Page 76 of Lost and Bound
Still. Even that felt good, since it reminded me I was with my mate.
I’d turned into such a slut.
We made it to the far frozen north in a little under three days of driving, by dint of switching off often and not stopping for more than a couple of hours, sleeping in the car in turns. Calder drove as we crossed the border, taking us along a shitty narrow side road that he said used to be a smuggling route.
And then I took over, driving for endless, uncountable hours and miles across the flattest plains to ever flat until my eyes burned. I loved my mate, but hearing him snoring in the passenger seat after the first couple of hundred miles of it made me want to kick him in the balls.
He woke up to take over again for our journey through northern Saskatchewan, and I fell asleep as the terrain went from grassy to rocky and wooded.
We found the mine on the third day.
It had been burrowed and blown into the side of a large hill overlooking a lake, one of hundreds of identical lakes that spread out for hundreds of miles. I had no idea how Calder had remembered where to look, given the approximately seven billion identical forest-covered rock formations we’d driven past, and the dozens and dozens of clear, rushing rivers. Granted, they were all fucking beautiful. But they looked exactly the same.
He parked on a small access road and we hiked in, slapping at palm-sized mosquitoes and huge biting flies, and wading through thick heaps of fallen branches and brush beneath endless trees or climbing over exposed chunks of rock. Eventually we reached a tall chain-link fence with a bunch of rusty, weathered signs bearing reassuring things like radiation symbols and dire warnings of danger.
The radiation warnings didn’t concern me much. Shifter healing could deal with a few rads no problem, and it wasn’t like we were walking into an active reactor or anything. On the other hand, it looked like something out of the part of a horror movie right before the first people on screen got eaten by the mine monster.
It reassured me a bit that the mine monster, if it existed, was more likely to take one look at Calder and run away howling than attack us.
Calder wrapped his hands through the fence’s links and pulled, and it ripped apart like tissue paper, leaving a tall, jagged rent.
We ducked through, and a couple of minutes later we reached the entrance to the mine, a dark, timbered structure with a padlocked gate.
“Huh,” Calder said. “I guess they replaced the gate since the last time I was here. I had to pull the last padlock off to get in. I hid the case well,” he added, in response to my look of dismay. “Anyway, you should stay out here. It’s not great in there.”
No shit, Sherlock. “Not great is something like, I got the wrong meal when I went through the drive-through,” I groused. “This is an eleven on the scale of not great.”
Calder laughed, his eyes crinkling. Gods, I loved his laugh, even though it probably sounded like a predator issuing a challenge to most people who didn’t know him. I loved that he laughed with me, for me, even more than the sound of his laughter itself.
“More like a twelve,” he acknowledged. “The spiders alone are epic.”
Yeah. “I’ll keep watch, since two of us just means more weight to collapse something. And your night vision’s better than mine. But I’ll be listening right by the entrance. And be careful, okay?”
He nodded, kissed me, ripped off the padlock, and disappeared into the bowels of the giant-spider-infested, uranium-poisoned earth.
They were probably mutant spiders.
Yeesh.
I paced near the entrance to the mine, amusing and horrifying myself in equal measure by imagining what would happen if Calder got bitten by a radioactive spider. He’d probably turn into the Hulk, only ten times more terrifying.
Finally, as I started to get antsy, I heard footsteps returning, and Calder reappeared a moment later, shoving the gate open a few more inches with a screech of rusty hinges. He had a metal suitcase in his hand, the kind people chained to themselves in stupid movies.
My heart beat a little faster. Money had never been a big motivator for me, partly because I’d never had any to be motivated by and partly because my chances of getting any were so fucking slim, why worry about it? But this…this wasn’t money, like you won a hundred bucks on a scratch-off ticket.
This was money with a capital M, the kind people killed for.
Calder grinned at me. “Right where I left it. Apparently spiders aren’t that interested in gemstones.”
He shoved the gate closed again behind him, maybe to keep the hordes of mutant spiders from escaping and ravaging central Canada, and set the case down a few feet from the entrance, kneeling down beside it. I joined him, crowding in close as he pried up the lid.
I held my breath. The case creaked open.
And I blinked down at a heap of not-nearly-as-shiny-as-I-expected stones, each one a lot bigger than what you thought of as a diamond. Diamonds fit in rings, or on necklaces.
These wouldn’t. Unless maybe you were a Kardashian, or something, and I was pretty sure even Kim would think these stones were tackily large. There weren’t that many of them, but it didn’t seem like there needed to be.
“I’m not sure what we can sell them for,” Calder said, answering the question at the forefront of my mind. “I don’t want to use any of my old contacts, for obvious reasons. But my boss at the time was buying them for a million. And he was getting a deal on them, since they’d been smuggled and were too hot for the original owners to sell openly right away.”
