When Villains Rise

by Rebecca Schaeffer

  That wasn’t a comforting thought, but Nita kept silent.

  “Now,” her mother continued, “this friend of mine was very good at killing monsters. Even better than me, if you can believe it. Her great love was the challenge of the hunt, and so she’d take dangerous, wild jobs no one else would touch. She was fearless, and people paid her well to kill their monsters.

  “But one day this friend fell in love. With a monster. One she was supposed to be hunting.”

  “And what?” Nita asked. “It killed her?”

  “No.” Her mother’s eyes went sad, and her voice soft. “It did something much, much worse.”

  Nita blinked, because the emotion in her mother’s eyes was old and worn but real. Nita had been thinking of this as a fairy tale. But the grief etched in the lines of her mother’s face was genuine. This person had existed. Her mother had cared about this person.

  And it hadn’t ended well.

  “The monster was smart. It knew just killing my friend would solve nothing. That would just make all her monster-hunting friends come after him. So he was clever. He ingratiated himself. For years, he was protected from the monster hunters of the world because of his relationship with my friend. He pretended he was different, that he wasn’t a killer. And because of my friend, they . . . Well, even if they didn’t believe him, they didn’t dare hurt him.

  “So by day he schmoozed with monster hunters and conned my friend, and by night he murdered and did everything terrible that monsters of his ilk do.”

  Nita was silent, leaning forward slightly, caught up in the story despite herself. “And what happened?”

  “Monster hunters started disappearing. They’d go out to hunt, and they wouldn’t come back. Their traps stopped working. Their plans were foiled at every turn. One by one, they were being picked off. And as they were picked off, the monster whispered in my friend’s ear, telling her that the problem had to be coming from close by, that there was no way the monsters could have known when and where and how these hunts were happening. No way it could have been monsters doing the killing. It had to be other monster hunters. Or someone close to them. Someone in the know.”

  Her mother’s expression was bitter. “And so my friend turned on the monster hunters, and they turned on each other, and the monster watched and laughed as all his enemies killed each other.

  “And at the end, when he had killed all his enemies, he turned on my friend, and he killed her too.”

  Nita rocked back, the pain in her mother’s voice shaking her as much as the story.

  Her mother took a long, deep breath. “He’d always intended to kill her. Years of relationship were all a sham. He was thinking of himself, of changing the world hunting him to suit his needs. He never cared about her, only what she could do for him.”

  Her mother met Nita’s eyes, hard and cold and angry. “So tell me, Nita, are you doing anything for your monster? Has he talked you into any harebrained schemes that benefit him more than you?”

  Nita stared at her mother and thought about all the running around she’d done, the desperate risks of meeting INHUP agents, the modifications to her plans, all trying to find a way to save Kovit.

  “You’re wrong,” she whispered. “He’s not like that.”

  Her mother smiled, sharp and hard. “The answer is yes, then. He’s roped you into trying to save him from something.”

  “I volunteered. It was my idea.”

  “Was it? Or were you made to think it was your idea?”

  Nita thought about all the conversations about the list, Adair’s revelations about its origins, all the tumbling thoughts that had gone through her head, and the truth was, she couldn’t be sure if she’d been led into anything or if it was a natural consequence of the lives she and Kovit had been leading.

  But she didn’t think Kovit was manipulating her.

  Her mother, on the other hand, was notorious for manipulating Nita.

  Nita rose. “Thank you for the story. It was very interesting. I’m leaving now. Don’t follow me.”

  “You’re making a mistake.”

  “So what? It’s my mistake to make.”

  “And it’s my job to protect you.” Her mother rose. “You’re my daughter, and I won’t let you fall into the same trap my friend did.” Her voice went low and sharp. “I will kill this monster before it has a chance to betray you.”

  Goose bumps prickled along Nita’s skin. “I’ll never forgive you if you hurt him.”

  “I don’t need your forgiveness, Nita. I need your survival.”

  Nita didn’t know how to respond to that. Finally, she just whispered, “Please. Please leave him be. He’s not the monster that hurt your friend.”

  “No, but monsters like that are all the same.” Her mother’s eyes were hard. “I know their type. And these things, they never change.”

  “Please,” Nita whispered.

  Her mother just smiled gently, as though Nita was a small child again. “Don’t worry, Nita. I’ll kill this monster before anything happens to you.”

  Fourteen

  NITA STUMBLED AWAY from the park as fast as her shaking legs could take her, glancing back every few steps to see if her mother was following—even though her mother had smiled when Nita fled, not moving, just watching with this mildly amused and utterly unconcerned expression, as though Nita running away wouldn’t change a single thing.

  Nita’s lungs felt tight, like she couldn’t get enough air, and her head felt like it was full of helium, ready to float away and leave her bloody corpse behind.

  She got on the first bus she saw, sitting down and fisting her hands in her lap to try and stop the shaking. Nita looked outside, almost expecting her mother to be standing on the sidewalk watching the bus leave, but no one was there. It didn’t calm Nita’s nerves at all. She wasn’t sure where this bus headed, but she knew she couldn’t go straight back to the recording studio. She had to make sure her mother couldn’t tail her.

  She couldn’t let her mother find Kovit.

  She leaned back in the bus seat and closed her eyes. How had she fucked this up so badly? She’d been so careful up until now, and one careless slip and everything was exposed. Her mother knew about Kovit. She would find him and kill him and think she was doing Nita a favor.

  The bus rumbled beneath her, and she looked up at the escape hatch on the ceiling. She needed to escape. She needed to grab Kovit and run, far and fast. That Buenos Aires flight tonight couldn’t come soon enough.

  Her chest hurt when she thought of how she’d added another person to the list of threats against Kovit. She was the worst friend. Every time she tried to help him, all she did was make everything ten times worse.

  Swallowing, she looked out the window as the bus turned onto the highway and carried her far away. As her heart rate slowly calmed, she considered the story her mother had told about a woman conned by a monster. To Nita, the hardest part to believe was that her mother actually had a friend. She couldn’t picture the calculating, manipulative woman who’d raised her befriending someone. But there were a lot of things she didn’t know about her mother.

  There was one thing she did know. Whether the story was true or something her mother made up to try and keep Nita away from Kovit, she wasn’t going to let her mother win. If it came down to a choice of her mother or Kovit, well, Nita knew who she would pick.

  By the time Nita got back to the apartment, it was almost time to leave for the airport. Kovit was waiting in the reception room, pacing. His hair was mussed from running his hands through it too much, and his eyes had shadows under them. He sagged in relief when she came in.

  “I was worried. Did you get my messages?” he asked.

  Nita shook her head. She hadn’t checked her phone on the last bit of her journey. “No, I’m sorry.”

  “We need to get going.”

  She nodded, all business. “Do we have everything we need?”

  She looked around and realized they didn’t really have
anything. No clothes—everything they weren’t wearing was bloody. Just passports, some money, and their phones.

  He smiled as though he was thinking the same thing. “We’re good.”

  Nita sighed. “I suppose we should untie Fabricio.”

  “Oh, I did already.”

  Nita raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

  “We can’t have him going on a plane looking like he just got kidnapped and tortured. I got him some new clothes and some bandages and antiseptic. He took a shower and is just changing now.”

  Nita tilted her head to one side. “That was . . . nice of you.”

  Kovit shrugged. “I didn’t see the harm in letting him have a shower.”

  For a moment, Nita was catapulted into the past, when she was a prisoner in the market, when she had tried to slowly build a relationship with Kovit by asking for small things. A towel. A shower. All a ploy to learn more and get him to let his guard down so she could betray him and escape.

  “Did Fabricio ask for a shower?” Nita asked.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “No reason.”

  He didn’t see the similarities. Well, Nita wasn’t going to point it out. Yet. But sneaky little Fabricio had already started spinning his web to escape. He’d already identified the same weak spots in Kovit that Nita had, and was starting to build on them.

  It disturbed Nita a little to find that she and Fabricio thought so similarly. She didn’t want to be anything like him. If someone had saved her life, she never would have betrayed them.

  But even as she thought it, she wondered. Because if it meant survival, there was very little she wouldn’t do. She just couldn’t see how Fabricio selling her out was a survival tactic.

  Kovit interrupted her musings. “I need to say goodbye to Gold before we go.”

  Nita resisted the urge to rub her temples. She still wasn’t happy that he was choosing to let a wildcard like Gold go. But she couldn’t think of anything to sway him away from his foolishness.

  So all she said was, “All right.”

  She followed Kovit as he went into Gold’s room. Gold lay on her cot, gently rubbing pain-numbing cream on her previously dislocated shoulder. She wasn’t bound anymore, so Kovit must have been in here earlier. Nita sighed, thinking of both their prisoners unbound and running around asking Kovit for things and taking advantage of him. Kovit really was a terrible jailor. Nita, of all people, should have known better than to leave him in charge of prisoners.

  Kovit shivered as he entered the room, and Gold tensed as she watched him eat her pain.

  “Here,” he whispered, taking out his switchblade. “Let me.”

  Gold stiffened, but Kovit made a small cut on his finger as he approached her, before reaching over and spreading his blood on her wound. The tension went out of both of their bodies, even though Gold remained wary. Zannie blood was a powerful anesthetic.

  Eventually, Kovit lowered his hand and cleared his throat. “I came to say goodbye.”

  Gold gave him a bitter smile. “Finally going to kill me?”

  “No. Of course not.” He looked away. “I know you hate me, but I still think of you as a friend, May. I’m not just going to throw that aside.”

  Gold was quiet for a long moment before she said, “Where do we go from here, then?”

  “Nita and I are leaving. You’re free to do whatever you want. I’ve left your phone in the front hall. It’s dead, I’m not sure where your charger is. If you can’t find it, just knock on one of the apartment doors in the building. I’m sure someone will let you borrow theirs.”

  Gold blinked at him, long and slow. “You’re really just letting me go?”

  “Yes.”

  She opened and closed her mouth, her face a picture of confusion. “I don’t understand.”

  Kovit sighed. “You don’t have to understand, May. It’s okay. I hope you have a good life.”

  He gave her one last smile, took a deep breath, and turned back to Nita. “Okay, let’s go.”

  Gold watched them leave with huge eyes as the door closed behind them.

  Kovit’s steps were heavy as they crossed the hall to Fabricio’s room. Nita wanted to say something, anything to make him feel better, but she didn’t know what. She didn’t think she could understand the emotions that led him to release a threat, that led him to care about a person who so clearly hated him.

  She tried to imagine that their roles were reversed and she’d been betrayed by a friend. But Nita didn’t have any friends except Kovit. She imagined it was her mother who betrayed her instead.

  Well, that wasn’t too far from the truth. Her mother was always disrespecting Nita and doing evil shit. And if it was a choice of Nita’s life or her mother’s, Nita would pick her own without question every single time.

  In many ways, that was the big difference between Nita and Kovit. Nita would always pick her life over anyone else. And Kovit . . . Kovit would always pick his friends’ lives over his own. More than anything, that convinced her that her mother’s threats about Kovit betraying her were utter bullshit.

  She couldn’t find the words to make Kovit feel better, so she put her hand on his shoulder, and he looked at her, eyes soft and sad. Then he smiled gently at her. It was enough.

  Nita took a deep breath and opened the door to Fabricio’s room.

  Fabricio lay on the floor, unbound and free. His brown hair was still wet from the shower, and it clung to his forehead as he lay on his back and stared up at the fluorescents above him. His hand had been carefully bandaged, so that there was no sign of the horror beneath. He’d taped his broken nose, though he couldn’t hide the swelling or the black circles under his eyes from pooled blood. He turned his head when they came in.

  His eyes were tired. “Nita. Kovit.”

  Kovit blinked. People didn’t usually acknowledge his presence with a name. Just a fearful expression or a desperate plea for Nita not to let him hurt them, like Kovit was a vicious dog and Nita held the leash.

  “Fabricio.” Nita stepped forward. “It’s time to go. We have a flight to Buenos Aires waiting.”

  He turned away. “Is there anything I can say to talk you out of this? Anything to make you reconsider trying to rob my father?”

  “No.”

  He sighed heavily, and began the laborious process of getting to his feet. He winced when he moved too quickly, and Kovit twitched with his pain.

  “I thought about what you said, Fabricio, about the carrot and the stick.” Nita gave him a smile.

  “And?” he asked.

  “And I’m taking it under consideration. But for now, I want to make sure we get to Buenos Aires without problems.”

  Fabricio eyed her nervously. “Wait, what—”

  Nita darted forward and stuck the needle in his arm. The last vial she’d gotten from Adair yesterday, the drug she’d used on Quispe and the other INHUP agent. She couldn’t take it with her, so she might as well get one last use out of it.

  Fabricio stared at her a long moment before his eyes moved down to the needle in his arm. Finally, he whispered softly, “We’re all going to die in Buenos Aires.”

  Then he crumpled to the floor.

  Nita rolled her eyes. “So dramatic.”

  She hoisted him over her shoulder, his head flopping against her back, and the three of them left the apartment behind.

  Fifteen

  THE AIRPORT was much easier with Fabricio unconscious. They put him in a wheelchair when they arrived. Online check-in meant that they didn’t have to go to the counter, and they went straight through the priority security lane.

  When they hit customs, Fabricio was groggily beginning to wake, but he was completely looped. Kovit went through separately, and Nita pretended to be Fabricio’s cousin. They didn’t look much alike, but they both had Spanish names, and Nita kept all her conversation with Fabricio in Spanish. The customs agent didn’t speak it, couldn’t hear that their accents were completely different. Nita’s father was Chilean, and she’d
been raised in Madrid until she was six, so her Spanish was an unusual blend of the two accents that most people struggled to parse initially. Fabricio spoke standard Argentinian Spanish, his y sounds whispering into sh.

  The customs agent side-eyed Fabricio drooling in a wheelchair, only half conscious and talking nonsense in Spanish, but she approved them. After all, Fabricio did have an Argentinian passport, and it looked like he was going home.

  By the time Fabricio was fully awake and less drug-addled, they were already in the air.

  They’d given him the window seat, and Nita realized the drug had worn off when he sighed and said, “I really should have expected the drugs after our conversation. Like mother, like daughter.”

  Nita flinched at that, remembering that was how her mother had kidnapped him and taken him on a plane too.

  He didn’t say anything else after that. Part of her expected him to start screaming, “Kidnapping!” in the middle of the plane to get it to turn around, but he was eerily silent. Plotting, probably. If she were him, she’d be plotting—more than just trying to manipulate Kovit when Nita wasn’t there.

  “He’s being too well behaved,” Nita whispered to Kovit after Fabricio plugged in his earphones and groggily watched an in-flight movie.

  “Maybe we scared him enough?”

  But Fabricio didn’t seem scared of them. He didn’t flinch when Kovit leaned over Nita to plug his charger in beside Fabricio. He just occasionally stared at both of them with these flat, angry eyes, his gaze boring into them with more judgment than Nita had thought a look could have.

  “I don’t think so.” Nita looked over at Fabricio’s form and scowled. “He’s definitely biding his time and plotting something.”

  Kovit shrugged, unconcerned. “Then we’ll deal with it when he makes his move.”

  Nita sighed and settled back, accepting the truth of Kovit’s words. There was nothing she could do with just suspicions. Yet.

  The plane ride was long, more than ten hours, and Nita slept for most of it. She woke up occasionally to check that Fabricio was still curled up in his seat, and then fell back asleep.