by Rachel Caine
"All right!" Imara said sharply. "Don't hurt her! I'll try."
She put her hands on the woman's face, turning it gently to one side so that it faced toward me and Eamon. I thought I saw the translucent eyelids flutter, but nothing else happened. The frail chest rose and fell under the pale nightgown. IV fluids dripped.
And then, with the suddenness of a horror movie, the eyes flew open. Blank and clouded, but open.
The eyes of the living dead, nothing in them at all.
I felt Eamon's reaction through the connection of his arm, a shudder that might have sent him reeling if he hadn't kept hold of me. Which he did, for a blank second, and then he shoved me away and lurched to the bed. The knife fell to the floor, forgotten, and Eamon bent over the woman. "Liz? Can you hear me?"
Her eyes rolled back in her head, and Imara let go as the woman's body went into a galvanic spasm, practically leaping off the bed. Convulsions. Bad ones. I looked at Imara, speechless, and she looked as shocked as I did.
"I told you," she said. "It's forbidden."
Eamon turned on her with the speed of a cobra. "No. You're holding back. Wake her up."
"I can't."
"Wake her up!" he shouted, and turned to pick up his knife. "I need five bloody minutes! Five!"
"I can't give it to you. I'm sorry."
"You're going to be!"
He rounded on me, and Imara reached out and knocked the knife out of his hand. It skidded across the floor in a hiss of metal, and bumped into a pair of shoes that had just manifested out of thin air.
I blinked away confusion and focused. Even then, it took me a few long seconds to recognize that David had come to our aid.
He bent down and picked up the knife. "Looking for this?" David's voice was reduced to a velvet-soft purr. The shine of the knife turned restlessly in his hand, over and over. "It has Joanne's blood on it, I see. Do you really think that was a good idea?"
Eamon froze. The woman on the bed stopped her galvanic spasms and went completely still again. Her eyes were half-shut.
"Yours?" David asked, and pointed at the bed with the tip of the knife. He looked—cold. Perfect and cold and furious, but absolutely self-contained. Rage in a bottle.
"Mine?" Eamon sketched a mad sort of laugh. "What the hell would I do with a girl in a coma? Other than the obvious, I mean."
I remembered Eamon's taunts and hints, dropped all the way back when he'd revealed himself to me as the bastard he truly was. Drugging my sister. I like my women a little less talkative and more compliant, in general, he'd said. The possibilities nauseated me, together with the fact that the nurse outside had recognized him by name, as a regular visitor.
I took a step backward, until the wall was at my back. Felt good, the wall. I needed the support. My legs had gone cold, pins-and-needles cold. My balance insisted that the room was pitching and rolling like the deck of a sinking ship.
David exchanged a look with Imara, a nod, and she dropped her gaze and moved out of his way. Nothing standing between him and Eamon now. I saw Eamon register that, and lick his suddenly pale lips.
"Hang on a minute, mate," he said. "I know it looks bad, but the truth is, I only need to wake her up for a couple of minutes. Less, even. Just long enough to say my good-byes and—"
"Don't lie," David interrupted. The knife kept turning in his hand, drawing my eyes as well as Eamon's. "You have a reason, and it isn't anything so sentimental."
Eamon's eyes narrowed, and I could see him trying to decide whether or not he'd be able to take the knife. He couldn't, but there was no way he'd be able to judge that for himself. I hoped he'd try. I really did.
"All right," he said. "Nothing so saccharine. We were partners. She took possession of a certain payment, and she didn't want to share. I need to make her tell me where she hid the money."
"Still not true," David said. His eyes were terrifying—flames swirling around narrowed pupils. "I want you to speak the truth, just once before you die."
"You don't want to kill me, old son. I'm the one with the antidote for your girl's poison, and unless you want to see her in a hospital bed next to my beloved Liz here—"
David moved in a streak of light, and suddenly he was pressed against the other man, chest to chest, bending him over the hospital bed in a backbreaking curve. His right hand was locked around Eamon's throat, and his left…
… his left held the hilt of the knife he'd buried deep in Eamon's side.
Eamon's eyes widened soundlessly.
"That," David said, "is a fatal wound. Feel it?" He moved the knife helpfully. Eamon tried to scream, but nothing happened. "Shhhh. Nod if you believe me."
Eamon shakily nodded, throat still struggling to let loose his terror.
"Good." David pulled the knife free in a single fast rip. No blood followed, and there should have been fountains of the stuff. "I'm holding the wound shut," David said. "But the second you disappoint me, little man, the instant I think that you're mocking me or even thinking about harm to my family, that ends. I watch you bleed your life away in less than a dozen heartbeats. Understand?"
Eamon nodded convulsively. He was paler than the woman on the bed.
"Now, you're going to get the antidote," David said. "Which I imagine you have hidden somewhere in this room. You're going to give it to Joanne, and then you're going to go and give it to her sister." He let go of Eamon's throat. "Move."
Eamon edged out of the way, one hand pressed trembling to his side. Too terrified to move quickly. David watched him with glowing metallic eyes, and Imara did, as well.
I made some sound of effort, trying to straighten up. David had his full attention on Eamon, and his knuckles were white where he gripped the knife. I remembered Imara saying that he was fighting off the influence of the Mother, and how difficult it was. I wondered what would happen if he succumbed to that here, in a building full of innocent and helpless victims.
Not for me. Please, not for me. I tried to send him the message, but I had no idea if he was listening. His attention was completely riveted on Eamon.
Eamon, meanwhile, was moving—slowly, carefully, with a hand pressed hard to the place the knife had gone in as if he could hold his life in with it. He walked to a wooden cabinet and dragged a floral suitcase—clearly a woman's—from a narrow cubbyhole. He opened it and took out a bottle filled with clear liquid that he held up in one shaking hand. His hair was plastered to his face in wet sweaty points, and I could feel the rage and fear coming off him.
"I hope we understand each other," David said. "If Joanne dies, I take you apart. Slowly. I can show you things about pain that you've never even imagined. And I can make it last for an eternity."
Eamon, if possible, paled even further. He tossed him the vial. David effortlessly snatched it out of the air without moving his gaze from the other man's face, and held it out. Imara took it and looked uncertain.
"Syringe," Eamon said. Imara ripped open drawers in the cabinet by the sink and came up with a syringe, which she filled from the vial.
She crossed to me and hesitated again. "I—I don't know how to—" She did. I knew, and she knew everything I did, but it was comforting to know that there were still things that could make my daughter flinch.
"Vein or muscle?" I asked.
"Muscle," Eamon said.
I took the syringe out of Imara's hands, jammed it into my thigh, and depressed the plunger. Whatever it was in the hypo, it went in ice-cold, tingling, and then turned hot. It moved fast. I gasped for breath as I felt it move through my circulatory system. My lungs felt as if I'd sucked on liquid nitrogen, and I got an instant, mind-numbing flash of a headache.
Then it was done, and I felt… clearer. Not well, by any stretch. But better.
For the first time, David looked at me directly. I gave him a shaky nod as Imara helped me up. "I'm okay," I said. "Now, can you—help her? None of this is her fault. She doesn't deserve to suffer for it."
David looked baffled for a second, then t
urned his attention to the woman lying on the bed. He crossed to look down at her, and put his fingertips on her forehead.
And then he said, very quietly, "There's nothing there to help."
"No," Eamon said, and lunged forward over the bed, one hand still clutched to his side. "No. She opened her eyes—"
"Imara opened her eyes for her," David said. "The mind that was inside her is gone. She's been gone for years."
Eamon's face turned into a rigid mask, with a red angry flush across his cheekbones. "No. She's there. I told you, I need five minutes—"
"Her brain is dead, and her soul is gone." David looked up at him, then at me. "This is why you wanted a Djinn. To heal her."
Eamon said nothing. He'd taken the woman's limp hand in his, and he was holding it. For any normal person, it would have been horrible, coming here, holding her warm hand, knowing on some level that it was just a lie her body was telling. I wasn't sure what it was for Eamon. I wasn't even sure why he cared so much. Both his explanations had been lies, David said. So what was the truth?
"You said you had a time limit," I said.
"Her family's turning off the machines," he said. It was barely a whisper. "Tomorrow. Brings new meaning to the term deadline, doesn't it?"
He laughed. It was an awful laugh, something wild and dangerous and mad. Not a good man, Eamon. Not a sane man. But there was something in him, some overwhelming emotion driving all of it.
"How did it happen?" I asked.
"Why would you care?" he asked, and brushed the glossy, oddly healthy hair back from her pale, dry face. It had to be about money, didn't it? Cold, hard cash. Because I didn't want to believe he was capable of love and devotion—it made things far too complicated.
"You did it to her, didn't you?" Imara suddenly asked.
Eamon transferred that feverish stare from the woman to my daughter. "Bugger off."
"Imara's right. She was just another victim, wasn't she? Only this one up and died on you." My voice was shaking, and I could feel the rest of me trembling along with it. "You got carried away, playing your little games."
He laughed, and looked down at the woman. "You hear that, Liz? Funny. Just another victim." He shook his head. "Liz and I—let's just say we had a professional relationship. And she violated some professional rules. Things went wrong."
I was never going to understand him. Nothing he said matched to what his body language said. The slump of his shoulders, the trembling in those long, elegant hands—that all spoke of grief, real and bone-deep grief.
David hadn't said anything. He was watching Eamon with the same intensity, but the incandescent rage had died down a bit.
"You going to kill me now?" Eamon asked. "Give me a colorful end to a bad career?"
"No." David shrugged. "I healed the wound. You'll be fine so long as you don't make any sudden movemerits. Or come after my family again. If you do that again, I will kill you."
My family. That struck me deep.
"You can all go to hell for all I care," Eamon said, and reached across to rest his hand on top of the respirator that breathed for the woman on the bed. "I didn't poison your sister, by the way. She's the one bright thing in my life. I didn't—" He fell silent.
"If you really think that, then let her go," I said. "Just let her go."
"Oh, I already have. I left her a note. I told her I had to go back to England. She'll come crawling back to you any moment now. Now bugger off, all of you!" The last came with a viciousness like a thrown razor.
David looked down at the bloodstained knife he was still holding, and casually broke the blade of it in two with his fingers. He tossed the remains in the trash.
And then the three of us—Imara, David, and I—left the hospital room.
As the door hissed shut behind us, David took me in his arms, and I melted against him. Into him.
I didn't ask, but David knew what I wanted to say. "I really couldn't do anything for her. There are limits."
I kissed the side of his neck. "I know."
"I leave you alone for five minutes—"
"It was more like days."
He growled lightly into my shoulder. "You're impossible. And I have—"
"Responsibilities," I murmured. "I know you do."
He let go.
"What about him? Eamon?" Imara was standing straight and tall, hands folded, watching the two of us. My daughter's face was a mirror of mine, at least in form, and in this instance I suspected she was a mirror of my expression, too. Compassion mixed with wariness. Eamon was a wild animal, and there was no telling what he'd do. Or to whom.
"If that demonstration didn't frighten him off, then the next step is to kill him. Not that I'd mind that."
My thoughts were on other things. "The woman—Liz—was she his victim, or his partner?"
"I don't know," David said. "I only know that Eamon never once told the truth about her."
Imara said, "Yes, he did."
David turned to her, surprised.
"When he called her 'beloved Liz.' He meant that."
At the nurse's station, an alarm began to sound. The nurse jerked to attention, checked a screen, and hit a button, then rushed past us… into the room we'd just exited.
"Let's go," David said.
"Is she—?"
"Go."
"Did Eamon—?"
He held the door to the elevator for me, head down, staring at his shoes.
"Oh God, David, did you—?"
He didn't answer. Neither did Imara.
On the way to the lobby, I called Sarah's cell phone. She was crying when she answered. "Jo, oh my God—Eamon—Eamon left me a note—I thought—I thought he really loved me—"
So. He wasn't entirely a lying bastard, after all.
"Sarah?" I said gently. "Stay there. I'm coming."
He hadn't exactly stinted her on accommodations. Sarah was registered at a downtown Boston hotel in her own room, a luxurious suite that came with a panoramic view, a fabulous king-size bed, and its own monogrammed robes.
I knew about the bed and the robes because when we arrived, Sarah was curled up on the bed sporting the robe, clutching a tearstained note in one hand and a generous wad of tissues in the other. She looked like hell, but she didn't look sick. I still felt achy in places, but I knew that was a legitimate price to pay for what I'd avoided. Eamon really would have killed me.
And my sister was weeping herself sick over him.
After parsing some of the hitching, half-understood things she was mumbling, I came to the conclusion that she'd consulted the liquor cabinet for some comfort, too. Great. Drunk, maudlin, and irrational. Sarah's best day ever.
I rolled my eyes at David, who had the grace to turn to look out the windows at the rain streaking the glass. Imara grinned. Together, my daughter and I escorted Sarah to the bathroom, where I dumped a cold shower on her to help with the sobering up (and yes, it was more than a little fun, too), and helped her get herself together. Eamon had provided plenty of tools, from high-quality makeup to shopping bags from half the high-end clothiers in Boston.
My sister should have been a model. She had the rack for it, and the elegant bone structure. Where I was round, she was straight, flat, and lean. Her hair still retained the delicate cut and highlights that I'd helped her put in—God, had it only been a week ago? I decided to forgo the mascara. As much as Sarah continued to sniffle about her latest romantic disaster, it was bound to be a wasted effort.
"I was so worried," Sarah suddenly said as I applied blusher to her pale cheeks. I stopped, surprised. "I didn't want to leave you, Jo. Eamon said—he said you'd gone back to get your friend."
I nodded. "I did." He'd basically left me to fend for myself in a hurricane, but he'd cut me loose, at least. Had to give him points for that. "I'm sorry. It took me a while to catch up to you."
She studied me from bloodshot eyes, getting more sober by the minute. "Were you? Catching up to me? Or were you really looking for Eamon?"
> I applied myself to the makeup with an effort. "Looking for you, of course."
"Jo." She stopped my hand with hers. "I know he's a bastard. But there was something about him—you understand?"
"I understand that you were married to one jerk, and you just fell for another one," I said. "But in this case, I can't really blame you. He put on a good show. Even I believed it for a while. So I think I'll have to forgive you for this one."
That was what she wanted to hear. I saw the flash of relief in her eyes, and then she hugged me. A warm cloud of Bvlgari Omnia embraced me, too. She'd put too much on. She always did.
I hugged her back fiercely. "Come on," I said. "Let's get packed up."
It didn't take long. Everything she owned, Eamon had bought for her; like me, she'd had to flee Fort Lauderdale with nothing but the clothes on her back. Even her suitcases were new.
And designer.
Some refugees just are born to land on their expensively manicured feet.
"What am I going to do with her?" I sighed to David as we leaned against the wall and watched Sarah fill the third Louis Vuitton bag with toiletries and shoes. I was considering knocking her over the head and stealing the suitcases. Eamon had excellent taste.
"She shouldn't stay here," David said. "If he comes back, I'm not sure she wouldn't—"
"Oh, I'm sure she would. Eagerly. Eamon could talk her into anything, and you know it."
"Then you'd better send her someplace safe."
"And where would safe be, exactly?" I asked. He folded his arms and stared at the carpet; there really wasn't a good answer to that, and he knew it. "I've used up my favors. I have no other family to ship her off to—"
"Actually," Imara interrupted, "you do."
We both stopped to look at her. A flash of lightning outside the windows illuminated the humor in her smile.
"I'll take care of her," she said. "If you're about to jump back into trouble, you can't keep her with you. She'd slow you down." Imara's golden eyes sought David's for a second. "So would I, as a matter of fact."
"Imara—"