by Kim Harrison
Dead men ringed his living room, blood radiating from each one like broken flower petals. Michael was sitting pretty in the middle of it, the scent of gunpowder choking. Susanne was tied to a dining room chair, her eyes red but looking unharmed. It had to be very like what a drafter experienced after a jump, and he wondered how long he’d been unconscious. He’d be damned if he’d ask. Judging by the tears on Susanne’s face, at least ten minutes. By the dead men, not much more than that. And my house is shot to hell again.
“You had to kill them all?” Bill complained, and Michael shifted his posture.
“They didn’t trust me.”
Bill levered himself up onto a chair, ignoring Susanne’s muffled but increasingly loud demands for help. “Why should I?” he asked, rubbing a tired hand over his head.
“Because I knocked you out instead of killing you.” Still holding his rifle, he showed Bill his palm. KILL PERI, NOT BILL was scrawled across it. “You want to fill in the blanks?”
Bill stood. Shuffling to Susanne, he untied the knots on her wrists. “You want to quit taking out my hired help, maybe?”
Susanne yanked the sock from her mouth. “Bill, you suck. Don’t call me again. Got it?” She stood, pushing Bill out of the way as she stormed over the downed agents and out the broken door. She was still in that black negligee.
Michael smiled, and as the electronic whine of Suzanne’s car went faint, Bill strode to the bookshelf and poured himself a shot. He downed it in one go, feeling it burn his throat and give him distance from what had happened. But the memory of his blood warm on his fingers wouldn’t go away, and he looked at Michael, the cold hatred in his eyes hanging heavy in him. The man was certifiable, dangerous—and exactly what he needed to get this done. But for the first time, Bill wondered whether he’d survive it.
The door pad was a neutral green, but someone would eventually come investigate the noise of six men dying in gunfire. Tired, Bill set the bottle back among the books and gathered his thoughts. If Peri was on the warpath, he should take the fight to where he wanted it. Michael, though, would never agree to what would sound like retreat, not the careful plan it was.
“Jack tells me she’s rabbiting,” he said, wanting to stick as close to the truth as he could. “This story of her coming in was a ploy to get you reacting. Get you to kill me for her.” He looked at Michael from under his lowered brow. “Which you obliged her.”
Michael brushed the gunpowder off his rifle. “What are you griping for, old man? I brought you back.”
The memory of gasping his life out on the carpet shuddered through him, and he hid it behind a last swallow. You are a wild boar, Michael, and you will be culled. “As you say.” Resolute, Bill reluctantly set his empty glass down, feeling as if he’d failed Michael in some way. “Peri won’t leave ends this time.”
Eyebrows high, Michael waited. “And?” he prompted.
It was looser than he liked. There were too many variables. But Michael was still the best option he had. “I think we need to talk to Helen. See about taking Peri out of the program and putting you in her place.”
Michael chuckled. “It’s about fucking time.”
And that would get him to Newport. Peri would follow. Tension trickled through him, a warm wash that rebounded at his toes and settled in his groin. “Are you hungry? Have you had breakfast? It will take the flight crew at least four hours to get themselves in order.”
“Breakfast sounds good.” Michael snickered. “You want to get dressed first?”
Bill stopped short and looked down. “Indeed.”
“I’ll pull my car around,” Michael said as he walked to the door, treading around the fallen men as if they didn’t matter.
But in the grand scheme of things, Bill thought as he strode to his bedroom, they don’t.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
The scent of eggs and sausage tickled the edge of her awareness. Concentrating on the softly glowing screen, Peri ignored it, even as her stomach rumbled. Feet on the worn coffee table, she propped the screen against the rise of her knees, her fingers moving rapidly over the icons and keyboard as she searched for evidence of Bill. She’d borrowed the tablet from the guys downstairs, and she couldn’t help but wonder whether she wasn’t charging enough rent. It was this year’s model, but even that was frustratingly slow compared to her old Opti tablet.
Waiting for the search to finish, Peri carefully rubbed her sore knee through her torn slacks, skirting the ragged, bloodied edges. She hadn’t been keen on the idea of showing Jack her safe house, but the way Jack was maneuvering about her kitchen making breakfast led her to believe he’d been here before, and if Jack knew about it, it was a good bet Bill did. She couldn’t stay here. As soon as she got a bead on Bill, she was gone.
The aroma of sausage became stronger, and she flicked a glance at Jack standing before the small efficiency stove, his hair damp from a shower, the sleeves of his once-white shirt rolled up, and his filthy suit coat carefully folded over the back of the kitchen chair. Under the musty staleness of the couch was the faint hint of someone familiar. Not Jack, but a man nevertheless.
Finally the page to her financial house loaded, and she typed in her password. It was the same thing she did to check every well-lined patron who came into her coffeehouse. This time, though, she was going to go a step further outside the law to use it to infiltrate Bill’s financial house. From there, she could track him—see where he had been spending money. Impatient, she put in Bill’s phone number. If he was using his p-cash, she’d find him.
The domestic sounds of breakfast cooking were incredibly soothing. “Where did you get the food?” she said softly as the program searched. It would take some time.
All smiles, Jack turned halfway around. “The sausage was in the freezer next to some crusty black-cherry ice cream and five boxes of Thin Mint cookies. The eggs were in the fridge. They’re good for a year if they’re kept right. And they were. No coffee, though. Sorry.”
He looked good there, comfortable, and not liking that fact, Peri prodded her knee to estimate the damage. She hadn’t taken any of the meds she’d found in the tiny bathroom cabinet lest she medicate herself into a nondrafting state. Her knee was sore, but all it needed was a hot bath and some stretching. A shower would be a good second, but leaving Jack alone again wasn’t an option. That she had fallen asleep for a few hours was bad enough.
I can’t believe I fell asleep. Eyes rising from her knee, she looked over the small one-room apartment in the light of day. The blinds were closed and the room was shadowed, her shelves of treasures dark. The furnishings were comfortable, worn, and mismatched. The rug, too, was old, doing little to cover the scratched floorboards. A forgotten project bag with yarn and a half-unraveled scarf was tucked in a corner.
Don’t I ever finish anything? she wondered, even as a weird peace was growing in her, far greater than the coming breakfast warranted. She couldn’t tell whether it was from Jack, that she was free of authority again, or just that she wasn’t alone.
The page dinged for her attention. Leaning over it, she felt a quiver of excitement. There was a charge on Bill’s security system early this morning. He’d had a ping and dismissed it. Even better, there had been an enormous influx of funds last week. Most had been parceled out, but it was enough to fund a small country for a year. Everblue? she wondered. His backer?
Nothing had been spent at an airport, though, and she frowned until she saw the Your Skies payment. The jet-for-hire service had been put on retainer at opening of business today. Peri’s eyebrows rose. Private jets were the best way to move around when you were covered in gunpowder residue. He was alive.
Not knowing how she felt about that, she closed out the financial records and opened Detroit International Airport. Everything in a fifty-mile radius from Detroit used the same tower whether it was a glider at Parkway or a crop duster at Ypsilanti. Stomach rumbling, she reached for her pendant pen, jerking it open and writing NEWPO
RT on her palm when she found a match.
Peri recapped the pen, focus distant as she thought. She had a direction, but it had been too easy—an invitation to find him, almost.
The sound of silverware clinking pulled her attention, but seeing Jack still fussing over the bacon, she returned to her tablet, closing everything out and wiping the search memory. A timer popped up, and not wanting to shut it down until it was finished, she glanced at Jack’s back and typed in an address by memory.
An uncomfortable unease seeped into her. Fidgeting, Peri tugged the tablet closer as her mother’s facility loaded. A few more taps and she had access to all the cameras, little slices of life in three-by-eight rectangles. Her brow furrowed as she leaned in, her knee throbbing as she searched the grainy black-and-white displays for her mother. Guilt rose as she saw the wrinkled faces and fading hair. Some were vacant, some angry, some eerily happy as they watched old movies as they sat in rows of wheelchairs and scooters. It was too cold to be outside, and she searched the nature room, where goldfinches and cardinals made a living display. Her mother liked birds, though Peri could never remember a time they’d had a feeder. She had always told Peri that birds were filthy.
“Breakfast is ready,” Jack said cheerfully, and she snapped the tablet off. Standing above her, Jack hesitated, two plates of food in his hands. “You’re going to eat it, right?” he said as he set one on the table and collapsed into the overstuffed chair across from her with the other. Plate on his lap, Jack looked mildly hurt. “If I’d wanted to turn you over to Bill, I would have already. It’s your usual. At least, it was the last time I got you breakfast.”
“I don’t remember.” Setting her tablet aside, she picked up the fork.
Jack lowered his head over his food. “I do.”
Her eyes narrowed. In sudden mistrust, she pushed her food across the table to him and took his plate right off his lap. Jack chuckled, continuing to eat her eggs instead without pause. Emboldened, she took a bite. Salt and protein hit the sides of her mouth, waking up her appetite. She began eating in earnest. Jack was clearly pleased, and she muttered, “This doesn’t mean anything except I’m hungry.”
His expression didn’t dim at all. “I know it’s going to take time.”
She stopped chewing, then swallowed fast. “There’s not enough time in the world, Jack.”
“I’m sorry I lied to you,” he said, his brow furrowed. “I’m sorry I tricked you into believing you were one thing when you were something else. If I could draft back to the beginning, I’d do it differently.” She snorted, and he added, “What can I do to prove myself?”
Pushing her eggs around, she chuckled and said, “You can kill Bill for me.”
“Peri, I lied because I loved you. And you loved me.”
She pulled her head up, ticked. “You lied because you loved me. Seriously?” He didn’t love her. He loved what she gave him. And it was such a nice breakfast, too, she thought as she set her plate down. “Three years, Jack. You made me a corrupt agent, the very thing I was supposed to be fighting.”
“You put yourself there, not me,” Jack said. “I didn’t make you into anything you didn’t want to be. If you don’t want to go back to Opti, fine, but don’t go back to WEFT.”
“If Opti can’t have me, no one can? God, tell me it is more than that,” she said bitterly.
“You’re better than this!” he exploded, arm waving dramatically, and she had a fleeting memory of seeing him like this before at some forgotten task. “If you try to bring in Michael with that lousy excuse of an anchor Allen Swift, a desked CIA agent, and a . . a . . . psychologist, you’re going to get killed.”
“Then it’s a good thing I can get around that.”
“You aren’t listening!” he said, his anger somehow comforting. It was real when not much right now was.
“No, you aren’t listening to me,” she said, not backing down. “We are done.”
Jaw clenched, he pointed his fork at her. “You need me,” he said softly, adamantly.
“It’s not about need.”
“Sure it is.” He returned to eating, stabbing his eggs with angry jabs. “If you’re serious about taking Michael down, you need me there to render your drafts back if nothing else.”
“Excuse me?”
Jack lifted one shoulder, easing back into the musty chair in an obvious attempt to look harmless. “You think I wouldn’t notice you aren’t remembering? That you haven’t been accelerated? I know you. I know you better than you know yourself, babe.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“I’ll call you whatever I want. You’re not accelerated, but you are hooked on Evocane,” he said, and it was all she could do to not smack his insufferably confident face. “You need my help to get that secondary source of Evocane. Steiner has one vial. Where is the other? Did that punk in the arena keep one?” he said, the light in his eyes shifting. “I thought so.”
“You don’t know me at all.”
Jack leaned across the table and grabbed her wrist. “I helped make you.”
Her lips pressed together. “If you want your hand to keep functioning in the next ten seconds, you will let go of me.” She tried to jerk away, but he tightened his grip, his eyes determined.
Peri stiffened to pop him one, but her anger vanished when a second Jack was suddenly standing at the door in a clean suit and tie, listening at the crack. “Babe, someone is coming,” the illusion said, and she froze, shocked at seeing them both together like this.
Jack, the real one, saw her sudden fear and he let go. “What?” he asked, staring at the door, obviously not seeing his twin.
“Someone is on the stairs,” she whispered. “You called Bill, you bastard!”
“I didn’t.” The real Jack rose, motions furtive as he padded silently to the door, ready to act. “You still have weapons here, right?”
Her gaze shot to the ceiling, but the faint creaking had ceased and a decisive knock at the door shocked through them, bringing Peri to her feet, pulse fast.
“Peri? Are you in there? I brought an overnight bag.”
Silas? Her mouth fell open, and she lurched forward, knee protesting. He found her?
“For God’s sake,” the hallucination complained. “Another boyfriend. Why do I bother?”
“Denier?” Equally disgusted, Jack rocked back from the door. “You must be bugged.”
“I am not bugged.” Peri walked through the fake Jack, forcing it to vanish. “If anyone is bugged, it’s you.”
“Babe, if I was bugged, it wouldn’t be Denier in the hall.”
“I said,” she said, angry as she worked the last lock, “don’t call me that!” Flustered, she opened the door.
“Silas,” she said around a whisper, relieved in more than a few different ways. He was there, looking good in his long cashmere coat, a tweed scarf about his neck and his shoes still damp from yesterday’s snow. There was a satchel with a WEFT logo in his hands. “How did you find me?”
His eyes rose from her torn and bloodied knee, his expression becoming even more stilted when his attention flicked behind her to Jack. “I’ve been here before,” he said as she took his arm and dragged him in.
Unthinking, she gave in to her impulse and hugged him, needing to go on tiptoe to do it since she didn’t have her boots on. She felt him start, but then his arms went around her, first tentative, then more sure, as if he wasn’t convinced. Cold air puffed up between them as his coat compressed, and her breath caught, but not before she smelled lab cleaner and aftershave. Her thoughts went to her diary and the scant few pages that remained. A need to read them gnawed at her, but she could guess at what remained, and she closed her eyes when a real memory hit her, of her and Silas at a lab bench, the ridiculous safety glasses that she’d decorated with pipe cleaner butterflies rakishly perched on his nose.
He cleared his throat and she let go, uncomfortable knowing Jack was watching.
“Going back to Opti, then?” Silas sai
d, his eyes on Jack as the man took his plate to the kitchen to rinse it. “Seems I owe Harmony a chunk of change.”
“I’m not going to Opti.” Flustered, Peri put space between them.
Jack washed his plate as if nothing was wrong. “At least you’d be free with Bill,” he said, standing sideways so his back wasn’t to them. “Steiner is going to put you in a cell. That’s why you ran in the first place. Or am I wrong about that, too?”
Silas dropped the bag. It hit with a soft thud that said clothes, not weapons. “There’s always option three,” he said. “Tie up Jack in a bus station for Steiner and go ghost.”
Jack stiffened, his wet hand dripping as he turned. “Like hell you are.”
Peri raised a hand in placation, her thoughts more on the chance for a new pair of underwear than their argument. “Hey, hey, hey! Both of you. Silas?” She waited until he looked from Jack to her. “I’m not going back to Opti. I’m not going to WEFT, either. But I can’t leave Bill and Michael as a loose end.” Her shoulders slumped. “Not this time.”
“Besides, killing them would prove she’s a good little WEFT agent,” Jack said bitingly.
“Shut up!” both Peri and Silas said, and he leaned casually against the sink, ankles crossed as he dried his hands.
Head dropping, Silas hesitated. “Do you mind if I make some coffee?” he finally asked.
She nodded, glad Silas was here but not sure how she was going to handle this new wrinkle. “Go ahead. I don’t think there is any, though.” Silas went into the kitchen, and she scooped up the bag and took it to the couch to see what he’d brought. Please, may there be socks.
Silas scuffed to a halt in the kitchen, facing Jack belligerently until the smaller but far more dangerous man moved aside so Silas could open a cupboard and bring out a teakettle. Jack vacillated for a moment, then sat down at the tiny laminated table as Peri looked through the bag to find a new pair of black jeans and a forest-green V-neck cashmere sweater. Under it was a black turtleneck and yes, three pairs of socks. He broke out of WEFT to bring me a new set of clothes? “How mad is Harmony at me?” she asked. “Did Allen tell her this wasn’t my idea?”