Can you do anything special like that?"

You will not use me to control my parents, I thought. Even if it kills me.

I said, "Just watch, Miss Minchin."

She froze, her mouth open, her eyes slightly wider.

I jumped in place, adding twenty miles an hour velocity, straight back into Jenkins, the man holding the wire. Sheetrock exploded around us as we slammed through the wall, then tumbled across the floor of the main warehouse.

My back screamed where his hand had been pushing against my spine, but I could move. When I rolled over and pushed up onto my hands and knees, the wire was not tight across my neck.

I clawed at it with my still-bound hands and the loop loosened enough that I could pull it over my head. I flung it away from me and its wooden handle clattered across the floor. Jenkins was sprawled in scraps of Sheetrock, unmoving. His left forearm bent unnaturally, like he had an extra elbow.

Hyacinth was staring through the gap in the wall, then she charged forward, ducking through it, the hypodermic held in her hand like a dagger, thumb poised on the plunger.

You're too late, Miss Minchin.

I dropped forward onto my elbows and, as she approached, jumped in place, adding a modest ten miles per hour toward her. My hip slammed into her shins and she flipped over onto the concrete floor, arms first, followed by her head. Almost like an afterthought, I heard the hypodermic syringe smash against one of the loading-bay doors at the far end of the room.

I stared back at her, looking for any movement, but she was as still as Jenkins. I considered the possibility that she'd broken her neck.

Then I tried to get up and considered the possibility that I'd broken my neck.

I hurt. My back hurt. When I lifted both hands to touch my neck it stung, and when I looked at my fingertips, they were bloody. The wire had cut me, but obviously not fatally. There was a lump on the back of my head where it had connected with Jenkins jaw.

"I warned you!"

It was Jason. He was standing beside the Hummer with a gun held toward me sideways, gangsta style. Marius and Calvin pulled Jade and Tara out of the rear hatch and down to their knees. Like me, the girls still had their hands secured with cable ties. Marius and Calvin were holding them by the hair, guns pressed against the girls' temples.

Dammit.

I wondered what Marius or Calvin would do if I jumped Jason away. The trouble was, they could flinch and shoot either girl. I could move one or the other gun away from the girls' heads, but not both, not at the same time.

In my sleeve, my phone vibrated, a single pulse. I shook both arms until the unit slipped down, out of the sleeve, and dropped onto the floor by my knee, face up. It showed a text message from Mom, upside down but I could read it.

INCOMING.

Mom and Dad must have started swinging before they even jumped.

The first Marius or Calvin knew of their presence was when the bones in their gun hands broke as the baseball bats knocked the hands and guns away from the girls' heads. To me it looked like the guns smashed into the floor and then Mom and Dad were standing there, Mom with a shiny red-anodized aluminum bat, Dad with a beat-up thirty-three-inch Louisville Slugger. In maple.

I knew that bat.

Calvin fell back, releasing Tara, clutching his hand and screaming.

Though Marius's gun was now a good ten feet away, he didn't let go of Jade's hair with his good hand.

Mom pivoted, raising the aluminum bat, but before she swung, Jade twisted and brought both fists up into Marius's crotch.

He doubled over, gagging. Tara staggered up from her kneeling position and kneed him in the butt, knocking him forward. Marius tried to catch himself with his good hand, curling the injured hand close to his chest, but he ended up smashing down onto his shoulder and rolling over onto his side, knees curled up, good hand cradling the injured.

Jason, eyes wide, started to swing his gun around, toward the girls, toward Mom.

Dad appeared beside him.

On the way down, Dad's bat did to Jason's forearm, what I'd done to Jenkins's. On the way back up I suspect it broke Jason's jaw.

Saw that coming.

Don't threaten Mom when Dad is around.

Dad's eyes were wide and his head was swiveling back and forth, looking for something else to hit.

I almost jumped back to Jade and Tara, but controlled the impulse and limped over instead. They were both standing by the time I got there. Like me, they were still bound at the wrists.

Mom was gathering up the guns, ejecting the clips, then working the slide to eject the round in the barrel. She put them on the hood of the Hummer, then turned to us, but angled so she could also watch Marius and Calvin. I noticed she and Dad were wearing blue nitrile rubber gloves.

I held up my cable-tied wrists. "Little help?" Mom nodded and stepped behind the Hummer. When she came back she had a pair of kitchen shears. Snip, snip, snip, and then all three of us were rubbing our wrists.

Tara threw her arms around Jade. "Oh, God."

I stepped closer to Mom. "We need an ambulance." She looked at me, Jade, then Tara. I shook my head then pointed at the hole in the wall. "In there. Jason beat Caffeine half to death."

Mom leaned closer and pulled my jacket open, her eyes widening as she looked at my neck. "What happened to your neck?"

"It's okay. Guitar string garrote. To keep me from ju-" I stopped, licked my lips. "To keep me in one place."

Mom's eyes hardened and her grip tightened on the bat. She pointed at Jason and said, "Was it him?"

I shook my head and pointed at Jenkins's still form between us and the hole in the wall. "It was him and that woman over there-"

From across the room Dad's voice said, "Son of a bitch, it's-"

And we both said, "-Hyacinth Pope."

"You are the spitting image of your mother!"

I was really getting tired of hearing that.

Rebecca Martingale looked more like someone's grandmother than an FBI agent. Mom fetched her from DC, though not in front of the girls. As far as Jade and Tara were concerned, Mom had walked outside and returned ten minutes later with the older woman.

It was Agent Martingale who did a quick physical assessment on the suspects (breathing with regular pulse) and then called 911.

Tara asked Dad the question I'd been holding in my head.