Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two

by Loren Rhoads

  “She thinks he’s messing with her dreams,” Mykah clarified.

  “It makes more sense when she explains it,” Coni said.

  “No, not really, it doesn’t,” Mykah added.

  Kavanaugh had a sip of ale to hide his smile. When he was certain of his poker face, he asked, “Messing with her how?”

  “You really should talk to her,” Mykah said. “It will sound crazy coming from one of us. In fact, it will sound crazy coming from her,” he hedged, “but at least you’ll know she means it.”

  “Duck,” Kavanaugh told them, not a moment too soon.

  He was impressed to see them do just that, dodging in opposite directions, staying low. When the creature came crashing across the table they’d just cleared, Kavanaugh caught the table’s edge and flipped it upward, sending the spider thing to the floor.

  The rest of the fight came piling their way. Kavanaugh left his gun holstered. “Never bring a gun to a fist fight,” Doc used to tell him. Someone was going to hit you before you could get clear enough to take a shot, and then your gun would be roaming loose around the party. Never a good thing.

  Kavanaugh circled around the altercation. He was amused to see the boy going over it, vaulting off one creature’s shoulder, another’s head, bouncing off the ceiling, using the light fixture to change direction. The blue girl was up and following him, a big grin on her muzzle.

  They were a joy to watch. The girl knew how to work that skirt. The way the boy moved told Kavanaugh he had been training with Raena. Neither of the kids seemed interested in joining in the fight, though. They weren’t even really running away, just stirring up trouble in pockets of the room where the brawl hadn’t yet reached, all of it done for the sheer love of chaos.

  Kavanaugh waded into the fringes of the turmoil and fought his way toward the door. As he expected, the kids got there first and were waiting on him.

  “Let’s go see Raena,” he said.

  CHAPTER 14

  Mykah unlocked the cabin door and stood back. Kavanaugh had a flashback to opening Raena’s tomb, not knowing what he’d find inside. Then he remembered that experience had only been terrifying in retrospect, after he better understood the danger he had been in. He wished he had a clue what he was in for now.

  Raena was sitting up on her crisply made bed, back against the wall. She wore skintight workout clothes in a festive shade of aquamarine, so different from the black military-styled clothing he still thought of her wearing. It was hard to tell if her hair was brushed or if she meant it to look that way: sticking out from her head in odd tufts in all directions.

  She looked tired, but he was struck again by how pretty she was, how very young she looked. Although her brown skin leaned toward shipboard pallor, her face was still completely smooth. She could pass for twenty, even though he’d met her for the first time almost twenty-five years ago. It took him a moment to miss the white line of scar between her eyes.

  “Thanks for coming, Tarik,” she said quietly. “I know I already owe you a couple of favors, but I wasn’t sure where else I could turn.”

  “I’m not sure what I can do about bad dreams, Raena. We all have them. I can’t prescribe anything for you.”

  “These are more than dreams.” She scooted forward toward the side of the bed, dangling her feet over the edge. She was barefoot, which struck Kavanaugh as wrong. He couldn’t remember ever seeing Raena without her high-heeled boots. Even when she’d come out of the tomb, she’d been wearing them.

  She asked, “Where are my manners? Would you like something to drink?”

  “What’d’ya got?”

  “Oh, they’ll let me have pretty much anything I ask for. This is the best prison cell I’ve ever had.”

  He couldn’t tell if she was kidding, or if there was a darker edge of paranoia beneath her light tone.

  “Would you like a glass of xyshin?” she offered. “I’m kind of in the mood.”

  “Sure, that sounds okay.”

  She didn’t get up to get it or even to reach over to the comm button. Kavanaugh looked at her, eyebrows raised.

  “One of the others will be along with it in a moment,” she explained. “I found out by accident that they were monitoring me. I try not to abuse the knowledge, but room service is pretty quick here.”

  When the door opened again, a squid-like creature came waltzing in on a multitude of tentacles, supporting a bottle in one tentacle and a pair of glasses in another.

  “Vezali, have you met Kavanaugh?” Raena asked politely.

  “Not yet,” the tentacled creature answered in a high-pitched girlish voice.

  “He rescued me from a bounty hunter’s ship a long time ago,” Raena said. “Remember?”

  The dream was very clear in his head: the way the icy crystals of his breath swirled in the stale air, the dead creature with the bashed-in skull glued to the deck by its own frozen blood, Raena caught impossibly tight in the crash web on the wall.

  “I remember,” he said. “I dreamed about it not too long ago.”

  Raena got up slowly, languorously, clearly trying not to frighten anyone, and took the bottle and the pair of glasses. She poured the drinks generously, handed one to Kavanaugh and the other to Vezali, and settled back on the bunk with the bottle.

  “Stay,” she said, “if you want to.”

  “Sure,” Kavanaugh encouraged.

  “Thanks.” Vezali perched on the end of the bed, since Kavanaugh had the only chair. He wasn’t sure how to read her emotions, but her body language didn’t communicate any agitation to him. He would have said the squid-girl wasn’t frightened of Raena at all.

  “I had that dream, too,” Raena said, sipping the sweet liquor. “Where did yours end? With me walking off into the rain?”

  “Yeah,” Kavanaugh said. “That’s where my memories of that night end, too: when you left us. I remember how the storm roared outside of Doc’s ship. I was so worried about you. Then I didn’t see you again until we opened your tomb, all those years later.”

  Raena jumped in before whatever he’d planned to say next. “The dream kept going for me. I walked off across the marsh toward the forest. A man was waiting there. I thought he was another bounty hunter, so I shot him. When I confirmed the kill, the dead man looked like Gavin. Not Gavin as I saw him last, in my waking life on Kai, but aged. Gavin with less hair and more wrinkles. In the dream, I didn’t know who he was. Once I woke up, I figured it out right away.”

  “Isn’t that how dreams always go?” Kavanaugh asked. “They make more sense after you wake up and think them over.”

  “Do you remember when you opened my tomb?” Raena asked, conversationally, as if she wasn’t invested in the answer. “You told me that you worked for Gavin. You said he was on a moon base orbiting the planet.”

  Kavanaugh frowned. Haltingly, he admitted, “I dreamed about that recently, too.”

  “Did your dream end when I walked out of the mountain?” Raena asked. “Or do you remember Gavin being there?”

  Kavanaugh stared at her.

  “You do remember that, don’t you?” she prompted.

  Kavanaugh confessed, “In my dream, Gavin walked into the tomb. He carried a torch pointed down at his feet, so I couldn’t really see his face. But he walked straight over and hugged you, which was weird because—”

  “It didn’t really happen that way,” Raena finished for him. “You came up to the moon with me and Gavin’s security goons. Gavin didn’t recognize me at first. He accused me of being an impostor, sent to fool him by Ariel or one of his ex-wives.”

  “How did you know Gavin was in the tomb in my dream?”

  “He was in mine, too,” she said. “Did yours end when we left you to take care of your men?”

  Kavanaugh nodded.

  “You’re lucky, then. Mine ended after Gavin took me off the Templar’s world. He turned his yacht around in the atmosphere and nuked the archaeological encampment from the air. He said Thallian’s brother would torture
your men in an effort to find me. ‘This is kinder,’ Gavin said. ‘At least, this is quick.’ I’m glad you don’t remember getting nuked by Gavin.”

  Kavanaugh’s mouth went dry. He raised the glass of sickly sweet liquor in his hand and choked down a swallow.

  In the real world, Kavanaugh had gone up to Gavin’s base with Raena expressly because he expected Gavin to do what she’d dreamed: wipe out the encampment, kill the men, erase all evidence that Sloane had funded the grave-robbing. Kavanaugh had been stunned and happily surprised when Sloane decided instead to bribe the men into silence. That is, he’d been happy until Thallian’s men started finding the grave robbers and torturing them to death …

  Raena sipped from the bottle of xyshin and added, “In my dream, I shot Gavin for killing you. That woke me up. In fact, I’ve shot Gavin almost nightly in my dreams, or I’ve beaten his head in, or I’ve broken his neck, or I’ve thrown him out an airlock …”

  She shook herself, had another swig from her bottle, and said, “For a long time, all my dreams had Gavin in them. Then there were some that didn’t. Those were the worst. But I talked to Ariel a couple of days ago. She’d shared some of the dreams I’ve had, including the day I rescued her from the Arbiter. In fact, all this started when I dreamed that Gavin drugged me and hauled me away from the souk on Kai. He snatched me before Thallian’s men attacked, like he knew the attack was coming and wanted to get me out of the way first. Ariel had a dream exactly like that.”

  Vezali interrupted. “Is it normal for humans to share dreams at a distance?”

  “I never heard of anyone sharing dreams like this,” Kavanaugh said. “What does it mean?”

  “When it was just me, I thought I was going crazy. But my insanity wouldn’t cause you and Ariel to have similar dreams. How could it? I can’t dream across time and space.”

  “You don’t have any theories?”

  “I have a theory, but it’s the maddest thing yet. I don’t want to get to it right away. First, I want you to know that I dreamed that Gavin met me at this ship on Kai the same day that Thallian’s men jumped us in the souk.”

  “Wait a second. He met you at this ship after he carried you away from the souk?”

  “Yeah. This was a new dream, one I had almost a week later. It’s like Gavin just keeps coming at the problem in different ways … Anyway, in the real world, I didn’t know where the Thallians had parked their ship, so I let the youngest member of the attack team go—he was one of Thallian’s sons. The dream went just the way I remembered, until I found Gavin waiting at the Raptor when Jain and I got here. Gavin grabbed the kid, held him at gunpoint. And in the dream, I knew if Gavin shot the kid, I would never find Thallian. I would never be able to kill him. I would have to flaunt where I was even more than having Mykah send videos of me to his kids. I would have to drive Thallian to come to me in person, after he’d exhausted all his brothers, all his sons, trying to capture me first …”

  As if hearing the slightly hysterical ring to her voice, Raena had another slug from her bottle of xyshin. Kavanaugh noticed that her hands trembled.

  “In my last dream,” Raena said more calmly, “Gavin said he had come back from the future. He said that was why he knew which ship I’d be coming to, even before I knew myself. The weirdest thing was that he was really old in that dream. His hair had almost completely gone. His face was all crumpled up. He looked ancient, Tarik. He looked like he really had come from the future.”

  “It was a dream,” Kavanaugh argued.

  “Was it? What if it was an alternate timeline?”

  He actually laughed at her. Afterward, he wondered that he had the courage, but at the time, it seemed like the only appropriate response. Everyone knew that time travel only happened in stories.

  “Do you really think Gavin has a time machine?” he asked. “Where would he have gotten it? He pretty nearly bankrupted himself looking for you on the Templar world and buying off the archaeological team after we found you. He had some money squirreled away, and Templar artifacts to sell, but if such a thing as a time machine really existed in the universe, it would be extremely expensive to access. Gavin wouldn’t have the funds.”

  “What if it was Templar tech? What if it was something your team dragged out of the tomb?”

  Kavanaugh had a moment when he considered the possibility, but the truth was obvious: “Nobody knows how Templar tech worked.”

  “Vezali could probably figure it out,” Raena said. “She can make almost anything work.”

  “You’re flattering me,” the tentacled girl said.

  “That doesn’t make it less true,” Raena answered.

  “Okay,” Kavanaugh interrupted, “let’s say you’re right: Gavin has a Templar time machine and somehow got it to work. What is he trying to do?”

  “Go back in time and rescue me. He’s trying to save me from having to hunt down Thallian and his family. He’s trying to keep me with him.”

  The stunning narcissism of that statement silenced Kavanaugh. He looked to Vezali, but she was calmly sipping her xyshin through a straw. Finally, he asked, “Why would he keep doing it over and over?”

  “Because there is no happily ever after for us. I’m older now, wiser hopefully, and a lot less quick on the trigger. Unfortunately, every time Gavin freaks out one of my younger selves, she panics and kills him. That was how I dealt with pretty much everyone while I was on the run. It’s amazing to me now, looking back, that I didn’t kill him from the get-go on Nizarrh. Or I didn’t kill you and Doc and Skyler. Or Ariel on the Arbiter … I was a frightened little girl. The only way I knew to protect myself was to do what Thallian taught me: strike first and leave your enemies too shattered to return fire.”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute. If Gavin really is going back in time and trying to right things to be with you, why wouldn’t he keep going to the same time? Why would he hop all around? If he’d already been in a specific time and things didn’t work out, why wouldn’t he keep coming back to the same point in time? Why wouldn’t he keep redoing the same moment until he got it right?”

  “Maybe he can’t. Maybe he can’t interfere with himself. Or maybe, once he’s dead in a certain timeline, he can’t come back from the dead. He’s erased on that timeline, going forward.”

  Kavanaugh had another drink. Damn, he hated the hyper-sweet kids’ liquor. He wasn’t sure why he’d let her suggest it. If they were going to be imagining Gavin as a time-traveling super villain, Kavanaugh really wanted to be drinking something much stronger. And probably more bitter.

  “You know this all sounds crazy, right?”

  Raena clenched her teeth in a smile. “It is crazy. It’s making me crazy. But that doesn’t make it less real.”

  “All right. So let’s say Gavin has a time machine. He’s traveling back in time to rescue you. Why is he concentrating on the window of time between when you ran away from Thallian until you got off of Kai? Why doesn’t he buy you from the slavers before Ariel’s family gets you?”

  “Actually, he tried that. I was eleven. I strangled him after I caught him peeping at me.”

  Kavanaugh was so aghast that it took him a moment to come up with another question. “Why doesn’t he go back to your childhood?”

  “I don’t know, Tarik. I’m trying to figure this out from inside the middle of it. Maybe he can only go to times and places that he knows something specific about. Gavin knows when I was born—he’d seen my birth record—but he would have had to find my mom, who was in hiding with a group of Humans First! terrorists. We were always on the move. I never went to school. I don’t even know where all we lived before my mother sent me away. I couldn’t go back in time and find myself. Did you ever tell him about dropping me off on Barraniche? The where and when of it? He knew when you opened the tomb, so he could be there. He knew when the attack was coming on Kai, so he could head it off. He knew when he’d rescued me from the Arbiter, so he could show up a little earlier than he had the last time and s
pring me. Ariel probably told him when her dad bought me from the Viridians. ”

  “So, wait … If Gavin is really changing the past, wouldn’t our present be wiped out? Wouldn’t we all be switched over to a new timeline and continue on there? Why would we remember how things used to be at all?”

  “I think you and I and Ariel, we’re all continuing on our original path. I think the dreams signal when something is being changed, when time splits off from the track we’re on.”

  “Why would we dream about them?”

  “I think they’re like bubbles in the stream of time. I think that when the dreams wake us, the bubbles pop. Time has been changed, but we’re snapped back to our original lives. And the new timeline goes on with our mirror selves in it, none the wiser.”

  “We need to be drinking more,” Kavanaugh groaned.

  “The whole crew probably needs to be drinking more,” Vezali said. “This is starting to make a scary amount of sense.”

  “It is?” Raena asked, surprised.

  “Coni and Mellix have been researching the Messiah drug. What you’re describing is how it was theorized to have worked.”

  “What’s the Messiah drug?” Kavanaugh asked.

  “Coni probably knows more about it than I do,” Raena told him.

  “Mellix knows the most,” Vezali corrected. “Maybe he’ll meet us in the galley and tell us about it.”

  There was a moment of awkward silence, then Vezali added, “If you fall asleep, Raena, we’ll hustle you back in here.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “So you want to be locked up?” Kavanaugh asked. That might have been the most difficult thing he’d been asked to believe yet.

  “I don’t want to hurt anyone. I was sleepwalking the other day and it freaked me out. I want them to keep me from doing any harm to them, myself, or the ship.”

  Mykah opened the door from the outside. “Come on down to the galley so Mellix and Coni can fill us all in.”

  Mykah had put the coffee on. The warm smell of it filled the room as it brewed. Raena took the center of the bench along the wall. Kavanaugh slid in beside her. She was amused. He was always more comfortable with his back against a wall, even if it meant sitting next to a serial murderer who had sleepwalking hallucinations. Being a veteran was funny that way.