Chapter 89

The sound of someone calling her name jarred Jo awake. She sat up straight, realizing she’d fallen asleep in the copilot’s seat. Alarmed, she looked around, petrified that she’d touched something she wasn’t supposed to.
“Are you awake now?” Ryker asked. “Can I hit the head?”
“Huh?” she asked, wiping sleep from her eyes. “I’m awake, but I don’t know how to fly this thing.”
“You don’t need to,” Ryker told her, already unbuckling his seatbelt. “Autopilot is on.”
“Then… why do I need to be awake,” she asked, a bit more sarcastic than she intended.
“Because… you tend to thrash while you’re sleeping, and I’d just as soon you didn’t knock us out of the sky.”
Jo’s eyes widened as she turned to stare at him, trying to figure out if he was serious. He seemed to be. He walked past her toward the toilet, which was just on the other side of the cabin, and Jo realized she probably needed to use it next.
Using her IAC, she checked the time and saw that she’d been asleep for over two hours. She wondered why he hadn’t woken her up. It didn’t seem like he really needed a copilot if the person in the second seat could be asleep.
“You all right, Lil Jo?” Elliott asked, coming up from the back and plopping into the pilot’s seat like it was just a vacant spot to sit in a theater.
“Be careful!” Jo said. “Don’t touch anything!”
“Gee, you’re touchy,” Elliott said, holding his hands up in front of him. “Believe me, Jo, this is not my first time in an airplane, okay? I know not to touch anything.”
Jo made a face at him and then returned her attention to the space in front of them. It was so dark, she couldn’t see much of anything anyway, but she felt like someone should be watching where they were going in case another plane came out of nowhere or a mountain popped up in front of them.
“How are you doing?” Elliott asked. “You doin’ all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Jo said with a shrug. She didn’t pull her eyes off of the scene in front of them, though. “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know. It’s just… the rest of us are all back there talking and strategizing, and you’re just sitting up here with this guy you don’t really like. Just wondering if you were hanging in there.”
“Yeah, it’s fine,” Jo said. She glanced over her shoulder at the bathroom door. “He… told me some things.”
Elliott arched an eyebrow. “Like what?”
The sound of the toilet flushing made her stop talking aloud. She switched to IAC. “I won’t go into detail, but I understand him a lot better now than I did before.”
“Are you flying this fucker now?” Ryker asked, standing in the doorway and looking at Elliott like he was trespassing in his house.
“Nope, nope. Just… checking on the niece. You know Cadon is back there chomping at the bit to have his turn up here.” Elliott got up and moved behind Jo’s chair so that Ryker could get back into the pilot’s seat.
“Will he fall asleep on the job?” Ryker asked, giving Jo the side-eye. She had no defense, so she said nothing.
“I don’t know. He slept a little earlier, so probably not,” Elliott said, either not putting it together that Jo had fallen asleep or pretending like he didn’t so that she could save face.
“You wanna switch out with your brother?” Ryker asked her.
For some reason, Jo got the impression he wanted her to say no, but she had no reason not to go back there and let Cadon have his dream of sitting in the copilot’s seat. “Sure. Why not?” she said, standing up with one arm on Elliott’s shoulder and the other hand on the seat itself, still afraid that she was going to bump a button or something.
Ryker gave her a look that let her know he was asking her not to tell anyone what he’d said earlier, so she gave him a nod and a small smile.
Walking on this plane wasn’t as easy as an airliner, and Jo found herself holding onto Elliott again as she walked.
“You okay, Jo?” Elliott asked, looking over his shoulder at her.
“I’m fine. Just a little out of sorts,” she said.
Elliott whispered, “You fell asleep, didn’t you?”
Jo didn’t want to admit it so she just shrugged.
Her uncle chuckled and took hold of her hand to lead her back to where the rest of the team was sitting chatting over the loud hum of the engine.
“You’re up, Cadon,” Elliott announced.
“It’s about damn time!” Cadon said, leaping up and pushing past his sister to get to the cabin of the plane. Jo rolled her eyes and found a spot next to Zane, her back against the hull of the plane.
“So… you didn’t crash us,” Cassidy said with a crooked smile. “That’s good.”
“Yeah. It wasn’t easy,” Jo replied.
“Did you even do anything?” Brandon asked.
“No.” Jo got a laugh out of everyone. “But I do think, if I ever get another chance to learn how to fly, I’ll do it. I think I’d be a lot more comfortable in these types of situations if I had some idea of how the plane worked.”
“Well, you see, you start the engine, and get the motor running, and then it goes really fast, and then it takes off into the air, and you fly it,” Elliott said with a snarky smile.
“And what happens when you want to land?” his son asked him.
“Oh, that’s easy. You just stop flying it, and it’ll go right back down to the ground.” He used his hand to illustrate a plane smoothly transitioning from the sky to the landing strip.
“Seems simple enough,” Scott noted. “So I guess you’ve had a lot of experience flying planes then?”
Elliott went along with it and started a diatribe about all of the different situations he’d flown a plane in, including Nazi Germany and one of the moon landings. While he had been alive for a long time, Jo knew he had never flown a plane before and was just being silly. She was too tired to pay too much attention to what he was saying. Once again, she found herself jealous of the Guardians who didn’t need nearly as much sleep as she did.
“Are you falling asleep?” Zane asked her, using the IAC. “Your eyes keep closing longer and longer every time you blink. I think they’re just not going to come open one of these times.”
“I’m fine,” Jo told him, but that wasn’t true. Despite the fact that she’d slept for most of the time that she’d been in the copilot’s seat, she was still sleepy. Zane’s shoulder looked even more inviting than normal.
“Did you find out anything interesting while you were up there with Ryker?” Zane asked, still looking at Elliott as if he was actually listening to her uncle’s crazy flying stories.
Jo thought it was a bit strange that Zane would ask, but she found herself answering him anyway. “Yeah, he told me a little bit about his life before we ran into him. It wasn’t pretty.”
“Did it give any explanation as to why he is both afraid that the Vampires are going to kill him and he was helping them with the reserve de sange?”
She had to consider the answer before she spoke. Ryker had told her his story in confidence, so it wasn’t hers to repeat to anyone else, but at the same time, she had to make sure that Ryker’s history wasn’t going to put anyone on her team in danger either. She finally decided to be vague. “Yeah, sort of. Some of the things that he said sort of explain that. I do think he was working with them as a spy, but I don’t know why the Vampires would be working with him, unless word just doesn’t travel that fast in the Vampire world.”
“You mean, you think the Vampires moving those humans didn't realize he was the same snitch who ratted out their friends in the cave?”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking.” Jo replied. “But I’m guessing he must’ve just used a different name or something. Vampires can’t share images quite the same way that we can, or at least, they usually don’t.”
“I guess that would be a question Heather or Cass could answer for us,” Zane replied.
Jo had never really asked her aunt what Vampires were capable of when it came to telepathy, but she wasn’t about to interrupt her uncle’s crazy story to ask. She’d save it for some other time. She didn’t think Ryker had been lying to her about the story he’d told her about his family.
But she could never be sure, either.