Of all the possibilities Zac and David had come up with, that wasn’t on the list.
Zac leaned nearer to the window. One of the woman’s arms rested outside the covering, her smooth skin bearing an age spot on the back of her hand. Her eyes were closed, her red-gold hair braided over her shoulder, escaped wisps framing her face, which also showed spots of age. She gave a quiet groan, seeming unaware of David and Zac.
The man twisted in his seat to touch the inside of her wrist with two fingers.
“Help? You want our help?” David was practically spitting the words.
“Not for me. For her.”
“After you shot me, after you accused us of murdering your friends and threatened us with—”
“David,” Zac said. “I think she’s rejuvenating.”
David straightened, stepped to the back of the car, and opened the door. He leaned inside and stared at her. The woman opened her eyes, but they remained unfocused.
“One of your people?” Zac said to the man.
“Yes.”
“Why bring her to us?”
“She’s aging permanently. Dying.”
“How can we help?”
The man got out of the car, ignoring the stiffness of David’s posture braced for defense. His attention had fixed on Zac like a laser. He stood before Zac with his shoulders loose, his hands at his sides, nothing aggressive in the lines of his body. He seemed to be trying to convey harmlessness, even surrender.
“You fell thousands of feet into that canyon.” The man’s voice shook, strange when emotion remained absent from him otherwise. “I saw it. The video. Not even one of us could survive that.”
Not medically, no. Not scientifically. Zac’s gut tightened.
“You have a secret.”
Zac shook his head. “Nothing to keep one of us alive if the serum’s expiring in her veins.”
The guy surged forward so fast Zac had no chance of reacting, seized his shirt, and shook him. “You have to help her, you have to—”
Getting over the surprise took about one second, but in that time the grip was torn away. David hauled the man off Zac and hurled him to the ground. Rather than retaliate, the man remained huddled on his hands and knees between them, his head drooped low. David jerked the man up by the front of his shirt and shoved him against the car and patted him down. The man let him.
“He’s unarmed.” David released the man with enough force to make him stagger against the car.
“Okay.” Zac tamped down his annoyance with both of them and coated the word with boredom instead. If David didn’t pick up on it, he’d go with a direct approach.
But the single word seemed to work. David caught his eye, drew a deep breath, and nodded. He stepped back from the man, who caved against the car, hands braced on the hood behind him.
“She hasn’t done anything to you.” The man drew a ragged breath. “Please.”
It was only rejuvenation. Age spots, aches, weakness, slushy lungs. They all knew this routine well, their bodies taking an annual break from the daily grind of keeping them ageless.
“Don’t you go through this yearly?” Zac said.
“I’m telling you, she’s dying.”
“Have you done anything to treat her? And the others in your group, what do they think?”
The floodlight glittered in the man’s eyes, reflecting desolation. “There aren’t any others. Only Cady.”
David stepped forward, his height making the move more aggressive than it might have been otherwise. The man flinched away. “‘Come after my people, and I’ll expose yours.’ That’s what you said. Were you exaggerating your numbers, then? After a strategic advantage?”
“There used to be others.”
“Used to be, three weeks ago?”
“Yes,” he whispered.
“And now?”
“Now it’s just Cady. And me.”
A quiet groan drifted from the back of the car, and the woman called out, “Finn?”
He kept one hand braced on the car as he leaned inside. “Here.”
“What’s happening?”
“Don’t worry about it. Just rest.”
“How long?”
“Two days.”
She seemed to drift again.
“Okay,” Zac said to Finn. Good to know his name at last. “What makes you think this is more than rejuvenation? The cycle thing, I mean.”
“I can’t tell. So I came.”
Forming simple sentences now seemed to require Finn’s total concentration. Maybe something was wrong with him too. Maybe it was a contagion of some kind. A contagion that could cure immortality.
In which case Zac and David should distance themselves.
David glanced across the roof of the car. Zac cocked an eyebrow at him. Were they thinking the same thing? He studied the woman again. The upturned nose, the slender fingers and fine wrist bones of her visible hand. The spotted skin. The shallow breaths rising under the blanket. Contagious or not, these two people were longevites. As such their kinship ran as deep as a mortal bloodline.
“We can take her to my apartment,” Zac said.
David glared at him but, after a long moment, gave a sigh. “My place is closer. And more private.”
Zac nodded his acknowledgment. He hadn’t been about to volunteer the home of the most introverted guy he’d ever met, but he wouldn’t turn down the offer.
“You’ll save her,” Finn said.
“I don’t think she needs saving,” Zac said. “I think she’s going to be fine in a day or so.”
Finn’s grip tightened on the frame of the car door. “Okay. You’re still young. Maybe you know.”
“Can you drive?”
“I know where he lives.” Finn tilted his chin at David.
Not what he’d been asking, but okay. “We’ll meet there.” They got back into the car, and Zac shut his door before blurting, “What is wrong with him?”
“I don’t know.” David cupped one hand around the other and propped his wrists on his knees. “He wasn’t like this before—there’s a kind of strain on him now.”
“And it was there even before you threw him around.”
David growled.
“He came in peace, man.”
“This time.”
“You’re not doing much to foster civility.”
“With the guy who shot me in the head.”
“There is that.”
“We’ll help the woman, and I’ll … avoid further antagonism. If he does.”
More acquiescence than Zac had hoped for. He drove toward David’s home with the K-car’s headlights in his rearview. “Her symptoms look like rejuvenation. He should be familiar with it.”
“Aye, I’d think so too.”
Zac had been to David’s house several times in the last nineteen days. New memories to dilute the old, to normalize the place. It hadn’t happened yet. He stepped through the doorway and could hear Colm’s voice over his shoulder. “Lied to her. That’s all.” Lied to terrify Moira, to keep her quiet, to keep Zac clueless.
David led them to his bedroom. They passed the bathroom in the hall, and another memory sucker-punched Zac in the chest. Moira’s hair in his hands, the sweat on the back of her neck while she knelt over the toilet and vomited. Her eyes when she looked up at him, brown depths glittering with exposed terror. And her voice, broken.
“I do want him dead.”
His confusion in that moment galled him now. She had been afraid of Colm, not for him. And Zac had missed it.
Finn lowered the woman to David’s bed. Her eyes were open now.
“Hello,” David said to her. “Your name is Cady?”
She didn’t seem to hear him as Finn took her hand between his. “Yeah. She’s Cady.”
“How long has she been ill?”
“Three days.”
Zac stepped through the doorway, though the three of them inside shrank the room. “That’s not an unusual time frame,” he said a
s Cady turned her head and found Finn.
“Hey.” Finn squeezed her hand.
“Hey.” Her voice came hardly above a whisper. “Quit freaking out. I told you I’m fine.”
“You’re not.” His voice broke.
“Relatively, immortally fine.” She gave a quiet laugh that turned into a wheeze.
Zac’s chest constricted in sympathy. Of all the symptoms of rejuvenation, for him the mud-in-the-lungs feeling was the worst.
Cady reached up and touched Finn’s bicep, the gesture … familial? More? “I’m not dying.”
“Okay.” No conviction there.
“Heard from James yet?”
“No.”
“Head?”
He sighed. “Bowling ball.”
“Stomach?”
“Licorice.”
They spoke their code language with utter nonchalance. Cady looked for the first time around the room. “You’re Zac. Zac Wilson.”
He nodded.
“Why are you here?”
“It’s more like we’re there,” Finn said.
She frowned in confusion. “Michigan? You drove us to Michigan?”
“I had to.”
“When? What day is it?”
“Friday. No, Saturday now, I think.”
“You drove for a day and a night?”
“You got worse, Cade. I thought they could help.”
She covered her face with her age-spotted hands, then lowered them to rest at her sides. “Okay. I get it. Now go lie down.”
“When you’re better.”
She studied each of them, first David, then Zac, then Finn. She reached for Finn’s hand and tugged it to her. “Train of logic.”
Finn blinked. “Now?”
“You brought me here, which means you trust them.”
“Yes.”
“I won’t be alone, and you can’t do anything more right now.”
“No,” he said quietly.
“You’ve been awake for two days and two nights. Train of logic says it’s time to rest.”
“I …”
“Go on.”
“Yeah. Okay.” He turned to the door, shoulders slumped and head down. One step, two, and then the third dragged over the carpet and he nearly pitched onto his face.
Zac surged from the corner and caught Finn’s arm. Unnatural warmth radiated through his sleeve.
Finn corrected his balance but did not pull away. “If she gets worse, you have to tell me. Right away.”
“Of course.” But she wouldn’t get worse.
Zac shot a look over his shoulder at her. She was watching him, not Finn.
“We need to know what’s going on,” he said.
“If one of you will take care of him, I’ll save the explanation.”
One of them wasn’t going to be David. The man still looked prepared to eject Finn from the room. Or the town.
“Right.” Zac sighed. “Come on.”
FOUR
Zac led Finn to David’s living room, an open concept area with a wood floor and windows on two sides, one corner occupied by a baby grand piano. Before he finished gesturing to the sofa, Finn was sinking onto the middle cushion, hands gripping its edge.
Take care of him. That’s what Cady had asked. “Hey, uh … anything you need?”
Finn didn’t look up. “The lamp. It’s bright.”
Headache. The tightness around his eyes gave it away. Zac switched off the table lamp, and when the room became dark, Finn’s sigh held relief.
“Thank you.” The words were quiet. Spent.
“Anything else?”
“Cady. If she’s wrong, if she’s …”
If she’s dying. Zac cleared his throat. “I don’t think she is, man. I really don’t. But I’m betting she’ll rest easier if I can tell her I did the best I could for you.”
“Yeah.” Another pause, another sigh. “If there’s an ice pack. Or a frozen bag. Peas and carrots … peas or carrots. Or anything.”
Zac went to David’s freezer and dug around inside. The food of a bachelor—takeout boxes mostly, though David did enjoy fresh produce—had been joined by signs of deliberate meal preparation, Ziploc bags dated and described in Tiana’s precise handwriting. A smile tugged his mouth as he moved items aside. Here in the back was a bag of frozen green beans. No less effective than peas or carrots, one could assume.
For his stuntman-variety injuries, Zac always had one or two gel packs ready—shoulders and knees, typically, but in the last several years he’d also managed to wrench his neck, sprain an ankle, and crack ribs. None of which threatened his life; therefore none of which activated the healing serum. He’d have to remember to stash a few gel packs in David’s freezer. If Zac didn’t need them in the future, Finn might. He and Cady seemed accustomed to this malady of his, whatever it was.
Right. Because the two of them had become a permanent part of Zac’s life. He ought to learn caution with people, but he hadn’t managed it to date, so his odds weren’t great. He could at least take a page from David’s library and require trust to be earned. For all he knew, Finn and Cady were a team of serial killers.
He returned to the living room expecting Finn to have drifted to sleep in the last minute. The man looked sufficiently wiped out to do so. But his eyes tracked Zac’s path across the room to the couch.
“Here.” Zac offered the bag of green beans. “Best we’ve got.”
Finn didn’t answer as he took the bag. He reached for a pillow at one end of the couch and lay down, his movements slow and smooth. Routine. He gave a hard sigh, positioned the bag against the base of his skull, and eased his head back to the pillow.
“I’m sure there’s painkillers around here somewhere. I’ll ask David.”
“Had some before, but they don’t … all the time …” He sighed. “Sorry, I can’t … need quiet now.”
If he was falling somewhere, it wasn’t into sleep. More like confusion or agitation. Zac nodded and took a step back, but Finn squinted up at him.
“Tell Cady I said … tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
His hand jerked at his side, an incomplete gesture. “She’ll know.”
“Okay, man.”
“Care of her.”
“We will.”
Finn draped his arm over his eyes, and Zac left him alone.
In David’s room, Cady had propped herself on a few pillows. She and David weren’t talking, but she sat up straighter when Zac entered.
“How is he?”
Zac shrugged. “Lying down in the dark with a bag of frozen vegetables on his neck.”
A small smile formed. “Thank you for doing that.”
“I think he’s running a fever.”
“Low grade is his norm for times like this. But thanks for letting me know.”
David pushed away from his sentry station in the corner of the room. “Is he ill?”
“Not the way you mean, no.”
She wrapped her arms around herself as if catching a chill. Probably she had. She looked small and withered, though her body bore no outward sign of aging except the spots on her skin. Her eyes held weary despondency. She had buried friends too these last few weeks, lost to her not through the necessity of justice but through a mysterious affliction.
“Finn said you should tell us.”
Her gaze flicked up to his. “Tell you what?”
“He said you’d know.”
“Wow. All right.” She stretched her legs then drew them up to her chest, wincing.
Zac perched on the edge of the bed, listening and letting her know. David could go take a hike, or he could stick around and learn something about putting people at ease. He still stood with his arms folded, a soldier at attention, carved from stone.
Cady seemed unbothered by his granite stance, or at least unsurprised. “How’s your knowledge of TBI?”
“Traumatic brain injury,” Zac said.
“Yes.”
A dozen quest
ions spiraled into his head. How? When? Not fatal, or Finn wouldn’t still be dealing with it.
“It’s a complex condition with a variety of repercussions, including the headaches.” Again that tiny smile. “And if he’s letting you in on it, then he must be ready to acknowledge new family.”
The word tugged inside Zac like sutures trying to close a wound.
“You might choose not to claim us,” she said more quietly, maybe misinterpreting his expression. “But regardless you are ours, in a way.”
“You don’t know us,” David said.
“Not yet. I guess that’ll change, now that we’re here.”
If you didn’t know him, you’d see only a scowl, but behind that David was cataloging, compiling a file in his head to process everything. Zac had seen him do it a dozen times in their three weeks of acquaintance.
“What else?” David said.
“I’m not going to lay out the whole story for you. That’s his.”
A reason to respect her. Zac said, “We don’t need to know how it happened. But that code you were using … bowling ball, licorice.”
“A creative pain scale. We tried numbers for a while, but everything was a three to him.”
It was a strange image, the hard-eyed gunfighter with cognitive damage. But every person alive carried at least one thing you’d never guess.
“A few times he’s said his head feels like a house. That’s a ten, or at least that’s the largest object he’s ever used. Licorice stands for nausea. He hates licorice even when he’s feeling well.”
“Whatever works.”
“Exactly. He’s been dealing with this since before … well, since before we became what we are. It’s a long time to be …”
“Damaged,” Zac said quietly.
She looked up quickly, as if she expected to find him sneering. “His intelligence is intact. Wholly.”
“What’s with the ‘train of logic’ thing then?”
“You’re seeing him at his cognitive worst, and by the way, he knows it. When he’s gone too long without sleep, sometimes he needs a nudge toward clear thinking.”
“Cady,” David said and waited for her to look up at him. “Does his injury have any bearing on his trying to put a bullet in my head?”
She looked away. “As I said, some things are his to tell.”
“I’ve the right to be told now if I’ve brought a ticking bomb into my—”
From Sky to Sky Page 4