Before he had realized what he had done, his hand was on the doorknob and he pulling it open so hard he thought it might come off its hinges. His legs drove him through on automatic, and his blood was fuel doped with the nitrous additive of rage and fear. Beyond the door yawned what was once a factory floor; vault-like and braced with vast steel beams, the massive room beyond was ribbed with catwalks that reached ever skyward over the trap-draped corpses of forgotten machines. It was the quintessential set of horror movies and of old science fiction, an abandoned industrial cemetery repurposed for whatever task the Duwamish boys had settled on. Gray didn’t care. His attention was not on the décor, but on the sight that assailed his eyes as he slid onto the floor, a sight that drove the beast up and through the flagging ice of the Solunex and roaring into the world once more.
Angie lay on the concrete floor, her hair cut short and wearing something dark and tight-fitting over her lean frame. Sitting on her stomach, pinning her arms with his knees, James Black-Eyes stared down at her with empty sockets burning like pits of black fire. He wore a long, glossy black coat over his scarred skin and biker shorts, and one powerful hand was cuffed tightly over her mouth. His expression was one of horrifying amusement as Gray approached the two of them, mouth yellowed dog fangs bared in a grin. Gray kept the Alfa trained on Black-Eyes’s tattooed head.
“That’s far enough, Detective,” Black-Eyes said, his tone as wicked as his expression.
“I’ve been hearing that plenty tonight,” said Gray, keeping the gun leveled at the horrible man. “Get off of her, Black-Eyes.” He looked at Angie, saw her face graying with fear as she looked between the two men. “And take your hand off her mouth, nice and slow.”
“I don’t think so.” Black-Eyes didn’t look at him, but Gray had the distinct feeling that he was looking straight at him nonetheless. “How many of my family did you kill tonight, getting here?”
“Only the one, I think,” said Gray. He kept his voice firm but flat, trying so very hard not to let the panic and treacherous joy that flooded him upon seeing Angie leak out from under the surface. “And that was in self-defense. The Pacifiers are using riot gas and tranquilizers to keep your people down.”
Black-Eyes let out a soft grunt. “You’re a soft touch, Detective,” he said. “If it were me, I’d have killed anyone who got in my way.”
Gray’s hand was slick on the grip of the rifle; he squeezed it anew, feeling the rough plastic checks bite into his palm. It reassured him, kept him on focus over the strengthening hurricane of conflicting emotion that was churning inside of him. “Don’t think I wasn’t tempted,” he said, and the rest of his words died in his throat as Angie let out a muffled cry.
“I can only imagine.” Black-Eyes squeezed her face now, causing her paling skin to puff out in slight folds around the top of his large hands. “Do you know why she is here, this woman? This Jacqueline Villalobos?” He laughed, dark and deep; the sound set Gray’s teeth on edge. “Do you know what that means, the name? ‘Town of wolves.’ Appropriate, considering our fair city. Don’t you think?”
Gray swallowed hard. He had no idea what the hell the man was getting at, nor did he know why he hadn’t shot Black-Eyes in the face with a full-auto burst. His fingers just wouldn’t work, not yet. “I guess, yes,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me what this is all about, James? I thought that she hired you guys to help her.”
More dark laughter escaped Black-Eyes’s fanged mouth. “A favor for a favor,” he said. “She pointed us toward the man who would damage our reputation, the German who set his little slut on all those people. We killed him. And then, tonight, she called on us to help her escape from the city – which we were only too happy to do, considering. But there’s more to the story, of course. Do you know how she came to learn about our methods, Detective? How to contact us?”
“No.” Gray was hard at work trying to will his hands to move, to squeeze the trigger and end the whole thing in a blast of blood and thunder. “I assumed it was because of me, though. I told her about you.”
“Ahhh, yes,” said Black-Eyes. “She did hear the name from you. And then she came, and she would drop bits of information about the German when she came. As time passed, I noticed that my own family, one by one, began to turn away from me and toward her. Not all of them, of course, and not in gross degrees, but in subtle ways. Subtlety is something that people think men like me tend to ignore.” He reached down with his other hand and stroked Angie’s brow; she stiffened under his rejoined touch as if it burned. “Then the affected started to become psychotic. I’ve already had to kill a few of them.” Black-Eyes shook his head. “She has a secret, Detective. She…affects people. She attempted to affect me, but it didn’t work. I wonder why that is.”
He’s going to kill her, whispered the beast inside of him, straining to break the bonds of his frozen hands. You cannot let him do that. Even through the mask, he thought he caught a slight hint of cinnamon in the air. “Get up off her, James,” he said, hearing his neutrality start to break. “I don’t have a quarrel with you. You can walk out of here without anyone knowing you were even here – but I’m not leaving without her. You have to hear me on that.”
“I hear you, yes.” Black-Eyes rolled Angie’s head left and right, very slowly, as if he were examining every millimeter of her pretty face. “But I won’t be getting up anytime soon, I think. I see that you’re wearing a mask, Detective. I take it that you’ve been affected by this creature also?”
Gray bristled at the question. “It isn’t important,” he said. “I’m taking her in. Now get off of her, James, before I–”
Black-Eyes took hold of both sides of Angie’s head. Her mouth, now unmasked, opened wide in a breathless scream. “Help me, Dan,” she cried, “Please! Kill him!”
He would wonder later if it was Angie’s chemicals, or just the sound of a woman’s terror that made him pull the trigger. The Alfa roared again in Gray’s arms, emptying the poor remainder of its magazine and bucking like a spurred horse in time to the jingling of brass falling to the concrete floor. Black-Eyes was lifted off of Angie in a cloud of blood and shredded plastic; the monster’s body fell into a tangled heap by Angie’s own, ringed in red. Gray stared at the body for a long moment, wondering if Black-Eyes were truly dead, before moving to the next item of business.
“Come on,” he said as he reached for Angie’s arm. “We have to get out of here.”
Angie took it, her skin still pale as she pulled herself up to stand unsteadily at his side. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you,” she said as she looked up into his face; her own was reflected in the viewplate of his mask, warped in the corners like something in a funhouse mirror. “He was going to cut me open!”
“Yeah.” He looked down at her; she’d straightened her hair and cut it, the resulting shag making her features look harder, sharper. This way, she barely looked like the woman that he had known. “Are you all right?”
She nodded. “Just a little shaken up.” Her hands found his chest, splaying across them like spiders.
He felt a shiver go through him that was not due to pleasure from her touch. Gray discovered with a shock that a current of revulsion had begun to feed into the emotional mess that surged inside him now. She wasn’t Angie, he knew that. She was…an echo of her, though, enough that the chemical creature that dwelled within his nerves still clamored for her. Love, yes, adoration, certainly – but also the revulsion, the fear, the anger. He stared into her face, into those beautiful green eyes, as the desire to kiss her fought tooth and nail against the desire to kill her for what she’d done to him. She would never again be anything to him but simply…She.
“Jacqueline Villalobos,” he intoned in a voice as cold and distant as if it had been broadcast from the dark side of the moon, “I am placing you under arrest for the murders of Ronald Anderson, Martin Askew, Diego Cuaron, and Klaus Muller, with further charges coming as the investigation continues. You have the right –”
“I know that whoever you’ve been working for will be looking for you,” he said, and his tongue felt numb with the effort of controlling his warring passions as he spoke the words. “You’ll be safe at Central. Our custody is the best place for you to be, Miss Villalobos.”
She was still a moment, during which her fear began to translate into something harsher. The eyes he loved so much narrowed into slits of emerald fire. “Why are you calling me that? How do you even know that name?”
“You have the right to remain silent,” he started again. Inside, forces that warred for supremacy – the loving and the violent, and now the desire for justice – threatened to drive him to his knees as the chemicals, betrayal, and despair smashed at him from all angles like the fronts of many storms. He had to get this done, get her out to Carter, before he came unglued. Before she won.
“Don’t say that! Don’t you fucking say that!” She reached up and tore at his mask, hissing the words as she clawed at the straps; he only stood there, staring at her, paralyzed by the weight of duty and emotion. He should be fighting her, he knew, even as the mask came off and he breathed deeply of that familiar scent. She stared up at him, the mask in her hand, and her eyes softened as she saw the look of resigned desperation on his handsome face.
“Just tell me why,” he whispered. “Tell me why – why them, why me. I have to know.”
She dropped the mask. It clattered to the floor, leaving silence between them in its wake. It had been like so many times before, only now the weight of that silence was oppressive as it settled down upon them both.
She spoke first. “It’s a job,” she said, her voice hurried as if eager to throw the silence off. “It’s like any other kind of espionage – corporate espionage is just as vital and as relevant as that between nations. Look at Germany, huh? A completely corporate nation who’s undergone three hostile takeovers in ten years. Someone like me did that, and I guarantee you it was much nastier.” A sigh rolled through her shoulders. “I was hired to do a job, and when it went wrong I had to cover it up. Nobody who died was innocent; they were all active players.”
“Tell that to Tony Bradstreet.” His mouth was dry, the temperature of his blood steadily descending with every passing word. “What was it all about? What could be so important that someone would commission this…this thing?”
“Control.” She shrugged. “I was hired by a consortium of…interested parties, let’s say. They wanted control over a series of local executives, all of whom fit the proper profile of skin-hunting thrill addicts. I just built a character and went with it.” Another shrug. “It worked like a charm.” She took a step back to look at him.
Gray couldn’t meet her gaze. “And the neurotoxin?”
“More control.” She shook her head. “Potentially permanent. Provided by them. Programmable, exuded by implants under the skin. You need to sample the subject’s genetic material through contact, but…well, that wasn’t hard, considering my approach.” A thin smile lined her lips, like razor wire painted with glossy red nail polish. “Anderson to take video and keep Civil Protection ignorant, Askew to work the video and compile holographic doubles for future purposes. Cuaron gave me…well. What you see here.”
“And Muller to clean up witnesses.” His eyes hardened. “Did you plan that from the beginning, too?”
“No.” She shook her head again, and hugged herself suddenly as if a gale of cold air had blown through the room. “They directed me to Muller once we determined that the toxin wasn’t viable, at least the way it was being used. Once everybody started going nuts, I had to meet him and introduce him to my little working group. I didn’t even need to dose him; he was happy to kill them all. The stuff congealed in the spinal column, that’s what was causing the problem – too much concentration from too many doses in too short a time. Killing them was the only way to clear the evidence.”
He tried to reach for some sense of sanity amid in all of this horror. She was confessing to him all of her sins, in volume if not in detail, and he had never expected any of it. He had never seen it in those beautiful eyes, the eyes of a beautiful predator which he felt himself beginning to love again by small degrees despite the remnant drugs in his system. It was like being lowered slowly into water, knowing that drowning would be assured. “All you had to do was to tell them to get down into position.”
She smiled at him again, though this time she had the decency to look somewhat abashed. “It’s incredible stuff. It really was just a matter of calling them and giving instructions.” Closing the distance again, she reached up to brush the back of her hand against his cheek. “I couldn’t make you do it, though.”
Gray swallowed down bile. “Couldn’t you?”
“No…” She leaned up on her toes, rested her head against his chest. He could smell her in his nostrils, taste her on his tongue, sense her inside of him – it was like it had been when they had made love, when his body was a thing of wires, and every one of them vibrated with the same magnificent energy. “It is what it is, Dan. Like I said, I was hired to do it, and it went wrong. Now I have to run.” She nuzzled him. “Come with me, honey. Protect me.”
He drew a deep, hissing breath. His body trembled with the power that she infused him with, the power which with every passing moment grew stronger in its hold over him. What was left of the Solunex in his system was only staving back what would likely have been an immediate return of control; his hands shook, his eyes brimmed with tears knowing that bondage was swiftly returning. “Protect you,” Gray whispered, and the spent rifle fell out of his hands; she looked up at him and smiled as it clattered to the floor.
“Yes, mi corazon,” she whispered. “Protect me. Protect me like you did from those company bastards.”
And somewhere in the dream-fog of chemical adoration that was drawing over his senses, a light sprang to life – a flame, bright and towering, a pillar of fire in whose roaring he could hear a message coming from the very primordial seat of consciousness within him.
She destroys everything she touches, sang the chorus of mental flame. She will destroy all this, and more.
“I…I will protect you.” The words were ground into the air between gritted teeth, his eyes growing red and streaming with tears of an agony he could not yet name but knew was swift in coming. “I will protect you…”
She smiled at him, and stood up on her toes to kiss him, exultant in her victory. Death took the form of the silenced Henekker, and whispered between them as she blasted him with her lips for the last time. Her eyes grew wide as the bullet found her heart; she sagged on her feet against him, and her blood was warm as it pulsed over her stomach between them, soaking them both. “I will protect you,” Gray sobbed as he caught her in his arms, repeating the words over and over again as he lowered her down like a china sculpture upon the concrete floor. Her eyes never left his; the beloved green staring at him, open wide in shock and disbelief – just as the dead had been confident in her love, so had she been in his subjugation. And they had all been wrong.
“I will protect you,” he said one last time, as he wiped the Henekker clean of prints and laid it into the dead hand of James Black-Eyes. “I will protect you…from yourself.”
They found him cradling her as if he had discovered her dead, raw and shaking and crying like a child. There was no question, because there could be none. His anguish was all too real.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“I still don’t see why you have to go.”
Gray stood with Megan Cinders in the emptiness of his now-former living room. The last of the boxes had been packed, and the moving crew taken them away. All that was left was to lock up. “It’s the only thing that’s going to work,” said Gray
with a shrug. “You know I can’t stay with the company after this. I signed the NDA, made my deal with Administration. It’s time for me to do something else.”
“Six months’ salary and a sterling set of references.” Megan shook her head. “I guess I just figured that you’d ask for something more, considering what they put you through.”
“Well, there’s the Vectra.” Gray took his hand out of the pocket of his jeans and showed her the key cylinder of his old duty car. He’d traded in a lot of things over the last few months – his home, his career. At least he’d get to keep the Vectra. “I got a lot of good memories with that car. And anyway, ‘they’ didn’t put me through much of anything – Carter’s been straight with me. She’s the one who did all this.”
Megan’s face fell at that. “Yeah,” she said quietly. “I’m just so sorry about it all. You were just trying to do your job when you ran into her.”
Gray gave her a weak smile. “No, what I was doing was being a dick who was only interested in career advancement. She dosed me, sure, but I was already going off track when I met her. In a way I almost feel like I should thank her for all of this. It’s shown me what’s important.” He shrugged. “I’m just glad they didn’t get the implants out of her.”
“That was…yeah.” Megan wrinkled her nose. While Gray spent two months in the hospital, sweating out the horrible chemicals that she had put in him and going through a regimen of antipsychotics and psych therapy to deal with the loss, Executive Affairs had attempted to dig the implants out of Angie’s corpse. As it turns out, the system had come out of the Wonderland black markets after all; the Industrial Security Bureau swooped down and took her body, along with everything that the medics had dug out of her, and carted it away. “In the end, though, I think it’s for the best. Carter thought so too, I think.”
“Carter was too busy trying to cover his own ass to care.” Gray grinned at her. “It’s fine, we’re different creatures.”
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