Marked

by S. Andrew Swann

I found another set of screws that had been nestled underneath the lower edge of the helmet. I released those, and I was able to lift the chest plate off.

  I heard sirens in the distance.

  I looked up from the man in the armor. “Jacob, this is the guy who killed my John Doe. After that, he did what I just did with you, stepped into some other time, some other world.”

  I reached down and undid the padded leather straps that held the guy in the armor. Then I reached under his armpits and lifted him to a sitting position, so much dead weight. His arms came free of the armor, but his legs were held tight.

  “Dana, you expect me to believe—”

  “Look!” I snapped at him, and I yanked the guy’s linen shirt up over the small of his back. Of course, I’d never seen him before, but I was almost certain of what was there. I was right. It wasn’t as elaborate as my Mark, but the black swirls were etched in his skin as they were on mine, visible even in the dim indirect light from the streetlamp outside.

  The sirens were a lot closer now.

  “Help me!” I pleaded with Jacob. “This guy is the best clue I have to where I came from. To what is happening. Who I am.”

  He stared at me, still holding the gun.

  “Please?”

  He holstered the gun, knelt down, and started undoing a couple more screws I had missed at waist-level on the armor. He lifted the groin plate off and undid a couple more straps holding the guy’s upper thighs in place. Once he did that, I was able to strain backward and slide the unconscious man completely out of the armor.

  I heard the sirens whoop, and I heard tires screech to a halt outside.

  Jacob saw me struggling with the guy and said, “Oh, hell.” He holstered the gun and got on the other side of the unconscious man, helping me lift. As we hefted him upright, I belatedly realized that the belt on my robe had been torn free during the fight. When I’d vaulted the stove, I had probably given Jacob a full frontal.

  I had to resist the urge to reach down and cover myself. The guy on my shoulders was big, muscular, and even with Jacob’s help, I barely had him under control. I didn’t want to risk dropping him.

  “Forward.” I told Jacob.

  “Dana—”

  “Now!” I said as I heard the front door splintering open.

  He took a step with me, and I pushed with the Mark as hard as I could manage.

  TWELVE

  THE MARK DUG its phantom fingers into my body and practically threw me forward. We stumbled back into the familiar confines of my apartment, and I practically fell to my knees on trembling legs. I was used to the feelings the Mark gave me, but this was different.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” I told him. I turned away from Jacob and concentrated on the unconscious man we were carrying. We needed to get him somewhere and keep him there. I headed toward the doors to the basement.

  Jacob held on to the guy and didn’t move. “Where are you going?”

  “We need to set him down.”

  “We should call an ambulance.”

  “His pulse and breathing are steady, and I’m not letting him disappear before I can talk to him.” I yanked the man’s arm in frustration and felt most of his weight fall on my shoulders. I grunted. “If I have to do it myself—”

  “Damn it, Dana,” he said, taking a step forward to take up the guy’s weight again. “You know this is kidnapping, right?”

  Jacob followed me down the stairs, cursing the whole while.

  We had to go down the stairs single file, and in my rush to get sword boy restrained, I’d taken the lead down. Even with Jacob’s help, I still bore more than my share of this guy’s weight. The whole length of the unconscious man’s body leaned into me. I could feel how well-muscled his thighs, shoulders, and chest were.

  At the bottom of the stairs, his weight shifted, and I had to turn into him to catch him before he fell and dragged Jacob onto the concrete floor with him.

  For a moment I had him in my arms. His limp body pressed into the skin bared by my unbelted robe. His shirt had ridden up, and with him slouched forward, I felt his skin touch mine, just below my navel.

  I gasped, barely able to breathe. I started to collapse backward, my knees buckling. With the skin-to-skin contact, I felt something—

  Jacob pulled him away from me, taking all the man’s weight. I heard the unconscious man groan as I took several unsteady steps back, pulling my robe closed. What the hell was it I had just felt?

  Jacob had him supported under the arms, and he took him down the last step himself. As he did, the man’s linen shirt fell back down, but not before I saw a sliver of black branching across an exposed hip.

  I had touched his Mark.

  It had touched me back.

  In some sense, it still did. I’d felt his presence, like fingertips too close to my Mark, when he had moved through worlds around me. That had been powerful, impossible to ignore. Here, now, I still felt it, very slightly, easy to miss but still very much present.

  “Dana,” Jacob grunted, “what are you planning to do with him?”

  I had Jacob drag him into the semi-finished part of the basement and sit him down on the carpet, leaning against one of the metal pillars supporting the floor above. Jacob looked up from our unconscious prisoner, who was continuing to groan. “Dana, what do you think you’re doing?”

  “Improvising,” I told him. “You have your handcuffs?”

  “What?”

  “This guy can do what I just did. If he gets to walk away under his own power, I’ll lose the chance to talk to him.”

  Jacob stared at the unconscious man while he took out a pair of cuffs and handed them to me. “If this guy is really the man who killed your John Doe, we should bring him in. Whatever fantasy world he came from, he’s still a murderer.”

  “And keep him in custody for how long?” I cuffed the guy’s arms around the pillar behind him.

  “This is kidnapping, false imprisonment, and God knows what else.”

  I stood up and stared at him. “You think I don’t know that? You think I’m enjoying this? I’ve spent years trying to keep this part of my life from leaking into the rest of it.”

  Jacob stared at me, and the disapproval I saw was like a slap in the face. “You have a pretty funny way of doing that.”

  How could I answer that? He was right. All I had ever done was pretend that the life I lived wasn’t completely founded on my use of the Mark, and Jacob had just thrown my self-deception back in my face.

  I was still only wearing an unbelted robe.

  “Can you watch our friend while I get dressed?”

  “You can’t just imprison a suspect in your basement.”

  I sighed. “Jacob, you’ve seen what I’m dealing with. If you want to call the station and pick this guy up, fine. You want to grab him and drive him in yourself, fine. You want to arrest me for kidnapping, whatever, fine. But if you’re going to do something, please just do it now, before you’re an accessory.” I started up the stairs. “And whatever you do, I’m still getting dressed.”

  * * *

  —

  I maintained some measure of dignity ascending the basement stairs, but once I was out of Jacob’s sight, I practically ran to my bedroom and slammed the door behind me.

  I wasn’t ready, not for any of this. I didn’t want to have to deal with my unanswered questions all at once. I didn’t want to have to deal with the collapse of the life I had built. I didn’t want to have to deal with Jacob’s disapproving looks.

  I had a strong desire to just walk away, from Jacob, from the man cuffed in my basement, from all the messes I had made.

  Fortunately, that fantasy about running away wasn’t nearly as powerful as the ones I had entertained in the past, before I’d seen other people like me. The need to discover
who they were, and possibly my real family, outweighed any momentary desire to escape by an order of magnitude.

  I pulled on clothes without thinking deeply about it and found myself dressing as if I was going into work—black slacks and a gray blouse that hid all of the Mark. I looked at myself in the mirror and suddenly felt a wave of resentment and shame hit me all at once.

  The Mark was part of me, yet I spent my whole life hiding it. Not one item of clothing I owned was sleeveless or backless, or even low cut enough to expose anything below the nape of my neck. I didn’t own one pair of low-cut jeans, and I didn’t even have a white T-shirt or a light-colored blouse that might allow some of the Mark to show through.

  I began to realize that I had much less of a handle on the woman looking back at me in the mirror than I thought I did.

  “What are you waiting for?” I whispered to my reflection when I realized I was stalling my return to the basement.

  I left the bedroom not knowing what possibility frightened me more. The idea Jacob might have turned me in. Or the idea he hadn’t.

  * * *

  —

  HE hadn’t.

  I descended the stairs, and I saw Jacob sitting on an old folding chair. His cell phone was in his hand, but he held it in his lap, as if he had forgotten he had gotten it out. He faced my prisoner, staring at the man.

  I paused on the stairs, looking at him. Even sitting down, he seemed more in charge than I felt. Most of the confusion and outright distress I had seen in him during our side trip to the world next door was absent now. He watched the prisoner with an almost dispassionate calm, one I recognized. When our job put us in front of an unstable or belligerent person, he was able to deploy the face of reason and, more often than not, talk someone down. Or at least edge that person away from a dangerous confrontation.

  I didn’t know if I should be grateful for the return of his professional cool. I didn’t want to do battle with him over this. Over anything, really. But, after all I had said, after all the secrets I had stripped away, after exposing myself to him more than any other person—after all that—a part of me felt a sudden sense of loss at the prospect of him retreating behind a professional façade.

  I almost preferred the anger, the frustration, and the disapproval. I found myself thinking that at least those meant he was still emotionally engaged in our relationship, in me. Intellectually, I found the thought appalling, as if I was starting to take on the thinking process of a battered woman. And that thought was patently ridiculous because Jacob and I weren’t in a relationship, and he certainly wasn’t abusive in any sense.

  Besides, his anger was pretty much justified.

  And that thought was also the common rationale of an abuse victim. And, again, my dismay at my own thoughts was ridiculous. I wasn’t in any sense abused.

  But was I so empty inside that I could accept that kind of relationship?

  He turned around and looked up at me. “Dana?”

  I was suddenly terrified of him. Not Jacob the person, but Jacob the abstraction swimming in my mind. He had no idea what kind of power he could wield over me. And neither did I.

  I decided that on balance I was relieved he had taken on a more distant, professional demeanor.

  “How is he doing?”

  “His pulse and breathing are fine. He doesn’t have any ID on him.”

  I walked down and stared at my prisoner so I didn’t have to face Jacob. I told myself it was a good thing that Jacob had found out about everything this way, better that he was distant from all this, for both our sakes. I had pretty much stopped being a cop, and I suspected that talking to this man was not going to push me back in that direction.

  I knelt next to my prisoner. He breathed steady, and his color was good. He didn’t have any obvious injury other than a bloody nose and a dark bruise by his temple. He was handsome in a ruthlessly Aryan way. He could have been a model for a Nazi propaganda poster.

  “Who did you call?” I asked.

  “No one, yet,” Jacob said. “If this guy showed any distress, I would have called 911, but he seems fine.”

  “He should,” I said. “This asshole is faking unconsciousness.” I grabbed the guy’s slack jaw and turned his head to face me. “Aren’t you?”

  His eyes shot open, almost startlingly blue. He stared at me with a disconcerting intensity and whispered, “Vi oplatitye dlya etogo.”

  Jacob said, “Sounds like Russian to me.”

  He’d been positively chatty when he’d been swinging his sword, so I snapped, “English.”

  Apparently, Jacob hadn’t heard him. He began to say, “Maybe he doesn’t speak—”

  My prisoner interrupted him. “I speak English well enough.”

  THIRTEEN

  “WHO ARE YOU?” I asked, trying to keep the sound of desperation from leaking into my voice. “What are you doing here?”

  “I am Ivan Roskov, Sergeant of the Imperial White Guard, and I am here because a rogue Walker has the insolence to chain me to a post.”

  I didn’t like the arrogant way the guy was looking at me, so I stood up. “I’m going to call you Ivan, then.” It was a cheap psychological trick, looming over him like that, but after being party to a semi-nude gun-slash-sword fight, I think I’d drained my reserves of subtlety.

  “Do not think you can defy the Emperor’s Law. Release me now and there may be cause for mercy.” Who the hell is the Emperor? Whoever it was, it didn’t sound good. “You must know no rogue can hide forever, even in the Chaos.”

  Wealcan has fallen! They’ll come for you! The shadows are coming!

  “Is that what you’re doing in my world?” I asked. I was reviewing the events in my mind, remembering the old man pounding on my window, remembering the specter of Ivan’s anachronistic armor emerging from the shadows. I felt something grow cold in me, the same deep anger I’d felt the first time I’d slipped in time to witness my first attempted murder, when I had stared into the eyes of a perp ten minutes before he would have put a bullet into an old woman’s brain.

  Difference: Ivan had already done the deed.

  “Is it?” I repeated.

  “Your world?” There was a mocking tone in Ivan’s voice which was just the wrong attitude to take with me now. I reached down with both hands and grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him so his arms were taut against the pole and his ass left the floor. I held him like that, staring into his eyes, my arms trembling with fury.

  “My world,” I said, feeling the strangest sense of protectiveness for the world where I had grown up. Wherever I had come from, this was my world. “I saw you kill a man.”

  Ivan glared at me, unmoved. “The man was a fugitive from the Emperor’s justice. What of it?”

  At this point it was clear I wasn’t dealing with the kind of perp I’d spent most of my adult life intimidating. He wasn’t some kid who wasn’t smart enough to understand the consequences of his actions, or some low-grade sociopath who was just narcissistic enough to cave once someone threatened the only thing he cared about— himself. I understood that, but at this point I didn’t care.

  “Who. Was. He?” I strained and heard his shirt tearing.

  He got his feet beneath him and pushed himself upright against the pole. Even though I still had a death grip on his shirt, he was looking down at me from about five inches of height advantage. “He was a fugitive from the Empire. Anything else does not matter.”

  I wasn’t going to let some arrogant prick try and intimidate me. I slammed him back into the pole hard enough that I heard his skull clang against the metal. “It matters to me!”

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and heard Jacob’s reasonable talk-down-the suspect voice, “Dana, ease up.”

  That pissed me off even more, but I did take a step back, letting go of Ivan’s shirt. I took a deep breath and told myself that I wasn’t go
ing to get anywhere treating this guy like a wannabe gangbanger.

  I tried to emulate Jacob’s reasonable tone. “You’re going to tell me who he was and why you killed him.”

  “Who are you to dictate to me?”

  To hell with it.

  I balled my fist and let him have it full in the face. It wasn’t like punching the heavy bag. I felt my first knuckle split against his cheekbone. But I heard his skull clang against the pillar again, and I felt myself grinning at his shocked expression. “I’m the woman who’s going to beat you to a bloody pulp.”

  “What the hell are you doing?” Jacob’s voice had lost the professional tone, and he sounded almost as shocked as Ivan looked.

  “Demonstrating who’s in charge,” I said.

  Ivan looked past me and said, “Take charge of your woman, sir. An assault on me is an assault on the Emperor.”

  I buried my fist in his solar plexus. He gasped. It was a dirty move, without him able to defend himself, but I found myself grinning so hard my cheeks ached.

  “Funny thing,” I told him. “I don’t see your Emperor around anywhere.”

  He sucked in a breath. Before he could say anything, I leveled another punch above his kidney. His linen shirt was smeared with blood from my split knuckle, but I didn’t much care. I wasn’t even feeling it. I just kept seeing that old man against the lamppost, his gut sliced open.

  I raised my fist again and Jacob grabbed me. “Stop it!” He pulled my arm back, spinning me away from Ivan. I was so focused that he needed to use more force than he probably intended. I felt the shoulder of my blouse tear.

  I almost brought my other hand up to hit Jacob, but I stopped myself. “Let me go.”

  “Not until you get a grip. What are you going to do, kill him?”

  “If I have to.” I was deadly serious.

  He let my arm go and took a step back. “I thought I knew you.”

  “Maybe you were wrong.” I swung my arm back to point at Ivan. “But this bastard murdered a man in cold blood in front of me.”