by Tosca Lee
* * *
We stop at a twenty-four-hour convenience store near Hammond, pick up a prepaid phone, a couple of prepaid credit cards, some Advil, and a baseball cap for me. Luka’s concerned about my apparent concussion. But that’s the last thing I’m worried about.
By now it’s very late, and adrenaline and neck pain have given way to mind-numbing exhaustion. Luka tells me to sleep, but he isn’t willing to stop. And though I’m moving through a fog, there’s no way I can attempt sleep with him sitting two feet away in the driver’s seat.
We drive until the city lights are within sight and my ear is practically deaf from the cold wind.
On the outskirts of Chicago he pulls into an all-night diner with free Internet and slides the cap carefully onto my head, pulling the bill down low. “Come on.”
It’s the kind of place a diner should be: greasy-looking, chrome on the counter stools, squiggly lines on the laminate tabletops with red pleather booths. I ask the waitress for a vat of coffee when she comes to drop off the menus. Luka, meanwhile, is tapping away at his phone.
“Let me see that driver’s license,” he says. I slide it over to him and he just stares at it for a moment.
“What are you doing?” I ask, as he returns his attention to the phone.
“Booking us tickets to Croatia.”
“Us?”
Suspicion and relief collide somewhere inside me.
“I’m going with you.”
“This isn’t your problem.”
His brows draw together. “Actually, it kind of is. Rolan knows you’re with me, which means the Historian sent him. They know I’m a traitor, and there’s probably a price on my head. And I told you I’d protect you.”
“Look, if you’re trying to make up for something, I’d say the fact you haven’t killed me yet makes us even. I release you. Okay?”
He lifts his gaze, eyes locked on mine. “You don’t get it,” he says. “There is no ‘yet.’ There will never be a ‘yet.’ I will never hurt you.” He looks for a moment as though he’s about to say more, but then seems to remember the phone in his hands.
Why this loyalty from him? Some need for absolution? To make amends? Was his mission to kill me such a great part of his life that he can’t function without a replacement cause?
My other theory is too uncomfortable to consider with him sitting across the table from me.
“Great. So we’re two targets instead of one,” I murmur.
He says nothing, ferociously tapping at the screen.
“By the way, I don’t know if you heard, but I don’t have a passport.”
“We’re going to fix that.”
“How? By heisting the passport agency on the way to the airport?”
I pour several ice cubes, two sugars, and half the tiny pitcher of cream into my coffee and drink it down. A minute later, Luka slides my license back and sets the phone aside.
“When she comes back for our orders,” he says, “ask her for a recommendation.”
I shrug. “I’m pretty sure waitstaff hate that, but okay.”
“But the entire time you’re talking, I want you to see her serving you a cheeseburger.”
“This is a breakfast menu,” I say, waving it.
“Doesn’t matter. If she suggests anything that isn’t a cheeseburger, compliment her and ask again,” he says, giving me a pointed look as the waitress comes back with an expectant smile, pad in hand.
“All set, hon?” I’m not a fan of endearments, but there’s something about the hon that makes her seem friendly enough to not spit in my coffee for my doing what Luka asked.
“What do you recommend?” I say cheerfully.
“Our stuffed French toast is really good.”
“Wow, you have a great smile,” I say, peering at her.
“Well thank you!” She laughs. “You just made my day.”
“So what do you recommend?”
And I realize as I’m asking it, that I am starving. And that the thought of French toast—or pretty much anything—is literally making my mouth water.
“Stuffed French toast for sure.” She beams.
“Well then . . . stuffed French toast it is,” I say, smiling not at her but Luka.
Luka mumbles something about the same, and she leaves.
“You have to be able to do this,” he hisses.
“Listen, Yoda—”
“You can do this.”
“See, that’s the problem. I can’t.”
“Look—” He points. “See that guy yawning? Over there?”
I glance over and feel my own mouth stretch open in response.
“Exactly,” he says, leaning across the table. “He yawns, and then so do you. It’s the same thing.”
“Yawns are contagious. And I haven’t slept in days.”
“Thoughts are contagious. What happens when you see a pizza commercial? What are you hungry for the rest of the day?”
“Sushi.”
“Thick, cheesy pizza. Normal people do this all the time. You just do it better. Whether it’s pizza or hot donuts. Or a greasy burger.”
I drop my hands on the table. “We’re talking about getting people to do things. Not eat them. I don’t need a burger. I need a passport, and right now I can’t get anything but breakfast food!”
“Listen to me, Audra.” He points toward the counter. “Unless that waitress is a hunter who secretly knows how to strangle someone with their own shirt, it will work.”
I feel the blood leave my face.
He leans back. “Sorry.”
“Can you really do that? Strangle someone with their own shirt?”
“I don’t know.”
“No, really. Can you?”
“I guess. If I had to.”
“Have you ever ‘had to’?”
“Audra—”
“Have you? How many people did you kill before I came along? What about my mother?” Something is boiling up in me that I didn’t see coming, but suddenly my hands are shaking. “Is that what happened before she ended up in the Danube?”
“No,” he says. “No! One hunter. One mark. You were mine.”
The waitress passes our table, and I stop her. “You know, I’m sorry. I’m not sure I’m in the mood for French toast . . . anything else that might be good?”
I tip well, and I want the biggest cheeseburger you’ve got.
“Well,” she says conspiratorially. “We’re on breakfast, but we do have the best cheeseburgers outside the metro. I think I could talk Matt into firing one for you,” she says with a wink.
“That would be great,” I say tightly. “With everything, please.”
The moment she leaves, I suppress a shudder. The release of adrenaline that relieves my shaking hands is immediate, and real.
When I slide my gaze back to Luka, he’s nodding. “There’s the Audra I know,” he whispers.
* * *
By the time we leave, I’m full and so tired I’m swaying on my feet. Luka finally finds a residential neighborhood off the expressway, parks behind a little church.
“You should try to get some sleep,” he says.
I pull my sleeves down over my hands, tuck them under my arms. But despite my exhaustion, sleep feels like the last thing I’ll ever be capable of again.
“Who did you tell me you were when I met you? Before, I mean,” I say. Somewhere a transit train rolls in the distance.
“I said I was taking time off from university to work for my father,” he says into the darkness. “Making some money so I could transfer to a school in the States. Which was true.”
“How did you end up involved in this in the first place? How does someone even become a hunter?”
“It runs in families,” he says.
“Christmas must be fun at your house.”
“It isn’t exactly something people discuss. The call may skip a generation. Maybe two. There’s never more than one hunter in any generation from the same family. Out of two sibl
ings, one might get the call and the other will never have any idea that such a thing—any of this—even exists.” His accent, normally light, is thicker when he’s fatigued.
“Or that his or her brother is a murderer.”
Do I imagine his flinch?
“What will happen to your family?”
“I don’t know,” he says quietly. But somehow I think he has a pretty grim idea.
“This ‘call’ . . . how does it happen?”
“It was after mass,” he says with a soft, bitter laugh. “I was thirteen when the new deacon invited me to join a secret group of ‘up-and-coming young people’ that my grandfather had been a member of. A kind of fraternity that supports the—what do they call it . . . ‘mutual advancement’ of its members.”
“What, like Skull and Bones?”
“What’s that?”
“Old boys’ club at Yale.”
“All I knew was he was the youngest deacon I’d seen. My grandfather had bought the bank he worked for at twenty-five; he passed it on to my father, who became very successful. I felt a lot of pressure, even then. I was called in a year later. Told I was special, given a mission. A single thing I had to do, when the time came, that would set me, my family up for life, and right an age-old wrong.”
“Then you can identify them!”
“I never saw their faces. And I never saw the rest of the fraternity again. By the time I was seventeen, I was working for a startup. It landed a major contract the same week I was accepted to Eötvös Loránd University.”
“So, did everyone in the fraternity go on to become a—”
“No. I suspect the Scions keep many charitable organizations as grooming grounds for positions in their members’ enterprises. The hunters are a small and very specialized part of what the Scions do as a whole. I actually don’t like talking about it. I was . . . completely brainwashed. I hate thinking about it, actually.”
“So what changed your mind?”
“You.”
I’m quiet for a long moment.
“What did you tell them you got from my memory?” I say finally.
“I said I botched it. That you were too badly burned for me to retrieve anything.”
I swallow. “And what did you get for my death?”
“I told my contact I didn’t want anything. That I wanted to travel and just be left alone. I dropped out of university, quit my job. I didn’t want anything to do with them. Forty thousand euros showed up in my account the next day.”
“That’s it? The going rate on a life?”
“Audra, I failed.”
“You killed me as far as they knew.”
“But I retrieved nothing. Based on who you are—what you possibly knew—I failed. They probably should have killed me but paid me instead. Leave with your life and a little bit of money—it’s enough to keep anyone indebted and paranoid. That’s how they work.”
“You could have reported it as an error, refused to keep it, so they couldn’t have anything on you—”
“How do you think we paid for this new life?”
I let out a breath, recall the stack of cash in my packet upon arriving in Maine.
He’s gazing at me in the darkness as though there are fifty things he’d say, given the courage to voice them all.
“You could still go back,” I say. “To save your family. Say I faked my death and you’ve been tracking me ever since—”
“I lied to you at lunch,” he says abruptly. “The other day. I said you were pretty. You’re not. You’re beautiful.”
I stop, and then give a short laugh. “Okay, you must be—”
“Really tired. That’s what you were going to say, isn’t it?”
I hesitate. Actually, it was. “How’d you know that? Hunter prowess?”
“It’s what you always say.”
I open my mouth, but before I can say anything else his phone chimes, startling us both. Luka holds it up, shows me the text.
Café Abbazia, Opatija. 16:00 Wednesday.
I don’t recognize the number except for the first digits of the country code. Croatia.
Ivan.
When Luka puts down the phone and takes my hand, there is no word for how disconcerted I feel.
No, I know how I feel. And I know what I feel like doing right this minute. And even though in all this time I haven’t once tried to match his ear to an egg or overanalyze the angle of his nose (106 degrees), some rational part of my brain is yelling at me that I also chose to trust Rolan—to jump in a car and drive all the way to Indiana with him—and look how that panned out.
I study Luka in the darkness, see his face again in the Greenville grocery, eyes locked on mine. Is that the gaze of someone searching for an ancient diary and ten million euros . . . or the recognition he once saw in my eyes?
Girls like me don’t get European guys who look like they should be dating models named Gisele. There is nothing desirable about me. I am not rich, I am smart. A nerd who watched Firefly’s lone season three times with friends whose names have been erased from my memory. But he and I? Unless I managed to glamour him with my Progeny supercharisma, I don’t see it. And I wonder if he’s working the plain-girl-lack-of-self-esteem angle on me. Because I agree it’s the best play—and far preferable to getting strangled with my shirt.
“So, obviously . . . you and I . . .”
He looks down.
“And you were okay with me forgetting you.”
“No.” He looks up, gaze intense. “I was not okay with that. But I was less okay with you being hunted by whoever stepped in after me.”
“Luka, I don’t know what—”
“I don’t expect anything,” he says and lets me go.
“I was going to say I don’t know where you’re from,” I lie.
“Oh.” He laughs softly. “Slovakia.”
“Nice to meet you. I’m Audra Ellison,” I say with a lame smile.
“From Sioux City, Iowa,” he adds.
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
We sit in awkward silence until he says something about getting an hour’s sleep and I agree. But my mind is racing.
How many conversations have we shared, he and I? Were we . . . involved involved . . . or just kind of involved? I’ve studied his face in my mind more times in the last hour than I care to admit. The curve of his lower lip, the hair teasing his jawline. And, okay, his ears. Once.
What was it like with him—with us? How did I ever manage any kind of relationship, let alone one with a hunter while chasing my mother across Europe—and how did he? I strain to remember anything about him, but he is gone. Like so many faces and details of a life that had no doubt once been full, a shell now in the absence of those who filled it.
Eventually, I must have slept, because the next thing I know Luka is gently shaking my shoulder.
“Audra, wake up.” I open my eyes as he retrieves an envelope from the glove compartment. “Time to go.”
14
* * *
“What about the car?” I say, glancing back at it. Even in the forgiving light of dawn it looks like junk.
“We leave it,” he says, shoving the envelope in his pocket.
It’s nearly half a mile to the closest Walgreens. My hands are freezing, and my mouth tastes gross. My head feels worse. The hour’s sleep I got wasn’t nearly enough, and my new passport photo shows it. Luka prints our itineraries while I buy toiletries, and puts in a call to the passport agency for an appointment. And then we’re out the door and hurrying to the Red Line station. Luka dismantles his phone as he goes, breaking the SIM card in two. He tosses half into a sewer, the other half in an open cup of stale soda sitting in a trash bin. He hurls the phone itself into the back of a beeping garbage truck.
We take the Red Line of the L into the city, get off at Jackson station. By the time we wait an hour for the passport agency to open, my hands are shaking from the chill as much as from nerves.
Luka
takes them between his own and rubs them. His fingers are warm. He’s been talking in low tones the last five minutes, though I couldn’t repeat a word of what he just said. I hate to say it, but I miss my meds.
“Just focus,” he says, low near my ear. I close my eyes. “It’s a Progeny thing, the jitters. You always had to work them off somehow—running, swimming, working some poor souvenir guy over for a deal. Just to get it out.”
“I feel like I’m going to climb out of my skin.”
“That’s good.”
“No. It’s not.”
He bows his head against mine. “You can do this. You have to. Or you’ll never get out of the country. You don’t have any contacts here, and the underground here is an inch deep. You’ll die if you stay. We both will.”
“You’re not helping,” I say. All I can think is that I’m going to be picked up for having an identity that doesn’t exist. Maybe, at least, I’ll be safe in jail.
The very nice man on the eighteenth floor takes my appointment confirmation, which isn’t for two weeks yet, and issues me a number. When it’s finally called, I pass my application and driver’s license beneath the agent’s window. She smiles at my story about our elopement to Amsterdam as Luka beams and puts his arm around me.
“And your birth certificate?” she says. I look at Luka. He slides me a page from the envelope. It’s a folded map of Greenville, Maine. I look blankly from the map to him. He shoves it into my hand.
“Here,” I say, not even attempting to smile as I hand it to the woman, fingers tapping a nervous SOS against the countertop.
My name is Emily Porter and I was born wherever you were, lady.
She takes the map, stares at it for a long moment, looks up at me. My heart stops.
“Well, what a coincidence! I’m from Ogallala, Nebraska, too!”
Luka and I make inane comments about fate, love, the size of the world.
“I’m just . . . trying to find your date of birth,” she says, finger scanning the map.
I point to Mooseless Lake but fumble for a date. I search desperately and then see the digital display behind her.
“Well, happy birthday!” she exhales with a laugh.
“Yup. Happy birthday to me.” I smile stupidly. “I’ve got my honey and my birthday cake, all together.”