Mine, page 10
Read him, a dark part of her demanded. Read him and see the truth your instincts know for a fact.
“Yeah, and then what,” she said.
You know what you want to do.
Xhex laughed. “Far as I’m aware, I’m at work and perfectly happy overseeing my staff and watching the crowd. So what I want to do is my fucking job—”
If you read him, you are free to do what you want.
In the recesses of her mind, she was aware that the back-and-forth was taking “talking to yourself” to a level that should probably be professionally assessed, but it was fine. She was fine.
Everything was fine—
“I’m free now.” She looked away from the man to prove the point. “Free as a bird.”
Read him.
“Will you leave me the fuck alone—”
“Sorry, I’m just following up on the text you sent earlier?”
With a jump, Xhex focused on her second-in-command. T’Marcus Jones was pointing to his iPhone as if to prove he wasn’t wasting her time. Not that the former Marine ever wasted anything. He was a consummate professional, always in control of himself and anyone around him. His black shirt might have had STAFF on the back in big letters, but like he’d be confused for anything other than BADASS?
What the hell had she asked him to do?
To cover her confusion, she waved his arm down. “Yeah, yeah. Good. What’s the answer?”
His brows went up. “Ah, I did it?”
“What?”
“I set the schedule for next week and sent it out to everyone?” When she just blinked at him, T’Marcus leaned in, like maybe if they were closer together she’d understand what he was talking about better. “You told me you were coming in late tonight and asked me to take care of it first thing. Bobby, the new hire, is covering for Mike while he’s on vacation, and the rest of us are splitting Bobby’s night off on Wednesday. S’all good.”
“Oh. Right.” She cleared her throat. “Thanks.”
“You need something else?”
“I’m fine.” Making a show of checking her watch, she said, “Is it me or is this night crawling?”
T’Marcus nodded and asked her something she didn’t track. As she nodded to whatever it was, what she was really concentrating on was the flare of panic kindling in her brain stem—and when he walked off, she told herself to get her shit together.
This time, the voice in her head wasn’t some version of her own, but Rehvenge’s: Your grid is still collapsing.
Rubbing her bloodshot eyes, she said, “No, it isn’t.”
As she answered yet another disembodied opinion, and then resolutely blocked out Blade’s second opinion on the subject, she looked back for the man in the hoodie—
He was gone.
Her senses came alive, and she moved without being aware of deciding to. Her body ambulated on its own, striding forward, shuffling through the humans getting their good time on. Tracking her prey—
Black sweatshirt was not prey, she reminded herself. No, she was just going to talk to him. Get him to leave peacefully.
Go on about his business before he got hurt.
Moving along, her eyes sharpened on the heads around her, weeding out the blond and red-haired, the long-haired, the mullet, and the braided. No hoodie thickening the nape of a patron, anywhere. But she hadn’t been talking long. He couldn’t have gone far—
Down at her waist, her hand snuck into her front pocket. The switchblade she carried with her came to her palm like it was answering a call, and her thumb searched for the knife’s release. Except she wasn’t going to do anything to him.
She wasn’t… going… to…
A strange pall came over her, her mind going numb to the point where her thoughts disintegrated as soon as she had them, threads of consciousness fraying until she couldn’t remember why she was here in the sea of humans, or what she was doing—
No, she knew what she was doing. She was going to take out that human in black.
“I’m protecting the patrons,” she said. “I’m supposed to protect them…”
Zeroing in on the hallway to the bathrooms, she made the turn and—
There he was. Her target. The man with the brush cut, and the stubble, and the eyes that moved over the stupid innocents getting drunk and high like he was at a buffet.
Except she stopped short as she recognized the big human standing with him.
T’Marcus.
And then they both looked over at her with expectation. Like they wanted her to say something. Do something—just not with a switchblade.
“Hey, boss,” the man in black said. “How’m I doing?”
Xhex glanced over her shoulder and got braced to see someone else standing behind her, someone who had hired the—
Abruptly, her mind sputtered and coughed, her memory engine coming back online. Turning to the men once again, she felt a stone-cold chill go through her—
The new hire. Bobby, the new hire.
She’d interviewed him two weeks ago. He and T’Marcus had served together in the Corps.
Bobby glanced at his friend like he was worried he’d done something wrong. “Ah… did I do something wrong?”
Xhex told her hand to release the switchblade and remove itself from her pocket. And in a feat of parallel processing, she also managed to reply to the question with some kind of word salad. She must have gotten the syllables right, too, because the guy smiled, and T’Marcus nodded with satisfaction.
“I’m taking a break for ten.” She made a show of checking her watch. “You’re in charge, T.”
The guy touched his right brow in a shadow of the salutes he’d no doubt given all his years in the military. “You got it, boss.”
Nodding like she had a clue what she was doing, she headed for her office and was glad it wasn’t far. Stepping into the concrete cell, she couldn’t wait to shut the door—and God, you’d have sworn the little box with its old-fashioned, elementary-school-marm desk and the black rolling chair she’d gotten from Home Depot was a deluxe spa. Not that the bass line of the music was dimmed much—that shit was running all the way down to the foundation and all the way up into the rafters of the low ceiling.
But she was by herself. So that cut the volume on all kinds of things.
Sitting in her chair, she stared at the lock screen of her laptop. Lasers of pink and yellow, blue and lime green shot through a black background, and as she traced them with her eyes, she wondered what the cutoff was for seizure triggers. If the linear extensions were faster? Brighter?
Probably both.
And why in the hell was she thinking about that kind of thing anyway—
Well, considering she had been talking to herself, and playing spot-the-serial-killer with an honorable discharge who’d filled out a job application she herself had reviewed? Why not wonder about neurological hiccups.
Closing her eyes, she let her head fall back and thought of Blade. No wonder she was homicidal. Seeing him had scrambled her, and just because she was a little confused, and had just jumped to a minor conclusion—
“My grid is fine—”
A sudden burst of shouting percolated through the dull thump of the music, and as the discord registered, she groaned. It was the kind of thing that a human in her office, behind her desk, in her chair, wouldn’t have heard. But thanks to her keen ears, the Houston-we-have-a-problem was as obvious as a holler.
Whatever. T’Marcus and the new guy were going to have to deal with it.
It was why she’d hired them. Both.
As her head started to pound, she went to rub her face…
And froze as only her left hand came up to do the duty.
Glancing down, she saw that her right one was still in her pocket. Still locked on that switchblade.
“Let go,” she whispered. “You let go… right now.”
Instead of releasing her grip, her arm moved on its own, slowly retracting to reveal what was in her hand.
It was not a switchblade.
The tool was about five inches long, with an end like a melon baller. A lys. An ancient artifact that was used to remove the eyes of the dead.
Or the living that was soon to be dead.
Xhex’s heart began to skip beats. The old weapons weren’t seen much anymore, but she was well familiar with them.
And this one had blood on it. That was dried, but still red.
Lungs burning, she dropped the length with horror on the desk next to the light-show laptop, and the way it clanged made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.
“Calm down… fucking calm… down…—”
In slow motion, she watched from a distance as she reached out and pulled open the thin drawer underneath the desktop. The key that she didn’t want to use was in the way back, on the right, behind blank envelopes that would never be put in the mail, brochures from the furniture company they’d used to kit out the VIP section with booths, and miscellaneous scissors, paper clips, and pens that were running low on ink, but not completely out.
A copper key.
Her feet gave herself a quarter turn on the chair’s rollers. There was a set of drawers off to the side, and the one on the left on the bottom had a tarnished circle under the stainless handle.
The trembling was bad as she went to put the key in its slot, and it was a while before the copper found home.
The lock turned easily.
Xhex pulled the drawer out a little, and the darkness that was revealed was an abyss that had no end.
A little farther out.
A little more.
Come on, she told herself. There was nothing in there, just an empty gray interior to match the cheap exterior—
The lidded glass jar was all the way in the back, not making an appearance until there was no more left to pull.
And for a moment—for a split second—Xhex thought there were marbles in the squat, transparent container. Big ones. Aggies—
Gagging, she wrenched away and pulled the wastepaper basket over.
The dinner that Fritz and his staff had pulled together with such gourmet aplomb came up quick. After that… there was only dry heaving.
The eyes have it, the voice in her head said.
“Shut the fuck up.”
Squeamish? Really? You were the one who wanted to start a collection. Come to think of it, you have something to add to it, don’t you.
As she straightened and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, the argument between patrons was still going on outside her door, but fuck that. She had bigger problems—and they were just about to go nuclear.
With a sense of dread, she reached into the left pocket of her jacket—which she hadn’t been aware of having on.
The bundle she took out was fit-in-the-palm size, a red bandana loosely wrapped around something that didn’t weigh much.
She told herself to just throw it away. And not under her desk. She needed to go to the dumpster behind the staff entrance. Or maybe head a couple of blocks down to an alley—
The bandana unwrapped itself.
And inside… a pair of baby blues.
THIRTEEN
SOMETIMES ALL YOU could do for someone was just be with them. Yes, you wanted to do some heavy lifting with your conversation, make sweeping declarations that framed suffering in a way that made it more bearable. Or maybe you wanted to try a little A-level distraction by telling hot gossip or reliving shared memories. Dumb memes. Recipes.
Sports.
As Lydia sat next to C.P. Phalen’s cumulous cloud of a bed, she was drawing blanks on everything. The inspirational stuff. The pseudo-psychology. Definitely the gossip, because she had none, because she knew nobody. She also was never on the Internet and she didn’t cook, and sportsball season started when?
And as for any in-common things? Professionally, there was no crossover between the pair of them anymore. Back during the Wolf Study Project era, C.P. Phalen had been the chair of the board, and Lydia, as a biologist specializing in wolf populations, had had some contact with the woman. But the nonprofit had shut down months ago.
Which was what had to happen after the executive director and the head vet died in the process of playing on the dark side of science and money.
On the personal level? Given everything that was going on for C.P., who needed to talk about Daniel’s latest bad-news PET scan.
“Thank you,” C.P. murmured.
Lydia jerked to attention. “For what?”
“Just being here.”
“I’ve been feeling useless about so much. But the idea I could be any kind of comfort to you helps me.”
“Silence can be therapeutic. When you’re in good company.” C.P. shrugged awkwardly. Then pulled the fleece into her lap, up to her nose. “I tell myself I can still smell him. I wish I had your nose.”
As she stroked the navy blue folds, Lydia murmured, “How long have you been in love with him.”
“Since the moment I met him, if I’m honest with myself. Naturally, I fought it as long as I could… because I was scared of what I felt.” A lopsided smile flared and disappeared. “I like control, in case you haven’t noticed.”
Lydia laughed a little, and motioned around the white room. “I mean, this chaotic color, these patterns. And it’s all over the house, too.”
“That’s me. The chintz queen.” C.P. grew serious and then tapped her temple. “He was smart, though. Well, I suppose Gus’s IQ speaks for itself. But he didn’t want me. He knew…”
“Did you tell him how you felt?”
“In a roundabout way. He kept things professional when I would have taken them in a different direction. He was too good for me—”
“Don’t say that.”
“Oh, but it’s true. Just because reality hurts, doesn’t mean you should ignore it. In fact, self-preservation is often unpleasant, and when you don’t have a lot of time, like I do, you can’t afford to waste a moment in delusion.”
Lydia wanted to say something along the lines of “We’ll find him,” but she kept that to herself. Gus’s body was what was going to turn up, if anything did, and who needed to be reminded of that?
“Anyway…” C.P. yawned in what seemed like an exaggerated way. “I think your man might have the right idea. It’s late.”
Indeed, Daniel had excused himself an hour ago. Or was it two hours ago? Who the hell knew. He’d been doing his best to hang out in the other super-soft armchair they’d pulled over to the bedside, but after a while, he’d no longer been able to hide the fact that he was falling asleep sitting up.
Lydia shifted her legs out of the tuck they were in. “Do you need anything? Should I call Georgina for you?”
“No, she’ll come out the second you’re gone. There’s a sensor back there that’s tied to the door.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Thanks, though.”
After a moment, Lydia nodded, got to her feet, and turned away. At the door, she hesitated again and wasn’t sure why. Then again, she could really smell the cancer inside the woman now, and she felt like she should acknowledge that in some way. As with the pregnancy, she had been too distracted at first by what was going on in her own life to notice the subtle changes in scent. But the disease was becoming more and more obvious, almost by the hour.
“The answer is, I don’t know.”
Lydia jumped and looked back around. “I’m sorry?”
C.P. stared down her fragile body and across the grand bedroom. “I don’t know whether I’ll try Vita-12b. Funny, it felt safer if Gus was the one giving it to me, which is illogical. The drug doesn’t care who is doing its administration. Then again, he would take care of me… if something went wrong. Would have, I mean.”
During their marathon of silence, Lydia had wondered about that, but how could she ask? Talk about insensitive: Hey, so you’ve lost your baby, how ’bout you try that novel agent you cooked up in your lab—if only because maybe it’ll help Daniel to take the drug, too. And then my life won’t be ruined if it works.
“That’s a decision only you can make,” Lydia said. “Get some rest. I’ll check in on you later.”
What a generic goodbye, she thought as she slipped out.
The kind of thing that took for granted you’d see the person again.
The stairs down to the foyer seemed as long as a trail descending a mountain, and when she got to the bottom, she went over to the guard standing sentry in his alcove.
“I’m just going to get something from the car,” she said.
He nodded curtly, and triggered his shoulder-mounted communicator. By the time she reached the heavy door, the lock was sliding free, and as she gripped the wrought iron handle, she sank down into her thighs and put her back into it—except there was no need for the muscle show. The bank-vault-like panel, which was easily as thick as her leg, opened as if it was nothing more than the lid to a bread box.
Outside, she took a deep breath, descended the shallow steps, and proceeded down the passenger side of the Suburban. As she came to the rear hatch, she stopped and stared at the glowing Chevy symbol on the asphalt, a false moon.
Shoving her hand in the pocket of her pants, she took out the key. She’d forgotten she’d had the fob with her.
She’d lied to the guard. There wasn’t anything she needed inside the SUV.
Wandering out from under the porte cochere, she looked over the front acreage that skirted the allée of trees guarding the driveway. In the nicer months, the lawn was mowed to golf course precision, the smooth, green nature-made carpet undulating out to the stone wall that ran along the roadside edge of the property. Currently, the landscape was draped in moonlight, everything in shades of blue, from the dull French gray of the ground cover, now dead, to the icy bright, skeletal branches, and the sapphire shadows thrown by the big trunked maples down by the road. This nocturnal palette wasn’t going to last long. Over to the east, along the horizon, a glow was just beginning to appear—
The flare of light came with such intensity that she was not just blinded, but assaulted by the burst of illumination.
Throwing both arms up to cover her eyes, she got nowhere with the blocking, her retinas continuing to burn in spite of the barriers.
