Blood and Fire

by McKenna, Shannon

  His eyes rolled. He was losing steam, getting spooked. She hurried to keep him talking. “When he sees what, Howard?” she prompted.

  “He’ll know,” Howard muttered. “Magda told me he’d understand as soon as he saw it, and he can—”

  “What on earth is going on in here?”

  Lily and Howard practically levitated, they were so startled.

  Miriam stood in the open door, her large eyes flashing in outrage. “What is the meaning of this?” she demanded, her voice razor sharp.

  Lily’s mouth worked, struggling for something, anything to say in the face of the woman’s inexplicable anger. “Ah, we were just talking—”

  “Talking?” Miriam’s voice slashed over hers. “Just look at him! You’re deliberately upsetting him!”

  Lily looked. Howard had jerked his hand away and wrapped his arms around his knees, eyes squeezed shut, streaming with tears.

  Shit. That brief, rare moment of opening up was closing down again, all because of that stupid nurse’s wretched crap timing. Shit!

  “No,” Lily said, through clenched teeth. “He was perfectly fine! You were the one who agitated him when you burst in on us like that! Howard, just finish what you were telling me about Magda and her—”

  “No!” He jerked away as if she’d struck him. “I never said anything! It’s just stupid, bullshit raving! I’m a crazy old man, a paranoid junkie! Get away from me, before I bring you down, too! You shouldn’t come to see me at all! I’ve told you that! Please, go!”

  True. But he never told her to stop writing the checks. Though, to be fair, it may never have occurred to him that she poured out her heart’s blood to pay for this place. She’d never rubbed his nose in it. “Just go. Don’t come back. Forget all this. Forget about me. Please.” Howard began to rock again, shoulders shaking with sobs.

  “Well?” Miriam prodded. “You heard the man! Go! Right now!”

  Lily shot to her feet, shocked and affronted. “No, I will not! I am here to talk to my father, and I demand privacy.”

  “Demand all you want,” Miriam retorted. “This is my shift, and he is my responsibility, and I’m standing by it! You need to go! Right now!”

  Lily turned to Howard, put her hand on his shoulder. “Howard—”

  “No! Don’t!” He shook her hand off, moaning and twitching.

  Miriam marched over, her steps full of grim purpose. Before Lily quite knew what was happening, the needle was in Howard’s arm, the plunger going in. Howard went rigid . . . and sagged, suddenly limp.

  “There,” Miriam said, in obvious triumph. “Now he can rest.”

  Lily was appalled. “How dare you?” Her voice shook. “I open my veins every month to pay for this place!”

  “That is not my concern,” Miriam said. “You can complain to my boss if you want, but I’m going to be filing a statement today, too, about how I witnessed you abusing him! Deliberately agitating him!”

  Lily’s jaw dropped. “Abusing him? I was just talking to—”

  “Leave! Now!” Miriam’s voice rang with command. “Or I’ll have you forcibly escorted out! And don’t think for one second that I’m bluffing!”

  Lily stared at the woman, her cheeks hot. She looked at Howard, slumped on his side. Air wheezed into his half-open mouth. Eyes half closed, blurred with drugs, like they’d been most of her life. He’d run off to his safe place and left her out in the cold, alone. Just like old times.

  She could have strangled that bitch for killing what amounted to the only real moment she’d had with Howard in years. But it would serve no purpose. Howard had retreated. He wouldn’t be back today. What was the point? She might as well go through official channels to make her complaint. It would be more dignified. She’d move Howard to some other facility if she didn’t get an appropriate outcome.

  Miriam frog-marched her to the door of the ward and shut the door in Lily’s face, hard, once she was outside it.

  Lily just stood there, at a loss. The guard was giving her a strange look. To the elevator. One foot in front of the other. She wanted to lodge her complaint immediately, but she was so angry and rattled, she’d flub it and come across as a hysterical idiot. Better to wait. Keep it together.

  So she powered through the lobby and out onto the grounds without speaking to anyone. The late summer sunshine felt incongruous. All those bugs and birds tweeting and chirring, wind rustling, boughs waving. The cheerfulness was unseemly. Her body felt as tight as piano wire.

  As if having her father be a suicidal drug addict weren’t enough for her nerves to handle. Now ghosts, eerie warnings, cryptic requests. Buckets of blood. Murderous bad guys out to get him, and Lily, too. Brrr.

  She hadn’t thought things could get any worse for Howard, but he’d never scared her like this. She needed distance, or she’d go crazy herself. She, unlike Howard, had no family members left who would sling themselves up into a strangling financial noose in order to lock her up someplace attractive and safe to be crazy. Nope, she’d be muttering-to-herself, eating-out-of-Dumpsters crazy. The mage did not appeal.

  She was shivering. She wanted to crawl under a bush, huddle like a hurt animal. The sky seemed so empty. Weirdly threatening.

  She hadn’t gotten the number of the cabbie. She should have gotten his card. She could go back inside, ask for a car service, but that would require mental organization, social skills, and a certain measure of calm that she simply did not possess. The other option was to sit down on an ornamental rock and wait for forty minutes.

  She glanced up at the fourth floor. Miriam stood in the window of one of the rooms, staring down. Talking into a cell phone.

  About Lily, no doubt. Probably telling her supervisor about the incident, painting Lily as the hysterical hag of the situation. Lily quashed the thought. It sounded grandiose, paranoid. The whole world is looking at me, plotting against me, out to destroy me.

  She was not giving in to that. Not even if it were true.

  Miriam stared down, still talking. The reflection on the doublepaned glass window obscured her expression, but Lily fancied she could feel the hostility radiating out of the woman, even at this distance. She got up, strolled along the grounds. She felt so exposed, under that blank sky. Like a raptor might swoop down, claws out to grab and rend.

  They killed her, Lil. In front of me. They beat her to death. They told me you’d be next . . .

  A wave of faintness came over her. She had to grab a tree branch to keep steady at the remote possibility that Howard actually . . . no.

  She couldn’t go down that road, even in the privacy of her own head. That way lay madness. There weren’t enough funds for both of them to be bonkers. But damn it, she’d wondered for years what the hell had broken Howard. Why would a normal, successful, relatively happy person suddenly fall to pieces? From one day to the next?

  One wouldn’t, she thought. Not without a precipitating cause. And witnessing this Magda’s brutal murder . . . that would do it.

  But her longing for a logical explanation was a trap, too. She was wise to all traps now. Suspicious of everything. Even her own mental processes.

  The grounds merged into forest at the end of the neatly mowed lawn. Shivery prickles on the back of her neck urged her to run, hide. Go to ground. Stupid impulse. She didn’t do nature, and besides, nobody was after her. The world didn’t pay much attention to her, and she liked it that way. She flew under the radar. Almost no one knew what she did for a living, and by necessity, her referrals were extremely discreet. She worked too many hours to know many people, other than Nina. And a few disgruntled men from her occasional forays into dating.

  She glanced up. Miriam was still there, still talking on the phone.

  It embarrassed her to stand out here, like a dog put out for piddling on the rug, while that awful woman glared down. She was out of this place. Right now. On foot. How far off base could she go? She had on sneakers. She couldn’t get lost if she stayed parallel to the road and kept the sound of
traffic in her ears. A walk in the woods to clear her mind, just the thing. Unless some fanged predator ate her, of course, but she didn’t think bears or cougars or wild boars lurked in the woods of New York. Plus, she’d save ten bucks of cab fare and avoid the embarrassment of not being able to tip the cab driver. And the money could then be put toward tonight’s dinner. A happy bonus.

  Lily pushed through the hedge and plunged into the forest.

  3

  “Come get her, Cal. Come fast.” The nurse Miriam, who was not, in fact, a nurse, nor was her name Miriam, whispered fiercely into her cell as she slipped into an unused patient room.

  “Did King say what to do with her?” Cal asked, sounding bored.

  “I haven’t spoken to him yet, but when I do, I certainly don’t want to have to tell him that we’ve lost track of her!” she hissed. “That would suck for you, too, Cal. I’ll give you more instructions in a few minutes! For now, just step on it! Get your ass back here!”

  Click. Cal hung up on her. Bastard. She’d never liked him much.

  Calm down, Zoe. Focus, Zoe. She used her name, like King did in her personalized programming sequences, trying to recreate his voice in her head repeating the commands. It helped the message go deeper.

  The situation was still containable—barely. Howard had surprised her, finally blurting out his piece. The processing delay had been longer than she’d anticipated. The gulper had bleeped the data to her laptop, run it through the word-recognition bot, and subsequently beeped her, but a dangerously long time had passed between when Howard pronounced the key words, “Magda Ranieri,” and when Zoe had gotten the signal. Almost four fucking minutes. Zoe could tell by the time she’d gotten to the room that Howard had spilled his guts completely.

  That bad, bad boy. They would have to scramble to clean this up.

  She didn’t understand why King had not simply ordered her to kill Howard years ago, but he had his reasons. And, of course, he’d wanted to maintain his power over Howard to the end. Howard had to understand who was boss. It was appropriate that he submit, that he behave and obey, to the moment of his death. And that he be punished for transgression. That was something she could well understand.

  In fact, she understood it so well, her guts churned with apprehension. King would be so angry. She needed for this assignment to go well. Her last assignment had been compromised by her lack of emotional self-control. She’d been working on that problem, putting in the hard time with DeepWeave XIII, the latest of King’s brilliant programming sequences. Four hours a day; two before work, two before bed. The same amount of time she spent working out.

  Please, let him not be angry. It wasn’t her fault. It was the time delay in the word-rec bot, not her. But King did not accept excuses.

  Zoe stared out the window as she touched a speed dial on her cell. Howard’s daughter stood outside by the entrance to the rose garden, her long, curly red hair flying in the breeze. As Zoe watched, she looked straight up at Zoe, with disconcerting directness.

  Zoe suppressed the urge to step back, away from the window. She had this situation under control. No one could intimidate her.

  So the Parr woman had opted not to make an immediate complaint about Miriam the nurse’s shocking rudeness. A stroke of luck in terms of timing, since after today, this place would never see Zoe’s face again. She was grateful this hadn’t happened when she was off shift. But that was due to her own careful planning and scheduling. Howard’s daughter was regular in her visits. The first Tuesday of the month, never weekends, no other visitors. After taking into account this dull regularity, King had decided that Zoe could handle the long-term surveillance job without backup. And until this moment, Zoe had been convinced that this job was make-work, inflicted to punish her with boredom. But she never complained. Not even when forced to do the disgusting, mind-numbing personal services nurses performed for their patients. Cheerfully, with professional perfection. For fucking years.

  Anything to make him forgive her. Approve of her again.

  The phone rang and rang. Ten times, fifteen. Zoe waited patiently, watching Lily wandering aimlessly in the flowerbeds. King was a busy, important man, with many things to attend to. She must wait her turn.

  Lily glanced up again, and Zoe stared down, composing herself. She began to mentally recite a DeepWeave emergency intervention in her mind to calm herself before—

  Click. “Zoe, my dear,” that beloved voice said. “Tell me everything.”

  Oh. Zoe sucked in air, nostrils flaring. That voice. So deep, so rich, so sparkling. It just undid her. She fought the jolt of excitement, clenched her body, ruthlessly pulled herself together.

  “Howard’s been bad,” she announced. Her voice barely quavered.

  A considering pause from the other end. “He told the girl?”

  “Yes.” She braced herself and confessed. “He named names.”

  “Ah.” That agonizing silence ticking by, again. “And how is it that you allowed him to do this, my dear?” King asked, his voice terrifyingly gentle. “What was the scope of this assignment? Had you forgotten?”

  “No!” She gulped. “They were alone together in the room, like always, and, ah, he took me by surprise! I’ve studied every transcript of their monthly visits over the last four years, and he never said a word about anything so far, so I—”

  “Zoe.” He cut her off, softly. “Calm yourself. You are babbling.”

  Zoe clenched her jaw. “I set the word-rec bot to beep me if he said Magda Ranieri’s name, but there were a few minutes of lag time that I didn’t anticipate. So I . . . it was a technical glitch. He, ah, talked for a while. I haven’t had time to listen to the data yet. I wanted to get your orders first. Do you want me to send you the raw data now? I could—”

  “No. First things first. Where is the girl now?”

  “Waiting outside for the cab,” Miriam replied. “I’m at the window, looking at her right now. Cal picked her up at the train station and brought her here. I’ve already told him to come back as soon as possible to pick her up. He’ll take care of her for you. Though I very much doubt that she believes what he told her. Nobody would, at this point.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” King’s voice sounded almost fretful. “I’m done wasting time and money on this. The last thing I need is that stupid business to inconvenience me now, when things are finally taking off.”

  “Of course,” Zoe agreed hastily. “Of course, you’re right.”

  “I should have cleaned this mess up years ago,” King went on. “I want it done today. And then I never want to hear about it again.”

  “Certainly,” she said. “Shall I tell Cal to—”

  “I’ll contact Cal. Concentrate on Howard. Is everything prepared?”

  Her heart leaped at the starting gates. “Of course.”

  Zoe pocketed her phone, tingling with excitement. At last! Afteryears of tedium, the punishment was over. Finally, she got to do what she was trained for. She’d do it just right. He’d be so proud of her.

  The endorphin-pumping fantasy that thought provoked derailed her concentration for eight seconds. She yanked herself together and retrieved the prepared gym bag from her locker in the staff area. She went to Howard Parr’s room, glancing up the quiet corridor before she went in. The sedative she’d given him had put him in a dreamy doze. He was unlikely to notice her preparations. Or have the wit to interpret them.

  Even so, she was quick. Fresh latex gloves went on, then a lightweight plastic poncho over her uniform. She’d have to take care not to get her white sneakers stained. Upon reflection, she pulled out a couple of plastic bags, encased her feet to the ankles. Details, details.

  She reached under the bed, plucked the small, supersensitive sound gulper she’d attached to the bed frame with gummy adhesive. She activated its power source only on the days that Howard’s daughter came to visit, when it would transmit its signal to the laptop humming away in the duffel bag in her staff locker. Its job was now done. />
  She pulled out the stretchy Ace bandage. Howard began to stir as she wrapped it quickly and firmly around his arms at the elbow, trapping them together. Still, he didn’t cry out.

  He did try to yelp when she popped the plastic ball into his mouth, but by then, it was too late. Pop, the gag was in place. She pulled out the long, sharp shard of broken glass that she’d stowed under his mattress long ago, and sat on him. She grabbed one of his hands, pressing his fingers randomly over the surface of the glass. He struggled hard, mewling and flopping, but she was five foot nine, a hundred and fifty-five pounds of rock-solid, gymtoned muscle, though she appeared quite slender. Far heavier than frail, wasted Howard.

  She smiled into his terrified eyes. “Poor Howard,” she crooned. “This is your lucky day, you know that? I’m going to help you finish what you’ve been trying to accomplish for years. Aren’t you happy?”

  His eyes rolled frantically. He shook his head.

  “Aw,” she murmured. “Well, I’m sorry you feel that way. If only you’d kept your mouth shut, hmm?”

  His struggles were so weak. It was so easy. She was up to more challenge than this. The shard bit deep into his flesh, a long, vertical gash into his pallid, clammy skin, and she’d angled his arm so that the hot black-red arterial gout aimed toward the floor. He fought, as best he could, but his blood pressure dropped fast, and his strength with it.

  Blood pooled under the bed. She watched it spread. So fast. Wow. This was by no means her first time, but somehow, it was always like the first time for her. Something about the combat programming, maybe, that revved her for the kill. It made something dark inside her swell, breathless with delirious excitement. Her heart boomed heavily against the cage of her ribs. Her thighs clenched, released.

  She kept her finger on his pulse as it slowed, reminding herself constantly not to squeeze too hard. She mustn’t leave bruises.

  When it was over, she slid off, careful not to step in the puddle. Pleased with her own frosty poise. White coat, pristine. Sneakers as pure as an alpine ski slope. Only the latex gloves were slippery and red.