by P. Kirby
Peter Angel had collapsed, hands clutching his thigh. Shining with an orangey glow in the living room’s light, blood slicked his hands. A second handgun lay inches from Peter on the carpet where he’d dropped it when Benjamin shot him.
Adam snorted. “You’re not completely hopeless, it seems,” he said to Benjamin. Neither he nor Octel showed any interest in their companion’s injury. Octel clamped harder on Maya’s arm. Peter hurled muttered curses at Benjamin and rocked back and forth on the floor.
Maya stared at Peter, morbidly fascinated by the sight. Except for witnessing a few schoolyard fights, she had never seen real violence, just the stylized versions on television and the big screen. Though the gunshot had been more like an angry pop than a ferocious roar, it had still been so much louder than she would have imagined. Jerking her gaze away, she looked at Benjamin and for an instant their eyes met. Then his full attention was back on Adam.
A shadow flickered behind him and for a second she thought it was cast by Peter’s agonized squirming. Except it was too high and it quickly loomed taller. Just as it turned into a tall, broad-shouldered silhouette, Benjamin sensed it. His reaction, however, was a second too late.
Maya’s warning shrank into a bright gasp as he half turned in time for the side of his head to meet a huge fist. The sound of the collision was horribly loud, even with the gunshot still ringing in her ears.
Benjamin’s face picked up the most peculiar expression, slightly cross-eyed and puzzled. Then the light faded from his eyes entirely and he started to fall to the floor. Her mind denying that this was real, Maya gawped stupidly at the scene. The shadow behind Benjamin moved and Maya saw his attacker for the first time.
The hulking man emerged from the shadows and caught Benjamin around the waist, left arm wrapped around him almost tenderly. A fist-sized rock, part of the force behind the blow, dropped from the big fellow’s right hand, making a thunk when it hit the brown shag carpet. He grabbed the gun before Benjamin dropped it. With Benjamin immobilized and disarmed, the man lifted his gaze to take in the rest of the room. Recognition so strong it hurt swept over Maya.
Sturdy and big-boned, the man possessed pleasant and unremarkable features, exactly the kind of everyday blandness that would never catch the attention of witnesses. The outstanding thing about him was his size and the strength it suggested, but that, as Adam had pointed out, was exactly what people would expect from a big, corn-fed Midwestern man.
“You’re quite a craftsperson, Maya,” Adam said. “If only you didn’t take so much prodding.” Adam looked at his newest employee. “Henry. What happened to your neck?”
Ugly maroon-and-purple bands of bruises encircled Henry’s neck. Henry opened his mouth and let out a strangled squawk. Unable to speak, he gestured to the limp man in his arms.
“Really? Benjamin? He’s been busy tonight.” With a reassuring smile, he said, “Don’t worry. Your voice will be back as soon as you heal completely from…whatever Benjamin did to you.” His smile was genuinely warm. “Now make sure he stays out of trouble, all right?”
On cue, Benjamin groaned. Cocking his head back slowly he took in the room. A bright stream of blood ran from the left side of his head and down his jawline. Tugged in a new direction by gravity, blood started a new path past his ear and down his neck.
Maya tried to shrug off Octel’s hand. “Let go. He’s bleeding.” Octel ignored her and Peter chuckled.
Long legs flailing like a newborn colt, Benjamin tried to stand, only managing to be half successful. He glanced back, eyes curious, at Henry. Curiosity gave way to horror. “Y-you? You were dead. I killed you.”
“Maya Stephenson’s Formed are not so easy to kill,” Adam said cheerfully. Benjamin had just long enough to shoot Maya a startled look before Adam signaled Henry. There was no outward malice in Henry’s actions, no sense that he wanted revenge for his attempted murder. With as much emotional involvement as one might invest in swatting a fly, he grabbed the back of Benjamin’s head in one huge hand and dashed the hapless thief’s face against the door frame.
With a painful grunt, Benjamin went boneless. “Leave him,” Adam said. Henry dropped Benjamin to the floor. He remained where he fell, chest down, face turned away from Maya, a large section of his coppery hair dark with blood.
Maya stared at the ugly shape of the blood-soaked hair, the slow seep that moved into the carpet’s worn pile and felt her vision darken, blood rushing from her head. No, Maya wasn’t the kind of woman who fainted, but she had never seen a loved one this badly hurt, certainly never been witness to something so brutal. Not until tonight. First Eric, now Benjamin. Hold it together, girl. Telling herself that there were people who saw far worse every day, she steadied her breathing and turned to Adam. “I’ll do whatever you want. Just leave my friends and family alone. Don’t hurt Benjamin anymore.”
Adam’s handsome face beamed with triumph. “Yes, you will indeed.” He studied her for a moment. “Maybe I should just keep Benjamin. He heals quickly and Henry can find thousands of ways to hurt him.”
Maya’s hopes sank but she covered her despair with anger. “I said I’d work for you. What more do you want?”
Adam moved to Benjamin, who still lay motionless. “Don’t you wonder how much physical damage an immortal can take?” His perfect smile flashed in the ugly light and Maya shivered, a deep tremor that ran up her spine and down her arms. “How many bones could be broken, how much skin peeled away?” He gave Benjamin a hard nudge, his toe hitting ribs.
“You’re sick, insane.” Maya struggled in Octel’s iron grasp.
His smile turned ironic. “No, I’m quite sane. I do believe sociopath might be accurate though.” The smile disappeared and he said, “In three days, I want two new Formed, built to the same specifications as Henry here, with just enough character so I can tell them apart. Understand?”
Even with Benjamin broken on the floor, even with Eric in the hospital, something in her rebelled at the idea. The man before her smiled, his face instantly growing more handsome, charisma rolling from him in waves. Her power was still active and she felt nothing but contempt. For all his charm, he had no conscience.
An immortal with no conscience surrounded by a small army of obedient soldiers, also immortal. She couldn’t do it. But she had no choice.
“Yes,” Maya said. “I understand.”
Adam started to speak, but Octel spoke first. “Careful, Benjamin is preparing to cast.”
Unconcerned, Adam glanced at Benjamin, who hadn’t stirred, and then started toward the front door. “Tie him up, Henry. Careful with the knots, he’s slippery.” Gesturing to Octel, he said, “Let’s get Ms. Stephenson home. She has work to do.”
Maya dug her heels into the carpet. “Wait. We agreed. You have to let Benjamin go.”
“I didn’t agree to that.” He stopped, one hand on the doorknob, and gave her a mocking smile. “If you continue to cooperate, I won’t harm any more of your friends or family.”
Maya, like Octel and Peter, who had risen shakily to his feet, were all turned toward the doorway. A sharp grunt of pain jerked their attention back toward Henry and Benjamin, in time to see Henry stagger back, bent over, hands at his thigh. A knife handle—Maya recognized it as the knife that Benjamin had threatened her with the night they met—stuck out of the thick muscle of Henry’s upper leg.
Unsteady but on his feet, Benjamin glared one-eyed at Adam. His collision with the door frame had left two deep gashes that angled down his face, the first between his eyebrows and the second on his right cheek. His right eye was swollen shut. Lifting a hand, he spoke several words that Maya recognized as Elvish.
Octel shrank back, dragging Maya with him. Air shivered and tightened around her and her power sang in her veins. Even at a distance, her magic recognized Benjamin’s.
On the edge of the spell, the gust blew her hair back. Adam, at the spell’s epicenter, was shoved off his feet and hit the closed door with enough force to make the hinges creak
.
Octel pushed Maya sideways, out of his way. Unprepared, she fell to her hands and knees.
Seeing her fall, Benjamin turned. “Maya!”
Magic, this time unfamiliar, hissed against hers and Octel barked a spell, the cadence just like the one Benjamin had cast in Elvish. Benjamin’s attempt to dodge the spell failed. A blast of air hit him square in the chest and he staggered back into the dark kitchen.
“Get him,” Octel said to Henry, the command echoed, though rather feebly, by Adam. Benjamin’s knife clattered to the kitchen tile as Henry pulled it from his leg and tossed it aside, hurrying after Benjamin. Maya winced at the dull sound of fist hitting flesh, once, twice, and just when she started to breathe again, a third time. Henry backed out of the kitchen, limping but still unperturbed, dragging a semiconscious Benjamin by the arms. Maya heard shoes scraping on the short stretch of tile by the door. Adam rose to his feet, his face murderous.
Benjamin hung from his elbows in Henry’s grasp, the rest of him in a sprawl across the floor. The damage to his face looked unchanged and, judging by his sobbing breaths, Henry must have hit him somewhere in the torso.
“Drop him,” Adam said, approaching Henry. He held out a hand, palm up, and wiggled his fingers. “Your gun.” Henry pulled it from a shoulder holster and handed it to him.
“No! What are you doing?” Maya said as Benjamin fell to the floor with a lung-emptying impact. Adam pointed the weapon down at Benjamin and squeezed the trigger twice; the recoil jerked up his arm, but the aim was steady through his experienced muscles. Benjamin cried out and squirmed, jerking his knees toward his chest and turning on his side. His dark gray eyes, bright with agony, stared at nothing.
Her own mind seared with shock, Maya rose to her feet and rushed toward Benjamin, heedless of Adam or anyone else in the room. No one attempted to stop her. Adam handed the gun back to Henry.
“You want him?” he said to Maya. “He’s yours. For tonight, anyway.” Maya felt his dispassionate gaze rake over her as she crouched by Benjamin. “He’s going to EverVerse tomorrow.”
“What?” Maya asked, meeting Adam’s violet eyes.
“Tomorrow evening, at seven, you’ll bring him and all the drawings, back here.”
“I thought you were going to play with him, boss,” Peter said, his face pale and mouth set in a cruel curve.
“He’s more useful to me in EverVerse. Come on, I’ve got business in town and we need to get you and Henry patched up.” He gave Maya a polite nod as though they’d just concluded some civilized business and headed for the door, followed by a limping Henry, then Octel. Peter spared Benjamin one last vengeful look before hobbling after them. The door clicked shut but no one bothered to lock it. If the house was Adam’s, he wasn’t terribly concerned with security.
Kneeling at Benjamin’s side, Maya pushed up his sweater. Struggling to maintain a cool objectivity, she pressed hard on a bullet wound. With her other hand, she pulled out her mobile phone and started to press 911.
“No,” Benjamin rasped, eyes still unfocussed.
Maya’s father had seen to it that she and Orson learned first aid, but two gunshot wounds, two probable concussions, and whatever else Henry had inflicted were beyond her. “We have to get you to a hospital.”
“No hospitals,” he said though a wet wheeze. “I’ll heal.”
“I think you have a collapsed lung, Benjamin—”
His fingers curled, driving into the spaces between the bones in her arm. “Holders…watch hospitals…looking for people like me…not human.” It must have taken a supreme effort, but he sat up. “I’m all right. Help me up, I need to move.”
“Move?” Maya said, incredulous. She hesitated, a finger still over the phone’s number pad. Inside her, a woman blubbered in despair and shock, but Maya clamped down on that part of herself, surveying Benjamin’s face with a cool eye. It was one thing to talk about his immortality, quite another to put it to the test. The gash on his cheek, a little red canyon with a base of white cheekbone, had already stopped bleeding. So had the cut between his eyes. Hoping she was making the right decision, she put her cell phone back in her purse. She took his arm over her shoulder and struggled to her feet, his weight bearing down on her. Hot blood started to soak into her sleeve. “You need to move? Is this an immortal thing?”
“Actually, it’s a ‘Let’s get the hell out of here’ thing.”
Feeling cheered by his slight humor and ability to stand, she said, “I hope you’re parked nearby.”
“I never park nearby.” He either grimaced or smiled, Maya wasn’t sure which. “It’s a thief thing.”
“And how do you define ‘not nearby’?”
“About a half mile away.”
As they reached the front door, he reached for the knob. For someone who’d just been bashed against a door frame and shot twice, he was doing well. Together they went out into the cold night. Maya shivered and tightened her grip around his waist. “Are you cold?”
“No. I can’t feel much at all,” he said, rather ominously.
Maya tried not to let the comment worry her and concentrated on walking down the gravel pathway toward the street. Nonetheless, her stomach was in knots, wound tight by fear. The air smelled of fireplaces, the spice of living piñon and juniper and Benjamin’s blood. She didn’t think any ordinary person could move after what had happened to him, but it was difficult to ignore the blood that soaked through her clothes, growing cold and sticky in the night air.
The street was just a few feet away and Maya looked up and down it, wondering what a passerby would make of the two of them.
“Benjamin? Which way to your car?”
Instead of a response, he went limp, the arm around Maya’s neck almost slipping free of her grasp. Maya grabbed his wrist just in time. His dead weight ground the bones of his arm into her neck. Despite her best efforts, Benjamin still impacted the gravel driveway a little too hard.
He had fallen onto his back, eyes closed. She took his hand, wondering whether she had made the right decision, not calling for an ambulance. In the thin moonlight, his face was ghastly pale.
“Benjamin, honey.” She leaned and kissed the one patch of skin on his face that wasn’t bloody. “Where did you park?” She dug around in his jacket’s pockets, finding a phone and car keys. “Benjamin?”
“About a half mile…away, side street…Los Padrinos.” He groaned and sat up.
Maya shrugged off her coat and put it over his shoulders. “We should get you back in the house. You can wait where it’s warm.”
“No. Not going back in there.” To prove his point, he closed his eyes and lay back again.
Since she couldn’t get him in the house without his cooperation, she kissed him again and got up. “I’ll be back soon.” She set off at a hard jog.
“All those gym fees finally pay off,” she said when the boxy shape of Benjamin’s car appeared around the corner. Maya had always disliked driving a strange car, the inevitable search for controls that were placed differently from her car. Finding the switch for the headlights turned out to be the least of her problems. Without her jacket, she started to tremble from the cold. And she couldn’t find the control for the seat adjustment, a serious problem, because at the seat’s current position, she couldn’t reach the pedals.
Though it only took a couple minutes, her search seemed to take forever. The cold bothered her less than the knowledge that Benjamin waited. She imagined him bleeding to death while she lost time groping under the seat and around the dashboard. The beginning of boneless terror threatened. After various experiments, which led her to the controls for the side-view mirror and the hazard lights, she discovered that the first lever she’d tried was the correct one; it just needed more muscle. The engine turned over agreeably, although with an alarming racket, and Maya eased it away from the curb. As she turned onto the next street, she caught sight of her name written in the dashboard’s dust. Her heart clenched and panicky tears welled in her e
yes. What if he was wrong? What if his injuries could kill him? She should have called an ambulance.
When she reached the house, her fear deepened. He wasn’t where she had left him. She couldn’t imagine him moving very far on his own. Had Adam returned and taken Benjamin away to be tortured?
She found him a few feet away, back against the subdivision’s concrete sign, eyes closed. “I’m okay,” he said as she rushed to his side.
“You need a doctor.”
“A doctor can’t do anything that rest can’t accomplish.”
“How do you know?” Maya asked, taking his arm over her shoulders again. “Have you been shot before?”
“Once. I healed…no doctors.” The last word gurgled from his mouth and he coughed. Blood splattered on his arm from his ill-timed attempt to cover his mouth.
“Oh, God, Benjamin, I should call—”
“No.” His weight thrust down on her as he started to stand. Forced to concentrate on helping him, Maya stood, unable to reach her cell phone. Leaving no room for protest, he took one surprisingly strong step forward and then another.
He made it as far as the car, where he passed out just as he had sat on the edge of the backseat. Wet with blood and without a jacket, Maya’s teeth started to chatter. In the watery light of the car’s interior light, Benjamin’s skin had a bluish pallor, but he showed no reaction to the cold. Though moving someone hurt this badly went against her first-aid training, she climbed over him, put her hand under his arms and pulled.
It took some doing. Unconscious, Benjamin lost all his lanky grace and became a frustrating collection of heavy, overly long limbs.
He woke after she’d moved him a few inches. Groaning in pain, he braced his arms against the seat and dragged himself all the way into the car. Maya started to climb out, but he stopped her. “You…you have to destroy Adam’s drawings and make him Fade. I know you don’t—” he coughed another glob of blood onto his hand “—you don’t want to destroy them, but it’s the only way. He’ll just keep making demands, hurting people…” His eyes rolled back into his head and he slumped into the corner of the seat, gasping for air.