by Reinke, Sara
“You talked to her, what, by phone?”
Mason shook his head. “Webcam.”
“Any chance you could get a hold of anyone else? Someone who could help us out?”
“I doubt it. They don’t keep me on a really tight leash, but they’ve got Edi. They don’t have to.” Mason looked back at the door, again as if to make sure Andrei and his companion were still distracted. “Nikolić is planning on taking you someplace called the Draka.”
Julien arched his brow. “I’ve heard of it.” Although the term referred a specific type of Russian mixed martial arts, the Draka Mason spoke of was far less structured, sanctioned—or legal. “It’s like a dog fight…only with people instead of pit bulls.”
“You can’t fight,” Mason said. “Not in the shape you’re in.”
Julien cocked his brow all the more, bemused. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing. It’s lovely,” Mason told him with a scowl. “Except you’ve got a hole in your chest that’s about three inches wide and twice that deep. And nothing holding it together except a few stitches and some Vaseline gauze.”
“Bullshit. I’m fine. I’ve got a hell of a doctor.”
“If he makes you fight, you’re going to wind up getting killed.”
Julien snorted. “He can’t make me do shit. Trust me on that. Besides, if he takes me to fight, it might just be the chance I need—the chance we both need—to get the hell out of here.”
“What do you mean?” Mason asked. “How?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t planned that far ahead yet.” Because Mason rolled his eyes, looking exasperated at this, Julien awarded him a reassuring smile. “But in the meantime, I have really high pain tolerance. I’ll be fine.”
Mason still didn’t look convinced.
“You’ve seen my back,” Julien added pointedly, referring to the artwork adorning his back from the nape of his neck to his waist, and trailing the lengths and contours of both arms. “You think that didn’t hurt like a bitch?”
The tattoos had been embedded in his skin since a visit to Japan in 1948 during which he’d established contacts on behalf of his father with several prominent Yakuza—Japanese organized crime syndicates.
Mason sighed heavily, hanging his head for a long, frustrated moment, then looked up again. “Yeah. I saw. Why the hell would you do that to yourself?”
Julien shrugged. “Why not?”
Although a Westerner, he had been welcomed and treated warmly because of his father’s wealth and promise of potential investment in Yakuza activities. Julien had been invited to partake in many traditional Japanese rituals and customs ordinarily reserved for Yazuka members only, including sakazuki, or the ceremonial sharing of sake, and tebori, a type of traditional tattooing that literally meant “carved by hand.” The intricate, colorful designs covering the entire back and sometimes torsos, buttocks, and limbs, were signatures of the Yazuka, and the method of application, which involved the implanting of ink deep into the dermal layer of the skin using repetitive, rapid-fire thrusts of the artist’s hand—instead of a mechanized needle, as with modern tattoos, or even a small hammer, as with other antiquated methods—dated back thousands of years.
The process had been long, taking several hours each day, every day, for more than a month, and grueling, requiring him to sit or lie perfectly still while the artist had worked—despite the constant, burning sting of the needles. But Julien had endured the pain without complaint because of the end product. That, and he’d considered it a sort of penance.
Mason scooted, trying to see better, and Julien obligingly leaned forward. “What is it…a tiger?”
“A tiger and a serpent, yeah.” Julien cut him a glance over his shoulder. “They’re traditional Japanese symbols. The tiger represents strength, prowess, power. It’s a protector; it can ward off evil spirits or bad luck.”
Mason cocked his brow and offered a pointed sweep of his gaze around the room to indicate their present circumstances. “How’s that working out for you?”
Julien laughed. “Yeah, well…it’s only a tattoo.”
“What’s the snake supposed to mean?” Mason asked. “Something evil or bad the tiger fights off?”
“They’re not fighting,” Julien said, craning his neck even though it was no good; he couldn’t see the tattoo without a mirror. “They’re together, see? The snake’s wrapped around the tiger’s legs. It’s good luck. It represents wisdom and…” He hesitated for a moment, then added: “And healing. Medicine.”
Mason was quiet for a long moment. Julien didn’t need to read his mind; he knew that he understood. The tattoo represented them; it had been Julien’s constant reminder of his past, irreversible and inescapable. When Mason touched his back, his fingertips trailing lightly along the curving line of the snake’s form, Julien shivered.
“It’s beautiful,” Mason told him softly. He leaned toward Julien, and Julien felt his breath catch in the back of his throat. His heart was jackhammering, a rapid cadence keeping time with the sudden surge in Mason’s. Julien raised his face as Mason touched his cheek, drawing his thumb along his lips, brushing the tip of his nose against Julien’s.
“I’m sorry,” Julien whispered. “For that godforsaken day…for everything, Mason.”
Mason shook his head, letting his forehead come to rest lightly against Julien’s. “No. It was my fault, Julien—all mine. I was an ass. Such a heartless, thoughtless ass, and I…” He cradled Julien’s face with his hands. “I’ve never forgiven myself for what I said to you, what I did, how much I hurt you. I came back to try and fix things, to tell you I was wrong, but you were gone.” He closed his eyes as a tear slipped past the edge of his lashes, winking in the muted sunlight as it trailed down his cheek. “I love you.”
“Don’t say that.” Julien closed his eyes, anguished. “I’ve done so many things…such awful things, Mason…” His voice grew strained. “I don’t deserve—”
Mason kissed him fiercely, cutting his voice short. For a long moment, Julien allowed himself the cruel luxury of that kiss, letting his lips part as Mason’s tongue swept past them, his voice escaping him in a low, muffled whimper. He let himself be that young man again, the one with whom Mason had fallen in love—instead of the monster he’d since become.
“I don’t care,” Mason whispered, clutching Julien’s face, his breath ragged. “Do you hear me? It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. I’ve waited two hundred years to see you again—to say those words to you. It doesn’t matter, Julien. All that matters is that you’re here, and I’m here, and if we get the hell out of this, we have another chance. Anything else we can set right—by God, by my breath, I swear I’ll make it right somehow. Because I love you, goddammit. I’ve never stopped.”
A sound from beyond the doorway caught Mason’s attention, and he abruptly drew back, glancing over his shoulder in wide-eyed alarm. The door swung fully open and both of the guards walked into the room. As one of them tucked his cell phone back into his pocket, the other, now brandishing his handgun, waved it at Mason as if shooing a fly.
“You,” he said. “Šef say you come now.”
Mason’s brows furrowed. “You tell šef I’m not at his goddamn beck and—”
“Mason,” Julien said quietly, his lips hardly moving as he spoke. “Go with him.” When Mason looked down at him, his eyes wide with surprise, Julien continued in French—a language he felt certain neither of the Slavic guards would understand at all. “Ne pas essayer de les empêcher de me prendre pour combattre,” he said. Don’t try to stop them from taking me to fight. “It may be our only way out of this. Trust me.”
“You!” the guard snapped at Mason, louder now, and more imperative. “You come now!”
“Alright.” Mason raised his hands as if in surrender and rose to his feet, but Julien knew he’d been speaking to him, not the guard. He looked uncertainly at Julien, but nodded once, then walked away.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The g
uard delivered Mason to the small bedroom where the young man, Piotr, had been brought to rest after Mason had amputated his arm. Mason was initially puzzled as the guard opened the door and offered him a not-so-kind nudge across the threshold. After all, he’d already checked on Piotr earlier that morning; he and Andrei had found him relatively stable, but still unconscious and weak. His bewilderment only increased when he found Nikolić and Andrei waiting for him inside—with Piotr sitting up on the side of the bed, awake, alert, and sipping from a can of Coke.
“Ah,” Nikolić exclaimed, his mouth stretched in a grin. “Dr. Morin. Thank you for joining us.”
“Not like I had much of a choice,” Mason grumbled in reply, shooting a dark glare over his shoulder at the guard who’d accompanied him. Less than an hour ago, Mason had been startled by the loud, distinctive report of gunfire inside the house, and though Andrei had tried to play it off, Mason could tell it had alarmed him, too. A pair of younger men had come rushing up the stairs moments later, and Andrei had gone with them, leaving this guard—whose name Mason neither knew, nor cared to discover—in his place outside Mason’s bedroom door. Shortly after that, more guards had come, this time to bring Mason to see to Julien’s dislodged chest tube. He still didn’t know what the hell had happened, except that Julien had apparently tried to stop one of Nikolić’s men from sexually assaulting a girl. He didn’t know yet how the gunshot came into play, but Julien hadn’t been shot, and that was all that had really mattered to him.
To see Julien, to touch him, taste him again had felt so bittersweet and surreal to Mason. How could two hundred years have passed by, and yet he still felt so familiar? At the same time, so much about Julien seemed new and strange—the tattoos covering his back, for example. Mason wanted more time, goddamn it; there were so many things he still wanted to say, so many he still needed to tell Julien.
Speaking of surreal and strange… he thought with a frown. “He’s awake,” he remarked aloud, nodding once to indicate Piotr. But that wasn’t the only thing he found odd. A strange sensation, almost like a chill, stole down the length of his spine. He’d felt it even before he’d entered the room; it left the hairs along his forearms pricking to attention, and those at the nape of his neck stirring uneasily. It wasn’t the same as the sensation he’d experienced when Nikolić’s men had taken him from his hotel room, when they’d been doped up with the juice. It wasn’t the same as whenever Julien was close by, or another of the Brethren. It was something in between these, eerily similar, yet strangely unfamiliar.
Andrei said they’d pumped him full of the juice last night, he thought, and even though it hadn’t registered with his extrasensory perception earlier that morning when he’d first checked on the boy, he couldn’t help but wonder: Is that it? Could that be what I’m sensing now?
“He is, da,” Nikolić said, nodding. “It’s…how do you say? A miracle.”
Mason was normally inclined to dismiss such notions as rubbish, but he had to admit, he had no other logical explanation for the young man’s sudden good turn. If nothing else, it was weird as hell. “How long has he been up?”
“Not long,” Andrei said. For some reason, he stood near the window, his expression less than comfortable. In fact, he looked decidedly anything but, like maybe he was fighting off the urge to vomit at any given moment. “Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. One of the men came to get us as soon as they realized.”
Nikolić sat in a chair he’d drawn to Piotr’s bedside; leaning over now, he said, “Piotr, look. Here’s the man I told you about, the doctor who saved your life.”
Piotr lifted his head and looked at Mason. His eyes were red-rimmed, ringed with heavy shadows, and sunken deeply into the sockets of his skull. He looked haggard and gaunt, his breath ebbing and flowing in short, ragged gasps. His mouth hung partially ajar, his lips lax. And still that sensation—familiar, yet foreign—remained.
“How…are you feeling?” Mason asked, feeling obliged to say something, if only to break away from the cold, unflinching, almost insectile-like quality of the boy’s gaze.
“Like shit,” Piotr said, his voice gravelly and hoarse. Earlier, Andrei had told him that both he and his sister, Anna, were Americans born to Serbian immigrant parents. Like his sister, Piotr spoke with no discernable accent, except for maybe a touch of northern Ohio. He was nineteen, just a kid, and had dropped the Anglicized spelling of his name—Peter—in favor of the more traditional Slavic spelling upon his association with Nikolić. “I’m hurting all over. And I’m cold.”
Mason cut a glance at Andrei. He didn’t like the sound of that—or the fact that he could see Piotr shuddering from across the room. A fever could mean the infection had spread, despite their best efforts to contain and control it. In order to minimize the risk of leaving any infected tissue behind, Mason had removed his arm completely at the shoulder socket, sewing the stump that remained closed and nearly flush with the contour of his torso. Andrei had been pumping a huge amount of antibiotics into him ever since, but without any means to culture the bacteria that had caused his infection in the first place, there was really no way to know with certainty that their efforts would have any effect.
“He’s not running a temperature,” Andrei said, as if he’d read Mason’s mind and realized his concern. “I checked just a few minutes ago.” Giving both the bed and its shivering, ashen occupant a wide and noticeable berth, he moved toward the door. “I have some morphine downstairs we can give him.”
He’s sure in a hurry to get the hell out of here, Mason thought with a frown, although he couldn’t exactly blame him. That strange energy in the room, though unfelt by humans, remained palpable, nearly oppressive, to him as a Brethren.
As he followed Andrei from the room, heading down the stairs, a realization occurred to him. “Wait a minute,” he said, and when Andrei paused, glancing back quizzically, Mason surprised the shit out of him by planting his hand against his shoulder and shoving him back against the wall. “Let me see your eyes.”
“Hey—!” Andrei yelped.
“You’re high on juice,” Mason said, frowning. “That’s why you were acting all skittish upstairs. You can sense it, too.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” With a scowl, Andrei shoved Mason aside and started down the stairs again.
“Your pupils are fixed and dilated,” Mason told him. “You’re either feeling the bloodlust or you’re a corpse.”
Andrei didn’t answer; he kept tromping downstairs. His frown deepening, Mason followed. “I heard a gunshot earlier.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Yes, I did. Right before Nikolić called you away. Julien was tussling with one of your men. That’s how his chest tube came out. I know because I had to patch him up. So I also know he’s not the one who was shot.” He caught Andrei by the elbow. “Did it have anything to do with Piotr?”
“No.” Andrei scowled, jerking himself loose. “But it’s none of your business if it did. You ask too many questions and go…” For a frustrated moment, he sputtered, trying to find the right turn of phrase. “…putting your nose where it doesn’t belong.”
“Sticking your nose,” Mason corrected.
“Šta god,” Andrei muttered, and given the tone of his voice, Mason understood his meaning implicitly: What-the-fuck-ever. “Around here, that’s a good way to wind up dead.”
“Is that what the gunshot was about?” Mason asked, falling into step behind the medic again as he started down the hallway on the main floor.
Andrei ignored him. He shouldered past a couple of his comrades along the corridor’s narrow confines, fishing a set of keys from his pocket. The guards turned, curious, as Mason shoved by them, too, fuming now.
“News flash, asshole—I didn’t ask to be here,” he snapped. “I didn’t ask to become the personal physician to you and your psychotic militia friends. You kidnapped me, remember? I’m the one wearing the goddamn exploding shock collar around my neck!”
Andrei had been in the process of unlocking a door; the key remained tucked into the lock when he whirled around, clamping his hand against Mason’s neck. Mason had him by a few inches in height, but that didn’t prevent Andrei from slamming him backwards into the wall, causing a sudden flurry of dust and plaster bits to rain down on them.
“That’s right,” he snarled, reaching again with his free hand for his pocket so he could pull something out, shoving it at Mason’s face—a remote control device. “The goddamn collar I have a controller for—and I’ll use, too, pederčino, if another word comes out of your mouth.”
He was definitely high on the juice. Any hint of grey in his irises was gone now, his pupils were so wide. The strength in his arm, his grasp, was beyond anything human; adrenaline-infused by the simulated bloodlust, it was nearly that of the Brethren. For the first time since they’d finished operating on Piotr together and shared cigarettes out on the back stoop, Mason didn’t view Andrei as a possible ally, a sympathizer to his plight, but rather, as a potential—and formidable—threat.
“You got it,” he said softly, lifting his hands, palms out. For a moment, he didn’t think Andrei would let him go. He’d pushed him too far; between earlier that morning, when he’d pressed Andrei to ask Nikolić for more time before removing the chest tube, and now, he’d overstepped whatever tenuous, tentative lines had been drawn between them. Given the fact that the other men they’d passed had slowed down enough to turn and watch their exchange, he also suspected he’d embarrassed Andrei in front of them, made him lose face.
“You got it,” he said again, and at this, Andrei opened his hand and stepped back, leaving Mason to gulp for breath.
Without a word, Andrei turned and resumed unlocking the door. Pushing it open, he stomped across the threshold, his motions tense, taut, and angry.
I can’t afford for him to be pissed at me, Mason thought, touching his neck gingerly. He hadn’t realized that Andrei had a controller for his collar. Would it work on Julien’s, too? And if he has the controller, maybe he has the keys, too, and can get them off us.