Page 35 of Red Boar's Baby

Costa backed the car out. Diana resisted the urge to duck down in her seat. The alley behind his condo was dark and quiet.

“I’m going to circle around a little, have a look at the neighborhood and make sure we’re not followed before getting on the road.”

Diana nodded.

Costa circled the block, then made a wider circle and left his quiet suburban street behind. He merged into expressway traffic, took an immediate exit, and pulled into the parking lot of a chain restaurant, where they sat for a moment.

“What are we doing here?” Diana asked.

“Checking for a tail, but I think we’re good. I’m still going to head out of town the wrong way, then double back.” He snapped his fingers. “Oh, wait.”

While Diana waited curiously, Costa plugged a small attachment into his phone, hopped out of the car and did a quick check of its underside. When he got back in, her mouth was dry with nervous anxiety.

“What are you looking for?”

“Bugs. No sense in going to all the trouble to check for a tail and then leading them right to our safehouse. But it’s fine.” He slipped the device off the phone and dropped it into a pocket of his rucksack. “Do you think there’s any chance your phone or anything you have on you might have been tagged? They have these little RFID trackers that can be slipped into anything nowadays; even an Airtag can do it.”

Diana shook her head. “The advantage of having absolutely nothing on me,” she said with an attempted smile. “And my phone’s been with me the whole time.”

“Go ahead and turn it off so it can’t be tracked, just in case. That’s unlikely if they don’t have malware on the phone or law enforcement connections, but it’s best to be on the safe side.” After she had done so, Costa nodded. “Let’s roll.”

They merged once more into the flow of expressway traffic, and Diana found herself marveling at the idea of all these people, all these bright headlights and red-flashing taillights, headed somewhere in the night. After they had passed through the majority of Tucson, Costa took an exit, drove in a big loop on completely empty side streets, then merged back on going the other way.

“Paranoid? Maybe,” he remarked to Diana, taking the travel mug of coffee they had been passing back and forth. “But we have one opportunity to give you a really good chance of getting away from these assholes, whoever they are.”

“I don’t just plan to sit at the ranch while you investigate. That was my house, Quinn. My stuff. Everything I own.”

“I know,” Costa said. After a moment’s silence, he added, “But at least take a day or two to get yourself straightened out and recharge. And we want to make sure whoever it is doesn’t get their hands on the kid.”

Diana looked into the back, where Emmeline slept in the car seat with her head twisted to the side in the boneless way of young children. “Do you think she’s in danger?”

“I don’t know, but she’ll be safer at the ranch than anywhere else I can come up with.”

They drove on into the night, and after a while, he took an exit and they were in the endless black nothing of a lonely two-lane desert highway. Except now Diana had atrueblack void to compare it to, wherever they had been when Caine took them to Costa’s place. Here, there were the twin pools of the headlights to guide them, and a bright tapestry of stars overhead.

“Remember how we used to look up at the stars and learn the constellations?” She craned to see out the window. “We’d always try to find the Milky Way. The headlights are too bright, but I know it’s up there.”

“All of that was a long time ago,” Costa said, so low that even her shifter hearing had to strain to hear him over the car’s engine. Diana didn’t answer immediately, unsure if he had wanted her to hear.

Finally she asked, “Do you ever look at the stars nowadays, Quinn?”

“Not often,” Costa said.

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t have anyone to look at them with.”

He stopped speaking then, as if he’d given away more than he meant to.

Diana searched for something to say. She needed to stop thinking about those long-ago nights looking at the stars, when stargazing wasn’t all they had done, or all they had dreamed of.

But it was Costa who finally broke the silence. “When was the last time you were back at your old place?”

“A long while,” Diana said shortly. She didn’t particularly want to talk about it, but as the road grew rougher and they got closer, it was hard not to think about it. “My parents sold our ranch—let’s see, let me do the math—twelve years ago, when Mom got sick and they needed to cover the medical bills. I haven’t been back since. Nothing to come out here for anymore.”

She had been to Costa’s family ranch a few times since then for family get-togethers, but it was usually a case of staying as little time as she could get away with. It was simply too painful.

But tonight, after a pause, she asked, “What are the new neighbors like?”

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