by Ana Calin
Try me, I wanted to say. But I didn’t. I only looked long and deep into his eyes.
“Keep contact,” he said, and I understood he referred to my gaze.
Then, slowly, he turned his head in the direction of the door, leaning slightly back to be able to see behind the bar, the end of which was right next to our table. All he had to do was extend his hand to touch it.
Soon the eyes spying us followed his gaze, curious as to the subject of his interest and leaving us unobserved for a few moments. The corner table that Pretty Waiter Boy had cleaned earlier was still unoccupied, while the group behind Damian, drunk and absorbed in their poetry, kept their backs at us. In a flash of complete privacy, Damian’s hand dashed towards the bar and touched it with just two fingers. Then I swear that the finest hairs stood all over me.
He didn’t seem to be straining at all as he pushed the heavy oak that sustained over three meters of drinks, mixers and other bar-props in its drawers. It lifted slightly, just enough to expose an inch of metal fittings that anchored it to the floor.
The scene lasted only a second, then the mass of wood settled back on the ground, Damian’s fingers seemingly guiding it and preventing a loud drop. But they didn’t stop the blast in my brain.
“What in God’s name!” As if bitten by a snake, I flexed to jump up. But Damian’s hand, covering most of my left thigh, revealed its purpose there – it instantly turned into a concrete cuff that moored me down.
“This is how they did it,” he whispered, eyes fixed on mine.
“This is freaking impossible,” I stressed through my teeth. Didn’t lean in though, instinctively keeping distance from him. My heart slammed frantically against my chest. “You’re freaking Hulk strong!”
“Keep it together,” he warned, hand still hard on my leg. With a glance around he made me aware that my reaction had drawn attention back at us. He was once again very close, his breath warm on my cheek, the scent of fresh wood strong in my nostrils. “Listen, Alice. BioDhrome agents are different. They’re what we call Upgrades – upgraded humans. That means they can do things that normal people cannot do. Things like hoisting a train carriage off tracks with their bare hands, as unthinkable as that may sound. Giant is one of these Upgrades.”
He paused, searching my face as if to assess if I was ready for more of this. I broke into low laughter. Part of my wit was still about me, as he would put it, thinking this could only be bullshit, while part of me based judgment on the extreme experience in the mountains and on what I’d just seen Damian do. Catwoman and Dracula may be pure fantasy, but his inhuman strength was freaking real.
“As are you,” I whispered. “You’re an Upgrade. An agent.”
“Not an agent.”
“Still, you’re a bad guy. You said it yourself.”
With his stare still hard and fixed on mine he said, “Bad guy or not, I’m your best hope of staying alive.”
“But you’re one of BioDhrome’s projects.”
“One of their hitmen once, to be exact.”
BAM! My head went light.
“Which means nobody knows them better than I do, Alice,” he continued, “but I still can’t foresee everything. This is why I need you to cooperate, for your own safety. The hit in the mountains had been prepared days in advance, as I told you. The peasants in the village had been intoxicated with the gas in their homes until they lost control the way our group later did at the cottage. They attacked each other and devastated the entire place, which is what our group would’ve come to if you hadn’t baited them out of there. You saved many lives, Alice, and I admire your courage. What you did was a special and rare thing. But the gas effects are a complex matter.”
“The gas must be a complex substance . . .”
“Less so than you imagine, actually. Despite the appearances, it isn’t the inhaled gas that makes you stronger. The gas only unlocks possibilities that are already there. It gives your genes a kick, if you want. The chemicals your body produces settle at a specific level – just an infinitely small unit above or under that level would’ve produced no unusual effects – and your body starts to perfect itself, so to say. Everything about you takes a huge step towards perfection, and your looks make no exception.”
Here his voice caught menacing undertones. The corner of his mouth crooked up. “Which brings us back to Mr. Dimples, Anton Anghel and, well, men in general. You see, your body starts to perfect itself, each trait when claimed. For example, after you’ve fallen down that ravine in the mountains, you needed the ability to self-heal. So your brain activated it. Which is why the traumas of fight and fall left no marks on you. And that night at Marvimex – that night you needed your looks as weapon.
“Yes, that’s right. You needed to soften an attacker whom you wouldn’t have had a chance of escaping otherwise. Your reptilian brain knew that, it did its calculations in a split second. Your attacker was much stronger, fighting him or outrunning him were out of the question, so your only chance was seduction. It’ll take a while until this extraordinary physical attractiveness will deactivate and go into hibernation until needed again, the way your ability for self-healing did.
“So you see, poor Mr. Dimples never stood a chance, and I’m aware that neither does Anton Anghel. I don’t doubt that he’s into you, Alice, it’s pretty hard not to be under the circumstances, but that still doesn’t explain his popping into the picture at this very point. Which brings us to the reason I brought you here of all places.”
Slowly, his hand withdrew from my leg, but his eyes glinted, intense as he stared deep into mine.
“I have information that Anton Anghel works for BioDhrome, and that he has a contact person in here. This is where Anghel spends his entire time whenever he’s not waiting for you at the cafeteria, by the way. I’m told he never attends his own classes, never sets foot in his university. All he does is drink himself senseless and write poetry, fantasizing without a hope of making it big one day.
“It turns out my informers were correct – the person who links Anghel to BioDhrome already reacted to our presence. He started texting feverishly under the table, and he’ll leave the place in a hurry when he thinks he found a good moment – since I’m busy with you; had I come alone or with irrelevant people, he would’ve felt watched every second, and wouldn’t have made the same decisions; he would’ve been more cautious.
“My men are outside, and they’ll follow him. He will guide us to BioDhrome’s front-line, and from there we’ll follow other leads to its leader – whom I’ll crush once and for all.” The last words were a low threat that sent chills crawling down my spine.
“Why so radical?” I breathed, my eyes scanning the place for the man Damian talked about.
“You still ask? Weren’t they radical with us? Alice, they would’ve let you die in pain in the mountains, or tortured you to upgrading.”
“Is that what they did with you? Torture?”
His eyes remained hard on mine, but the answer was there.
“Did you tell my dad?” Tears lurked behind my words. “Does he know what you’ve been through?”
“He does.”
“He’s the only person you ever trusted with that secret, isn’t he?” I inquired softly.
He hesitated, then answered plainly, “Svetlana knows, too.”
Jealousy punched me full in the stomach. I forgot all about Tony and BioDhrome. “Of course, your sweetheart knows. She knew who and what you were all along.” I grew vehement, though keeping it low. “You’re surely working together.”
“Let’s leave Svetlana out of this.”
“Are you protecting her?”
“It’s not that.”
“What is it then, Damian?” I snapped. “I know she dug out the story Marius Iordache published about you nine years ago, and I know she somehow confronted you with it. Leona told me about that night at the Bourbon Pub.” An idea hit me. “It’s Svetlana who recruited you and got you on the antagonists’ side, isn’t it?”<
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Before I even realized it happening, Damian lifted my chin with two fingers, his stare hard as if I were an errant child who needed to get things inside her head once and for all.
“Listen, Alice. I’ve been working with BioDhrome’s antagonists – the Order of Lords by their true name – ever since I left BioDhrome almost a decade ago. Svetlana couldn’t have had anything to do with it, as you must realize.”
“What made you switch sides then, if not a beautiful woman?” I spewed.
“The promise of becoming something other than a beast engineered into a killing machine.” The deep tar in his voice gave me goose bumps. “I proved potential, that’s why I advanced so rapidly in BioDhrome’s assassins’ ranks. But with them, I had to obey orders. With the Order of Lords I get to decide when to use my skills. There’s no one to tell me who I am to take down, I make my own decisions.”
“You’re still a hitman, then? Only that you work for someone else?” A part of me slapped the other. What did you expect he was doing with the blades under his sleeves, carving pottery?
“I don’t work as an assassin. That’s a pleasure I grant myself once in a while, when I run into scumbags like BioDhrome’s Upgrades.”
“Pleasure? You find pleasure in killing?”
He shook his head. “You don’t understand.”
“Hell, no. I don’t understand, Damian. You kill people!”
“Lower your voice,” he hushed me. “We didn’t come here to have this conversation.”
“No, we came here so you could lay down some stupid set of rules that I won’t follow.” I tried to stand. In a second his hand was back on my thigh, keeping me down.
“Those I kill are not what I’d call people, Alice.”
“That’s what all fanatics think about their victims. What Hitler thought of the Jews.”
“No, this is different.” His grip tightened so much that it hurt. “I hunt creatures like myself, criminals engineered into Upgrades, into killers normal men don’t stand a chance against. You must understand, what BioDhrome does with men like me, it’s . . . it’s like enhancing deranged murderers, turning them into Terminators. That is giving them power, Alice, physical strength beyond measure, brains to rival geniuses, and good looks. But on the inside we’re still the rotten devils we were born to be. We’re hideous, and we should be squashed like the creepers we are before we get to do too much harm.” His voice grew softer, his touch on my thigh turning into a strange caress. “But Alice, no human, no matter how strong and well-trained, could take out someone like Giant. For that you need another Upgrade. You need a monster like me. That’s the only thing that justifies my existence, and that enables me to live with myself. I only seek to eradicate my own kind. A cause I share with all Upgrades in the Order of Lords.”
Chapter Twelve
“I guess you’re not that rotten after all,” I said. “Maybe you weren’t born a beast, but a guardian of mankind. All right, maybe that’s a bit pompous. What I mean is, since you went for med school, and hunt down creatures that mean us harm, you must like normal people.”
“Normal people.” He smiled, looking boyish and vulnerable for a moment in a way that made my head spin. “When I switched sides Alice, I did it for this very reason. Normal people don’t have a chance of surviving if these oppressors ever decide they want this world all for themselves. You know, all that speculation about alien contacts, about angels and demons walking this Earth, they have their roots somewhere. Humans are highly sensitive and sensorial creatures, so they sensed there was something so much like and at the same time so unlike them out there. In the absence of information they resorted to archetypal models such as demons and angels, which they later transferred to fantasy characters like vampires, aliens and superheroes to explain what their sixth sense told them – that human potential is limitless.”
“It sounds to me like you love us, mere humans.” I gave him an honest smile. “But it’s still not for you to decide who lives or dies, Damian. Even if your victims are exclusively Upgrades, they’re still that – victims.”
Damian’s lip curled over his predator teeth. “Nothing will keep Giant from breaking your neck with a flick of his hand if he lays it on you, so don’t go overboard with the morals.”
“Speaking of morals.” I tilted my head to the side and narrowed my eyes. “Will you finally tell me where Svetlana fits into this story?”
“She doesn’t matter.”
I didn’t need more than an instant to go from enthralled to mad, too. “I asked you a question, Damian, don’t take me for an idiot. Don’t lie to me.”
Steady, deep, “I don’t do lying.”
“I know Svetlana used to sleep with my dad,” I snapped at him over the table. “As I know that she’s obsessed with you, and that she’ll go to any lengths to get you. Did she achieve her purpose?”
I waited for a reaction, but none came. Damian kept inspecting my face, his own features expressionless.
“Damian, talk to me,” I insisted, clasping his hand on my thigh. The feel of it sent static up my arm. I thought Damian’s eyes lost some of their sharpness for a second too, but maybe that was just in my head. The air around grew hot, my skin tingled.
“BioDhrome recruited Svetlana Slavic,” he said, “and used her against your father. She seduced Tiberius. They started seeing each other frequently, and, through him, she met me. She developed a weakness for me, but I wasn’t something BioDhrome could give her along with everything else they’d promised.”
Not the slightest change in his tone, as if this didn’t flatter or interest him in the least. “So she tried to use the information she’d obtained from BioDhrome about my past ties with them – the article, The Executioner file, the upgrading process – to force an affair.” Damn, Leona was right! “And it did come to a one night stand, but unfortunately too late to spare you the incidents in the mountains. I only conceded when we returned to Constanța in order to secure her cooperation.
“It got her to tell me all she had on BioDhrome – they had promised her money and upgrading in exchange for her loyalty, but in the mountains she had a particularly violent reaction to the gas, which you know better than anyone. She understood she wouldn’t survive the upgrading process, and this strengthened her decision to betray them. This is the reason I talked to her about my own upgrading, to make her realize it’s not for everyone. Now she’s helping me get to BioDhrome’s leader, which isn’t easy. She might be a double agent, but that doesn’t bother me. I feed her the information I want BioDhrome to get anyway. I keep her in check in the hope for more sex and – of course – with money.”
So cold, so matter-of-fact, even as that word, sex, left his sin of a mouth. After the short stricken phase I became aware of my feelings again – anger.
“When?” I rasped through a dry throat. “When did you two—?”
Damian looked away from me, to the door again, as if this were just casual info. “We drove back to Constanța together after you were all released from the hospital. I invited myself to her place, and she was happy to accept.”
So after he’d allegedly stared at me for hours as I lay in that hospital bed. Just a night before he had tea in the living room with my mother. My brain began to boil.
“What about Dad? Did he cross your mind when you decided to bang her?” My tone was sour even to my own ears.
“He’s better off without her.”
“Maybe he has feelings for her. Feelings you tramped on.”
“Not maybe, surely. He has feelings for a woman who was BioDhrome’s weapon against him. He’ll want nothing to do with her once he gets back, trust me.”
“You made love to her,” I whispered, pain in my chest.
“I didn’t make love to her!” His hand wrapped around mine, bringing it on the table between us. He shook it to make me look him in the face. I couldn’t hide my tears as our eyes met. “I did what I had to do, Alice.”
“Sure, poor you. Being handsome as a
god comes with a price, doesn’t it? You spark obsessions against your will, so no wonder you get forced into this or that bed now and then, ain’t it?”
Damian pressed his lips together. A shift in the air signaled that we were no longer alone, and I realized why – Mr. Dimples stood by our table in his apron, the smile wide on his face, a plate of Penne in each hand.
“Sorry for the delay, the chef was on break,” he apologized with a slight bow towards me. I’m pretty sure he gave me small wink, but all I managed back was a twitch of my cheek. He went away kind of disappointed, while Damian and I remained facing each other over the plates, neither of us touching the food. He still didn’t speak, as if there was nothing more he had to add on his affair with my dad’s slut, but tension oozed out of him.
“It’s the way it is,” I eventually broke the silence, grabbing the fork and picking with it at individual pasta that happened in its way. I didn’t take any of it to my mouth. “Actually, if I think about it, yours isn’t such a bad strategy. Maybe I should do the same with Tony, and he’ll tell me everything he knows about BioDhrome, too.”
Before I could blink Damian’s hand clenched around my face. Huge and stone-hard, that’s how it felt from jaw to temples, and I wasn’t sure if he got ready to kiss me or crush me.
“I’m sure Anton Anghel would promise you the world in order to get his dick inside of you.”
What the –? I stared at him dumbfounded. His eyes wandered all over my face, his wooden scent strong in my nostrils, assuring me this was actually happening.