The darkness was complete. Her breath came in short stuttering gasps. The hands stroked her hair, and her ankle gave way as she tried to walk. Her teeth clicked together, chattering, even though she was feverish.
“One good deed,” he lisp-whispered as he dragged her, Anna’s boots scraping the floor and bumping soft things he stepped over. “To repay another.”
Her mouth was dry, her throat coated with metal. Still, she had to ask. She had to know. She peered up at where the face should be, blinking furiously against the complete absence of light.
“Josiah?”
The blackness engulfed as he carried her away.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The stitches had torn, and his arms ached savagely. He’d taken a hit on the head that trickled warm blood down his neck, and his knee might not ever be the same again. His hair was full of drying blood, dust, broken glass, and other things.
Killing was a dirty business.
Josiah braced himself against the wall. Time was running out. The lab was a chaos of broken glass and smeared substances he didn’t want to think about, the entire second floor of the brownstone given over to rooms full of medical and laboratory equipment, dentists’ chairs with well-used leather straps, and enough half-trained cops to make the entire fucking thing a tactical nightmare. Kit had disappeared, leaving Josiah to fight his way up; the result was a sweep-and-clear to find the only thing that mattered to him at this point.
She wasn’t up here. He cased the entire second level, his hands moving without conscious direction to keep the gun pointed where it needed to be, sweeping the rooms full of broken bodies and shattered glass. He wasn’t sure if he’d taken a bad hit or not; he was past caring.
Nothing. She simply wasn’t here. His hands, busy little movers that they were, were itching to take out the plastic explosive and burn this whole nightmarish place to the ground. He had a vague idea what the racks of syringes and other equipment were for—and the straps on the chairs looked far too well-used for comfort.
Did they take her out through the front? Got to go, time’s clicking, someone’s going to come along or report the noise, I haven’t exactly been quiet.
Broken glass ground underfoot. He whirled, gun coming up, and the shot went wide as he realized who it was at the last second.
Hassan held both hands up, both with a shiny 9mm loose and easy in slim brown fingers. “Friendly!” he yelled as he threw himself down and aside, rolling behind cover just in case.
Josiah’s hands itched furiously for a moment. He almost hadn’t pulled back in time.
“There’s nobody alive in here!” Hassan yelled. “There’s chatter on the bands about tac-teams moving this way and if the agency’s going to move in and mop up, now is the time! Can we go?”
Not without Anna. He turned back to the room he’d just searched, the bodies no more than insensate lumps of clay. The exploding ones were easiest to deal with; grit showered the floor, crunching like the broken glass. The live ones were tricky, half-ass-trained off-duty cops, amateurish mistakes giving them openings a professional wouldn’t take.
“She’s not here!” Hassan sounded half-frantic. “Come on, Josiah! Blow this hole and get out! I’ve checked from the basement up to here—if she’s not here she’s gone! Come on!”
Basement? There was no basement. I didn’t see…He replayed mental footage as his body moved, heading for Hassan. It looked like a freight elevator. What if it was to the basement? Or—
“Come on!” Hassan grabbed his arm, and Josiah suppressed a flinch. He was bleeding pretty badly, and his head wasn’t right. The objective wasn’t here, and if the objective wasn’t here he had no business being here.
The situation had gone critical.
Where is she, then? They brought her in here. Where’s Kit? He’s got his goddamn ring; did he leave me in the lurch? Figures.
His feet took care of the stairs for him, a line of blood smeared at shoulder height where some idiot had tried to escape him. The idiot was sprawled at the bottom of the flight—this place had once been a house, long ago when the city was young. It might have been a pretty place, too, except for the use it had been put to.
How many had he killed? He’d lost track.
Anna.
Where was she?
He stopped four times as they made a circuit of the lower level, long enough each time to tamp down the plastic explosive and push the detonator sticks in. Blood and other fluids dripped with monotonous regularity. There were no sirens in the distance. Whoever was approaching, they were coming in low and silent.
The Chief of Police wasn’t among the dead. Nor were the two dozen men who had taken treatments here. The likeliest explanation was they had gone right out the front. But why? This was their bolthole; it would have made more sense for them to come in the front and slip out the back, scattering and regrouping at another location. It fit with the whole amateurishness of the operation.
Hassan had a fresh disposable cell out. He was talking into it, quietly, fiercely; he snapped it shut. His hair was wildly mussed and his face looked worse for wear, and he moved like a man who has endured a beating in the past twenty-four hours and was ignoring it. “We’ve got no time. Willie’s got a visual on a black van heading this way along the main approach; if she’s seen one there’s others. She’s packing up and getting loose now.”
“Where’s our rendezvous?” his voice asked, independent of his brain. Training had him in its iron grip, because he had failed and there was nothing else to do. He hadn’t retrieved her. Kit had vanished, the men responsible were gone, and all he’d done was clean up their operation.
The agency’s going to turn this place inside out. And there’s no scientists here, no medical personnel. The agency will round them up, extract everything they know.
It was all bollixed up. Gone sideways. They had Anna.
Then you’ll just have to get her.
It was too late. He’d failed in every major objective. Time to tie it off, cut the losses, and run.
The slap of rainy night outside met the pulsing of the bite at his throat, a half-note in the thunder of pain his body had become. What had he done to his knee?
He didn’t know. He’d covered the whole house—
There was a dark green SUV with tinted windows parked on a side street. Hassan bundled him into the passenger seat, slammed the door, and went around the front of the car, checking his surroundings unobtrusively.
Josiah let out a soft breath. The mission had gone sideways. He held up the pulser, looking at the sleek chrome and the single button. It would send out the signal, detonating the explosive and cleaning up the operation.
The gun caressed his cheek. “Be very still,” a flat, low voice he knew said softly, in the car’s deep dark interior.
Hassan opened the driver’s side door, climbed up into the seat—and jerked as Kit took his gun away. “And you. Drive.” The ring glinted on Kit’s corpse-pale left hand, and Josiah got a funny unsteady feeling in the pit of his abused stomach. Had he taken a fist there, too, or was it the one with the nightstick? He couldn’t remember.
Kit’s left hand was whole and well now. Four long flexible fingers and a thumb, prominent tendons and the knuckles broad and scarred with faintly flushed white lines.
Knife-fighter’s scars.
Some lizards grow their tails back. Did he need the ring, or did he need blood? Or something else? Something they stole from him with their syringes and straps?
A ghastly flush crept under pale waxy skin, and the ring gave a flash of green as Josiah twisted slowly in the seat, dust and little bits of broken glass scratching between his coat and the upholstery.
There, on the bench seat, behind Hassan, slumped a very bruised and very tired-looking Anna, huddled against the door and staring out. She looked like she’d been through the grinder, her eyes glazed in the dimness as she breathed, touching the window with a faint cloud.
There’s no fog on the windows. How di
d we not see them? How did I not mark them in here?
“Wolfe?” Hassan was tense and ready.
Josiah blinked. His heart slammed inside his chest, and the gun Kit held seemed laughably small, a toy instead of a real weapon. “Drive.” The word scraped his throat.
The pulser was still in his hand, a small, cold chrome weight.
He pressed the button as Hassan started the SUV. The engine roused, swiftly.
The sound of the explosion was distant, muffled. Josiah watched Anna’s profile. She was milk-pale, and she didn’t even look at him. The stare of a catatonic deadened her marred face.
His heart hurt, just like the rest of him. What did they do to you, baby?
Kit’s gun vanished. Hassan’s was proffered, Kit’s right hand miraculously with its full complement of fingers too. Josiah couldn’t see the creature’s face, but that voice was unmistakable. “She is better thus, for a little while.”
“Jesus Christ.” Hassan wiped at his forehead with the back of his hand. Great beads of sweat stood out on his skin, damping his hair down. “You sure know how to throw a party.”
“Where was she?” That was all Josiah wanted to know. “Is she hurt?”
“They kept her where they kept me, in the cellar. Which is only reached from the alley to the side. Once they used it for coal delivery.” Kit paused. “They are no longer among the breathing, canny one, those who stole from me. We are at quits.”
“Not nearly.” Josiah’s tongue felt too big for his mouth.
Hassan made a right turn. Now the sirens became audible, and he pulled over to the curb to let a cavalcade of spinning lights and noise go past in the opposite direction, mostly cop units and a SWAT team. A black van trailed silent and deadly in the wake of flashing red and blues, the agency coming in to clean up the mess, recover what they could, and probably search for Josiah himself. There would be other units converging from other directions.
A brief flash of Chilwell’s bloodless face floated through Josiah’s head, was shoved aside. One problem at a time. “I owe you.”
Kit paused. He made a brief movement, and all four of his new fingers brushed Anna’s bruised cheek, the ring’s claws touching her tangled hair. Someone had given her a few good shots. “She will wake in time, and her memory will be blunted. It was the least I could do. Tell her…”
Hassan hunched in the driver’s seat. He was still sweating. The stink of fear was a cloud in the car, the defroster suddenly working overtime against traceries of steam starting on the windows.
“Tell her Eric is avenged,” Kit finished, as if he wanted to say more. The door opened, let in a breath of frigid rainy air, closed, and Josiah thought he heard rapid padding footsteps vanishing into the night.
“Fucking hell.” Hassan’s voice shook. “I can’t take much more of this.”
You can, and you will. “Get us to the rendezvous.” Josiah scrabbled for the seat controls and pushed back the top half of the passenger seat. His entire body cried out in pain as he monkeyed backward, Hassan keeping up a steady cavalcade of obscenities in four languages.
Josiah didn’t care. He made it into the back bench seat, popped the front seat back up, and grabbed her. She was heavy and unresponsive, but he slid his arms around her. He breathed into her snarled and matted hair, and for the first time in his memory, Josiah Wolfe wept with sheer unalloyed relief.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
There was motion inside her head, black wheels turning at midnight and the sound of his voice. Soothing, calm, and even, just the way he always spoke. The weight of dark water added to the sound of wheels turning, and she no longer remembered why exactly she was staring into the distance, only that she was safe.
Kit had told her she was safe, his eyes swelling with green foxfire and red pinpricks, and she had seen—
No. Don’t think about that. You don’t want to think about the darkness, and the sounds. You’ll be a lot happier if you don’t.
For a moment she remembered what else Kit had done, and a scream welled up in her throat. She swallowed, hard, and shoved the memory away. It went willingly, an unwanted guest. Her head hurt, a swift flash of pain lost in the general discomfort. Even her hair hurt.
She was alive. And Eric’s killers were…what? Dead?
God, I hope so.
Sunlight striped through a window, lay across the end of a bed. The mattress was soft and deep, the sheets were clean, and Anna’s back still ached. She was stiff, and her face felt like a bruised pumpkin.
The bed was clean. She was clean. The golden sunshine scoured away at the inside of her head, dust dancing in its slanted fall, and Anna realized she never wanted to sleep in a dark room again.
This room was plain—white walls, the window, a skylight, and a television on a low white table. The floor was carpeted in short industrial blue.
It was beautiful.
Her wrists were still bruised and puffy, sliced and scabbed over. Her ankles throbbed with dull pain.
To top it all off, she was completely naked.
The distant sound of traffic intruded. She pulled the sheets and blankets to her chest and craned her neck, painfully, finding a half-open door into a white-tiled bathroom.
The bathroom looked really good.
Another door opened just as her gaze touched it. Anna huddled on the bed, her mouth suddenly dry and her heart thumping in her throat. She cast around wildly for anything that looked like a weapon, however improbable.
If they’ve come back for me I’m going to die fighting. Surprisingly, the voice in her head still wasn’t Eric’s. It was her own—but harsher, colder than she could ever be. More determined.
A stranger’s voice.
Josiah stepped through, softly, as if tiptoeing into a hospital room. He closed the door with a precise little click. He moved a bit stiffly, and he was unshaven but otherwise clean. A dark navy blue sweater, a pair of jeans, and a pair of dark sneakers completed the picture. His eyes were more green today, a few shades lighter than usual—maybe because of the dark sweater, or because of his stubble. His hair was tousled, shoved back from his face.
Her heart threatened to knock her ribs outward. “Jo,” she breathed.
He crossed the carpeting in long angry strides, reached the bed, and stared down at her. His eyes were flat, their depths curtained; his mouth a straight line. He looked terribly, coldly, thoughtlessly furious.
Anna froze. For a moment the absolutely absurd idea that he was going to slap her drifted through her head.
Then he dropped down on the bed, the mattress giving a squeak of protest. His face still held that awful blank expression for half a breath before he blinked and took a deep breath. “Are you all right?”
Anna opened her mouth to reply. Shut it. There was nothing to say.
“The operation’s tied off.” His mouth belonged to a hoarse stranger; it shaped the words like they didn’t belong to him. “The agency’s too busy chasing down the medical personnel attached to the brownstone. They might chase Corpse Boy for a while, too. Which will give us enough time to bury ourselves nicely.”
The air was chill against her naked back.
He took a deep breath, and his gaze met hers, the hazel tinted with green and wounded under their screen of indifference. She almost flinched. The pain in his eyes was well hidden, but she saw it, and her heart twisted back on itself with another thump.
“I have to tell you, Annie.” His voice didn’t get any louder. “You’re coming with me. I don’t want to hear any argument. I let you walk away once, and it almost killed me. Do you understand?” He was breathing like a man walking uphill, despite the set pallor of his unshaven cheeks. There was a slash along his hairline and a bruise on his jaw, under the stubble.
He looked, quite frankly, like hell.
There was still nothing to say. She wondered if his shoulder still hurt him. He’d been shot at and had his home taken away, just like her. If she hadn’t walked out on him, would Eric still be alive?
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I didn’t know. I couldn’t have known.
Her heart hurt. Everything else on her hurt, but her heart most of all. Not knowing couldn’t salve her conscience.
Nothing would.
“Anna.” He reached up with his left hand, wincing a little as his shoulder dipped. His fingers cupped her chin. “What does it take? Does it have to be a bargain? You got your goddamn revenge—”
“Shut up.” So my voice still works. “The others?”
“Willie and Hassan are fine. They’ll meet us in Montreal. We’ll go on from there.” His fingers tightened a little, her bruised face throbbing. “What’s it going to take, Annie? What do I have to do for you? Tell me.”
I don’t know that you could do any more. I was so wrong about you, Josiah. I was wrong about everything. “We’d better get going.” Her face hurt even more when she tried to speak. She’d stiffened up all over.
Still, that look in his eyes threatened to make her heart stop its busy knocking around. It hurt too much. Everything hurt too much. “If you have any more of those magic pills, I’d like one. I don’t think a Tylenol will do much.”
He stared at her, the sound of traffic going about its business in the real, peaceful world outside like the sea lapping the shore. Normal lives were going on outside the walls of this room. Normal people were going to work, going home to their families, getting into traffic accidents, and buying underwear.
I don’t think I’ll ever feel normal again.
It was her turn for a deep breath, all the way to the bottom of her lungs. “I’ll go with you,” she whispered. “You came down there for me.”
Josiah’s fingers turned to stone. His mouth opened slightly before he shut it, his lips thinning. The indifference in his eyes vanished, pain mute and dark and terribly present in its place. How long had he been hurting like that? Since she’d left him? Since before she’d left him?
She’d never known. Never even guessed.
“I remember that much, even though it was dark. I remember…” For a moment Anna was confused. What exactly did she remember? Something dark, and confusion, and somehow, she had been taken up out of it. There had been a green glow, and the sense that she was safe, held in a pair of thin, very strong arms—