by Shutt, Tom
“Hi there,” he said, his lips spreading in a vulpine smile. The red curls of his hair stood out sharply against his black clothes. You look fantastic, she heard him rehearse in his head. A moment later, his mouth caught up to his brain.
“Thank you, Sam,” she said, smiling at the compliment. “You’re always such a sweetie.” She stood in the doorframe another moment, letting his eyes drink in all that they could, before stepping aside and waving him in.
“Sorry I’m late,” he explained, walking as far as the kitchen before turning to face her. “I was having drinks with a friend and—”
Alex cut him off as she planted her lips upon his. They were still cold from being outside and tasted like cheap beer, but she didn’t care. His body, too, was cold, but she would soon fix that. Sam’s brain was still processing the comment about his friend, but she pushed away the name and the thought from her mind. It was background noise that she didn’t need to hear right now. A second later, she felt his primal urges rise to the surface, and she found herself pushed up against the wall.
“I needed this,” she sighed, moving to work the leather jacket from his shoulders.
“What kind of gentleman would I be to keep my lady waiting any longer?”
He thinks he’s terribly clever, doesn’t he? She pushed him away, down the hallway toward her room. “Has anyone ever told you that you talk too much?”
Chapter Three
True to his word, Greg had left a Coke in the freezer.
Unfortunately, the timing had made it so the bottle was fully frozen by the time Brennan was able to recover it. “Hey, Greg,” he called out, putting the plastic bottle on the counter to thaw.
“Yo,” came the dignified response from, of all places, the bathroom.
“I can see you’re busy.” Brennan opened the bottom right cupboard, one which wasn’t casually accessible, to see which of his bottles had been pilfered by his underage nephew. If Greg throwing up in the toilet was the worst of Brennan’s concerns, he could count himself a lucky man.
Oddly, though, nothing seemed out of place. Two dozen bottles of locally brewed beer were still in their unopened box. The bottles of Stoli and Belvedere, both gifts from Sam, still had a fine layer of dust coating their unbroken seals, and the Captain, usually mixed with Coke, was more or less in line with the volume he remembered.
“I thought you didn’t want any of the hard stuff,” Greg said from behind, stepping out of the bathroom. Brown hair threatened to sweep down over his eyes, more representative of a much-needed haircut than any particular fashion choice. He wiped his mouth with one hand, and he shivered in spite of the long-sleeved shirt and sweatpants he was wearing.
Brennan’s knees popped as he rose to his feet. “Just making sure you didn’t get into my stash.”
“You have a stash?”
“Like you didn’t already know,” he said. He raised a skeptical eye and looked pointedly at his nephew’s sweaty brow and wobbling stance. “But you haven’t touched any of these, so what’s up? Are you getting sick?” He reached forward to feel Greg’s forehead, but the younger man retreated.
“I’m fine,” he said. “You know how it is when the temperature starts to drop. It’s probably just a flu or something, and I’m the first to catch it.”
False.
Brennan grunted noncommittally. His nephew was a recovering addict. Chamalla copycats had flooded the streets at half the price. Brennan was rarely home to keep watch over him. It didn’t take an enormous effort to connect the dots, and he knew an easy way to confirm his suspicions.
“Sam mentioned he might be catching something, too,” Brennan said, rubbing his chin. “He said his body was burning up; he could barely stand to keep his jacket on, even when we were outside.” The words followed each other like ducklings in a row, the lie coalescing as easily as dew drops on a cool morning.
“I feel the same thing,” Greg said. He was rubbing at his arm, same as he had been coming out of the bathroom.
“You should get out of that long-sleeved shirt, then, and put something lighter on.”
Greg shook his head. “No, no, that wouldn’t be a good idea.” His eyes darted up; they were bloodshot, with a hint of dark bags starting to form beneath the heavy lids. “It’s still cold out, you know. I don’t want to catch something worse by being exposed like that.”
Brennan sighed. “All right, look, here’s the deal. I know you’re using, and I know you’re hurting from it right now.” He extended a hand. “Let me help you.”
Greg continued to shake, but it seemed beyond his control. He nodded jerkily and moved to sit down on the couch. Brennan sat next to him and rolled up Greg’s right sleeve; the skin was clear, except for an extremely faded square-shaped scar that was only really visible because he knew where to look. When Leviathan had been active, their Chamalla patches had produced hallucinations and a strong addiction to the drug, but some other ingredients had been responsible for slowly burning away at the skin of the application zone.
Hesitantly, Brennan moved on to the other sleeve. Three-quarters of the way up, the shirt material peeled rather than rolled away from the skin, and he had to force his stomach not to rebel. The skin all around the patch was like an open sore, oozing clear pus and blood even as the patch pumped something black and toxic into Greg’s system. Brennan started to lift the patch away, but Greg yelped out in pain; Brennan had to hold his arm to keep him from recoiling away entirely.
“I can’t get it off!” Greg sobbed. “That’s what I was trying to do in the bathroom, before you got home. This thing, it’s—it’s bad, real bad.”
“What the hell were you thinking?” Brennan was more exasperated than angry. Clean for just over three months, somehow his nephew had fallen off the wagon, this time with an even worse concoction flowing through his veins.
“It’s going to sound stupid,” he mumbled, looking anywhere else but Brennan’s eyes.
“You can trust me. Whatever it is, I won’t get mad. I just want to help.”
“It’s like—” He stopped to rub at his eyes and wipe across his nose with his free hand. “I just wanted to feel it again, you know?”
“Feel what again?”
“The fever dreams,” Greg said wistfully. “I felt like I could do anything, because I could see everything. The past, the future…it’s hard to explain. Did you ever wish you had a superpower as a child?”
Brennan shook his head. If he were honest with himself, he might admit that he already did have a superpower. But these days, it was beginning to feel more like a curse than a blessing.
“To have that kind of sureness about something,” Greg continued, “is so liberating. And I can do some good with it, too! I helped find Detective Bishop, right? You couldn’t have solved it without me!”
That was exactly the problem. While Bishop had been grateful for the rescue attempt, just exactly how Brennan had learned of her location was still suspect. He had reported it as an anonymous tip, but he knew Sam suspected something, his outward nature notwithstanding. It seemed everyone was playing it close to the vest these days.
“So you were thinking…what? You’d get the visions again if you relapsed into patches?”
“Relapsed,” Greg scoffed. “You make it sound like I did it for the fix.”
“Didn’t you?” Brennan asked. He gingerly lifted a bit more of the patch, exposing more afflicted skin in the process. His nephew inhaled sharply. “I wouldn’t blame you if that’s the case, but I need to know.”
“No, Uncle Arty.” To his credit, Greg looked him straight in the eye as he answered. “I only wanted to be special again, to have visions like I did before. Without that, I don’t want the patches.”
Truth.
Brennan grunted. “Here, hold this up,” he said, passing the lifted side of the patch to Greg. He went to the kitchen and soaked a washcloth under warm water, then returned to the couch. “You said ‘patches,’ plural. Where did you apply the others?” he aske
d, pinching the raised patch between his fingers again.
Greg reached to the hem of his shirt. “Mostly on my chest and—” He cut off in a howl of pain as Brennan ripped the remainder of the patch from his arm and quickly pressed the damp cloth against the open wound. Greg swore a steady stream of expletives as Brennan went to toss the toxic patch in the trash.
“Just like ripping off a Band-Aid,” he said, cleaning his hands thoroughly in the sink. His fingertips just barely started to tingle where they’d brushed the patch. “I want to get you in to see a doctor tomorrow, too, and have him look at that arm.”
“Whatever.”
He shut off the tap and dried his hands. “Greg, listen to me. Maybe the patches were responsible for what you saw, but maybe they weren’t.”
“You think people are just born special?”
Brennan couldn’t reveal his own power. Not yet, at any rate. He had already told Greg about his past experience as a Sleeper, and his nephew had taken it surprisingly well. He could count the number of confidants privy to that secret on a single hand, and those others had all been Sleepers themselves. But the gap between being a Sleeper and being…well, something else, was still too big to bridge. Sleepers were generally accepted as boogeymen in Odols, walking the fine line between covert operatives and figures from folklore. He had been one of them, too, a long time ago. As far as Brennan knew, he was the only person who possessed a talent above and beyond a Sleeper’s standard set of skills.
Until Greg, that is.
“I think you might have a gift,” he said. He carefully kept excitement from creeping into his voice. “It’s not unheard of, after all. They have all those shows now about superhuman strength, endurance, telepathy—”
“Yeah, but all of those people are fakes. It’s scripted, everyone knows that.”
“Really? The psychic boy wonder is now arguing against the existence of psychics?”
That got a grudging smile out of his nephew. “I’m not—No, I’m not saying that they don’t exist, necessarily. But what are the odds, really, that I’m one of them?”
If it’s genetic, the chances are far greater than you think. “Anything’s possible,” Brennan said with a shrug. “How is your arm looking?”
Greg peeked under the washcloth; his face paled a few shades. “It’s, uh, not pretty.”
“Do you feel anything from the patch?”
“Nothing good. Next to Chamalla, this stuff is shit.”
“Eloquent,” Brennan said dryly. “Watch that mouth of yours.”
“But you curse all the time!”
“Yes. Yes I do. I also hunt down killers and spend more nights awake than not.” I also used to stalk the sleeping minds of nightmarish criminals. I was a hero—and a monster. “How much do you really want to be like me?”
Greg swallowed hard and looked away. His nephew didn’t know all of the details of his past work, but nobody on the street had anything good to say about Sleepers. If Odols was a city of legends, Sleepers were the demons who hunted in the shadows.
“I’m going to bed,” Greg said. He moved quickly to the bathroom and shut the door behind him, leaving Brennan alone with his thoughts. And his phone. He felt the lure of sleep tugging on him, but he had to make a couple calls first.
First, he dialed the precinct, with an extension code to the basement. It rang eight times before he hung up. Apparently, Wally didn’t believe in keeping voicemail. His apartment was less than a block away—practically across the street. But if Wally wasn’t picking up, he wasn’t in the office.
Probably sleeping, like a normal person, he thought, scrolling down through his contacts list.
The second number also went unanswered, but he didn’t expect his doctor to be in this late at night. However, she at least believed in voicemail, and he left a message to schedule a morning appointment tomorrow for Greg.
He could hear the water stop flowing as Greg finished brushing his teeth; it wouldn’t be long before his nephew reemerged to go to sleep on the pullout sofa bed. Brennan didn’t need an awkward, pre-sleep conversation about his boogeyman past. He nearly had his bedroom door closed when Greg appeared, his face peeking out from the bathroom.
“Uncle Arty?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you,” Greg said, looking slightly uncomfortable. “God, that sounds corny. But you’re all I’ve got now, you know?”
Brennan smiled. Despite the upbringing he’d had and the dangerous road that he occasionally walked, his nephew was still a caring young man. “Love you too, kid,” he said. “Get some sleep.”
Chapter Four
Arthur Brennan.
Alex woke with a start. Her whole body shivered with fear, though she had no rational reason to explain it. Despite the absence of clothes, she wasn’t cold; far from it, she felt far too warm from the heavy bedspread and the snoring man beside her, whose body was a living radiator. Her legs were tangled in the silk sheets, and she struggled silently against them until she could free herself from the bed.
The air was deliciously cool against her skin. She stretched with both her arms and her mind. She touched dozens of people, their minds humming as they dreamed. Sleeping was a dull activity for most, as far as Alex was concerned. Their dreams never reached anything close to exhilarating, and she wondered sometimes if she was the only person who was truly alive, truly aware of how precious her time was. Her father certainly didn’t, but he had good reason to disregard time.
No, it wasn’t the cold that had awoken her. She tried to calm herself, to make the goose bumps on her arms disappear, but whatever had disturbed her sleep was still affecting her on some level. She walked to the closet and wrapped a long white bathrobe around herself.
Every light was off, but she didn’t need them to get around her apartment. Eyes wide open, she pretended that she was a mountain lion, a predator perfectly at ease with the dark. After all, what woman didn’t secretly wish to be a cougar one day?
Alex glanced at the kitchen clock; it was just past two in the morning, and the building was absolutely dead. The white robe swished around her legs as she walked out the front door. She was in the middle of a long hallway which continued for a long while in both directions. She continued to probe, but everybody on her floor was sound asleep. Her footsteps made no noise on the padded carpeting on her way to the elevator. The doors slid open with minimal creaking, and the usual ping that sounded the elevator’s arrival was subdued at night, so it would likely go unnoticed. But now which way to go?
A pressure weighed on the top of her head like an oncoming migraine. She lifted her chin toward the ceiling, and the weight shifted to her forehead. Up it is. Alex pushed the button for the top floor, just to be sure.
She leaned against the metal handholds as the elevator ascended. Almost immediately, the pressure on her skull doubled in intensity, and pretty soon she was white-knuckling the railing.
Arthur Brennan.
She heard the voice more clearly now, and she trembled as its familiar aura touched her mind. It was definitely the same thought that had woken her, though she had no idea what it meant. More so, though, she was disturbed by the person the thought was originating from.
As a young girl, she had accepted that every thought carries emotions, and every emotion radiated a color of some kind. Pleasant thoughts, ones of compassion and love, were royal blue. Violet or purple often accompanied envious thoughts, which were almost always tinged with a little greedy green as well.
The thought that carried that name, Arthur Brennan, was coated with deep, blood red dripping in black malice.
It was utterly fascinating. Something new, she thought. The residents of Harcour Towers had always been greedy and self-absorbed, and those attributes rarely amounted to much thinking. It took someone with a real degree of passion and fury, not to mention a heaping amount of brainpower, for Alex to hear them from so far away.
Through trial and error, she determined that the voice was coming from the s
ixteenth floor. She didn’t dare leave the elevator, not now at least. The last thing she needed was to confront a nigh-homicidal maniac with attachment issues. There was little variation in the brainwave activity; whoever it was, they were single-mindedly obsessed with Arthur Brennan.
“Whoever the hell that is,” she muttered, jabbing the down button repeatedly. The psychic pressure was too much, and it was getting to her. The boring humdrum background noise of a thousand plebeians thinking common thoughts? No problem. But this madness was something else, something she couldn’t handle right now with little sleep and no coffee.
If Sam stirred at the noise made by her return to the apartment, Alex never saw it; he was still sound asleep when she crawled back under the covers and curled up against his comforting warmth. With a dozen floors between her and the belligerent thought, her mind was much quieter, and she embraced sleep as tightly as a familiar lover.
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“Rise and shine, sleepyhead,” said Sam, a subjective millisecond later, as he tore open the wall-length curtains.
There he goes again, she thought, thinking he’s clever. Blinded by the sudden light, she tracked his thoughts.
Sensory thoughts, like a lot of other things, went completely unnoticed by normal people. The brain processed too much information in any given day to assign much importance to one sense, so most people took it for granted that they had an audiovisual suite come standard with their bodies. But each one of those impulses from the eyes, every decibel picked up by the ears, even the slightest sense of touch on the hairs of their hands, was translated into a thought the brain could understand. Background noise. And what they could see, Alex could see.