by J. C. Nelson
“What do you mean, ‘time off’?”
He hemmed and hawed. “Brynner told my honey he’s quitting the BSI.”
I’d been given a new badge, but not so much as a ‘welcome to field operations’ pamphlet before we left. “I don’t have the phone number for field command. I’m just supposed to be getting field pay, not finding co-orgs or killing them.” This couldn’t be happening. Not when I was so close.
“Brynner does. We can ask when he comes back.” Emelia opened the door and waved me in.
“If he comes back.” Bran dusted off a brie case. “I figured something like this was coming, the boy showing up out of nowhere. Then I saw he brought home a pretty young gal. You know you’re the first one he ever brought home to meet us.”
I stopped at the threshold, willing myself to not enter. To take a seat on the porch swing. And make sure they knew the truth. “He didn’t bring me home to meet you. He only brought me here to translate the journals. We’re not—anything. Director Bismuth thought you’d allow me to access them if Brynner brought me.”
Bran shook his head. “I knew it was too good to be true. Boy could charm the scales off a snake and played doctor with so many girls I swore he’d set up a clinic, but bringing home a smart one? A real one? That should’ve been the tip-off. That boy . . .” He rose and took his briefcase off the steps, got in the car, and drove off.
I sat on the swing. Rocked. Worried. And when I couldn’t worry anymore, I slid open Brynner’s phone, looking for his contact list.
The picture staring back at me could have been Emelia twenty years ago. Long black hair and dainty features, she stood next to a man who looked like Brynner would in fifteen years or so. From the square jaw to narrow eyes, Brynner was his father made over again.
I looked up to find Aunt Emelia standing in the doorway.
I couldn’t meet her gaze. “I’m sorry. I’ll leave as soon as I contact field command. I just really needed this job.”
She came out and sat down. “You seem like good people, Grace Roberts, not at all like the others they’ve sent. Don’t go running off just yet.” She took the phone from me, looking at the background photo and smiling.
“What happened to Brynner’s mother?” I was already so far out on the ice it couldn’t hurt to ask.
“There was only one witness. So all I can tell you is what he told us. Did you know Lara ran BSI’s investigative labs?”
Ran them? I knew she’d done a stint in the armory, but I’d read no papers with her name on them. “No. I thought she believed in magic and religion. I can’t imagine that mixing with science.” I put my head in my hands. “I’m sorry. I’m going to go someplace else, lie down, and just forget the last few days happened.”
“Oh, honey, it ain’t like that. Lara believed, all right, but she liked to know as well as believe. So Heinrich finds this perfect mural, written by one of them meat-skins while the Re-Animus was in it. And she brings the whole damned mural back to her lab.”
And I saw it coming, making perfect sense. “She thought it might be a spell?”
“Thought you didn’t believe in magic.”
I bit back the acid response that came so naturally. “Every skeptic has a level of proof. Make a believer out of me.”
“Lara was trying to translate it. Understand it. My sister swore the words were only part of the meaning, and the key was the understanding. So she kept it on a wall in their lab, trying different interpretations.”
This idea of a rational Carson seemed at odds with what I’d read about his father, or seen from Brynner. Much more my style. “And?”
She paused, studying me. “One of them must have worked. Brynner said she was just gone, and in her place were the knives the boy carries, and a silver jar.”
The thought that Brynner had seen—whatever it was—that happened to his mother made my heart ache. If he believed it was a result of magic, that certainly explained his reaction to my disbelief.
“I thought his dad made the blades. There’s nothing like them in the BSI arsenal.”
Aunt Emelia shook her head. “Heinrich believed they were sacrificial knives. Even he didn’t know how they were made, only that they seemed made to kill meat-skins.”
“And the jar? What was actually in it?”
She shook her head. “Heinrich guarded that jar like nothing I’d seen. I never saw him open it, but he said it was a heart.”
Right there, I spotted my first problem. Canopic jars held other organs. Not the heart. Removing the heart represented ultimate death in ancient Egypt. “Where is it?”
Emelia stood and took my hand, pulling me to my feet. “I suspect that’s what you were sent to find out.”
I opened the phone dialing history and chose the most common number. Held my breath as it rang. When the phone picked up, no one spoke for ten, almost fifteen seconds. Then a mechanical voice buzzed. “Carson, you’re in a shitload of trouble.”
I swallowed, my lips suddenly dry. “This is Grace Roberts. I need to speak to field command. Brynner Carson quit this morning.”
In the background, a noise like a vacuum pump continued, then the mechanized voice cut in. “We are so fucked.”
The line went dead.
BRYNNER
I didn’t want to go home. Couldn’t go home, and not just because Grace might be there. I could blame her for the director’s assumptions. Or I could accept the truth. Of the two, one of us had a history of causing trouble. I guess the shrink back in Seattle was more right than wrong. It wasn’t any one thing, but the accumulation of a lifetime spent fighting an enemy that never gave up, never slept, and against whom I never seemed to win a permanent victory.
So I drove down the highway, past the high school, and up a road to a citrus farm. A dusty trail led down to the farmhouse, and by the time the truck pulled up, a man stood outside, waving to me.
“Brynner Carson,” said a man with white hair and more wrinkles than skin. He walked over and took off his hat, giving me a one-armed hug. “Rory’s out running irrigation, but I’ll send a hand to let him know.”
I missed these people. I’d spent more summer nights here than I could count. “I’ll stay away from the barn this time, I swear.”
He slipped his hat back on. “I’m not mad about that anymore. Haven’t been for sixteen years, if that’s what kept you away. Get on in out of the heat, Mary will want to see how you’ve grown.”
I opened the screen door, and stepped back fifty years in time. I don’t think anyone ever told Mary Hughes that the fifties came and went. In her world, which I’m sure she saw in black and white, women still baked pies while men worked in the field.
And the pies smelled like a piece of heaven, blended with apple and cinnamon. Choosing Rory as a best friend had nothing to do with his mother’s cooking, but it certainly hadn’t hurt. His mother set down a rolling pin, which to me was a good club for killing meat-skins, and dusted off her hands.
“Brynner Carson, young man, it’s about time you came back to see us.”
“It’s good to see you, too, Mrs. Hughes.” I slid up on the bar stool.
“You come all the way to New Mexico to check out the horse killings?”
Horse killings. Not exactly my style. “I didn’t. But I could take a look. Which farm?”
“The McMasters’. Rory said he ain’t seen nothing like it. Poor creature just torn to parts. Where is that boy?” She hollered at the stairs, “Luce, could you keep an eye on the oven?” She washed her hands and walked out the front door.
And down the stairs came a vision and a nightmare.
Lucille Stillman, homecoming queen and my date to prom my senior year. A woman I knew so very well once. On her hip she carried a baby about nine months old. She saw me in the kitchen and stopped, her mouth open.
“Lucy Stillman.” It was all I could think of to say.
“Hughes. It’s Hughes now. Make yourself useful and hold Junior.” Her tone made it clear that I’d better che
ck any pie she served me for razor blades and needles. She thrust the baby at me like he was a rabid wolverine.
The baby squirmed in my grip, fidgeting and making a square face with angry eyes. Babies, unlike knives, didn’t come with padded grips. He didn’t like me any better than his mother did and began to mewl like an angry cat.
Lucy looked up at me, her hands in oven mitts. “Calm him. I seem to recall you like to sing.”
I seemed to recall liking almost anything a girl liked in high school. I might have attempted to serenade a couple of them. I remembered the tune Dad hummed while he worked. I bounced the baby softly and began to sing. “Hush, little baby, don’t you cry, Daddy’s going to stab a meat-skin in the eye, and if that meat-skin takes a bite, Daddy’s going to get six stitches tonight.”
The baby cooed and made burbling noises, obviously impressed with my skills as a bard.
His mother, not so much. She turned the oven off and stalked over to seize the child. “What kind of lullaby is that? Stay away from Junior, and stay away from me. I’m married now. Don’t you have a rotten horse to look at?”
Once, she’d looked at me with an adoring gaze and a willing smile. That would have been before she caught me in the movie theater with her best friend. I left the kitchen, preferring the heat of the noon sun to Lucy’s withering stare. Dust devils danced in the yard, and a distant line of clouds said we’d be getting a storm soon enough. It would roll through, dump a month’s worth of rain, and move on. The desert would suck it up, use it to go from brown to green.
I closed my eyes, savoring the scent of rain on the wind. The creak of wheels made me open my eyes as a golf cart rolled up, and from it came my best friend, Rory Hughes.
“Big B.” He ran to me, slapping me on the back so hard my stitches hurt. “Heard about the horse. I was wondering when you big shot BSI folks would look into it. Lucy says the word is you brought someone special home to meet Aunt Emelia and Uncle Bran.” Rory’s dark brown hair stood up in spiky tufts on his head. He was even less related to Emelia and Bran than I was, but no one in their right mind argued with Aunt Emelia.
Rory had gained weight, a good fifty pounds, but he was as tall as me, as wide as me, and still probably capable of taking me in a wrestling match.
“I quit the BSI this morning.”
Rory whistled. “Damn. You get in trouble over a woman?”
“No. I mean, yes, but that’s not why I quit. Listen, I can’t really go back to Emelia and Bran’s. There’s someone there I’d rather avoid. You think I could stay in the guesthouse?”
Rory scratched his head. “Avoiding is what you do best. But you can’t stay in the guesthouse.”
I nodded in acceptance. “Thanks, anyway. I know, would’ve been awkward, you marrying Lucy and all. I’ll catch up with you over dinner sometime.” I turned to leave, but Rory clamped a strong hand on my shoulder.
“Big B, I trust Luce. If you could see her face when your name comes up, you’d understand. You can’t stay in the guesthouse ’cause it burned down five years ago in the Big Rock fire.” Rory pointed to the barn. “I used the insurance money to finish the barn loft. If you don’t mind climbing a ladder, it’s yours.”
“Daddy!” From the fence at the edge of a field, a girl with Rory’s dark brown hair and Lucy’s angled cheeks sprinted, out of breath. “I was over at the Larsons’, and we went to feed her pony.” Tears streamed down her face as Rory swept her up in his arms.
“It’s dead. It’s everywhere.”
For reasons even my dad never determined, meat-skins attacked horses and other ruminants with a ferocity that made even the best-prepared operative uncomfortable. I walked back to the truck and took out my knives, sliding the sheaths onto my belt. I looked over to Rory. “Can you show me?”
Twelve
GRACE
Brynner’s phone stayed silent for exactly four minutes, thirty seconds. Then it rang with a new tone, one that blared like a warning siren. I reluctantly answered, grateful for Emelia staying by my side. “Grace Roberts speaking.”
“This is Director Bismuth. Where is Brynner Carson?” “He quit.”
Her sigh worried me more than the sharp tone. “I’m aware of that. Please answer my question. Where is Brynner?”
I looked to Emelia. Given how loudly the director spoke, she’d heard. Emelia shook her head.
“We don’t know. He just handed me the phone this morning and drove off. I’m at his aunt and uncle’s house now, so if he comes back—”
“Is Emelia Homer present? I’d like to speak with her.”
I handed the phone to Emelia. She whispered into the phone, “He said he didn’t think he could do it anymore.” Emelia glanced over at me. “Give my best to Tom and the kids.”
She handed me the phone back and went inside.
“Ms. Roberts. I’m sorry you are caught up in this drama. You may book a flight to Portland and take a few days off.” Director Bismuth stopped, sounding almost broken.
“No.” I couldn’t believe I spoke the word, but I’d be damned if I didn’t give it a try. “I’m not done yet. I just started in on the notebooks, and I can figure them out, I know I can.”
“May I call you Grace?”
“Of course.”
Director Bismuth paused to bark orders at someone. “Grace, I only wanted the heart because the Re-Animus wanted it. You haven’t read sit-briefs in the last few days, have you?”
I hadn’t, but she didn’t give me time to answer.
“We’re facing a surge of co-org activity, the likes of which are unmatched in BSI records. I have every field team in service working round the clock and have allowed more than one retiree to return. We have greater concerns than the demands of one creature.”
Assuming the activity wasn’t because of the heart, her priorities made sense. “So you need Brynner back to work.”
“I need Brynner to be seen working. Like his father, the man is as much a symbol of the BSI as the emblem on your badge. When other field teams hear about him, it gives them courage. It tells them they aren’t fighting a losing battle against an enemy that grows stronger every day.”
I shivered in the hundred-degree heat at her implication. And now more and more made sense. “Do you arrange media coverage of his operations?”
“Of course we do.”
“And his extravagant vacations?”
“It takes time to heal. Now, I refuse to accept Brynner’s resignation. When, not if, he shows up, I expect him back on the job.”
I thought of his stitches, done and redone when the man just couldn’t rest. I left my job at the office every night. His followed him home, waiting in dark alleys and around every corner.
I couldn’t imagine living like that.
The question in my mind wasn’t, Why did Brynner quit? It was, How did he manage to last as long as he did? “All right, but we’re going to need another field team out here. The local sheriff wanted a couple of things checked out, since there may be some co-org activity.”
“Absolutely not. Even if I had spare operatives, I couldn’t afford to have news of Brynner’s situation leaking out to the other field teams.” She paused again. “There’s hardly a dot on the map where there isn’t some form of co-org activity, and to be honest, Ms. Roberts, if we both agree you aren’t up to handling a minor infestation, I believe it would be best for you to return to your safe office in Portland.”
I couldn’t go back. Not yet. “I need this job. Please, I’ll figure out the journals. I will.”
“I don’t need the journals as much as I need that man back at work—” She paused, long enough for me to listen to the bustle of conversations in the background. “Perhaps there is something you could handle in the field. Find Brynner for me, convince him this whole quitting nonsense was just an overreaction. In return, I’ll allow you to stay and continue your translation efforts for, say, three weeks. And If Brynner returns, ready to do what he does best, I’ll award you three months’ back
pay.”
I let my head rest back on the swing and stared at the porch roof. Promises I couldn’t keep competed with bills I couldn’t pay. “I’ll do what I can.” I snapped the phone shut, then rose and went inside to Aunt Emelia. “I need to talk with Brynner. How can I find him?”
She continued kneading a meatloaf. “That’s not a problem. I know exactly where he’d go. I just don’t trust Maggie to keep the boy’s best interests in mind.”
Her words might as well have speared me. Had she heard through the window? “And you trust me?”
“Oh, sweetie.” She washed her hands and gave me a crooked smile. “We all have to trust someone.”
I couldn’t look at her as I spoke. “The director wants him back to work. Wants me to convince him to come back.”
She nodded. “The boy looks like he’d do almost anything for you. Maggie will calm down. She’s just surprised he quit.”
“I’m shocked it took that long. How does he deal with those things every day without going insane?”
“If you’re going to be around, him, you need to understand. Brynner’s not like normal men. He’s a Carson. He’s got his father’s strength, his mother’s stubbornness.” She stopped mauling the meatloaf to look at me. “Like God rolled up the desert into a man. He was born to do what he does.”
One phone call, one set of GPS coordinates, and a thirtyminute drive later, I pulled up at the farmhouse where Emelia insisted I’d find Brynner. The clouds overhead boiled, tinting the sky green, and the wind whipped up, blowing gravel and sand.
I knocked on the door, then banged on it, until it swung open. A tall woman with jet-black hair, a baby on her hip, and a thin smile answered. “You lost?”
“Maybe. Emelia Homer told me I’d find a friend of mine here. Brynner Carson?” I shouted to be heard over the wind.
She swung the door open, holding it while it whipped back and forth. “You’re lost, all right. Come on in.”
I stepped into a kitchen covered in cracked white linoleum and white Formica counters. The woman pushed the door shut, battling the winds, then turned to me. “I’m Lucille Hughes. Most folks call me Luce. That bastard ain’t here right now. Him and Rory are off doing something. Just like old times.”