The Archer

by Abigail Roux

  a low, plaintive growl that ended up sounding more like a miserable howl as he

  pushed Brandt against the wall once more in disgust and turned away.

  “We have to move again,” he groaned as he began throwing things into his

  bag.

  XIII.

  AFTER Connecticut, Remy and Nikolaus made their way to Canada, purchasing a

  map of the country as they got further north and poking it full of holes as well as they travelled over the country. Remy amused himself with teaching Nikolaus as they

  went, and Nikolaus vowed never to ride a motorbike through Canada in January ever again so many times that Remy lost count.

  Remy became particularly melancholy in Toronto, telling Nikolaus that

  being there brought back memories of Shawn, and he wondered how the others were

  faring, and did Nikolaus want the last of his pie?

  It was also in Toronto that their pursuers finally caught up to them. It was

  then that Remy’s true genius began to shine through. His methods of evasion were

  unique and inventive, and the calm, almost nonchalant manner in which he faced

  almost certain death was quite admirable. Nikolaus began trying to emulate Remy’s example; he’d soon gotten quite good at the whole business.

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  From Canada they followed the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico,

  stopping and sidetracking wherever the Holey Map told them to, and then followed

  the coastline until they crossed over the border in Texas. Mexico proved to be more trouble than it was worth, and Remy found himself wondering why Shawn liked to

  work down there so much. They crossed the border again, local style– wading

  through the Rio Grande– then it was back up into the States once more and on to

  Marietta, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta.

  They refrained from accessing the files there, hoping for a respite from the

  chase, and instead holed up and analyzed the information they’d collected. So far, they had very little. Remy sat and stared at his crispy little piece of paper for hours during their various pit stops, but had rarely written anything on it. When he finally passed it to Nikolaus over Chinese takeout one night Nikolaus expressed his

  frustration with their lack of progress by teaching Remy several interesting German curses.

  “You still think the key is embedded in it somehow?” Nikolaus finally asked

  him in frustration.

  “I have no idea. I’ve stared at that fucking thing for so long I can’t even

  make any sense of what I’ve writ, much less the code,” Remy responded with a

  careless shrug. “I’ve been wracking my brain searching for something that could

  provide key codes but would be mobile enough for his operatives to take with them.

  Books, movies, even music. Well-known manuscripts… what about archery? Are

  there any, like… archery manuals?” he asked as he reached across the table and

  snagged a fortune cookie.

  “I’m sure there are,” Nikolaus responded absently as he stared at the

  message.

  “Fuck it. They’d still need some way of finding them!” Remy huffed as got

  up to go throw away the take-out boxes.

  Several hours later and they both rested their heads on the table morosely

  and stared at the piece of paper.

  “Maybe he’s high when he writes these,” Remy suggested. “Maybe you have

  to be… I dunno… under the influence to be able to read them.”

  Nikolaus raised his head and stared at his companion.

  “You really think he’d order his operatives to go on a binger right before

  receiving their orders?” he asked incredulously, a smile playing at his lips.

  “Maybe not. But it’s a good excuse to get plastered, non?”

  That led to their first trip to the liquor store down the street from their hotel.

  After two bottles of vodka shared between the two of them, they decided that it

  probably wasn’t going to help them crack the message.

  “We have two options,” Nikolaus murmured seriously as Remy bit his lip to

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  keep from snickering at him. “We can either keep frustrating ourselves with this for a few more hours until we’re too tired to fuck each other, and then get dressed again and go for more vodka. Or we can forget the message, go get the liquor now, and then fuck all night. Your choice.”

  Remy didn’t display his shock at Nikolaus’s pronouncement. In the time

  they’d spent together, Nikolaus had not expressed an ounce of interest in sex. Not with Remy, anyway. They’d been moving nonstop, staying permanently exhausted

  and in fear of being caught. Remy supposed that this, their first real night of feeling safe, was a logical time for Nikolaus to finally bring it up. It would be a good way of releasing all the pent-up stress. And the knowledge that Shawn was probably fucking Brandt every time he managed not to blow something up went a long way to

  assuaging any guilt.

  “Why do I have to make all the tough decisions?” he sighed dramatically.

  “Closing your eyes and jabbing at a map is not a tough decision!” Nikolaus

  shouted as he began to laugh.

  Remy laughed as well and stood up, stretching his wiry muscles languidly.

  “Vodka first,” he decided with a mischievous grin. He leaned over the table and

  placed both palms flat on the tabletop. “Then you can fuck me ’til the sun comes up,”

  he murmured with a glint in his black eyes. Nikolaus merely grinned at him.

  With that, they made their precarious way back to the liquor store and were

  miraculously sold another two bottles of liquor. It was in getting back to the hotel that they ran into problems.

  When they made it to their room– and had checked the room number three

  times– they couldn’t get in.

  Nikolaus leaned against the wall and snickered as Remy pressed his forehead

  against the door and repeatedly ran their card key thingy through. The red light

  blinked morosely at them with each attempt.

  “Do you’ve it downside up?” Nikolaus asked. Remy snickered and hissed

  drunkenly as he flipped the thing every which way it would go, but to no avail.

  A clang in the stairwell near their room drew Remy’s attention, and he

  stopped his movements and cocked his head to listen intently. Someone was climbing the stairs.

  Remy turned to look at Nikolaus, who’d tensed as well. He licked his lips

  and looked around the hallway, cursing himself for allowing them both to get so

  drunk. They’d left their weaponry inside the room. All he had on him was a small

  pocketknife.

  “Come on,” he hissed, taking Nikolaus’s hand and tugging him down the

  hall. He shoved Nikolaus into the alcove that housed the drink and snack machines and then went to the decorative hall table. He grabbed the flowers and yanked them out of their vase, then dumped the water on the floor as he glanced back at the

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  stairwell door. No one had appeared yet.

  He moved faster, taking the empty vase and wrapping it in his shirt hastily

  before pressing it hard against the mirror that hung over the table. The mirror cracked and splintered, and Remy dug out a piece of the broken mirror and then moved back into the alcove, the flowers still in his hand.

  Nikolaus stood behind him, breathing unevenly as Remy used the mirror to

  peer around the corner.

  The stairwell door opened and a man stepped out into the hallway slowly,
>
  peering left and right as he held his wrist up to his mouth.

  Remy held up his hand to Nikolaus as another man followed the first out of

  the stairwell. Down the hallway, the elevator dinged to announce its arrival.

  “Hallway clear,” the first man murmured into his wrist. “They must have

  gotten into the room. Moving in,” he informed whoever was listening as he began to move toward Remy and Nikolaus’s room. “Copy,” he whispered in response to some

  unheard order.

  The man pulled out a key card and slid it through the lock. It turned green on

  the first try, and Remy cursed to himself. He should have seen the trap. He had used it himself in the past. Killing someone in their own hotel room was like child’s play in a moderately priced hotel. In the movies, you saw men using advanced gadgets as they tried to gain entry, wiring them to the locks and letting the digital readout find the code and unlock the door. But that was mostly theatrics.

  All you had to do to gain entrance to someone’s room in a place like this was

  go to the front desk and tell them you locked yourself out. They would ask you for your room number, you give it to them, et voilà, your keys would open their doors and their keys no longer work.

  The elevator doors opened, and Remy pushed Nikolaus further into the

  alcove. They couldn’t hide. They would have to fight their way out. And Remy knew the fucking hotel would be surrounded. He looked around desperately, and his eyes landed on the courtesy phone beside the ice machine.

  He reached for it hastily and watched with his mirror as one more agent

  made his way warily down the hall. The front desk answered his call, and he spoke in a hurried whisper, his accent heavily southern. “Yeah, uh, I’m up here in 407 and there’s these two guys out by the ice machine?” he drawled in an annoyed voice. “I think they’re fuckin’ or somethin’. That’s right, two guys,” he said in apparent disbelief, “right out in the hallway! I got kids up here!” he whispered angrily.

  The flustered woman stuttered a response, and Remy hung up the phone as

  the last agent got closer. The first man had entered their room and was even now

  searching through it and realizing they weren’t in it, the second stood guard at the stairwell as the third blocked the way to the elevators.

  Remy took in a deep breath and let it out slowly, then stepped into the

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  middle of the hallway, right in front of the third man. The agent raised his gun in alarm, and Remy held out the flowers to him with a cock of his head.

  “Allergies can be a bitch,” he said to the agent as he wagged the flowers in

  his face, then jammed the heel of his hand through the flowers and into the man’s nose. The crunch practically echoed in the silent hallway and the ruined flowers

  fluttered to the ground and stuck to the blood pouring from his face as he stumbled back. Remy grabbed him by his wrist, spinning him around as if they were

  performing some morbid tango, and he wrapped his arm around his neck and held

  him as the guard at the stairwell opened fire.

  The silenced shots caught the agent in the chest, and he and Remy both

  stumbled back slightly with the impact. The shots did little damage, though, thumping against the Kevlar vest the man wore. He groaned and struggled weakly, and Remy’s hand tightened on the man’s chin as he jerked his arm to the side.

  He crumpled to the ground, his neck broken, and left Remy without a human

  shield. Remy cursed and tossed the piece of jagged mirror in his hand, underhanded as if it were a horseshoe. It caught the other agent in the neck. He reached up and touched the piece of glass with wide, startled eyes. The spurting blood oozed through his fingers, and he stared at Remy in shock as he stumbled through the door and

  disappeared back into the stairwell.

  The last man, the one who had been searching their room, raised his gun

  from the cover of the doorway. Remy sidestepped and snatched the vase from the hall table. He turned and tossed it, throwing it like a baseball pitcher, and hit the man’s gun hand to send the weapon flying.

  Remy was already moving, and before the man could draw his backup Remy

  was on him. One swift kick to the Adam’s apple was all it took and the man went

  down in a heap.

  “Niko,” Remy hissed as he pounced on the body and began dragging it into

  the room. Nikolas crept out into the hall, and Remy hurriedly instructed him to get into the room and gather everything they had. Nikolaus hurried to obey.

  They dragged the bodies into their room, hastily wiped down the blood in the

  stairwell, and then ran down the stairs to the fourth floor.

  Remy yanked Nikolaus into the fourth floor alcove, and they hurriedly

  stashed their documents behind the ice machine. Then Remy pressed Nikolaus against the wall, unzipping his fly as they both panted for breath after their mad dash down the stairs. He dropped to his knees and enveloped Nikolaus’s cock with his mouth, and he held Nikolaus’s hip firmly with the other. Nikolaus groaned and let his head fall back against the wall as he tangled his fingers in Remy’s curly hair automatically.

  “Is the intention to get caught?” Nikolaus asked in a strangled voice.

  Remy merely hummed in response and the vibrations rippled though

  Nikolaus’s body. Surprisingly, he’d understood the message. They had just spent the

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  last month living in almost constant fear of being killed; getting caught giving a guy a blowjob in the hallway of a Holiday Inn was not going to faze Remy much. Plus, they would be assured a police escort out of the hotel.

  They spent the night in the Fulton County lockup for their trouble, with

  several large, inebriated men who were curious as to how two such ‘pretty boys’ had ended up in jail on public lewdness charges.

  When the guards finally came to break up the brawl that ensued, three of

  their cellmates were in various stages of injury, and Remy was close to choking the life out of the fourth man as the fifth cowered in the corner. After that, they were given their own little solitary cells in which to sober up, and after posting their own bail in the morning, they promptly retrieved their things and disappeared once more.

  A joyously proclaimed “So much for keeping under the radar,” was the only

  comment Remy ever offered on the experience.

  XIV.

  THIAGO wondered how the others were faring as he stared at the dark ceiling. He

  was amazed at how quickly he’d become attached to the other five men. Thiago rarely became attached to anyone; what had made him suddenly turn full circle and actually start caring now? Thiago didn’t know, but it had happened regardless.

  He liked the feeling.

  At the same time, though, he hated it. He hated worrying and wondering. He

  hated not knowing how the two younger men were faring in their deadly game of cat and mouse, and he missed the camaraderie that Shawn’s presence had offered. Hell, he even missed Brandt and his damned explosives.

  Carl was a good man, though, and Thiago was glad for his company. Thiago

  didn’t know where Remy and Nikolaus had ended up, but he was fairly certain he and Carl had traveled the farthest distance of the three groups, if not the longest time.

  Clearing the money out of the two hides Remy had directed them to, one in

  Washington, D.C. and another in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had been easy enough.

  Thiago had wondered about Remy’s sanity when they had finally found the address in Louisiana.

  “Bergeron’s Storage?” Carl read incredulously as they pulled up to the little

  store-it-yourself establishment. “He’s got to be kidding, right?”

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sp; Thiago simply shook his head and muttered, “Guess it’s a common name.”

  There had been close to $200,000 stashed there amongst the cushions of an

  old sofa and the drawers of an old armoire, and any doubt as to Remy’s mental

  stability in Thiago’s mind was wiped away. He was definitely crazy.

  The real travel came because Carl was based in Russia, and they’d been

  forced to fly all the way to St. Petersburg to retrieve his stash of weaponry. The tricky

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  part was getting the damn things out of the country. Carl had all the papers required to transport them, saying that he was a dealer heading for a show in Los Angeles, but there had been a lot of unusual weaponry that raised a lot of eyebrows. It was also a bitch to move– physically– with just the two of them.

  Now they were in Los Angeles at one of the more high-end hotels, cooling

  their heels and awaiting a call from Remy or Shawn. It had taken Carl an entire day, but he’d found a storage unit under the name ‘Travers Storage’ and they stashed the weapons there, snickering to themselves all the while.

  Thiago just hoped Remy lived to hear about it.

  XV.

  CARL stared out the window at the haze that hovered over Los Angeles. He pressed

  his lips together tightly and glanced back at Thiago, who was spread eagled on the bed and drifting in and out of sleep.

  It was not in Carl’s makeup to worry. It went against his training to brood

  over a problem he could do nothing to fix. But the ice he’d been accused of being carved from in the past was beginning to melt, and he found himself unable to

  completely relax as concern for his companions constantly assaulted him.

  He ran a hand through his hair and let his foot bounce restlessly.

  He hadn’t thought he was ready to get out of this business. Now, though, he

  wasn’t so sure if he still had the nerve to watch the people he cared for lose their lives around him. And lives would be lost, that much he did know.

  XVI.

  SHAWN sat staring morosely at the television in the cheap hotel room in Toronto. He despised being in Toronto with Brandt– a city that had been the backdrop to several important events for himself and Remy– when it should have been Remy. He