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stolen riches.
     
    Z lifted his head. Qhuinn and Rhage were standing right behind where the lessers had been, their guns just lowering. Blay and John Matthew were with them, their guns drawn as well.
     
    “You okay?” Rhage asked.
     
    No. That would be one big fat hairy fuck-no. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m tight.”
     
    “Blay, back into the tunnel with me,” Rhage said. “John and Qhuinn, you stay with him.”
     
    Z let his head fall back and listened as two sets of shitkickers headed off in the distance. In the eerie silence that followed, a wave of nausea rolled over him and every inch of him started to shake, his hands flapping like flags in a brisk wind as he brought them up to feel his face.
     
    John’s hand touched his arm and he jumped. “I’m okay . . . I’m okay. . . .”
     
    John signed, We’re going to get you out of here.
     
    “How—” He cleared his throat. “How do I know this is happening?”
     
    I’m sorry? How do you know . . . ?
     
    Zsadist’s fingers skipped along his forehead as he tried to prod where the slayers had aimed their guns. “How do I know this is real? And not a . . . How do I know I didn’t just die?”
     
    John glanced over his shoulder at Qhuinn like he had no idea how to respond and was looking for backup. Then he pounded on his own chest with a solid thumping. I know I’m here.
     
    Qhuinn leaned down and did the same, a heavy bass sound rising from his chest. “Me, too.”
     
    Zsadist let his head fall back again, his body scrambling in its own skin so badly his feet tap-danced on the hard-packed floor. “I don’t know . . . if this is real . . . oh, shit . . .”
     
    John stared at him as if measuring his increasing agitation and trying to figure out what the hell to do.
     
    Abruptly the guy reached down to Z’s broken leg and gave his turned-around shitkicker a quick tug.
     
    Z shot upright and barked, “Mother fucker !”
     
    But it was good. The pain acted like a great broom sweep of his brain, clearing out the web of delusions and replacing them with a focused, pounding clarity. He was very much alive. He really was.
     
    Right on the heels of that realization he thought of Bella. And Nalla.
     
    He had to reach them.
     
    Z shifted to the side to get his phone, but his vision went furry from what was doing with his leg. “Shit. Can you get me my cell? In my back pocket?”
     
    John carefully rolled him over, took out the RAZR, and handed it to him.
     
     
    “So you don’t think there’s any working this out?” Rehv said.
     
    Bella shook her head in answer to her brother’s question, then remembered he couldn’t see her. “No, I don’t think so. At least not in the short term.”
     
    “Shit. Well, I’m always here for you, you know that. You want to stay with mahmen ?”
     
    “No. I mean, I’m happy to have her come visit during the night, but I need my own space.”
     
    “Because you’re hoping he comes after you.”
     
    “He’s not going to. This time is different. Nalla . . . has made everything different.”
     
    The young snuffled and burrowed in closer to her favorite nook between upper arm and breast. Bella propped the cell phone against her shoulder and stroked the downy-soft hair that was growing in. The waves, when they grew out, were going to be multicolored, with blondes and reds and browns mixed together, just as her father’s would be if he didn’t trim it so tightly.
     
    As Rehv laughed awkwardly, she said, “What?”
     
    “After all these years fighting to keep you on my property, now I don’t want you leaving the Brotherhood mansion. For real, nothing is safer than that compound . . . but I do have a house on the Hudson River that’s tight. It’s next to a friend of mine’s, and it’s nothing fancy, but there’s a tunnel linkup between them. She’ll keep you safe.”
     
    After he gave her the address, Bella murmured, “Thank you. I’m going to pack a few things up and have Fritz take me there in