Hearing him use my real name filled me with more unease than if he were shouting. I aimed my phone flashlight, sending long shadows across the driveway. Jayce crouched low, ducking his head to look underneath the motorcycle. His hand was on a small piece of metal. A drab-green cylinder a little bigger than a Coke can.
Jayce took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“That’s good enough.” He never took his eyes off the bike. “I need you to do one more thing. Go back inside.”
“Why? Jayce, what is it?”
“Just go inside, Charlotte. This will only take a minute.”
“Whatwill take a minute?” I asked. My voice was shaky but I didn’t care. “I’m not leaving until you tell me what’s wrong.”
Finally he turned to look at me. His blue eyes were piercing in the light from my phone. “There’s a grenade on my bike.”
I gasped. “Oh my God!”
“And my hands will be a lot steadier if I know you’re a safe distance away. You understand?”
I felt like I was frozen in place. It took extra thought to force my feet to move backwards. Like I was controlling someone else’s body and there was lag between the command and response.
I backed up until I felt the barn door behind me, then slipped inside. I pulled the door mostly closed, leaving a sliver where I could see. Jayce hadn’t moved since finding the grenade.
“Do me a favor and turn the floodlights on?” he asked in that too-casual voice. Like a mechanic asking for a certain type of wrench. “Switch is on the wall to your right.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off Jayce, so I felt around on the wall until my fingers found the switch. The area in front of the barn was suddenly bathed in harsh white light.
“Get away from the door and windows,” he called, but he didn’t look over at me so I didn’t go anywhere.
Jayce didn’t move for a long time. He remained crouched next to the bike, deathly still, with one hand underneath. For the first time, I had an opportunity to get a good look at the bike. While other bikes were covered in shiny chrome, the components on Jayce’s bike were matte black. Even the twin mufflers on the left side. Only the wheel guards and engine housing were a burnt red color. It was beautiful in its uniqueness.
It might explode at any moment, killing Jayce.
I never saw Jayce do anything. For what felt like several minutes he kept his hand underneath the bike. Maybe he was carefully probing the object. Then suddenly he pulled his hand away, with the grenade in it. He walked straight back to the barn, toward me.
“What are you doing!” I demanded. “Don’t bring it in here!”
“I thought I told you to get away from the door and windows.” Sweat covered his face like he’d just run the Boston Marathon. He held out the device for my inspection, and although I wanted to run and hide under the bed in case it spontaneously went off, I made myself look. The grenade was the shape of a family-sized can of beans. A metal ring stuck out of the end, as if it could be attached to a keychain and carried around. Wire was tied from the ring to another piece of metal that looked like a bobby pin.
“This is a fragmentation grenade,” Jayce said. “An old Russian model. Pull the ring and it explodes. This wire was attached to my bike’s engine housing. The engine would have pulled on the wire, yanking the pin out of the grenade.”
“Oh my God.” I didn’t know what else to say. I felt like a broken record. “Oh my God!”
“It’s fine now,” he said, walking past me and into the workshop. His voice drifted out into the main room. “I’ve plugged the pin so it won’t go off.”
“You could have died,” I said in disbelief. “You almostdiddie! If I had forgotten to mention it…”
He returned and rubbed my arms. That simple gesture instantly made me feel better. “But you didn’t forget. You remembered just in time.” He kissed me on the forehead, and my skin felt warm where his lips had touched. “You might have saved my life, Peaches.”
“And my own life,” I managed to stammer. “Yours is a nice secondary benefit.”
The joke sounded dull to my ears, but it made Jayce laugh. “All joking aside, since that’s a frag grenade and not a concussion grenade, itprobablywouldn’t have killed us. The bike would have protected us from most of the shrapnel.”
“Oh. Then what was the point?”
He led me back outside. “It would have shredded our legs. Leaving us crippled.”
“Oh, that’s all,” I said in a small voice. I glanced down at my legs and fought the urge to vomit.
I got on the bike behind him, winced when he turned on the engine, and then clung to him as we drove away from the barn.