Ed groaned out loud and put the pillow over his head. It did nothing to drown out the whispers.
HELL’S KITCHEN
If her own father was leading her into an ambush, what was there to live for, anyway?
39th St. & 11th Ave.
GAIA’S MIND WAS BLANK. HER existence was all and only about keeping the tall man in the gray sweatshirt — her father, she reminded herself — in her vision. At this point Sam, Heather, and CJ were strangers to her, inhabitants of a different planet.
The fact that her father was running away from her was immaterial. The reasons for his presence here didn’t cross her mind. She made no consideration of what she’d do or say when she caught him. Past and future no longer shaded her thoughts.
She wouldn’t let him get away. She would not let him get away. Her consciousness was only as big as that thought.
Pedestrians, cyclists, cars, trucks, pets passed in an unobserved blur. She didn’t pay attention to which streets she took and where they’d lead. Chasing was so much easier than being chased because it required no strategy.
The man — her father — was fast. He was clever. He almost lost her when she collided with the Chinese-food deliveryman someplace on the West Side. Her dad was still pretty nimble for an old guy. But Gaia was unstoppable. She was too focused to feel loss of breath or any ache in her muscles. Her father had trained her too well for him to have any hope of losing her.
Now they were in the West Forties, Hell’s Kitchen, she believed it was called, and her father was showing signs of exhaustion. From Eleventh Avenue he peeled off sharply to the left onto a dark side street. Gaia pulled up short and turned to follow. In this creepy neighborhood the streets and sidewalks were virtually deserted. Streetlights were few and far between. She saw that the side street dead-ended into the West Side Highway. Her father had disappeared into a building. Which one, though? A second passed before her fine hearing picked up a thud. The inimitable sound of a closing door. Gaia traced the sound to the door belonging to the last building on the street, one overlooking the Hudson River. Quickly she raced around the corner to determine if the building had a second entrance on the river side. It didn’t. She had him.
44th St.
JESUS, WAS SHE EVER GOING TO stop? CJ felt like his lungs were on the verge of collapse. He was in no shape to scramble thirty-some blocks uptown and all the way west to the river, much of it at a dead run.
Gaia was running away from him, but she never once looked over her shoulder to see him coming. Not even when he’d nearly picked her off on Hudson Street, after she’d collided with the Chinese guy on the bike. He’d locked on her head at point-blank range, and she’d stopped to help the Chinese guy up! The girl had ice in her veins. She wasn’t a regular person.
When she turned off on the side street, CJ skidded to a hard stop, almost losing his balance. Gaia slowed down, then walked to the entrance to the building at the very end of the street and stopped. CJ didn’t move from the corner. He felt his heart pounding like a jackhammer. But now it wasn’t just exhaustion. It was excitement, too.
He secured the gun in both hands. He brought it up almost to eye level. Why wasn’t Gaia moving — getting her ass out of there? Didn’t she know he was there? She was crazy! She was a dead woman.
He tensed his right index finger on the trigger. “This is for Marco,” he whispered. And with a huge, heady surge of accomplishment, he pulled the trigger and blew her away.
BANG
TOM MOORE WATCHED THE YOUNG gunman from a distance. With deep concentration he observed the young man aim the pistol, aiming his own weapon almost simultaneously. He pulled the trigger and heard two explosions, a fraction of a second apart. With fear spreading through his heart he watched the young man go down. It was a good wound. Enough to scare a guy like that off. For now, he was out of the equation, and all that mattered was Gaia. Tom bolted around the corner in flat-out panic.
Gaia was alive. She was standing at the entrance to a building, looking around to see whence the shots had come. She was unharmed. She didn’t even appear particularly concerned. Had she any idea how close that bullet had come to ending her life?
Tom ducked out of sight again. With relief flooding his body, he slid to the pavement and allowed himself a moment of rest to slow his speeding heart. Then he took out his phone and connected with his assistant. “There’s a man down. I need you to report it to 911. Make the call untraceable.”
GAIA’S BACK
SAM WAS WEARY AND CONFUSED and fast losing his grip on reality. He’d chased Gaia for at least two miles of congested city streets up to this godforsaken neighborhood and onto a side street as dark and empty of people as a New York City street could be. What was she thinking? Did she have some plan in mind? And was he crazy, or was there more than one other guy following her?
What was Gaia into now? What had she really come to tell him when she’d barged into his room tonight? Nothing was clear to him anymore — except that Gaia was a source of astonishing complexity and trouble, and of course he knew that already.
Sam staggered along the street, catching a flitting glance of Gaia’s back disappearing into an old loft building that faced the river. Now what the hell was he supposed to do?
He didn’t pause to answer his own question. He just followed her, of course. He hoped she wasn’t leading them both to their deaths. And at least if she was, he hoped he would get a chance to tell her that he loved her (in addition to finding her stupendously annoying) before he went.
HER FATHER
GAIA FOLLOWED HIM UP THE STAIRS on silent feet. Did he know she was still behind him? Did he know she could hear his footsteps perfectly well in the darkness? She was certain her father could have evaded her more skillfully than this. Was it possible he wanted her to find him after all? What could it mean?
Complicated questions were filling up the purposeful blank that had been her mind. Eleven floors up, he exited the staircase. The heavy cast-iron door banged to a close behind him. She waited a second before following.
This had the feeling of an ambush. Gaia knew she should be cautious and prudent, but on the other hand, if her own father was leading her into an ambush, what was there to live for, anyway?
She walked through the door and found herself suddenly in a vast, well-lit loft. The ceiling soared twenty feet above her, and the floor under her feet was highly polished parquet. Enormous floor-to-ceiling windows spanned the entire wall facing the river. She could see the lights of New Jersey across the way and a garishly lit cruise boat churning up the Hudson.
She blinked in the light, regained her bearings, and turned around. There, standing before her, not ten feet away, was her father. He wasn’t running from her any longer. He stood still, gazing into her face.
“Gaia,” he said.
NOT NOTHING
The raw pain that lived hidden inside her every day of her life had broken free.
A SOULLESS VIPER
GAIA’S HEART WAS VOLCANIC. Tears threatened to spill from her eyes.
It was really him. He was here with her. For the first time in almost five years she had before her the thing she’d yearned for most.
In those long, empty years she’d hardened her heart against him with anger and distrust, commanding herself not to care, not allowing herself the hope that he would ever come for her.
But now, in his presence, her heart’s protective shell was cracking and threatening to fall away. She’d been so strong, so capable for all that time, and now she felt that the pressure of the misery and frailty and helplessness built up over those lonely years could flatten her in a torrent of sorrow and self-pity.
She was like the toddler who’d lost her mother in the grocery store, facing miles of grim, dizzying aisles and shelves with numb courage, not allowing herself the luxury of tears until she was back in her mother’s arms.
Now Gaia’s tears distorted her father’s familiar features, the blue eyes so much like her own. It brought upon
her wave after wave of memories that she hadn’t allowed herself since he’d disappeared.
Her father scrupulously drawing castles when she loved castles, horses when she loved horses, boats when she loved boats. Making her waffles every Saturday morning through her entire childhood as she sat on the counter and told him stories. Teaching her algebra, basic chemistry, martial arts, gardening, marksmanship.
He was teaching, always teaching her, but he made it fun. On Mondays he would speak to her only in Russian, and she and her mother would make blintzes and potato latkes for dinner. On Tuesdays they’d speak only in Arabic, and she and her mother would make kibbe and hummus and stuffed grape leaves. He and her mother took her on hikes in famously beautiful places all over the country to teach her about the natural world.
Most other fathers Gaia knew were good for one game of catch on Sunday after the NFL games had ended. Gaia’s was different.
Now Gaia’s father took a step closer. She didn’t move.
That blissful childhood was what made it almost impossible to survive the night her mother was murdered and her father disappeared. She needed him and missed him so desperately, crying for him every single night, not understanding at first that he was really gone. And it wasn’t beyond his control, the way it was for her mother. He was still alive. He chose something else in his life over her, and even when she became so severely depressed that she could barely eat or sleep or talk for weeks and then months at a time, still he stayed away. He never once called her or wrote. She wanted to die then just so her father would know that he had broken her heart.
Could she ever forgive him for that?
He took another step closer. And another.
His face was close and vivid now. A question hovered in his eyes.
Gaia’s heart was a war zone. On the one side was the happiness and devotion her father gave her for her first twelve years. On the other was the brutal neglect for the past five. Which side was more powerful? Would Gaia’s love or the anger win out?
She was watching his face very closely.
“Gaia,” he said again, tentatively. He reached out to her.
Suddenly the battle shifted. Gaia wasn’t sure exactly why. It was something in the way his mouth moved, something indescribably subtle, that made her know that this man was different than the one she’d adored above everything else for twelve years. Something fundamental had changed between the way he was then and now. She couldn’t put her finger on it.
The anger surged forward in a fierce offensive, beating back the love with ruthless energy. The victory in battle was so quick and so decisive that when her father came another step closer and reached out his arms to embrace her, Gaia recoiled. Feeling the brief touch of his hands on her shoulders, she experienced no warmth, no affection. Nothing.
Well, not nothing. Anger.
She experienced such powerful anger that she shoved him away from her. “I don’t want to see you,” she told him.
The anger was building. It was terrifying. The raw pain that lived hidden inside her every day of her life had broken free, and she couldn’t control it. She shoved him again, harder this time.
There was sadness and confusion in his face as he stumbled backward, or some semblance of it. She couldn’t tell. She didn’t know this man. His expressions weren’t familiar to her.
She drew back her arm and connected her fist with his jaw. It made a satisfying crack. It was horrible, unspeakable of her to do this, to treat her own father this way.
And yet his expression conveyed no pain. He never took his eyes from her.
She was hauling off for another blow when her arm caught behind her. She spun around and realized for the first time that there was another person in the room. Over her shoulder she saw a tall, very broad man with dark clothing, short dark hair, and a completely blank expression.
Who was this? she wondered distantly, from beyond her rage.
The man held Gaia’s arm tightly and twisted it behind her back.
What could her father have meant by this? Gaia wondered, staring at him in indignant disbelief. Was this some kind of ambush after all?
It didn’t matter. The oversized man provided an opportune release for Gaia’s exploding rage. With some zeal she broke his grasp. Instantly she grabbed a fistful of his hair in one hand and shoved her other hand under his armpit. She positioned her legs for the greatest leverage and swung the son of a bitch over her shoulder, laying him flat out on the wood floor.
She waited for him to scramble back up to his feet before she buried another jab in his stomach and kicked him brutally in the chest.
She was dangerous now. She wasn’t in control. She had to put him away before she really did harm. She calculated the exact spot on his neck and struck fiercely with the heel of her hand. The man crumpled to the floor without a glimmer of consciousness, just as she’d expected. He’d wake up in a while. He’d be fine. It was her own wildfire temper that caused her concern.
Her father watched her intently. Beseeching her. She couldn’t look at him anymore. If she didn’t get out of there, she would do something she would truly regret.
“It’s too late. You stayed away too long,” she muttered to him as she turned and walked away. He was no longer her handsome, magical father; now only a pale reminder of sickening betrayal and loss, she needed him out of her sight.
She wished he were dead. That way she could treasure the time she had with him. She could carry on in life with the belief that love was real and happiness could be trusted. Now that cherished time, the foundation of her existence, was fatally poisoned by the knowledge that her beloved father had been a soulless viper all along.
THE DARK HALF
TOM MOORE STOOD SWEATING IN the dark stairwell on the eleventh floor of the largely abandoned loft building. He had a terrible feeling about this. Why had Gaia come to this place? He felt certain there was grave danger here. He sensed it so strongly, his brain clouded with dark, impenetrable fear. He hadn’t had this feeling in a long time.
He was preparing to follow her when he heard the metal door creaking open just a few feet away. He hurled himself backward, concealing at least most of his body behind dusty boxes in the corner of the landing. He crouched there silently.
Gaia staggered through the door and into the stairwell. Her face displayed pure psychic pain. He stopped breathing as she walked within inches of him. Clearly she didn’t see him because she continued down the stairs.
Tom felt as if his heart were being ripped from his chest. This was too hard, being near Gaia, seeing her pain, and not being able to help. But he was involved now, and how was he ever going to pull away again?
He knew he would follow her, but before he did, he needed to see what was beyond that stairwell door. Gaia had emerged physically unharmed, but nonetheless something had destroyed her in there.
He had a bad feeling about it. A black curiosity. Even as he crept to the door, he advised himself against it.
He opened the door with ultimate gentleness, wincing in anticipation of the slightest creak. He pulled it open about a foot and took a deep breath. Slowly, silently he peered into the giant loft, his hand poised on the trigger of his gun.
Tom’s glance lighted ever so briefly on a man of his own age and build sitting in the middle of the floor, elbows resting on knees, chin resting in hands, silently contemplating.
That man sitting on the floor was exactly Tom’s build and exactly his age — to the hour. His face was more familiar to Tom’s than any other, and yet Tom flew from the scene with the singular horror of a man who has seen the dead rise and walk.
Tom knew it was the man referred to, in his short, explosive life among the terrorist underground, as Loki, after the Norse god of the netherworld. But he also knew that the man’s given name was Oliver Moore and that he was supposed to have died five years ago.
It was Tom’s alter ego, his dark half, his brother.
IF YOU LOVE SOMETHING . . .
“YOU LE
T HER GO?” ELLA ASKED IN disbelief, returning to the loft from the floor below.
Loki said nothing. He sat there, meditative.
“After all that, you let her go?”
It was a great failing of Ella’s that she couldn’t keep her temper under control. She was self-destructively trying to get a rise out of him, and he wasn’t in the mood to play. Ella made a grave error in allowing her dislike of Gaia to get the best of her.
For a man who had risen above (or perhaps fallen below?) his emotional impulses long ago, it was rather confounding to feel the sting of Gaia’s rejection. He should have been delighted to see the rage and hatred she held for her father — or a man she believed to be her father, at any rate. Instead, in some primal way, he longed to see love in her eyes, no matter who she believed him to be. She was his daughter after all, genetically if not actually. She was the child of the woman he’d loved. In all of the sordid, black history between him and Katia and his brother, Gaia was the prize, and he meant to win her.
“You’ve lost her now,” Ella prodded sullenly.
Loki stood and stretched. He walked toward the windows, admiring the sparkling panorama with fresh eyes. Suddenly he felt enormously hungry, like he’d woken from a very long sleep.
“Until Monday, perhaps,” Loki informed her with a careless yawn.
“And why will she be back then?” Ella demanded snappishly.
Loki stood inches from the window, staring out, his hands pressed against the cold glass. He was in no particular hurry to answer Ella. He studied the dark precarious cliffs of New Jersey’s Palisades for a long time.
“Because I’ve detained a certain friend of hers. We’ll keep him. Weaken him for a day or so. On Monday morning Gaia will learn that if she doesn’t come for him when I wish, I will murder him.”
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