by Rebekah Blue
He resumed his sales pitch, quick-witted and fascinating and so obviously a scoundrel. And to her astonishment, people listened. He wasn’t selling snake-oil, he told them. He wasn’t peddling panaceas or placebos. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, everything I have here today has been rigorously tested and proved to work in clinical trials identical to those demanded by the FDA. And they believed him.
And what’s more, it was true. Because what he was selling was baby aspirin.
And his customers, she noticed after watching him for a while, selected themselves. Teenage boys out to impress their girlfriends were gently ushered away with their egos intact. The merely curious were diverted and sent away laughing.
As for the serious customers…there was a certain kind of person who wanted the berserker strength and superhuman healing abilities he hinted his pills would provide, while never actually saying it. Large, scarred types in expensive-looking suits that must have been hand-tailored to accommodate their steroid-swollen muscles. Ferrety, shifty-eyed types whose furtive attitudes screamed that whatever they intended to do with their new-found strength, it would be illegal and deeply unpleasant.
They were being cheated, yes, but she couldn’t help feeling that the world would be a better place for the fact that all the pills would do for them was cure a headache. And the money kept mounting up.
Byron had just completed an exchange with a narrow-eyed man with tattoos that marked him out as part of the Jackal Mafia, and who was going to be able to treat minor pain and low-grade fever in any number of his goons, when he whirled around and his hand shot out.
He was holding a skinny, dishevelled girl by the wrist. She wriggled and tried to get free. She had a hard little face and there was a blankness behind her eyes that made Naomi shiver with misery. She was about to step forward, but Byron whipped up the girl’s sleeve, exposing an ugly patchwork of bruises that extended up her arm. He growled, but it was obvious his anger was not directed at the child. He gentled his grip and crouched down in front of her.
“It’s okay, he said. “I’m not going to hurt you. You were trying to pick my pocket.”
“I wasn’t!” she protested, but when he released her wrist she didn’t run. She looked down at her feet and kicked the dirt. “It’s okay for you,” she said. “You’re big and strong already. You don’t need any magic potion.”
Byron studied the little girl seriously. She didn’t look away. “I’m big and strong,” he agreed. “But I remember what it’s like to be little and scared. Who hurt you?”
She shrugged.
“Your dad?”
She looked away.
“Okay,” Byron said, and his voice was low and soothing. “Listen to me. The pills I’ve got won’t make you strong or keep you safe. But I know some people who’ll stick up for you and make sure nobody ever hurts you again.”
He pulled a wad of notes from inside his jacket and handed it to the child, folding her hands around it. It probably represented half of what he’d made. “Tuck this away somewhere safe. Safe! There are pickpockets around.” He grinned that heart-melting grin of his, and the girl gave him a tremulous smile in response. “There’s a bus station a couple of streets over. You need to get a bus over to Greenville, and when you get there, you ask for Mae and James, got it?”
She nodded.
“Good. The people there will keep you safe, find you somewhere to live. Some of them are kind of strange-looking.” He thought for a moment. “Also you’ll learn some really bad language. But they won’t hurt you, and they’ll make sure nobody else does either. Okay?”
The little girl searched his face, as if trying to decide whether she could trust him. Naomi had no doubt she’d been caught picking pockets before, and she’d expected a curse or a blow. Not…this.
Byron took her by the shoulders, turned her around firmly and gave her a shove. “Off you go!” he said.
She darted away in the direction of the bus station and disappeared into the crowd.
And then he slipped back into the persona of Doctor Dash as though it had been nothing.
“Just who are you?” Naomi muttered under her breath.
By the end of the day, they had enough money to stay on the run…and Naomi no longer knew whether she believed Byron should turn himself in, even if she could clear her name. He wasn’t the person she’d thought he was. The person she’d been told he was.
Clem would return to his stall to find enough money to pickle himself for a week – some of it even from Naomi’s attempts to sell his flowers.
The girl was on her way somewhere safe, even if it sounded an unconventional kind of safe.
Byron picked her up and twirled her around, laughing, exhilarated by his performance, and she shrieked with delight.
Byron the loner, Byron the lover, Byron the showman…which one was the real him?
Chapter Nine
Back at the motel, Byron flicked through the cash, counting it. They had several hundred dollars, even though he’d handed over a substantial wad to the little girl, and they’d left more than enough for Clem to make up for a day of lost sales. Naomi’s eyes kept drifting to it as she munched on her pizza. It wasn’t exactly gourmet dining, but after a diet of candy bars and soda, a slice of pepperoni-and-mushroom tasted like heaven.
He tucked the money into the inside pocket of his leather jacket, then sat on the floor beside her, back propped against the side of the bed. He reached for a slice of pizza, then said, “Go on. I know you’re dying to say it.”
“Well…” She put down her half-eaten slice on the box lid she was using as a plate and licked pizza grease off her fingers. “Doctor Dash? Roll up, roll up and buy my wonderful snake oil? It’s very charming and I want to believe it, but something doesn’t add up. How did you end up in the high-security wing, snarling at the wardens and shredding your jumpsuits into confetti? Did you hurt someone?” She hesitated. “Did you kill someone?”
Was there a flash of hurt in his eyes again? But he’d intimidated even the wardens when his feral behaviour had been at its worst, and they routinely dealt with some of the most dangerous shifters in the state. She hardly thought he’d been locked up there for running a few games of Find-the-Lady.
“I’ve hurt people,” he admitted. “Sometimes badly. You can’t be an Alpha wolf without a pack and expect to avoid challenges. That’s just the way it goes.”
“But responding to challenges is legal under shifter law,” she said. “I meant…”
“I know what you meant.” He linked his hands behind his head, and the movement pulled his T-shirt taut across his muscular chest. “I grew up on the streets, so I learned how to fight early on. Somehow I drifted in with a group of carnies. It’s a pretty good life for a lone wolf – carnival folks are accepting of people who don’t fit in, and if you do something on the shady side of the law…well, you’re never in one place for long.”
“And I take it you didn’t earn your living selling cotton candy.”
He grinned. “I did a bit of this and a bit of that, but when I stood in for the carnival barker on the sideshow, it turned out I had a gift for patter. So I started to specialize. Slight-of-hand. Misdirection. Scams and hustles and swindles – confidence tricks.”
“And that’s when you left the carnival and became Doctor Dash?”
“Oh, I’ve been a lot of different people. Chase Aston Junior, a very rich man with a very bad poker face. Nicolo Garibaldi, a penniless street musician who doesn’t know his violin is a Stradivarius. It’s true what they say – you can’t cheat an honest man.” He grinned that panty-evaporating grin. “Thieves, liars and bastards, though? They’re just lining up to get exactly what they deserve. But it was Doctor Dash who got me into trouble, yes.”
“How? My father would never tell me what you did, but…”
“Like I said, it was something he couldn’t let go. I was running my Doctor Dash hustle, but with a twist. What I was selling was a multi-shift serum.”
“Multi-shift…”
“You’re a cat shifter, right? Haven’t you ever wondered what it would be like to be an apex predator like a wolf or a bear?” He cracked his knuckles and wiggled his fingers as though casting a magic spell. “Just a single dose will transform your whole world! Are you a scaredy-cat in your feline form? When you’re an Alpha wolf you’ll be leader of the pack. Trouble with the law? Throw them off the scent – literally. While the cops are on that cat-burglar case, you’ll be out-foxing them in your cunning new vulpine form.”
Naomi laughed delightedly. “But that’s impossible!” Then her merriment tapered off. Byron looked… Well, he looked pensive. His pretty eyes were shadowed, his dark brows drawn together.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Except it turns out…it’s not. A multi-shift serum is one of the projects Dynamic Earth is working on. Among other things.” He looked grim.
“Like what?” Naomi asked, bewildered. “And what does it have to do with the rehabilitation center? The research branch is completely separate.”
Byron growled – he actually growled; not an expression of disapproval but a purely animal sound, wild and dangerous. “Oh, they’re not as separate as you think. All your pet cases? Magnus, with his berserker strength, and those little old ladies who set fire to things? They’re experimental subjects for Professor Stanhope’s laboratories. He’s working on artificially recreating rogue powers – super-strength, pyrokinesis, precognition…you name it.”
“But you don’t have a rogue power,” Naomi said. “You were institutionalized because you were semi-feral. Dangerous.” She knew feral shifters could become paranoid and fearful as well as aggressive. Had she been wrong to begin to put her trust in Byron?
“No,” he corrected. “I was institutionalized because I was too convincing for my own good. Dynamic Earth got to hear about my multi-shift serum, and they swallowed my sales pitch whole. They thought I really had come up with a formula that would enable shifting into multiple animal forms. And they knew it was possible, because they were working on the exact same thing.”
“Wh…what? Why?”
Byron gave her a tired smile. “If you can think of an innocent reason, I’d love to hear it. And they were desperate to keep it secret. And that meant they had to shut me up.”
“Then why…why keep you alive?” Naomi couldn’t bring herself to believe her father would kill to keep a corporate secret. She couldn’t. But she had to ask the question, because if Byron was so dangerous to Dynamic Earth, why had they kept him around for three years?
He shrugged. “They couldn’t be sure I didn’t know something that would be invaluable to their research. Was I lying when I sold the serum…or was I lying when I said it was cough syrup in a fancy bottle? And how could they find out for sure when it was obvious I was crazy?”
She gaped at him. “It was all an act?”
A shadow passed over his face. “After three years of listening to the screams at night in the high-security wing? Being dragged out of my cell every day by people who wanted to get at the contents of my brain? Anyone would be nuts.”
Naomi thought about it for a moment. It made a horrible kind of sense. And that meant her father wasn’t the person she’d thought he was. But that was too hard to think about right now – once she started to unpick the lies, she had a feeling she’d be opening up some raw and ugly wounds. So she put it aside for the moment.
“Why did you always growl at me, or turn away, or snap and snarl at the bars if I tried to talk to you?” she asked. “Did you dislike me because of who my father is?”
“I was wary of you,” he said. “But there was another reason.”
“What was that?” She’d started to reach out towards the pizza box again, but her eyes snapped to his when she heard his reply.
“Because I wanted you so badly. Just the smell of you was so good it was almost painful. Naomi, I couldn’t let you get close. It wouldn’t have been safe. For either of us.”
Chapter Ten
They traded the stolen motorcycle in at a repair shop that didn’t ask too many questions and was open after hours. It’d go on sale with new plates, new papers and a new paintjob, and they wouldn’t have to ditch it somewhere and risk it being discovered and putting Dynamic Earth on their trail.
In return for the motorcycle and most of their cash, they got an ancient monster of a machine that belched blue smoke, and no questions asked. Naomi didn’t know whether Byron knew the surly, musclebound men he made the deal with, and she didn’t ask. She just kept quiet and corrected the spelling of their tattoos in her head as money changed hands.
They were on the road as dawn broke, tearing up the asphalt as a chill early-morning wind whipped past and the sky faded through shades of dusky blue and salmon pink. Once the battered old engine was warmed up, it growled along happily, eating up the miles. The thrumming of the machine between her thighs and the smell of leather as she held tight to Byron’s waist punched through the early morning drowsiness, and adrenaline licked her senses.
At first the roads were more or less deserted except for the occasional trucker hauling a load cross-country, but as the sun climbed, traffic picked up and they were joined by carpooling parents and yawning commuters with bleary pre-coffee eyes. As the peak of the rush-hour traffic hit, Byron pulled into the parking lot of a roadside diner. He leaned the bike on its kickstand in the dappled shade of a tree and they headed inside. Naomi’s stomach gave an undignified gurgle at the smells of fresh coffee, frying bacon and pancakes oozing with butter and syrup. The dawn ride had sharpened her appetite.
They found seats towards the edge of the room, where they still had a clear view of the television set above the counter, and shovelled down scrambled eggs and sausage and drank cup after cup of scalding hot coffee. Byron nudged Naomi when the news channel showed the now-familiar mugshot of Byron follow by the unflattering candid of Naomi, and they turned their attention to the report. Fortunately, nobody else in the diner paid it much attention. Everyone was too intent on their breakfasts. A trucker-type was engrossed in the crossword page, chewing his pen in between bites of French toast. He had powdered sugar on his chin. The waitress, coffee pot in hand, was telling the fry cook about her new guy’s bitch sister’s smart remarks about her dye job.
Naomi’s father appeared on the screen. He was wearing another of his expensively tailored suits – he had dozens, along with a rainbow of subtly patterned silk ties – and once again he was in the family room. Cassandra and Magnus were visible in the background playing a game of chess. That was a bold choice on Magnus’ part, since Cassandra could see the future. Or maybe it was staged – Cassie usually preferred dice games, because they had an element of chance. She said it got boring winning every single time.
Dr Atkins was alone this time – Professor Stanhope was, presumably, overseeing some experiment or other. Naomi felt vaguely sick at the thought. Did he observe experiments on real people, people with unusual powers, with the same solemn objectivity she’d seen on his face as a child, when he’d showed her how to push copper and zinc rods into a lemon to make electricity?
She tuned back in to the newscast.
“…to appeal to all viewers to call Dynamic Earth’s security line if they have any information on the whereabouts of these two fugitives, who should be considered extremely dangerous.”
Naomi looked at Byron, who was gnawing on his thumbnail and studying the screen intently. He didn’t look upset or alarmed – he looked shrewd and confident, and she felt a swelling of affection for him. He knew how to look after himself – and she realized he’d look after her as well. She could trust him to keep her safe.
Her father made a show of accepting a piece of paper from someone standing just off-screen. She found it vaguely annoying, because her father would never appear on camera without knowing exactly what he was going to say. “Our surveillance experts inform me that the criminal known as Byron may also be travelling under the pseudonyms Doctor Da
sh, Chase Aston Junior, or Nicolo Garibaldi.”
A chill crawled down Naomi’s spine, spider-like, and she gawped at Byron in horror as he slammed back from the table and stood, toppling his chair. He was looking at her as if she’d stabbed him through the heart. She knew exactly what he was thinking. He wasn’t bugged – he’d crushed the listening device from his button before they’d even left the Dynamic Earth grounds. And that meant she must be.
He’d shared those personae with her – the incompetent card-counter, the penniless musician – less than twenty-four hours earlier. She knew he hadn’t confided in anyone else. He’d shared nothing of himself – nothing – for over three years.
He darted forward suddenly and wrapped his fist around the golden locket that hung from her throat. With one sharp wrench he pulled it free, snapping the chain. Her hands flew to her throat and her heart fluttered in her chest as he prised the locket open. He held it out to her on his palm, revealing within the tell-tale miniature circuit of a listening device.
His eyes locked with hers and they were as hard and cutting as flint. The betrayal in his gaze felt like a blow. He turned and punched the wall beside him, then he flung the locket to the floor and stormed out. The door swung closed behind him and Naomi realized an expectant hush had fallen over the diner.
She stammered an apology and threw down a couple of bills on the table without looking to see what she’d left, and ran after Byron. She couldn’t let him believe she’d know about the bug. Couldn’t let him believe that three years acting crazy was the smartest thing he’d ever done, and opening up to her the stupidest.
She skidded to a stop in the parking lot, scattering gravel. Byron was astride the motorcycle, revving the engine, and the look he cast over his shoulder at her was wounded and dangerous.