Head Rush

by Carolyn Crane

  “Justine! Thank goodness!”

  My heart pounds as Otto strides toward me, a dark commanding figure against a background of flashing red. I stand and he wraps his arms around my cocoon of a blanket. “I’ve been out of my mind with worry. You’re hurt? They said your knee? And an attack?”

  “I’m mostly just upset,” I say.

  One of the officers brings over the big axe and Otto’s eyes grow wide.

  “It was the assailant’s,” I say, telling them the story of the attack, the way the man spooked and ran off.

  I see it in Otto’s eyes the instant he figures out how that spooking happened. “Give us a moment,” he says to the officer.

  “I had to,” I say. “The guy was insane, and I’d hit my head. I thought I was having a bleed out. I thought I had nothing to lose…”

  “Do you think I care about that?” Otto whispers forcefully. “Do you think I care if you zinged?” He furrows his brow. “You’re okay, that’s all that matters. How hard did you hit your head?”

  “Hard, but I think I’m okay.”

  “You’re sure?”

  I put my hand to the bump. “There’s a goose egg.”

  He touches where I do. “Jesus! We need to ice that.” He rubs my arms through the blanket. “I’d be lost if anything happened to you, Justine. Lost.” Otto’s such a strong, tough man, but there’s a level of distress in him I’ve never seen. “I’ll never let anything happen to you.” He says it like a vow.

  “I’m okay,” I say. “Totally unoriginal to copy the Belmont Butcher, though, don’t you think? Get your own identity, dude, you know?” I’m trying for a lightness I don’t feel. “Or at least a variation. How about changing it to Belmont Baker, and he could do a rolling-pin thing?”

  Otto’s jaw is set grimly. “That should never have happened to you,” he mutters.

  I thought he’d be more upset about my zinging. If Otto and I are like two addicts, two fear junkies, then I went off the wagon—my fear won’t consume me for a while, and he’ll be alone fighting his.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “Don’t say that! You did what you had to do. But what possessed you to go rollerblading alone after curfew? To sneak out?”

  “Oh, Otto, I just…I don’t know…” I don’t know a lot, I realize. Too much. “It’s just been so overwhelming, all this life change—losing my home, my job, becoming first lady. And everyone knows me, and those nursing textbooks are freaking me out…” All true, but not why I went rollerblading.

  “Oh, Justine.” He rubs my shoulders some more. Paramedics appear just then, and I let them look at my pupils and prod my knee, bending it for them and then promising to get an X ray in the morning if it doesn’t feel better.

  Otto’s limo pulls up and stops, a sleek snake in the night. Chauffer Smitty emerges from his door and opens the back door.

  Otto picks me up.

  I gasp. “Otto, you don’t have to—”

  “Nonsense,” he says, carrying me to the limo.

  Everything’s happening too fast, and there’s too much I don’t know. But here I am, moving inexorably toward the limo. Otto sets me in back and I scoot over to give him room, like it’s any other night. Smitty slams the door after us and I jump. Was it an unusually hard slam? It seemed loud.

  “You felt overwhelmed?”

  “I don’t know what possessed me.” I stare out the window, heart pounding as I picture him violently smashing Avery’s antihighcap glasses. He hated those glasses, and for good reason: they endangered highcaps. But to kill the man who invented them?

  I turn to him and lay a hand on his arm, look into his brown eyes. This man, this good man—could fear really have pushed him so far? I believe in his goodness, but I believe in the power of fear even more. The power of fear trumps everything. This is one of the few things I know for sure. It’s a law of life.

  “What, my sweet?”

  “I think I’m a little in shock.”

  “I can imagine.” He brushes my hair off my forehead. “Good God, you’re full of muck too.”

  “I skated near the river,” I say. True, but not where the muck is from. It’s that memory of his smashing the glasses that makes me lie. I still recall the sick feeling I had, deep down, watching him. I hadn’t paid much attention to it at the time—after all, this was Otto, my knight in shining armor. His losing control, consumed with fear and rage, that didn’t fit in with my idea of him.

  Smitty pulls out. Just like that, we’re on our way home. I stare at the privacy panel that separates Otto and me from the front seat.

  “You fell in the river?”

  “Not exactly in it, but apparently…” I touch my hair and start babbling about toxins.

  “Oh, Justine.” He reaches into his breast pocket and I flinch, struck by this overwhelming terror. I wait, frozen, as he pulls something out of his pocket.

  Just a handkerchief. He hands it to me.

  “Thank you,” I whisper, wiping my face, thinking about the flinch thing I’ve been getting whenever Otto reaches into his breast pocket.

  Of course, the breast pocket is where he keeps his gun when he’s carrying. I’d chalked it up to witnessing the killing. Like a side effect. But then again, a lot of people carry guns in their breast pockets, and I don’t freak out when they put their hands in their breast pockets. Why do I only have it with Otto? Over and over, ever since the shooting, it’s as if I think my life is in danger on some gut level whenever he slides his hand into that pocket.

  Some gut level.

  Again I wipe my face. Jordan said a revisionist can erase memories, but not emotions. Whenever Otto reaches into that pocket, I get that flood of terror, like some form of knowing—something beyond thought, beyond memory—is imprinted in my cells.

  Something like emotion.

  That flinch, that fear, it feels like it comes from the same place as the instinct to protect Packard. And it’s telling me something that I’ve never bothered to listen to before.

  But I’m listening now. I get it now.

  Chills come over me as he takes the handkerchief from my hand. I avoid his eyes. Instead, I’m fixated on this new sense of knowing.

  “You’ve had quite a night,” Otto says.

  “Yes,” I say.

  He wants me to repeat my description of the Butcher copycat, and he asks questions about the attack: did the Butcher seem to be following me? Did I fall by the river before or after? And did the Butcher say anything? And why do I think he attacked me?

  “I don’t know!” I say, finally, fighting to maintain a mask of calm, and especially not look at the car door—he once told me that people who feel guilty or trapped look at doors during interrogation. The Tanglelands smell, horrible in this small space, makes me feel even more nervous. Does he know I lied? Can he tell the Tanglelands smell from the river smell? “I was too busy getting away and skunking my thoughts to be hugely observant.”

  “If you skunked your thoughts, you knew he was a telepath. How did you know? What did he read off you? What did he say?”

  “Jesus!” I say. “I was flipped out, Otto. He picked up on my fear.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “No more questions.” He won’t stop looking at me. I turn away. I feel like he senses I’m hiding something.

  And I am.

  I’m hiding this terrible new certainty, deep in my heart, that he killed Avery.

  And of course he’d have Sophia revise me if he’d killed Avery. It’s the obvious thing to do! I think of Packard’s words: You’ll be in danger if he knows you know about the revise.

  “You’re overwhelmed, my sweet, and I understand that bodyguards make you feel caged up, but you should’ve had Max along if you wanted to blade. I don’t understand why Norman didn’t see you leave.”

  “I climbed down the fire escape.”

  “Justine! Why?”

  “I guess I wanted to be alone.”

  “Why Justine? It was such a lovely party, and you s
eemed so happy…”

  I shiver. “I think I was temporarily insane. I never thought I’d be one of those crazy mood-swing brides, but—”

  “You’re not getting cold feet, are you?”

  “Don’t worry.” I look up at him. “I’m one hundred percent sure about the wedding.” Sure it’s a mistake.

  He pulls me close. My pulse pounds, and I pray he can’t feel it. “I’m sorry. That was more questions,” he says.

  “It’s okay.” I stare out the window, thinking about his personal force field. I couldn’t even zing him if I needed to!

  “But Justine,” he says, turning to me. “No more nightly excursions until the curfew is lifted. It’s so important. I promised not to track you, but I need to know you’re safe. That curfew is there for a reason. Things will only get more dangerous, but they’ll settle very soon, I promise.”

  “I’ve learned my lesson,” I say.

  He looks at me a beat too long.

  I try a smile.

  He frowns. “There’s something else,” he observes.

  My heart flip-flops. “Yeah. I would trade my soul for a hot bath.”

  His tilts his head, still watching me. Detective mode.

  “The longest, hottest bath on the planet,” I add. “In fact, I want to take three baths in a row. One to get clean, one to scrub this toxin-infused layer of my skin off, and one to soak in forever. Extreme bathing.”

  “Hmm.” He turns away.

  Hmm?

  I have this urge to get away from him. I imagine turning to him, simply telling him I can’t marry him. Sorry Otto, there is something else—it won’t work out. This whole marriage. Then I’d lean forward and rap on the privacy panel. Smitty would open it, and I’d tell him to drop me at the Midcity Arms Hotel. People break off engagements every day, don’t they? But Otto’s suspicious already; I feel like breaking off our engagement would change the game. It could even put my friends in danger.

  A killer! I can't get my head around it—I'm engaged to a killer! I tell myself I’m not in actual, immediate danger here in the limo, but it doesn’t help. I stare at the door handle, picturing myself leaping out and making a run for it. Absurd as it is, I start planning it. I still have my skates on; I could use the alleys to elude the cop cars. But it's madness. Even if I didn’t break both my legs jumping out of a moving limo, I'd be tracked down in minutes—there are so many cops out right now.

  Yet it's still tempting.

  The silence goes too long. “I’m a total basket case,” I say.

  He turns his brown eyes to me, bright and hard. Something’s off. “This is a dangerous time, my love. This is a war.”

  “Right.” I swallow, recalling my amusement at Shelby’s ability to work a machine gun—I’d likened her to a pet learning an impressive new trick. How naïve! Because Otto’s right—this is a war. There is a curfew. Police officers carry machine guns. If they even are police—how many of them are members of Otto’s private army? And what happened during those lost hours of mine, the ones Packard won’t tell me about?

  “We’ll come out better than ever, Justine. This is going to be our time—you and me. There’s so much to look forward to. You’ve been through a lot, but just wait. You’ll see what I mean.”

  “Right. Good,” I say.

  The car stops in front of our condo. Otto gets out and extends his hand. I force myself to take it, to let him help me out; I even let him keep my arm as we head in through the grand entrance of the condo building, still hobbling on my skates. Otto nods at Sammy, the doorman. “You’re off the hook, Sammy.” He tips his head at me. “Fire escape.”

  Sammy nods coldly.

  “Sorry, Sammy. I didn’t mean to cause you trouble.” I sit on a lobby chair and unlace my rollerblades. Has Otto discovered the situation on the seventh floor yet? No way—I remind myself there’s nothing to discover; Shelby would have been careful to leave everything looking the way she found it. And the darts from Avery’s gun are so tiny, people never know they’ve been hit. They just think they dozed off. Avery was proud of that. I pull off the blades. It feels a lot better to have them off, even though the slime has soaked clear into my socks.

  We cross the lobby to the elevator and Otto stabs the Up button. I can slip away tonight, I think, when I have my clothes and a head start. I have to get away.

  “Are you hungry, my sweet?”

  “Just tired. Looking for that bath.” The elevator doors open, and there’s Norman with his usual contented expression. We get in.

  “King’s penthouse?”

  Otto gives him a weary look. Norman punches floor eight. “Interesting scent you’re wearing tonight, Miss Jones,” he says. “Is that eau de Tanglelands tea?”

  My heart thwacks at my rib cage. “I had a very bad rollerblading experience,” I say. “Near Midcity River.”

  “So I hear,” Norman says.

  I fix my gaze on the elevator lights. Surely there’s no way a man can tell Tanglelands tea from the Midcity River smell.

  “We’ll run you a nice warm bath.” Otto says.

  “Excellent.”

  How would Norman even know the Tanglelands smell? Has he even been there? And anyway, Tanglelands tea is a common Midcity term for something yucky—people use the term the way you might use “pond scum” or “dumpster juice”. I wonder if Packard and the others are still down there. Would they have cleared out? Or trusted that I would come to my senses?

  Otto rubs my arms and it’s all I can do not to pull away. My skin feels so sensitive, nerve endings too exposed, and I’m chilled to the bone in every sense.

  Once we get inside, I head to the bedroom and straight into the walk-in closet, and I just stand there trying to collect my thoughts. I’m not in danger, I tell myself. Nothing is different from yesterday, except in my mind.

  Not exactly helpful.

  A crash of water into the tub. I grab my big, wool bathrobe, shake off my slimy clothes, and stuff them into the far hamper, then I put the robe around me and tighten the belt.

  Out in the bedroom I sink into one of the armchairs that look out over the street, thinking about Packard. I need him to know that I know. And Shelby claimed Otto is holding Carter and “the others”. So is that true too? He cannot die until we find Carter and the others and free them from his prisons, she’d said. Enrique, Helmut, Vesuvius. Where would Otto have put them?

  I realize that I haven’t seen Sophia for at least a week or two. She used to come around every day.

  “Milk and cookies.”

  “Oh!” I startle at his voice. Then, “Thanks!”

  He sets the plate on the table in front of me. We’ve gotten into the habit of bringing each other comfort food: cookies, mashed potatoes, chicken soup. God, our whole lifestyle has been about insulating each other. A cocoon of false ease.

  I eye the plate. Even comfort food is suddenly looking sinister.

  He leaves and comes back with an ice pack for my head.

  I press it to my lump. “Thanks. Don’t want things getting crowded in there.”

  “Certainly not.” He takes the other chair. “How’s the knee?”

  I stick it out of the robe; it’s red and swollen, with a dark bruise starting on the side of it. “Hurts like hell. I can’t believe I was able to skate on it at all.” I reiterate the details of the fight, my shock at waking up and finding the guy sitting there, thinking I was faking. The incident makes a good story, even twice told, and it keeps the focus on anything but the here and now.

  Otto shakes his head darkly. “What am I going to do with you?”

  “Um…” I don’t know how to answer this. How would I have answered it yesterday? “Get me a home gym? Now that I can’t rollerblade anymore?”

  Just then his mobile phone buzzes and he pulls it from his pocket. I realize I should call Shelby, let her and Packard know I’ve rethought things. But what exactly would I say? Would they even believe me? How can I be sure it wouldn’t be monitored?

 
I head into the bathroom where I quickly locate my lavender bubble-bath, thankful I’d brought it from home. I dump it in, and soon the big, old claw-foot tub is overflowing with white bubbles. After rinsing the worst of the gunk out of my hair in the sink, I slip into the tub, making a little hollow for my face so the bubbles don’t get on my nose. The warmth feels good, in spite of my terror.

  Terror, my old friend…it’s building again. But nobody hides it like I do.

  I settle the ice pack onto the side of my head.

  Otto comes in. “A bubble bath,” he observes.

  “For relaxation.” I smile wanly. “I’m hoping my parasympathetic nervous system gets the memo.”

  He hands me another pack. “For your knee.”

  “Thanks.” I raise my knee just above the bubbles and fold the pack over it. “Two-pack night.”

  He sits on the marble edge of the tub, seemingly waiting for something. Maybe testing to see what I’ll fill the silence with. He does that with criminals—it’s a way to get them to divulge things. I’m feeling thankful for all that I’ve learned from my super detective.

  When the silence between us gets too weird and uncomfortable, I say, “I’m sorry I scared you.”

  “No, I’m sorry,” he says. “The idea that…that man,” his voice shakes a bit. Lips serious. “That you would be attacked by him.”

  Wouldn’t want that! I imagine myself saying. Nobody attacks your precious Justine except Sophia, huh? Instead, I say, “It’s over.”

  Otto nods.

  He killed Avery. Avery was a good man, an innocent man. Hell, without Avery’s help, we wouldn’t have located Otto’s kidnappers so fast. Surely Otto knew that! But he killed him. I feel sick that I ever let Otto touch me. I turn the ice packs. The silence builds uncomfortably. Or is it just my imagination? “You know what I just realized?” I say. “I haven’t seen Sophia for a while.”

  “She left for vacation last week,” Otto says.

  “Really? Where?”

  “Countryside, it seems.”

  I lay the pack over the side of the tub and lower my knee into the water, thinking about Fawna’s prediction that the danger will come from Otto’s inner circle. If anybody is Otto’s inner circle, it’s Sophia. Could he have sealed her up? Killed her? Surely she’d know where Carter and the others are. Then a horrifying thought comes to me: could Otto have killed them?