Still, I’d hoped—I’d hoped that by saving Owen, I could save us too. Hope. Such a stupid, foolish emotion. One that could lift your heart to the heavens and then grind it into the ground in the very next instant. My emotions felt as tangled and twisted as the briars around us. And every move I made, everything I did to try to make things better, just stabbed another sharp, brittle thorn deep into the desolate wasteland of my heart.

“Gin?” Owen asked again, all sorts of questions in the soft, single syllable of my name.

Before I could answer him, bullets zipped in our direction.

Chapter 19

19

Crack! Crack! Crack!

Bullets zinged through the air. I started to throw myself forward onto Owen, but he shook his head and held up his finger, pointing at the tree branches above us, and I realized what he was getting at. Those shots had been far too high for someone to have seen us. So why was someone shooting? Why waste their ammunition like that?

Crack! Crack! Crack!

“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” a mocking voice called out.

Owen and I looked at each other and reached for our weapons. I didn’t know how many giants were waiting, but we’d fight our way through them just like we had all the others tonight—

A loud sigh sounded. “Quit messing around, Dave,” a second voice, this one female, said. “We’re supposed to be searching for the thieves. Do you want somebody to hear the noise and shoot us by mistake?”

“Please,” Dave, the first giant, said. “Whoever set off that bomb is long gone. So I say we have a little fun before we go back inside. Besides, we’re the only ones still out this far. Everyone else has headed back to the museum already, from what I’ve heard on the radio.”

A knife in my hand, I crawled over to the weeping willow at the other end of the hedge of briars and slowly got to my feet. Owen took cover behind another tree. Using the long, fluttering tendrils as a screen to hide me from sight, I peered around the tree trunk.

I spotted two giants in the semidarkness, both holding guns and standing about twenty feet away from us beyond the row of thorns. The male was tall and extremely skinny, with a shaved head that looked like a cue ball in the moonlight, while the woman was a bit shorter, with a plump body.

“Come on, Dave,” the woman said again. “We need to get back so we can help load up the rest of the art.”

“Sure, Cindy. We’ll go back—in a minute.”

Crack! Crack! Crack!

Dave laughed as he fired off a few more random shots.

“Will you stop that?” Cindy hissed. “It’s creepy enough out here already without you acting like a jackass—”