by Therin Knite
“But…but I…”
“What is his name?”
“It’s…” She caves, choking back a sob. “His name’s—”
A spiked tail shoots through the bushes, cutting us off from each other. As the dragon screeches in victory, I flatten myself to the ground and roll away. The tail spikes start shearing the leaves less than a foot above my head, and pointed leaf tips rain over my face, threatening to scratch my eyes. So I clamp them shut and keep rolling and rolling and…I drop off the edge into a deep ditch, hitting the muddy bottom with enough force to knock the air out of my lungs. The impact bites at my injured shoulder, and I stifle a cry as pain radiates all the way up my neck.
Williams screams. Over and over. I wait for the inevitable conclusion: a burst of fire burning away Williams’ every mod, every accomplishment, every pride and joy. Her life.
But it doesn’t come. Instead, one of her screams is cut off abruptly before returning triple fold, and then the sound of batting wings rattles through the bushes. Williams never stops screaming, even as the dragon soars off with her into the dim morning, far too high for anyone on the ground to hear her. I catch one last glimpse of her panicked body—she flails in the grip of the dragon’s claws—as I clamber out of the ditch. It looks like she’s reaching out to me, begging me to save her.
The problem is I’m not a hero. I can’t slay a dragon.
* * *
The day Ms. Williams’ last frayed nerve snaps, Lionel spends the morning ignoring her from the other side of the breakfast table. Another vicious argument settled into a strained silence last night—suspected infidelity burned them out far more quickly than the usual topics of debate: extraneous expenses, vanity, and a lack of intimacy in their relationship. While Missy the maid scuttles around the table and makes sure Williams and Lionel receive their respective portions of coffee, a call triggers the latter’s business ringtone. He slides his chair back after one glance at the screen, rises, and storms down the hallway, grabbing his coat and briefcase on the way out. His newest antique auction win zooms out of the garage a few minutes later.
He didn’t even nod goodbye.
The tape Ms. Williams has used over the past ten years to cover the cracks in her sanity starts to tear at the force of her repressed fury. She marches into the kitchen and pours her entire mug of fifty-dollar coffee down the drain. She is well aware that Lionel has every right to be angry with her for seeing someone on the side, but he has no business whatsoever threatening to out her lover to the press. Lionel is a tall man with a short fuse, and he has a funny habit of refusing to look at the most important details until he’s already blown the situation sky high.
If he goes to the press with this, he’s going to end up blacklisted from every major business in the world. He’s already gotten himself kicked off four Boards in the past two years. But damaging the reputation of someone with more power than he can imagine? He’s going to lift the whole world over his head and realize it’s far too heavy far too late. Crack. Crunch. Splatter.
She intends to attempt to reignite their discussion (to try and talk some sense into him) when he returns home. If he returns home. If he doesn’t, the next time she hears his name will be on the eight o’clock news: Local Businessman Kicked to Curb. Ms. Williams knows this will have consequences on her social life as well. She will be jeered at by her wealthy peers for daring to break the bonds of a relationship and exalted by the lower-class masses for finally getting out from underneath Lionel’s boring, loveless thumb.
Williams reclaims her seat at the end of the table, gaze lingering on the crumbs of a gobbled-down serving of eggs and toast while she tries to eat her own. Was Lionel’s as tasteless and dry? Or has she finally lost her mind? She abandons her fork with finesse, replacing it in its original, aligned-with-the-knife position. Then again, what does her mental state matter? In the long run, she would have gone crazy anyway. Lionel’s ever-increasing distance assured that. Her pledge as a Leonite—union once forever; divorce never—assured that. She spent adolescence hung up on that upper-class bullshit. It worked out for her parents, and her young, idealistic stupidity kept her wrapped in the sheet of belief too long. If she breaks it off with Lionel now, not a single one of her family members or childhood friends will speak to her again.
Either their relationship crashes and burns or she does.
There’s little point in trying to prevent the inevitable.
But she’ll do it nonetheless, for both their sakes.
A two-hour recline on the leather sofa watching soap opera actors spit out improvised lines improves her mood from hopelessly numb to simmering with rage. She swipes her Ocom from the coffee table and messages her lover, who replies to her request with a sincerely remorseful rejection. His job has him out of the city again, and he won’t be able to catch a train back until Saturday at the earliest. So sorry, love. Promise a special date when I get back. There’s a new club opening downtown next week. I’ll get us a VIP room.
Foiled in her attempt to garner some shred of contentment in this hell, she retreats to the master bedroom and downs five of the strongest sleeping pills she can find. Half an hour later, she’s lost in the dense fog of half-dreams: visions of Lionel finally reclaiming some of that lost flame from their dating days, her lover pecking her on the cheek as they join arms during a moonlight stroll, her body floating in the shallow end of the pool, a funeral. Seven hours slip by her in the haze of drug-replicated rest, and she doesn’t stir until her unconscious brain registers the sound of a briefcase slamming against the kitchen countertop.
Lionel is home.
She presents herself sluggishly, hair tousled, eyes drooping, in the doorway of their room. When Lionel locates her, his cheeks puff out and his chest puffs up in the manner of a disgruntled peacock. “Napping. You have got to be kidding me. I work all damn day and you…Did you do anything today? Clean? Cook? Set the lawnmower to auto-cut the grass?”
“We have people who clean the house and cook and set the lawnmower to auto-cut the grass. And last time I checked, you don’t have to work because you inherited a fortune. You work because you want to work, Lionel. Or so you told me.” She leans against the doorframe, speculating about his openly aggressive behavior. His face is red. His eyes are bloodshot. Is he drunk? High on something?
Without warning, Lionel line drives his briefcase across the dining room. It hits the table’s centerpiece, shattering a priceless glass sculpture into fifty or so worthless chunks. The man reddens and reddens until he’s ready to erupt, and then he does. He grabs a heavy angel statuette off the nearest hallway table and heaves it at her faster than she can react. Skin tears on impact, white suffocating her vision, her body folding like it’s come unplugged from its energy source.
Dazed, she rolls over and sits up, blood running down her face. Lionel is storming toward her, his face a deadly violet. Whatever he’s on has overridden all his controls, and what’s left is the rage he’s always been too polite to unleash on her. She scrambles up and slams the bedroom door shut, jamming a side table under the knob. The lock on the door was broken when they moved in. She never thought it needed fixing.
Her Ocom is sitting on the bed, but before she can reach it, Lionel bursts through the door, breaking all four legs of the table at once. Screaming, Williams sidesteps his charge, and he plows face first into the mattress. Her back hits her vanity, and she spins around, searching for something (anything) to use as a weapon. The only thing she finds is her Hi-Hazel stash, carefully stowed away in a nondescript jewelry box.
The biggest auto-syringe in the box contains a lethal dose.
A…end.
Lionel rolls off the bed and rises, his limbs trembling. Whatever drug he indulged in is taking its toll on him. But he’s still twice her size. He can break her neck easily. And her last round of bone restructure mods was only a month ago—her bones are more brittle than normal.
“Lionel,” she says. “Listen to me. You are high on something. It
’s messed your head up. You’re a distant asshole, but you are not an abuser. You are not a killer. You are not going to kill me. If you try, I will stop you.”
Ad…mend.
A half-choked laugh works its way out of his throat, along with a spray of spittle. “My head is messed up? You cheated on me, you bitch. You stood in front of that judge at that fucking courthouse and said you’d be faithful, according to the agreement of our union as signed by us both. And here you are, whoring yourself out to some asshole who thinks he’s immune to punishment. You did whatever the hell you wanted to me—you betrayed me. Now I get to return the favor.”
Adamend.
He lunges for her. She tries to evade his grasp, but he catches the edge of her blouse and throws her to the floor. Her vision goes white again, and the next time it clears, he’s on top of her, hands around her neck. He squeezes so hard something crumples in her throat, and she can’t breathe, can’t escape, can’t think. She hits him with her free arm, over and over, but even when she splits his skin with her nails, he doesn’t respond. He’s impervious to pain.
So she plunges the auto-syringe into his thigh.
Adamend!
Then she passes out.
Chapter Thirteen
“Adamend? Adamend! Can you hear me?”
Grant Acres is cool and damp in the early hours of the morning. The sky is clear, stars visible in one half of the sky but obscured in the other by the residual glow of Washington’s light. This place is the rich picturesque—it is close enough to the city to allow its inhabitants to see, smell, and taste the urban life they desire and far enough away to shade them from the dirt and grime of lower-class neighborhoods. It is clean. It is lavish.
It is lonely.
“Adamend!”
In the half an hour since the dragon kidnapped Williams, not a soul has passed by on the well-kept sidewalks or driven into a fancy garage or even let a pet outside to stretch its legs. All of the houses remain silent. Some are slept in during the day by those who club hop through the night. For others, their owners are never home, and they are maintained by gardeners and cleaners once a week, every week, for the entire year on the off chance that the master stops by for a weekend in August on the migration path down to Miami. What bastards the rich are, buying all these priceless ghosts while the average Joe comes home to a cramped inner-city apartment every day. He has no other choice.
“Adamend!”
Someone shakes me roughly, a wave of pain resonating through my half-healed shoulder. I bat the hands away, moaning. “What? What do you want?” Is it the only rich fucker currently in Grant Acres, having stumbled out of his hot tub to see what all the long-gone commotion was about?
The man crouches next to me, and in the dim morning light, it takes me a second to make out his dark-skinned features. Briggs. “Adamend,” he says, “what happened?”
Another person glides by him—Ric Weiss—and picks up Martin Rickman’s Ocom where it fell out of my coat as I crawled from the ditch. The voice I’ve been hazily ignoring for the past thirty minutes belonged to Briggs. He answered my call after thirty-nine rings, but by then, Williams and the dragon were a dot on the horizon, and there was no longer a point in asking him for help. He came anyway, no doubt tracing my call.
Briggs eyes the Ocom in my lap and the one in Weiss’ hand, frowning. He takes my Ocom and slips it into my sling. Then he makes a circular motion with his index finger, and Weiss tucks the stolen tablet into a vest pocket. Out of sight, out of mind.
“Adamend, are you okay?” Briggs removes a small flashlight from his tool belt and shines it in my eyes. A moment later, he leans toward me and leafs through my wet hair with a gloved hand. “You’re soaking wet. Hypothermia might be setting in.”
Is it? It’s possible, but my sluggishness and muted emotions can also be explained by a lack of sleep, too much physical exertion, and a sudden absence of dragon-chase adrenaline.
And then there’s my unwarranted reconstruction of Williams’ love affair gone wrong. Weighing on me. Punishing me. It left a strange and hollow feeling in my chest. I don’t know why I made it to begin with—why I forced myself to watch Williams get assaulted by her partner—and I don’t know why it saddened me this way. It wasn’t even a legitimate reconstruction. I added so many embellishments, so many unknowns, it might as well have been a fantasy. Gods, why did I do that?
“Sounds like the team is here, Ric. Go grab the medics. Tell them to bring a thermal blanket.”
Weiss complies without a word and jogs off around the vehicle collection in the yard, skirting the hedges where Williams and I managed to keep hidden for not quite long enough. Blue and red blinking lights close in on our position. They reflect off the dark windows of every house in the cul-de-sac, creating the illusion of being surrounded. It’s always an illusion.
“Adamend.” Briggs tries me again, and I know I should respond to him. But a heavy buzz in my head has my tongue feeling like a lead weight, my throat like sandpaper. “Was it the dragon, Adamend? The one that killed Manson? Did it attack you?”
I manage to nod.
“Adem!” Someone sprints around the end of the hedge row and charges toward me. When he gets close, he falters, taken aback by my appearance. “Good gods, Adem! What happened?”
It’s Brennian.
“Sir, I’ve got medics coming to look at him.” Briggs rises and starts making hand signals to a growing crowd of agents in the street.
“No need. I’ll take him to the hospital myself.”
“Sir?”
“I’m not waiting around for EDPA to get here and put their grubby hands on him again. They’re already in route.”
“Is it wise to forgo an initial examination?”
“Wiser than letting him sit in the dirt for another twenty minutes.”
Briggs has nothing to add to that.
“Get some of your agents to help him into my car,” Brennian says. “And leave him alone until I tell you otherwise. No calls. No check-ins. I’ll bring him around to headquarters for his mandatory interview sometime this afternoon, once he’s gotten some rest. Once I’ve had a chance to speak with him in full. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Briggs waves a couple of men over and orders them to assist me. They each take a side and lift me up, following Brennian as he retreats toward his parked car a few houses down. My head lolls back and forth, and a few times, I spot Briggs, cross-armed, staring at me with an expression of immense pity. It occurs to me that he has already received his Brennian-grade smack down for involving me in the Manson case, complete with blaming and screaming and threatening and finger-pointing. Now it’s my turn to get ass-whipped.
I’m lowered into Brennian’s car, strapped in, and cut off from the cul-de-sac by the door. Brennian commands the auto-drive AI to jack up the heat for me before selecting preset destination number sixteen. Then we’re off, the Director whisking me away from the one type of place in the world where I’ve always felt useful. The one type of place where I have the drive to work. The one type of place where I have any motivation to continue forward with my existence.
Solving cases is my hobby. Crime scenes are my life.
Chapter Fourteen
My third car ride in twelve hours is no less painful than my first or second. In place of bleeding onto leather seat cushions while Dynara tries to keep me breathing, in place of being overwhelmed by unwanted drugs, Brennian alternates between poking at my (wet) bandaged shoulder and shooting me the sort of smoldering gaze one would use on a pet who’s knocked a flowerpot off the kitchen windowsill. Sharp prickles in my reforming bones make me fidget all the more under observation by the man who controls my occupational fate.
“Who shot you?” he asks when the car pulls to an auto-drive halt at the next stoplight.
I consider lying to him, but at this point, it would do more harm than good. “Briggs. He was leading the SWAT team.”
No hint of surprise or shock crosses Brennian’s face. He
is well aware of the situation at hand, and whatever information EDPA was unwilling to give him about the Manson case he has probably gleaned through a smidgen of intelligence and a bit of careful inference. “Did he even hesitate? You’re not supposed to shoot first.”
“I think that’s why he shot me in the shoulder and not the heart. A step in between questioning and killing. You know Briggs.”
He traces the window reflection of a neon pink department store sign, considering how to best break it to me. “I don’t know what to tell you, Adem. You’ve fucked up.”
“So, am I demoted, reassigned, or relocated?”
“I haven’t decided. Yet. But I can assure you that if you ever go gallivanting off into the night again with EDPA, I might have to consider the first option. The fact that you actually endangered yourself twice in a row last night is mindboggling to me. The fact that you ran from your own Commander and ignored an interview summons, knowing that it gives the Bureau more than enough reason to arrest you…I don’t know what’s gotten into you, Adem, but I’m sure as hell going to get it out.” He sighs, heavy and disappointed. “Eight months ago, I saw myself in you. Ambitious. Determined. Disciplined. A little immature, yes, but you can’t expect but so much from a boy. Now, I don’t even know what to think of you. It’s my fault, I’m sure, for not being around enough. You’re so smart. I thought that meant you didn’t need any guidance. That was naïve of me.”
Brennian stares at the passing cityscape as his sleek town car merges with early morning highway traffic, weaving seamlessly through lanes of tractor trailers and commuter buses. I have no idea where he’s planning to take me after our hospital stop—his high-security townhouse on McKinley Street, my apartment with the addition of a few armed guards to keep me from sneaking out, or hell, Jin’s house so as to guilt-trip me into staying put. All options are plausible. The traffic is thick, and the car’s windows are tinted so black the overhanging directional signs are obscured.