“We can radio for evac,” he said.
“Actually, Red Djinni,” said a polite and asexual voice on Vickie’s Overwatch Two frequency. “I was going to ask if you wanted that. Shall I call it in? There may be a wait. Belladonna is still dealing with the casualties at the Georgia Dome, although that seems to have come to a partly satisfactory conclusion.”
“Eight-Ball?” Vickie gasped. “Red, did you hook him up?” Of course all the Overwatch frequencies were back online for her. With Bela’s death, all his protective spells on this prison cell were gone too.
Wait…three people…she looked past Red’s shoulder. “Uh, hi, Mel. We have to stop meeting like this. People are going to talk.” With her teeth she pulled the snaps apart that were holding the silk-lined outer gloves to her wrists, and tugged the outer gloves off, dropping them to the floor. I need to be able to touch ground, just in case…
Mel stood near the still-surprised face of Uncle Bela. She nudged the oozing head with the toe of her boot. She looked momentarily sad, or perhaps perplexed at the sorry state of Vickie’s former captor, but then she shrugged and turned away from it. She favored Vickie with a wry grin. “Something tells me that ain’t the biggest piece of gossip out of here. Jesus, Djinni. What do we do with this?”
“Soccer?” Vickie suggested. Okay, that sounds bad. But he deserves it. Oh, bugger it. “Can we kick him halfway to hell?”
“Who was that?” the Djinni asked.
“My darling Great-Uncle Bela Nagy. I told you about him. The one that tried to turn me into Kentucky Fried Magus when I was just out of college. Seems he was working for the Space Nazis.” She couldn’t help herself, another automatic reaction decided to kick in at that moment, and she was wracked with shudders. All the terror and loathing she’d been repressing hit her without any warning, and she started to shake as if she had hypothermia.
“Hey, easy,” Red said soothingly. “He’s gone, he’s done. We’re going to get you out of here.” He looked around. “So this was all him? Solo operation? Or we got more Kriegers to worry about?”
“He said he was working with DG,” she managed, trying to get her teeth to stop chattering. And stop shivering, because it hurt to shiver. Shock. I hate shock. She did her best to sound as if she wasn’t wishing with all her heart for one of her pain pills and a session with one of the ECHO healers. A long session. “More like for, though, I bet.”
Red groaned, and rubbed at his eyes. “Oh perfect. Haven’t seen that asshole in ages, so of course he’d pop up now.” He looked around again. “Eight-Ball, we are definitely going to need extraction, as soon as you can manage it. I…”
Red hesitated, snarled, and then hung his head. Wearily he looked to Vickie. “If he shows, I don’t know what we’re going to do. You’re hurt, and don’t try to hide it, Vix, I know it’s bad. If he shows, I don’t know if I can take him.” He glanced up at Mel. “You know about him, got any ideas?”
Mel gave Red an uncertain shrug. “That she get out? She’s compromised and hurting, and he’ll use that as a distraction for the rest of us. Vickie, he’s right. We gotta get you back to campus.”
“I can walk out of here fine, just give me a couple minutes and a shove…” she began, then a belated memory hit. And pain became secondary. “Omigod. The kids!”
“Kids?” Red asked.
“DG has a bunch of kids stashed here. Bela said he was using them for something, but he’d get them when DG was done with them. Don’t ask. There’s not less than twenty-seven kids—because magic reasons.” Dear gods, do not tell him it’s probably ninety-nine. He’ll never go for that. She rubbed her aching head, and tried to bludgeon coherency into her thoughts. “We need to turn them loose at least. I won’t leave them for whatever the hell DG is doing to them.”
Red paused, considering her words, and finally shook his head. “Forget it, we can come back for them. We’re getting you out, now. You’re too important. On your feet, let’s get you out of here.”
“You’ve got Eight-Ball hooked up, you don’t need me now,” she protested, resisting a little. “Eight-Ball can do everything I can and doesn’t need sleep and can multi-multi-multitask—a badger could do my job as long as Eight-Ball is hooked up!”
“Oh for…” Red growled. “You are more than just…air traffic control for ECHO! Come on, Victrix! You have to know this! You can’t have done all the things you’ve done and be this blind! You are the key in all of this! And forget about the badgers, okay? I’m tired of hearing about them. I regret ever telling you guys about them. The badgers are a lie, alright?”
“That’s not true—” she said, shaking her head and regretting it. “That’s never been true!” She paused, and amended it. “Well, maybe before, but it’s not true now! Sera and JM are WMDs, you’ve got Eight-Ball, you’ve got the Colts and all the overseas versions of the Colts, you’ve got—” She blinked. “Wait…what do you mean, the badgers are a lie?”
“I made it up!” the Djinni roared. “The whole stinking mess! It made for a great story, okay? Fast cars, a self-destructive man and bestiality, it was a freakin’ HOOT!”
He paused, struggling to regain his composure.
“For fuck’s sake,” he muttered. “What is it with you? You always get me so angry. And you’re always derailing me with tangents. Just trust me, alright? Trust me when I tell you that you are the most important person I’ve ever known, that you are the most important person we have in this fight. You. We can’t lose you.”
“You’re deluded,” she replied flatly. “How can you possibly be so sure of that?”
“Because I saw it,” Red snarled. “I saw glimpses of the future. Strands of fate, and they all ended in flaming badger turds if certain people weren’t there.”
“You saw me?” That…was pretty hard to swallow.
“Okay, mostly Bella,” Red admitted. “But, yeah, you were always there. Didn’t think much of it at the time, I took it for granted. Of course you were there, you had to be there. Who do you think is the glue that’s holding this whole mess together?”
“Horseshit,” she replied. At least getting annoyed was pushing some more of the pain into the background. “I thought you hated magic! Since when are you gazing into crystal balls?”
“Oh, like I ever got a freakin’ choice when it came to magic!” Red scoffed. “You arcane bastards are drawn to me like junkie moths needing a fire fix! What the hell is it about me, huh? I can’t get away from you, any of you! And I think you know better than anyone that I’ve tried!”
“I seem to recall you got into magic in the first place out of your own free will, cupcake,” she mocked. “Red Djinni, you’re a professional liar, and I’m not that important and I am going to turn those kids loose before we get out of here, even if I have to do it on my hands and knees with you hanging onto my ankles.”
Red sighed, and Vickie watched his shoulders slump in defeat. He shook his head, and she started as he drew her closer to him. She had almost forgotten that he was still holding her, that he had been, all this time.
“Fine,” he seethed. “You want a rare moment of Red Djinni truth? Alright. When I heard you were gone, that you were taken, that hit me harder than anything ever has. Let me say it again. You are the key in all of this, and you can deny it all you want, but I think you know it. You’ve made bridges between us and every potential ally out there. You are our eyes and our ears and you don’t let anything slip through the cracks. You’re the lifeblood of this; there’s nobody who can just fill in for you.”
He paused, and something in his tone changed. His voice cracked, just a little. “But I wasn’t thinking that. When I heard you were gone, I thought about how we go out of our way to annoy each other. How you and I are trapped in a weirdly escalating and adolescent game of one-upmanship, yet when things go south, you and I know we can count on each other. There’s no one else I trust more. You were gone. Suddenly, there was nothing more important than getting you back.”
He exha
led, and drew her even closer.
“Because I need you,” he said.
“Jeebus, you play to win,” Vickie gulped. Her eyes started to burn with tears she refused to shed. She hadn’t cried until this moment. She damn sure wasn’t going to now. Need isn’t love, moron. And Mel’s right here. Even with him laying his soul bare…no. And she had always vowed that no matter what it cost her, she wasn’t going to screw up anyone else’s love life. Especially not his. Absolutely not his. He’d already lost too much as it was; she wasn’t going to tangle him in some kind of messed-up love triangle and ruin the one good thing he had going for him. “Uh—yeah, Red, I need you too; you’re my main man. BFFs. Right?”
They jumped, startled, as Mel cried out in exasperation.
“For the love o’…are you two insane?” Mel howled. “He loves you! You love him! How is it possible that you can’t see it, even now?”
Both their heads swiveled to look at Mel, as if pulled by the same wire. Then they snapped back. She stared into his eyes, and saw what he must be seeing in hers. Panic. Terror. And…something else, something she still couldn’t quite bring herself to believe. The curtain had been pulled back, and there was the Wizard of Oz. Laughing at them both.
Oh…what the hell. She threw all her resolutions into the wind, pulled his face scarf down and kissed him. She expected him, even now, to pull away. Because, of course, he would. That was how life was. She was misreading him and so was Mel. He’d pull back and cough and Mel would see it was her that he loved and somehow they’d get past this, because they had to. But at least the frog princess would have gotten her kiss, even if it wasn’t going to make her human again.
So she was completely sideswiped when he drew her tightly against him and kissed her back. Nothing tentative about it. Nothing held back. Raw, honest Djinni, with no masks. When she opened her eyes, she saw there was something going on that was more revealing than the kiss. It was his real face as she had seen it in reflection, when she’d worn his body. The bones of his face were good, strong, and a fine foundation for faces like Clooney’s. But the skin over the bones…from his cheekbones down, the skin hung off those bones like the jowls and sagging hide of a Shar-Pei dog. He was all scars and wrinkles and pendulous folds. Tight in places, bizarre and loose in others. He had killed people for seeing this face; he’d said so, and she believed him. And he exposed it to her now, letting her share the deepest secret he had, making himself utterly vulnerable to her. But his eyes—oh, his eyes—she had seen those eyes smile before, seen them cold with rage, seen them look rueful or exasperated. But she had never seen them like this. Alive with emotion, warm and welcoming and saying so much that she wanted to hear without needing any words at all.
Somehow she dragged the inner, concealing glove off her right hand. She cupped her left behind the back of his head, and laid the right along his temple, and caressed him with it. Because she wanted it, she had to feel it, at last, warmth-on-human-warmth, her flesh on his, no matter how abused that flesh was. And he didn’t shrink from that, either. He just paused for a breath, and kissed her again, and this time—it was more than just a kiss. She felt whatever defenses he had left crumble away as he surrendered to it. And every last good intention vanished, the last desperate shield around her soul melted, as she surrendered in turn to him.
“So that’s that then,” Mel said, nodding. “The final piece.”
Her words brought Vickie out of the kiss like a hard slap. She glanced at Mel, who stood just steps away with her arms held tightly against her stomach. She turned to Red, whose eyes were now closed, his brow furrowed in an odd mix of elation and confusion. It was the weirdest scene imaginable. And she…she struggled with a contradictory mix of emotions; guilt uppermost (but she hadn’t done anything wrong! She’d tried, tried so hard to keep her love to herself. Tried never to get between him and Mel!) But guilt, and joy, and pain for Mel, and fear, and desire, and the absolute certainty that this was right, and the absolute certainty that it was all going to go horribly wrong. It was surreal, to say the least, a tsunami of emotions that tore at the fabric of her sanity.
Damn, Vickie thought wildly. Why can’t I write shit like this?
“I figured it out a while ago, y’know,” Mel muttered. “Didn’t believe it, at first. ’Course I didn’t. Didn’t want to. Thought what we had was real, I did. You had me fooled, Red Djinni. I think you even fooled yourself.”
“No, no…” Red said, opening his eyes and shaking his head. “It wasn’t like that, Mel. I know cons, I’ve done them all, but you can’t think I would have…”
“But you did!” Mel shouted, and looked away. She quivered, and willed herself to look back. “You did,” she said again, her voice quiet and deadly.
“No!” Red insisted. “Look, I’m the last guy to pretend to know what love is, but I know what I felt, what I feel, and I loved you. I did and I do, you know I do…”
Vickie felt paralyzed. Anything she said at this point would only make things worse. She was the Other Woman. Even though she had intended the opposite. And…dammit, he wasn’t faking anything. He was in love with Mel on some level. I know he was…
“Yeah, sure,” Mel chuffed. “Doesn’t matter, not anymore. Whatever you felt for me, whatever you think that was, it was never enough, was it? You know now who you really want.” Mel drew herself up and gave them a pitying look. “It’s all going to be fine, y’know. Things are going to work out the way they’re supposed to, despite all your talk of choice and free will, I do believe in destiny. I believe we each have a place in the universe, that it provides for those that are strong enough, brave enough, to provide for themselves. I believe things happen for a reason. Take this situation, for example. This monumentally messed-up situation. Would you believe this will actually make certain things easier? Things might have gotten derailed for a time there, y’know, false hopes and dreams being what they are, but now we can get back to business. Things are going to be just fine.”
“You believe we’re going to be fine?” Vickie asked incredulously.
“Oh, I meant me,” Mel said. “I’m going to be fine. Something tells me you two are royally fucked. Even if you abandon a plan, you never totally abandon it. You keep it close, and available, just in case. A backdoor, an escape route, you know about that, don’t you, Red? I spent a lot of time and effort trying to plant seeds, suspicions, diversions…wow. What a colossal waste of time.”
“The hell are you talking about?” Red demanded.
“Scope,” Mel said with a wry smile. “The perfect fall guy, or gal…the gender doesn’t matter, more on that later…she was already on a path of self-destruction. Y’know, I almost let her get blown to bits when I fixed those detonators in Ultima Thule. Instead, I threw her in a forgotten transport tube system running under the shield pylons and programmed it to get her the hell out of there. Didn’t really need her anymore, not the way things were going, but maybe I wasn’t totally willing to give up the plan. But y’know, I don’t believe that. I think I had a change of heart. Y’all should know, you’re the ones responsible for reawakening this odd, empathic side of me, after all.”
“You…you are…” Red stumbled on the words. “You are confusing the hell out of me right now.”
“I’m not confused,” Vickie said, her voice tinged with fear. “I get it.”
“You get what?” Red demanded.
She felt cold with the sheer horror of it. Her heart refused to acknowledge it…but she had always been a creature of mind over heart, and her mind had presented her with all the evidence, neatly tied up, with a bow on top.
“Doppelgaenger,” Vickie croaked. “You’re Doppelgaenger.”
Mel smirked, and Vickie recoiled as the smirk grew to an elated grin and continued to grow, as did the rest of her, and grow, and grow…
It towered over them, a massive brute comprised of thick ropes of muscle coiled over an immense frame. Mel’s hair fell away, leaving a bald scalp that seemed to undulate with thr
obbing veins. Her ECHO nanoweave had torn apart as all the seams parted under the strain, and fell to the ground in oddly precise pieces as the thing continued to grow. She…he…it…craned its neck and Vickie stuffed her hand in her mouth to hold back a scream as bones and cartilage scraped against one another, a thunderous staccato that sounded bizarrely like a string of firecrackers going off.
And then it spoke, but not with the growling rasp one might expect. It was a feminine voice, it was almost Mel’s voice, but darker…richer…sultry even, and Vickie shuddered at the horror of it.
“Well done, Vickie,” Doppelgaenger crooned. “You know, I never intended to let Bela have you. The smart ones are always more fun to play with. They can always see what’s coming…”
* * *
“Penny! Penny! What’s goin’ on?” Pike tugged at her arm as the rest of the kids gathered around her. It was funny, really…the more the Good Ghost had helped her by scaring away the bad ones, and by giving her information she could use to warn the other kids, the more they had come to depend on her, to even treat her as a leader. From being the “crazy one” they avoided, now they all looked up to her. Even Pike.
“I dunno,” she said, her ear pressed to the crack in the door, knowing that before the Dark Man or the Devil could come, the Good Ghost would warn them in time for all of them to get back to their cots. “After that breakin’ glass, I didn’t hear nothing.” She bit her lower lip, and frowned with unease and worry. “I hope nothing ain’t happened to Lacey.”
Had there been a window in Lacey’s room? She didn’t think the Good Ghost had said. There wasn’t a mirror, for sure. The Devil hated mirrors. He’d broken all of them in every room before any of them had come here.
“You should be worrying about yourself, miserable little rat!”
Penny whirled, the blood draining out of her face. Because that was the Dark Man’s voice—but it had come from right behind her! How had he gotten into the room without passing the door?
She screamed, then clapped both her hands over her mouth, because the Dark Man was there. Only now—he was a ghost.
Avalanche: Book Five in the Secret World Chronicle Page 38