Jove Brand is Near Death

by J. A. Crawford

  The three of us sat there, silent.

  I had been 100 percent certain Kit was about to transfer the rights to Missy. Did Missy suspect it too? Did she even know the watch really worked? Maybe it broke before she could find out, or maybe she couldn’t bring herself to look. Either way, Missy didn’t want to battle Dina over Jove Brand. She didn’t want Jove Brand. She wanted Kit. They had their June wedding, but the summer sun never shined on her again.

  Missy was gathering but now Dina broke. Everything she had dammed up for eighteen years came rushing out. She wailed and shook and sunk to the ground.

  I guess I would have too, if I had killed the brother who loved me for nothing.

  “I didn’t answer the phone. Why didn’t I answer the phone? I. Should. Have. Answered. The. Phone.”

  I knelt next to Dina while the tide rolled in.

  “Fate sent Dean. Fate made sure the rights would be safe.”

  Fate wasn’t responsible for either of those things. That’s why I didn’t comfort her. That, and having just witnessed Kit being himself for the last, best time.

  If I was ever going to get Dina when she was weak, the time was now.

  “He was blackmailing you, wasn’t he?” I asked. “Layne Lackey. The condo, the car. And he kept turning up the heat. Him, I understand. You did what you had to do. But why Sir Collin? Did Layne tip him somehow?”

  “What?” Dina looked up at me in genuine confusion.

  I sent some confusion back. “You didn’t kill them?”

  “It wasn’t Fedorov?” Dina asked.

  Missy found her feet. Her presence filled the room. She was a giant on the screen, but that was nothing compared to her live. She was done crying.

  “You killed me too, Dina.”

  Looking at Missy was like staring into an eclipse. Dina had to shade her eyes.

  “Since Kit died, the only way I could live was to become someone else. You killed me too.” Missy’s voice was diamond hard. “How could you fathom what you were doing? You’ve never loved anyone but yourself.”

  Missy stopped in the doorway. “You’re every measure your father’s daughter.”

  Dina swallowed a breath. Missy answered before Dina could ask.

  “I won’t tell, but not for you.” The doorway was somehow big enough to let Missy pass. She didn’t look back. “I’ll stay quiet because I loved Kit, and love means sacrifice.”

  I’m not sure how long it took for Missy’s spell to break. My brain rebooted to a blank screen. I had solved Missy’s mystery and come up empty on mine. Sir Collin and Layne Lackey’s deaths had nothing to do with Near Death. Nothing at all.

  “Who the hell is the killer?” I went to rub my forehead and smacked myself with the Quarreler.

  Dina was anchored in place. “I don’t know. But everyone’s down there waiting. What am I going to tell them?”

  It wasn’t that I couldn’t prove Dina did it. Proof didn’t matter. This wasn’t about me or what I thought was right. I knew what Missy wanted, and what Dean didn’t want.

  In the end, it came down to Kit.

  Kit was bigger than vengeance. He wouldn’t have wanted his sister dying in prison. He wouldn’t have wanted his nephew marrying Fedorov’s daughter in some weird dynastic movie deal. Kit gave his life to save Jove Brand. Expose Dina now, and everything he died for would be tarnished.

  I handed the watch to Dina. “Let Kit tell them.”

  Dina turned on her webcam to check the damage. She was in the middle of fixing her face when she almost broke down again. “Oh God. Dean.”

  “Dean will be fine. Better than fine. He’ll be free,” I said.

  Dina muttered to herself as she revised her presentation. “I can play this, then keep everything else the same. At least I don’t have change anything about Niles.”

  “What about Niles?” I asked. Talking it out would help Dina get her sea legs back, and it wasn’t like I was busy solving two murders or clearing my name.

  Dina took a makeup bag out of a drawer. She tried to reapply her mascara, but her hand wouldn’t stop shaking.

  “Niles’s connection to Brand, his grandfather being Bowman Fletcher’s editor.” Dina started to steady. Talking about what wasn’t really on her mind helped her recover. “Then the big coming out. A gay Brand. How’s that for diversity?”

  “Niles is gay?” I asked.

  “And into daddies.” Dina smirked. “I told you: Niles was dying to meet all the old Brands, so we introduced him to Bryce Crisp. It was love at first sight. They’ve been shacked up ever since.”

  Niles was the younger man at Bryce’s place?

  Bryce had seen the Jove Brand contract.

  That’s Gamesman, Niles had said to me on the stairs, before sticking the drop like a gymnast. Niles, the action star. Niles, who’d been taking motorcycle lessons. That’s when it finally clicked.

  “Niles Endsworth is the Black Knight.”

  “What?” Dina said.

  “Niles is the killer. The gloves, the Black Knight outfit, the motorcycle, he cribbed all of it from Bryce.”

  And it was how both Chevalier and Stern got to Bryce’s so quick. Bryce told Niles about our meeting, then Niles dropped a dime to Stern and Dean. He was going to kill Bryce with me placed at the scene. It took me a minute to put it all together. Pacing helped.

  “Fedorov told me Fletcher had an affair with his editor’s daughter. Niles must think he’s Fletcher’s son. In his head, if the rights revert, they revert to him.”

  “No way that’s true,” Dina said.

  “It doesn’t have to be true. It only has to be the story Niles believes.” Fedorov, of all people, had been right. I imagined Niles, peeking out from Bryce Crisp’s kitchen to discover me cosplaying. “Niles believes becoming Jove Brand is his birthright. The idea of anyone else playing the role must blow his top.”

  Dina’s jaw dropped. “He replaced Hamilton Price.”

  “Was Niles in England when Ham died?”

  “They were dating,” Dina replied. Her voice fell to a whisper. “And it was his idea, using you on Beautiful Downtown Burbank.”

  I didn’t have time to get incensed on my own behalf. I was too busy thinking about someone else. Someone who had confided in Niles. Someone who, Niles thought, was about to steal his inheritance.

  “Dean!”

  I snatched a fountain pen off Dina’s desk before hitting a sprint and took the stairs in bounds. I passed through the fire pit and stopped at the top of the spiral stair, scanning for Dean. No way the guest of honor should be alone, but none of the clusters of party-goers surrounded him. Where was he?

  A three-story metal spiral staircase was not designed for fast transit. I forced myself to take it a step at a time. I hurdled the last turn of the spiral and pushed my way through the crowd toward Dean’s room, doing my best to conceal the Quarreler behind my thigh. The optical illusion of the whorling hall got me angling so far sideways I almost wiped out. The iris door was sealed but that meant nothing. There was another way into Dean’s room, for someone who could do what Niles could.

  I punched in the code. The second the opening was big enough, I dove through. I rolled to a crouch, aiming to put a fléchette into Niles Endsworth, but my sights were empty.

  I stalked across the room, mindful of being blindsided. None of the shadows were big enough to jump out of, but I pointed the Quarreler at them anyway. Two bodies were waiting for me on the terrace.

  19

  Niles must have gotten to Stavros first, because he was purple as a grape and done twitching. But Dean was still fighting, kicking like he was trying to paddle on dry land.

  “I’m here, kid.” I dropped the Quarreler and pulled out the multi-tool. “You aren’t going to like this but it’s gotta happen.”

  I unscrewed Dina’s pen and dumped out its guts. The rear half had the better tube. I snapped the knife blade open, tucked the tube into my left hand and used my forefinger to mark the indentation under Dean’s Adam’s
apple.

  I took a breath and slit Dean’s throat.

  I cut an opening about the size of my finger tip, pushing firmly. The sensation of the blade slipping through Dean’s neck and into his airway made me burst into a full sweat. I set down the knife and took the pen tube into my right hand while pinching the cut open with my left.

  If I had done everything right, there wouldn’t be much blood, but I’d only ever witnessed the procedure the one time. It saved me from killing my friend then. It was going to keep Niles Endsworth from racking up another victim now.

  It was the helicopter kick everyone kept bringing up. There had been no time to practice it. The wind gets pretty wicked thirteen stories high. My jacket might as well have been a parachute. But when I jumped out of the helicopter, the wind switched direction and what had been a parachute became a pair of wings. Yuen didn’t budge—he trusted me to adjust. But I didn’t. Desperate to get the shot and not look like the amateur I was, I panicked, and my foot caught him flush on the throat.

  Kit was all over it. He rushed to the rescue with his dad’s cigar trimmer in one hand and the pen he used to write the script in the other. I did Kit’s dirty work, but he kept my hands clean. Now it was my turn.

  Getting the tube in was a nightmare. Screwing it down worked better than pushing. Beads of sweat rained off my face to pool with Dean’s tears.

  The first drink of air hit Dean’s lungs. His back arched as his body sucked in all the oxygen it could get. I didn’t have any tape, but I did have a bow tie. I slipped it onto Dean and used the knot to anchor the tube in place.

  “Don’t worry kid,” I said. “Chicks dig scars.”

  Niles was long gone, but I spotted where he must have dropped. The terraces below were fifteen feet down. The ones after were thirty. Hundreds of feet later those were rocks and ocean. The closest terrace was directly under this one. Whatever technique Niles used to make sure he landed on it I didn’t know. I was going to have to catch him the old-fashioned way.

  I heard the Quarreler skidding over the edge too late. I spun as it fell toward the waiting waves, caught a glint of metal, and delivered a tight crescent kick that sent a pistol tumbling off to join it.

  All I knew was, someone had snuck up behind me. My kick had been delivered on instinct. As it connected, I realized I was attacking a cop. Stern’s counter-kick swept out my base leg. I posted an arm to stop myself from face-planting. Stuck in a Twister position, I raised my free hand to ward her off.

  “Wait! It’s Endsworth!” I yelled.

  Against the night sky, the bow tie around Dean’s neck all but concealed the tube. Between the timeline and the motive and the details there was too much to cover to convince Stern it wasn’t me. First and foremost, I wanted to explain why she didn’t pass Niles Endsworth on her way here. Why no one passed him on the stair up to the roof where Sir Collin died. Because he didn’t use the stairs.

  I said the first five words that came to mind.

  “Niles used parkour! To kill!”

  Stern’s eyes flicked toward the ledge to confirm her gun was gone. There was no concealing a backup piece in that dress. She had dumped her shoes on the way. What Stern saw was the prime suspect and two bodies. I needed her to believe me. Still, it was hard to say out loud.

  “Dean’s my son.”

  Stern froze, glanced from Dean to me and back.

  “Look at him. Look at his face. I wouldn’t kill my own kid.”

  Stern circled me to get closer to Dean. She saw his fair hair and skin. His features, reminiscent of renaissance sculpture. She had recently watched Near Death, with a twenty-one year-old Ken Allen, and now she was looking at Dean Calabria, eighteen years later.

  Stern knelt down to make sure Dean stayed stable. “Go, Allen. But I’m right behind you.”

  I was sprinting across Dean’s gym on the quest for medical help when Dina burst through the door.

  “Where’s Dean?”

  I pointed toward the balcony. “He’s alive but needs help now.”

  Dina’s expression was a mix of relief, gratitude, and apology. She rushed to the wall intercom and started shouting orders.

  Something in me I had been holding down for decades boiled to the surface. My skin was pulsing in time with my heartbeat. My scalp was so hot, I thought my hair might burst into flames.

  My whole life, I never wanted to strike anyone in anger. Sure, I had wanted to succeed and I had wanted to win and I had wanted to survive. But never had I wanted to hurt someone for the sake of hurting them.

  It wasn’t only that Niles had gone after Dean or that Niles was trying to frame me. It was that the bastard wouldn’t stand toe-to-toe. He was a bully who ambushed people who couldn’t defend themselves in the first place. I wanted to hammer a hole straight through Niles Endsworth’s perfect face.

  I found the stairs at the entrance to the ballroom and descended a smooth spiral like the inside of a shell. The room at the end of the hall was double the size of Dean’s gym above. A suitable space for a museum.

  A lot of people became hoarders when their parents died, unwilling or unable to discard anything connected to them. Now imagine someone whose father had made a dozen big-budget movies.

  The cavernous space was crammed with everything Jove Brand. Miniatures and models lined aisles and hung from ceilings. Racks and stands and cases displayed everything from prop weapons to typewriters to tea sets. Mannequins stood in costume. The walls were papered in discarded matte paintings, creating portals to places that had only ever existed in the minds of the audience.

  I stalked the history of us all, one Jove Brand hunting another. One of the mannequins was naked, with Niles’s tux pooled at its feet. He had taken the time to get into character.

  Silhouetted against the terrace, Niles was buckling on the para-suit from Flights of Fancy. I was too late. There was no closing the distance in time. My Quarreler was gone. My knife was forgotten on the terrace above. The only thing I had to reach Niles was my voice.

  “You better run!”

  Niles stopped mid-latch. I walked forward confidently, in no rush, standing tall, arms wide like I was trying to scare off a bear.

  “We both know you can’t take me.”

  Stern had been right the whole time but she’d suspected the wrong man. Maybe Niles really was Bowman Fletcher’s son, or maybe, like so many of us who don’t know our fathers, he just needed to believe that his was special. That he was a lost prince questing to claim his kingdom.

  Maybe he had planned to kill Sir Collin all along and had invited me to play patsy. Or maybe Niles’s tepid audience reception combined with my ovations had ruined his big moment, detonated his inner doomsday device, and sent him spiraling into fantasyland. That’s what I was hoping for. That in his head, I had usurped him as Jove Brand.

  I was praying I was the villain in Niles Endsworth’s story.

  “What are you waiting for?“ I asked. “Fly away, little pretender. Everyone knows if it were for real, I’m the toughest Brand, hands down.”

  Every word brought me a step closer.

  “Put me in a room with Connor Shaw, Bryce Crisp, and Sir Collin, and I’d wipe the floor with all of them at the same time. Same goes for you, poser.”

  Niles was twitching. His leg straps hung loose and he was flicking the quick release buckle on his chest over and over, as if he had a nervous tic.

  “That’s why you’ve been framing me.” I tossed my tuxedo jacket aside, a casual show of confidence that cost me my protection. “Why you ran at Bryce’s. Because you can’t take me. You know it, I know it, and the world knows it. So float away, Mary Poppins, before I beat you back to reality.”

  Niles looked toward the terrace, his smart and his crazy doing battle. I nearly had him, but improv was never one of my strengths. I searched for something to tilt him over.

  “I have the Quarreler and I have the jacket and I have the Stag. There can only be one Jove Brand, and that’s me. Now and forever.”
r />   Niles triggered the quick release and charged me. I asked for it, now I was going to get it. He was fifteen years younger than me, at his physical peak, and there was no drug testing to get a SAG card. He had spent his whole life training to be Jove Brand and fulfill his destiny. He had killed anyone who got in the way. Everything—all the work and the pain and the necessary deeds—had led to this moment.

  Niles trucked in with full commitment. Usually, charging attacks were easy to avoid, but his flying knee nearly ended me because I was too busy processing what he was wearing.

  He was in my Jove Brand wardrobe from Near Death, sporting the actual salmon jacket I wore eighteen years ago. Here’s a little bit of trivia: I picked it out. What could I say? It was stylish back then. Niles had abandoned the Black Knight for another role:

  Ken Allen.

  Being late on the draw forced me to block the knee. The metric ton of momentum behind it required the use of both arms to soak. Niles hit a beautiful switch in midair, his rear knee coming up to slam my own hands into my face.

  Niles launched a back kick the instant he touched down, followed immediately with a question-mark kick I checked way too late. There was a certain sting you felt when a bone broke. My forearm stung that way.

  I thought I had an opening but got blasted with a side kick I never saw coming. Niles had been waiting for me. It caught me clean in the ribs and ripped the wind from my lungs. He used the opportunity to put out a picture-perfect hook kick into a round kick designed to tap both my temples.

  I slipped the first kick and checked the second with my broken arm. It felt like when the dentist pokes to see if you’re numb enough to get to work but you aren’t. Niles threw a straight rear hand into a spinning back fist meant to catch me as I circled out. I slipped both by the skin of my teeth. By all rights I should have eaten the attacks, except the sequence of techniques tweaked my muscle memory.

  I was yet to throw a single punch back. Fighting could be like tennis. If you controlled the pace and kept sending hard shots in, your opponent was never able to mount their own offense.