Alex belatedly realized that Eerie had indeed been very quiet on the way to the room, and to think ‘Good for you, Eerie’. Then the Weir released his hold on Alex’s throat and hair, and grabbed him instead by the ears. Alex pounded futilely on his wrists and forearms, but it stung his hands like he was striking wood. Mr. Blue-Tie grinned, and then shook Alex head violently back and forth, until blood gushed from his nose, until he was thoroughly disoriented and crumpled, gasping on the floor. He curled into a ball and lay there, unable to stop the world from spinning or cope with the rushing sound in his head, while the Weir muttered incoherently somewhere above him. Improbably, he heard the sound of someone running a bath. Alex had little time to wonder what was going to happen to him.
At that point, he felt no fear whatsoever.
Mr. Blue-Tie came back from wherever he had gone, and kicked Alex savagely in the midsection, leaving Alex wheezing and cursing. The other Weir must have come up behind him while he was still blind with pain, because they managed to get a canvas bag over Alex’s head before he even realized what was going on. The burlap wrapped around his head stunk of fear and old vomit. He tried to struggle free, to pull the bag from his head, but this also turned out to be futile. Without much trouble, they wrench his arms behind his back, and then handcuffed his wrists together.
“I’m sure you remember me, right? You know what I’m capable of. I’m going to ask once more, nicely,” Mr. Blue-Tie said, delivering another devastating kick to Alex’s stomach. It was only through an act of tremendous self control that he avoided throwing up inside the bag his head was trapped in. Instead, he wretched involuntarily and tried to curl up tighter, half-crazy with claustrophobia and panic. “Then things are going to get ugly real fast. Where is the girl?”
Alex was glad, very glad that he didn’t know. Because he couldn’t be sure about himself in this situation. He was very afraid; on a fundamental level he was absolutely terrified about what he knew was going to happen to him. It made him physically ill he was so frightened. But at least he didn’t have to worry that he would betray Eerie under whatever torture they had planned for him, because he didn’t know. That made things a bit easier.
“I have no idea,” Alex said honestly, pressing his knees as tight to his chin as he could manage. Even thinking the word ‘torture’ had started him shivering uncontrollably.
“Okay then,” Mr. Blue-Tie said with obvious relish. “But, don’t say I didn’t warn you, shithead.”
Two of the Weir grabbed Alex and carried him forcibly into the bathroom, banging his head into what seemed like every available surface on the way. In the suffocating confines of the bag, Alex couldn’t anticipate the impacts, which made the whole experience that much worse. Eventually, they got him wrapped around one side of the bathtub, one Weir standing on either side of him, with their feet on the backs of his knees, his thighs pressed up against the cold of the tub wall.
“Now, to refresh your memory,” said Mr. Blue-Tie, his voice made resonant by the small bathroom’s acoustics. “The question of the moment is: where is that little bitch we saw you with, earlier? No need to answer right away, I’ll give you a minute to think about it.”
When Alex felt the hand on the back of his head, he stiffened his neck against the pressure, but it was hopeless. Whichever of the Weir crowded into the hotel bathroom it was that pushed him under, he had all the leverage he needed. The water was ice-cold, and the shock of hitting it almost made Alex gasp involuntarily as he his head went under. The fabric of the bag soaked through immediately, and the rough burlap clung to his face, increasing the feeling of suffocation. Alex could see nothing at all, even when he opened his eyes, and he could feel nothing except the water around his head, the unyielding force of the hand on the back of his head, and the dull sound of his own legs pounding desperately against the side of the bathtub. He wondered how long they would hold him under, and the question repeated itself in his mind, became obsessive, and made him acutely aware of the agonizing passage of time.
Inside the bag, under the water, Alex’s existence was defined by a consuming panic, an increasingly urgent need to breathe, and his eroding self-control. As Alex tried to count the seconds ticking by in his head, the dull pain in his chest grew sharper, more intense, his lungs seeming to contract, to collapse in on themselves. More than he could remember wanting anything, ever, more even then he wanted to breathe, Alex wanted the bag off of his head. Drowning didn’t seem as bad, without the stifling confines of the sack.
The seconds crept along imperceptibly, and Alex started to wonder if they were going to kill him, after all. His chest was on fire, and his throat had started to make convulsive motions. He held his mouth closed, unsure if he could stop himself from breathing in if it were open. It was impossible, he decided. Maybe Eerie had shown up at the door, maybe she’d stopped by reception or the ice machine or something, and now they had her, and they didn’t need Alex anymore, so he would die here, drowned in a stinking bag in some hotel bathroom.
Then they pulled his head back out of the water, and his chest convulsed, trying to force air through the water-logged fabric that had worked its way inside of his mouth and clung to his eyes and nostrils. The pain in his chest was soon matched by one radiating out from somewhere behind his eyes, and through the bag, the lights of the bathroom were dim and strange. He spat and coughed and squirmed helplessly on the hotel tile, frantic to pull the wet, suffocating fabric from his face.
“We aren’t too good at counting, Alex,” said the snarling voice of Mr. Blue-Tie, his breath tickling Alex’s ear like that of a lover. He could barely hear him over the sound of his own labored gasping. “We almost lost you there. You feel like telling us anything, yet, or do you want to try testing our math again?”
Alex wondered, even as he twitched against the bathroom floor like a fish out of water, his chest so tight that he couldn’t seem to breathe any better now than when he had been underwater, how it was that Mr. Blue-Tie knew his name. He finally drew in a long, shuddering breath, gagging as the bag worked its way still more deeply into his mouth.
“Nothing, huh? Well, that’s great, as far as I’m concerned. You see,” Mr. Blue-Tie confided, pulling Alex up by his shoulders, and leaning him against the side of the bath tub, “we don’t actually need you to tell us anything. We’ve got this area locked down, and your girlfriend isn’t going anywhere, not without running into us. And when we do,” he hissed, grinding his crotch against Alex obscenely, “well, maybe we’ll start with you, so you don’t have wonder what we are going to do to her.”
Alex felt the stiffness pressing against him and felt a horrible sickness, a level of panic and dread that had somehow opened beneath him, impossibly worse than the prospect of being drowned in an anonymous hotel bathtub. He wanted to say something, anything; Alex knew in his heart that, if he had someone to sell out, he very well might have, that he wouldn’t have been able to help himself, and it hurt him to know that. But he had nothing to say, and no breathe to say it with.
Abruptly, his head was underwater again, and it happened so fast that he was still gasping when he hit, water flooding his mouth and nose, burning his sinuses. Without thinking, he panicked and blew out the little air in his lungs. The heavy fabric and the cold water beyond it pressed in on him again. Then, with an almost surreal horror, he felt fingers hooking inside his belt, tearing his pants down and away from his waist. He tried to buck, to shake the Weir from his back, but the feet on his knees and the hand on the back of his head remained intractable.
Alex decided to breathe in. He decided that, if this was one of those things that someone could live through, that he didn’t want to. He gave up, relaxing his chest and throat and opening his mouth. For a moment, he felt no fear at all, just disgust, regret and profound disappointment.
With a quickly dawning horror, Alex realized that he could not make himself breathe in, his body would not obey him, he could not fill his lungs with water. Despite the horror and shame, d
espite the pain in his chest that defied description, Alex could not make himself drown. He struggled against the hand on his neck, and then finding his legs suddenly free, he kicked out frantically at the Weir behind him, struggling like an animal in a trap. He knew with a clarity that surprised him that he was dying. Alex decided to die fighting.
Slowly, he realized that the person behind him was altogether too small to be Mr. Blue-Tie, or any of the other men he’d seen in the hotel room. Then Alex noticed that the other Weir who’d been holding him down on other side seemed to have disappeared. And, finally, that the hand on his neck was attempting to pull him up and out of the water, not pushing him into it, something made more difficult by his struggling and kicking.
Alex tried to cooperate with the effort, then, and found that he could do little to influence affairs. The whole thing seemed rather impersonal, as if he were observing the struggle.
Then he was out into the light and the air again, and that was ridiculously good, even if his chest rattled and wheezed as he gasped, even if the air burned his mouth and throat. A moment later, the bag came off his head, and that was even better. Lying on the floor, with the bathroom tile cool against the side of his face was like heaven.
Alex looked up at Eerie, her face streaked with tears and her mouth moving, and smiled adoringly at her, like she was an angel.
Then his expression froze, and his face twisted as he struggled for breath, clutching at his throat and writhing. The air was wrong, somehow, unless it was a trick of his vision — it was dense and faintly discolored, and it burned his eyes and mouth, and the inside of his nose. It was even worse in his lungs, and he found that he could not hold the air in. Every breath he took was expelled instantly with a series of choking coughs.
It took a little while for Eerie to pin his head down, her knees on his shoulders, and longer to force his mouth open and wedge something inside it. It was sweet, too sweet, sickeningly so, and Alex thought at first that he might be ill, the candy floating syrupy and huge in the dry confines of his mouth. And then, slowly, he felt his chest and throat relax, and the burning in his sinuses died down.
“Sorry, Alex,” Eerie apologized, blushing for reasons he could not understand. “I know it’s gross, but please keep this inside of your mouth until I tell you, okay?”
He lay on the bathroom floor for a few minutes, caring only about breathing, about the simple luxury that he had never appreciated fully before, while the candy disintegrated in his mouth. It was almost gone before he realized that it was a toffee. Then, almost reluctantly, he opened his eyes.
“Do you feel better, Alex? I’m sorry I had to poison you, too, but I couldn’t figure out any other way to help.” Eerie leaned him against the side of the bathtub, then reached over his head to empty the water from it. Alex shuddered when he heard the splash. “You can spit out the candy now, if you want,” she added shyly.
Alex didn’t really want to, not anymore. In fact, it was pretty much gone, and Alex was surprised at how much better he felt, how amazing it felt to be able to breathe freely, free of the awful weight of the Weir, and the terrible confines of the bag. Maybe it was shock, but Alex felt surprisingly okay with the situation, despite his physical distress.
“Oh, you poor thing,” Eerie said, patting his back and fretting over him. “I’m so sorry that I couldn’t stop them. It took a long time for me to poison the entire room with something that would kill the Weir, but not you.”
Alex shook his head, his mouth terribly dry. He couldn’t imagine Eerie feeling bad for anything. In his book, she was a candidate for sainthood.
Eerie walked over and bent down next to Mr. Blue-Tie and dug through his pockets. He was totally unresponsive, and judging from the trouble she had moving his arm, Alex figured he was probably dead. A moment later, Eerie produced a key ring from his pants pocket, and then used it to free Alex’s aching wrists from the handcuffs.
“Are you starting to feel better?”
Alex nodded, still unable to speak. Eerie ducked back to the room and rummaged for a moment, then returned, twisting the cap off a bottle of mineral water that she gave to Alex.
“Eerie,” he managed, after a few sips of water. “Eerie, what did you do?”
She flinched, and then looked away.
“I did not want you to see that. I have never,” Eerie stopped and then turned back to face him, face streaked with tears, “Alex, I have never done anything like this before. I’ve never even thought about doing something like this. It’s not, it’s not me.” Eerie shook her head despondently. “This is not the kind of thing that I do.”
“So, this was like the other night?” Alex asked groggily. “Like at the party? Except…”
“Except that I was how I felt then,” Eerie said, hanging her head, “and this is how I felt today, watching them hurt you. And now,” Eerie said sadly, “now Alex will be afraid of me, because of what I am, right? Do you hate me?”
“Hate you?” Alex said, coughing. “Fuck, Eerie, as far as I’m concerned, you’re Mother Teresa. I’m not afraid or angry, I’m grateful, grateful as all hell, really. That was,” he added thoughtfully, inclining his head in the direction of the dead Weir, “quite possibly the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. You saved me, Eerie.”
Alex tried to get Eerie to smile, but she just stared over his shoulder, transfixed by something behind him. It took Alex a while to manage turning around, as his back and neck seemed to have seized up.
Renton was peering in through the doorway, a nickel-plated H amp;K semiautomatic pistol in his left hand. Behind him, barely visible, Margot peaked around the corner. In front of both of them, Anastasia stood, arms folded across her chest, immaculate in a black dress. She seemed terribly amused by the situation.
“Well, I can see why you’d want to stay here,” she said seriously, after deliberation. “It is a very nice room. Perhaps you would consider staying the night at my suite, instead? The hotel is better, for one, and there are also significantly fewer dead people in the bathroom.”
Twenty Seven
“I heard that you and Eerie went on a date.”
“I’m not sure that it was a date. Exactly.”
“But you did go dancing with her.”
“Did Eerie tell you all this stuff? It was more like she went dancing, and I sat there and watched.”
“Huh. Very smooth. Quite the lady-killer.”
“Shut up, Margot. Why do we have to walk halfway across town to make a phone call, anyway?” Alex complained, hurrying after the vampire, who set a rapid pace. “There were phones back at the hotel. Cars, too, if we absolutely had to leave the room.”
“I need a pay phone, and it has to be far enough away from where we are staying that they won’t find us if they trace it. Besides, these days, it’s pretty hard to find one in the first place.” Margot threaded through the crowded street, talking without looking back at Alex, sounding bored with the whole thing. “I figured you could use the walk, to clear your head.”
“Really? Pardon me for doubting your concern for my well-being, but…”
Margot stopped at closed-down strip mall, glanced around for cameras, and then strolled over to a bank of phones so deep in the shadow cast by the flickering streetlight that Alex hadn’t even seen them. She inspected the phones from a distance with obvious distaste, and then pulled a set of latex gloves from her pocket and began sliding them on.
“Okay, okay,” Margot said, looking at the phones reluctantly. “Renton had an errand to run, and procedure demands that none of us be alone, until we are out of the field. Edward went with him, and Anastasia hates to walk, so I got you. Lucky me, right?”
“I don’t understand why this is such a big deal,” Alex complained. “I mean, Eerie already killed those Weir,” he said, immediately regretting having brought it up. “We are good, right?”
“Are you kidding me?” Margot stared at him in disbelief, and Alex felt very small indeed. “There have to be more. And anywa
y, I doubt that the silver one was dead.”
Margot shook her head, as if he had saddened her.
“I knew that was him,” Alex said with conviction. “I knew I had seen that bastard somewhere before. But, he sure looked dead…”
“Bet he did after Mitsuru was done with him, too,” Margot said, “and look how that worked out. I’ve never actually seen a silver one before, Alex, but they are supposedly very hard to kill.”
“Do we need, like, silver bullets, or something?”
Margot shook her head dismissively.
“More like a train to hit him with,” she said grimly, “or a cruise missile. Or,” she added, reaching for the handset, “Mitsuru, assuming you plan on letting me make this phone call.”
“Where did Renton go? And the cute one who never talks?”
“Edward?”
“Right. Him. Where did they go?”
Anastasia continued to stare at the television, the evening news turned on, with the volume turned off. The information was so dated already, she could hardly believe anyone watched the news channels.
“I sent them on an errand,” Anastasia said, glancing over at the changeling lying on the plush, queen-sized bed opposite her own, and then flipping the TV off. “There was something I wanted to talk to you about, anyway.”
Anastasia sat up and turned to face Eerie, smoothing the wrinkles from her black silk dress. Eerie looked over at Anastasia, propping her head up on her elbow, appearing genuinely surprised.
“Really? Because if this is about the cartel thing, then it’s very nice of you to offer, but…”
Anastasia waved her off, looking a bit distracted.
“No, Eerie, nothing like that,” Anastasia said, “I am not trying to recruit you.” Anastasia paused, then smiled at her. “At least not at the moment.”
Eerie stared at her blankly. Anastasia sighed, and shook her head.
“I will be direct, then,” Anastasia said unhappily, her hands folded in her lap in front of her, her posture rigid, her eyes boring into Eerie. “What is there between you and Alex?”
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