Lethal Reaction

by S A Gardner

  “We have more than Anna, Ed. We have your daughters.”

  Did that sound as menacing as I thought?

  No. No way.

  A scalding torrent of emotions exploded in Ed’s eyes. “Is she—are they…?”

  “They’re fine.” Damian extended his hand to Ed. I winced. Would he get him up only to knock him down? Ed had hurt him, irretrievably.

  At the time, Damian had said he’d understood Ed’s motives, but he’d later said he wouldn’t have let innocents die for me. He’d insisted that what had happened in Darfur, when he’d saved me at what had turned out to be the cost of Mel’s and his men’s lives had been different. That had been hot-blooded and spur-of-the-moment, and they’d been warriors who’d known the score. He’d also thought he’d be the first to die to spare my life. He no longer thought Ed’s actions comparable. He sure wasn’t about to forgive him. Not in this lifetime. And neither should he.

  Ed took Damian’s hand, rose to his feet like a boxer who’d taken too many punches to the head, his eyes wavering on Damian’s almost on the same level.

  My heart kicked. The sight of these two, blessed by nature, honed by will, privileged to have found each other and forged an unquestioning and unstoppable alliance, only to have something so unique destroyed in an act of desperation.

  Hot moisture blossomed behind my eyes.

  God, what a waste. What a damned waste.

  “I need to see her,” Ed pleaded. “Need to see them. Please. Do anything you want to me afterwards.”

  Damian’s eyes remained dead. He let go of Ed’s hand. “Anna is recovering from her Caesarian. It’s up to Calista as her doctor if she thinks you could see her now.”

  Ed turned the force of his scorching entreaty on me.

  “She’s not well,” I started. “And seeing you is going to be very…”

  “Please Cali—she needs me. They need me. Anna’s been through hell, and I—I… Please, I beg you—let me see her.”

  Oh, what the hell!

  I exhaled forcibly. “I’ll see if she’s recovered from anesthesia.” I passed Damian on my way out, whispered, “Vent some fury. And not on Ed.”

  I got the same black hole glance.

  In fifteen minutes, Damian, I and everyone in IC, witnessed the reunion between Ed and Anna.

  It was harrowing.

  These two, the sheer magnitude of their dependence—it was like seeing a soul sundered in two, straining to become one again. How hadn’t I sensed the depth of their connection before?

  Damian let them weep it all to one another, standing there, carved out of granite. Then he moved, his effect like vacuum depressurizing an airtight vessel. All eyes turned to him.

  “I believe I speak for everyone when I say no one will forgive you for the lives you cost us.”

  Ed straightened from his lover’s weakened embrace, faced his ex-leader. “I don’t expect or want forgiveness. There is nothing to say. I deserve to die.” Anna’s sob sounded like it had gashed her coming out. Ed gritted his teeth. “Just promise me you will take care of Anna and my babies.”

  Damian studied him for a moment. Then he shrugged. “Impresionante. Very convincing, Ed. But then you were my protégé and my best man. Whether you’ll die for your crimes or not, depends on you. You get to live if you tell us all about our enemies and exactly what you told them of our secrets.”

  Ed’s summer-skies eyes blipped. I could almost see realization sinking in them. It hadn’t occurred to him before that he still had something to bargain with. He must have been too distraught, thinking he was at our total mercy with Anna and his girls in our hands.

  “I’ll give you what you need to win this, in return for a chance to disappear with my family.”

  Damian sighed. “You’re forgetting one of the first things I taught you, Ed. Never leave a winning enemy no reason not to kill you.” Damian drew out his gun and we all jerked.

  But he didn’t shoot Ed, just took slow steps towards Anna, and held the gun to her head.

  Fifteen

  The stifled gasps were deafening.

  “You’re bluffing,” Ed cried out, stiffening in horror and denial. “I know you, Damian. You’d never harm Anna.”

  Damian looked down on Anna, his eyes pouring such sorrow, such anguish. “I’m so sorry, Anna. Perdoneme. But you always knew the stakes in this mad existence we chose. The way Ed has played this, your life now means untold deaths. And you are guilty, too. You could have at least warned me. You didn’t.”

  And horror of horrors, Anna nodded, admitting her guilt, giving him her consent to kill her if it was the only way.

  Damian then raised his eyes, turned them on Ed and I almost cowered. “Everyone thinks they know me, Ed, when they only know what I lead them to believe. Even you have no idea what hell I was raised in, what hell I’m capable of. Anna is no more precious than the innocents you helped slaughter. I would have preferred it was your death, or mine, that would stem the tide that could drown the world in its own blood. It’s you who’re making it Anna’s.” He pressed the nozzle a little harder.

  “You won’t do anything even if you want to,” Ed was shrieking now. “She’s your only power over me.”

  “She’s not my only power over you anymore, Ed.”

  He meant the girls.

  Oh, dear God! How could he even suggest this? What was he doing? He had to be bluffing. He just had to. But it was still too horrific. And certainly Ed wouldn’t buy it.

  Seemed he did. Ed turned rabid eyes around the room. “You’d let him do this?” Shocked silence met his butchered shout. Seemed I wasn’t the only one paralyzed with horror and disbelief. “God, what kind of doctors are you?”

  “You should have thought you might need their support when you sold their secrets and had their loved ones murdered.”

  “I didn’t sell anything—they just asked me who survived…”

  “You knew why they asked, and what they’d do with the knowledge. You got paid in Anna’s continuing treatments. You as good as killed those people.” He looked down on the weeping Anna. “Now you have three lives that you’ve done anything to preserve. Be smart. Continue doing it. Don’t test me.”

  “You cruel bastard. You son of a bitch. If it was Calista…”

  “I’d do anything for Calista. Anything but the one thing she’d hate me for, and killing innocents is it. But since this isn’t the case with you and Anna, your love is just too destructive. Now make up your mind.”

  Ed’s weeping had reached heart-crushing levels. It was too agonizing watching Damian’s decimation of his ex-right hand. “I will—only if you tell me none of you—will ever blame Anna for anything later, that you’ll—take care of her—of them all. Promise me, you crazy bastard!”

  Damian removed the gun, shoved it back in its holster beneath his jacket. “I promise. Now talk.”

  And for the next hour, Ed talked.

  He gave us the details he’d given our enemies. Then he gave us all he knew of them, only corroborating Damian’s list. What he contributed that Damian hadn’t uncovered was that the retrieval and deployment of Jake’s agent was only one of the world-reshaping catastrophes they had on their agenda.

  After the others left the room to their chores or to be alone to come to terms, Ed made his first unbidden revelation.

  “No one knows about Desideria, Damian.”

  Damian only looked down on him. He already knew that. His mother was safe. And he wasn’t about to thank Ed for it. “You thought I was dead, Ed. You had no reason to bargain with her. I bet it would be different if you could escape now. Giving me and mine to them would be the ultimate bargaining chip.”

  “Damian, I swear…”

  “Don’t. And don’t try to escape.” With one last look at me, that told me nothing of what had to be seething inside him, he walked out of the room.

  I followed, would have gone in the opposite direction even if my room wasn’t there. I wanted to be alone.

  I’
d just entered my room when the shouts exploded.

  I ran back out, sprinted in their direction, the room we’d left Ed in. I saw Damian walking back, not in any hurry.

  As I approached, I made out the words, thundered on

  manic rage and murderous hatred.

  “Move, you goddamned bastard! I want your goddamned lover to watch you die!”

  Char! Now I remembered. She hadn’t been around since Ed arrived. She must have been waiting to get him alone.

  I skidded to a halt at the room’s door, and all my hair roots erupted on end.

  Char was standing over a heaped-on-the-floor Ed, her long blonde hair a riot, her eyes so bloodshot they looked like they were hemorrhaging, her face shuddering with the force of her shrieks. She was brandishing a fluids-holding stand, bludgeoning Ed with it, her considerable strength and endless grief behind every ram.

  Ed must be really done in if he’d let her surprise him, if he’d let her hits connect. She had him folded in a protective posture as she rained damage on him. On the last blow, blood spattered the pristine white floor.

  Judging by the fountain-like spurt, she must have gotten him in the head, gashed his scalp. Her next blow could kill him.

  My stasis shattered on a forward surge. “Char, stop!”

  Damian’s hand clamped my arm, aborted my momentum. “He got Di killed, Calista. And Char’s cousin. Let her vent her grief.”

  I struggled against him, my eyes on the macabre sequence unfolding before my eyes. “But she’ll kill him!”

  He only cast the scene a dispassionate glance, shrugged. “You don’t have to worry about that.”

  Don’t worry about what? Char becoming a murderess in a few moments? Or Ed becoming a corpse?

  But it seemed he knew what he was talking about. That I really shouldn’t have worried. Next moment, Ed’s hands shot out, latched onto one of the stand’s legs and snatched it from Char’s hands, clipping her in the face with its other end. Then he rebounded to his feet, reminding me what an ultimately fit killing machine he really was.

  The side of his head was covered in blood, his face swollen with injury and twisted with rage. Then he threw the stand down and beckoned to Char like a taunting contender. Come on.

  Give me all you got. Let’s end this.

  Char launched herself at him, almost as big as he was, and ten times her usual strength in her frenzy. She took him down and they rolled on the floor, growling and tearing like two desperate, wounded animals. I didn’t know how, but suddenly I was bouncing on top of them, trying to separate them, getting punched and torn at for my troubles.

  I heard Damian thundering my name then I was hauled off them.

  I struggled with him. “Goddamn it, Damian, I swear if you don’t help me pull these two apart, I’m taking you apart!”

  He raised his eyebrows, let me down. Then he just did it.

  In seconds, Char was in a gentle yet inescapable headlock. He whispered something in her ears and she stiffened. He kept talking until she sagged in his arms, let him steer her out of the room.

  On his way out, he caught my eyes. “He’s all yours.”

  Yeah. Great.

  Still, I’d rather deal with Ed than Char right now.

  I went to the door, looked over my shoulder at Ed who’d remained on the floor, looking like he’d rather not get up, ever again.

  “If you’re rather not bleed to death, follow me.”

  He did, at a halting pace, stood at the threshold of Emergency watching me prepare my supplies and instruments as if not really believing I would treat him. I finished my preparations and stuck impatient hands on my hips.

  He moved then, approached me, sat where I silently indicated, didn’t move again as I blotted his blood and stemmed the bleeding with a pressure pad. Once I made sure the blood flow had slowed, I shortened the hair around the jagged gash, injected him with local anesthetic then started suturing his wound.

  I tried not to look at him as person, just an injury I had to take care of. But it wasn’t that easy. Ed had been a friend. An ally. My first one among Damian’s people when I’d had none, starting with Damian himself. My actions had gotten him injured in Darfur, and he’d preferred to dwell on the part when I’d been the reason he and the others had made it to hospital alive. I’d felt good around him. I’d been so damn fond of him. I’d loved his relationship with Damian.

  Now it had all been destroyed.

  He suddenly talked, his voice bleak and lifeless. “I was mad. When I struck the deal with Jake. If you’d seen Anna after her stroke—God, Cali—I went mad and I think I still am mad. I don’t think I’ll ever recover from the scare or the desperation. I tried not to give him anything in return. I couldn’t. So I gave him as little as I could. And when I gave him Damian—you have to understand—I never thought Damian would die. Damian, to me—he’s indestructible. I knew he’d survive, and take that crazy bastard down. I knew Jake would never harm you. And then you took him down and I thought you did at the cost of your lives. And there was no turning back, not with Anna in their hands…”

  God, why was he telling me all this? I didn’t have enough ambiguity and confusion and heartache in my life?

  “If you knew what Anna had gone through, all her life, what led her to Damian, to our way of life—it should have been enough, the horrors she’s endured, there shouldn’t have been more, and I swore to her there wouldn’t be…”

  He stopped. I knew it was all he had. He wasn’t asking for forgiveness. He just wanted me to hear his side.

  And like it or not, he’d given me another perspective. One I wished he hadn’t.

  His tears were falling again, in silence now. I finished up the procedure on auto, then escorted him back to the room that would be his prison for the coming week.

  At the door, something that had nothing to do with volition or common sense stopped me.

  “Ed, there is always going back. There is at least not going any further down the road to hell.”

  Then I walked out, headed to my room, fell on my bed face down.

  It had been—too much. The whole day and night. And the day before it. And all the days before that.

  And it was only going to get worse.

  I tried to regulate my breathing, my thoughts, pack as much energy as I could for the coming ordeals.

  It didn’t work. Not with the image of Ed’s devastation interfering with my efforts. But it was that of Damian’s too-convincing ruthlessness that really disrupted my stamina.

  So it had been effective, but I couldn’t silence the worries that he hadn’t been bluffing, that he could have killed Anna in cold-blood for real. Extreme measures for the greater good was his creed. Scaring Ed out of his mind was one thing, but scaring Anna was another. Even if she was guilty, too…

  Still, this was emotional and moral territory, to be indulged in when the world wasn’t ending. Right now it was time for the severest kind of pragmatism. And an idea was blossoming in my mind. It could also be insanity. Or a breakdown.

  And though I wasn’t sure I wanted to be around him right now, I sought Damian. When it came to talking strategy and waging war, he was the one I’d run to.

  I shared my idea with him, expecting him to blast it.

  He only thought it ingenious. And then he launched into weaving it with my earlier propositions into a watertight plan, actually making it all sound plausible. And possible.

  We were going to do this.

  We might even have a chance.

  Sixteen

  “You think there’s any chance I’d ever stop being flabbergasted by your mother’s real estates?”

  In answer to my question, Damian just looked down at me and smiled. Had I ever mentioned this man was ridiculously tall? And absurdly beautiful?

  “I mean, just when I think I’ve seen it all, think this is it, there can be nothing more, there’s this.”

  I threw my arms open, encompassing the sprawling expanse of quintessential Wine Country o
f wildflower meadows and vineyards stretching into the horizon. And let me tell you, all those documentaries and TV series set in such places did nothing to transmit the lush, mystic foreverness of it all.

  We’d just landed in an airstrip that was clearly made to accommodate far larger jets than the midsize private one that had flown us to the heart of Napa Valley.

  Desideria, currently known as Mrs. Josiah Henderson, was spending spring—or as Damian had informed me, the time before the Crush Season madness arrived with its fanfare and tourists—in her vineyards.

  I went on, sounding like an awed tourist myself, “After this, there is nothing more except maybe an Ancient Egyptian temple or Versailles.”

  I mean, the mansion in the distance looked like it would dwarf the one I’d last visited Damian in. It was more of a palace. And there came the off-white limo sparkling its way up to us, coming to escort us there.

  As it stopped by us and Damian held its door open for me I blurted out, “Say—maybe I should go back, find something better to wear…”

  Damian took off his sunglasses, poured the hot honey of his gaze and indulgence over me then broke into the widest smile I’d seen on his face in—ever. “Relax, mi amor. I’m just taking you to meet my mother.”

  Yeah. Just. Not that I was meeting her in that sense.

  And it should be—well, interesting. As long as Desideria didn’t turn out to be what all those soap-opera matriarchs of manipulation had been fashioned after.

  But then again, if she was half the force Damian said she was, the one who’d help us with our plans, she must be way worse.

  In minutes we were nearing the mansion in the luxuriant crème leather interior of the limo that made me wish I’d learned to levitate. Who wants to sit on such pristine cleanliness? This was beyond our autoclaved bed linens!

  OK, I was losing it.

  So I wasn’t used to luxury and ease, especially anything on this level, but this wasn’t what this was about.

  So yeah, it contributed, but it wasn’t why arrhythmia was replacing my usual placid sinus rhythm. I had to face it. I was more nervous about meeting Damian’s mother than I had been going into a minefield. Hell, give me a minefield with bullets whizzing over my head and a wildfire zipping on my tail any day.