“But a whole year?”
“What’s a year?” he asked. “A beat of the world’s heart. It’s nothing. A breath drawn in and let out, and a century has passed.”
It was the kind of thing he sometimes said. Poetry, or something similar. Like when she asked him once how old he was and he said, “I don’t know. No one does.”
Like that.
“Where did you go?” she asked. “I asked Uncle Hugo, but he wouldn’t tell me.”
John only shook his head.
“Why did you come back?” she demanded.
“To see you,” he said. “To tell you that I love you.”
“My mom’s sick,” she said abruptly.
“Yes. She has cancer.”
Zephyr pushed back from him. “You know?”
“I know.”
“But … how? We just found out?”
John shrugged.
“It’s the same kind of cancer I had.”
“How does that make you feel?” he asked. “To know that she is dying of a peasant disease?”
“It sucks! It’s not right. How come that gardener isn’t sick? How come the maids aren’t sick? How come it’s Mom? How does it make sense that they get to live and my mom has to die?”
“Everyone dies, Zephyr. You almost did.”
She met his eyes and then shifted her gaze. They had never really talked about what happened that first night when she was so sick and he appeared in her room. She tried to bring the subject up a dozen times, but he refused to be drawn into that conversation. All he would say when she begged him to explain what happened to her cancer was more nonsense. He patted his coat pocket and said, “I took it with me. It’s like a little mouse. Hear it go cheep-cheep-cheep?”
That was it. After that he would act as if she never asked a question, and over time she stopped asking and merely accepted that he had somehow taken her sickness away. Not just the cancer but all sickness. She never had a cold or a sniffle or anything. At first her parents and the household staff laughed about it and toasted it at holidays, but eventually the laughs faltered, their happy glances turned suspicious, and they stopped talking about it, too. When Zephyr demanded that Uncle Hugo explain it to her, the big man only laughed and changed the subject.
“Can you help my mom?” Zephyr asked.
John smiled and shook his head. She didn’t know if it was an admission that he couldn’t help her or a statement that he wouldn’t.
“She’s going to die,” she repeated, her fists clenched in anger and frustration.
“And you’re going to live” was John’s answer.
He took her hand and drew her over to the window. The snow covered everything now. Only a thin coating, but the sky was pregnant with more. It was midnight snow, and no footfall had tainted it. Not a person, not a deer, not a squirrel.
“The world was once as pure as this,” he said softly. “Once upon a time.”
“What happened?” she asked.
“People happened,” he said, and then sighed. “So many people. Trampling the snow, leaving footprints, pissing in it, turning it to black slush that is without beauty.”
Zephyr looked up at him. “It’s just snow.”
“No,” he said. “It’s purity. The difference is important, Zephyr. It’s the reason I came to you in the first place. It’s the reason your Uncle Hugo and I do so much work together. It’s why I do so much to help his friends, and to help people who see things as clearly as he does. There are a few—a pitiable few—who can see with clearer eyes and understand with sharper minds.” He paused, and for a moment his voice softened as if he was commenting to himself rather than to her. “Colder minds, yes. Clarity and courage can only come from such coldness.”
“What?” she asked, confused.
John took a breath and cut a look at her, back again in the present moment. “Look at it, Zephyr,” he said, nodding at the unbroken whiteness. “Behold purity.”
“Okay, sure,” she said. “But if there weren’t any people there wouldn’t be anyone to see how pretty it is.”
“Hmm, true,” he conceded. “But how many people are really necessary to see it and appreciate it? The more crowded the world, the less of the earth they can see. There was a time when people had no choice but to look at the world and see it in all its many forms and aspects.”
He sounded wistful, as if it was his own memory about which he spoke. John was like that sometimes, Zephyr knew. He could be simple and practical, and at other times he was a dreamer. She wondered if that was how all vampires were. If he was a vampire.
They watched the snow fall for a long, long time.
He said, “You won the school science fair.”
“Huh?” she said, surprised. “Oh. Yeah. Sure. You knew about that?”
“I pay very close attention to everything that happens with you, Zephyr. Even when I’m not around, you’re never far from my thoughts.”
“It was just some dumb science fair, though.”
He turned to her, and the soft light from the snowy yard cast half of his face in paleness while the other half remained in deep shadow. “No,” he said very seriously, “it is so very exciting. Your Uncle Hugo is so proud of you. He was bursting with it. As am I.”
“Proud? Of my stuff with robots…?” she asked, incredulous. “All I did was make some dumb ordinary robots do more than they were made to do.”
“Yes, and what did you do?” He clearly knew but coaxed her into saying it.
“Well, I attached metal spider legs to the Roomba so it could crawl over an obstacle course and clean furniture and get to hard-to-reach places.”
“Yes. And…?”
“And I made a little automatic trigger from a perfume bottle so that the small-sized quadcopter drone could spray antibacterial spray over surfaces inside the house after people have been in a room. It was silly. Anyone could do it.”
“You know that’s not true, my sweet. The other children in the science fair were jealous of you.”
“No, they weren’t,” she said, but she said it in a way that showed her doubt. Were they jealous? Some of them looked at her weird, and Mark Chang didn’t even talk to her after she won. Suzie Kirtley was like that, too.
“They’re afraid of you,” he said.
Zephyr stared at him in frank astonishment. “Afraid…?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Why?”
He smiled but didn’t answer.
Not then, anyway.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
THE WAREHOUSE
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
SUNDAY, APRIL 29, 11:47 AM
Sean and I sat on wooden chairs across from Bartoloměj Fojtik. His bandaged wrists were cuffed to a chain that was attached to a D ring on the table. He glanced at us, but his eyes bugged as Ghost came in and sat down near him.
“Get this dog away from me,” Fojtik said, jerking away as far as the cuffs would let him, which wasn’t far. Ghost bared his teeth to display the six titanium spikes. I clicked my tongue, and Ghost stopped showing off and sat like a sphinx, eyes dark and alert.
“I am going to sue your ass,” yelled Fojtik. “When my lawyer gets here, I am going to own you and I will have this fucking mutt put down.”
He had a thick accent, but his vocabulary was pretty good. Stilted and oddly formal the way many Eastern Europeans speak when they’re working their way through English. Even so, I replied to him in Czech. Partly to confuse him and partly because I didn’t want Sean to know what I was saying.
“Listen to me, asshole,” I said quietly. “If you threaten my dog again, I’ll let him chew your balls off. He’d like that and you wouldn’t.”
Fojtik stared at me, doubt clouding his features. Suddenly the situation had changed on him. He looked at me and Sean and then out the window. I could see him working it out. He hadn’t been booked and he hadn’t been given his phone call. This didn’t look like a police station, and I was speaking to him in his own language. Too mu
ch of that didn’t compute if this was a simple arrest.
“You’re in very deep shit,” I continued. “If you’re willing to cooperate, then the worst that will happen is we deport your ass back to the Czech Republic. Or if you’re willing to go the whole way, then we can put you into a relocation program somewhere out West. Give you a double-wide and a car and a job far away from anyone who ever heard of you. That would mean you get to stay here and live the American dream. Wife, two kids, a dog—well, maybe not a dog—an SUV, a low golf handicap, and a membership to the Rotary Club. And you don’t go to prison.”
He stared at me, mouth open but not saying anything.
“Fuck with me,” I said, “make this more difficult than it has to be, then my dog chomping your nut sack will be the very least of your problems. You are not among friends unless you make friends, and believe me when I tell you that I am a hard sell.”
Sean was looking at me, too. My use of Czech only mildly surprised him. Sean had gotten the gene for math and I’d gotten the one for languages. He didn’t like it that he couldn’t follow what I was saying to the prisoner. However, Fojtik leaned forward and answered in a way that was universally understood.
“Fuck you,” he said very slowly and precisely.
Sean wasn’t ruffled. He even smiled. “You work for Vsevolod Rejenko.”
“I do not know this name.”
“You work for Superior Linen, which is owned by Vsevolod Rejenko. His name is on your paychecks,” said Sean.
Fojtik grinned. “I do not know anyone of this name.”
There was something wrong with this picture. Fojtik was acting tough and talking trash, but he was sweating bullets. I could smell the sour stink of genuine fear coming off him. Ghost smelled it, too, and was twitching with nervous energy, his predator instincts kicked into high gear.
“If you’re afraid of what Vee might do,” I said in English, “believe me when I tell you that we can run interference. We’re going to put him out of business.”
“I do not know this person,” he said, “so why should I care?”
I tried another tack. “Just so you know the stakes here, cupcake, this is a murder investigation. We’re going to hang Vee for kidnap, corruption of a minor, human trafficking, conspiracy to commit murder, and felony murder. You are an accessory to all of that, and the reason you’re not getting a phone call is because we’re debating whether to label you as a terrorist. How’d you like that? Terrorists don’t get bail, they don’t get constitutional protections, and they don’t get conjugal visits. What they get is a cell in some remote spot that makes the dark side of the moon seem like a Miami resort. I’m not much of a fan of enhanced interrogation—you know what that means, yes? water sports?—but you and your friends are making sex slaves out of little girls and then killing them with nanobots or maybe rabies. So, yeah, I’m thinking that I might even sit in on some of the fun and games once we lock you away in a black site that doesn’t even have a name.”
Fojtik was good. But no one’s that good. He tried to keep the tough-guy smirk on his face, but I let him take a good, long look at my face. My smile only goes about so far, and doesn’t reach my eyes at all. I know that. I’ve been told. And there are spooky shadows in my eyes. I’ve seen that in the mirror. I wouldn’t want to be the guy in cuffs on the other side of the table from me, and I like me.
Fojtik’s eyes flicked away and he mumbled something.
“Sorry, lamb chop,” I said. “Didn’t catch that.”
“Fuck you,” he said a little louder, but still didn’t look at me.
“Dude,” I said. “I admire the stoic tough-guy shtick as much as the next Bruce Willis fan, but you’re not thinking this through. Vee’s lawyers aren’t going to gallop to the rescue. You are actually fucked. I can Google the word for you. Fucked. There’s your picture with a wet towel over your face. Whatever. You got only one play and that’s to—”
And my damn cell buzzed again with another text. I nearly tore my pocket pulling it out, and then froze when I saw a single word on the screen:
Run!
Beside me, Sean gasped. The hair on Ghost’s back stood up straight as needles, and he began to growl. Two tears broke from the corners of Fojtik’s eyes and ran down over his cheeks. They were bright red.
Sean said, “What the hell…?”
Fojtik stared at us in confusion. “What? What’s wrong?”
He tried to raise his hands to touch his face but the handcuffs prevented it, so he bent his head down instead. The drops reached his chin and fell onto the tabletop. Fojtik stared down at them and suddenly went rigid as he saw the color.
“No,” he said, but then he gave a sudden, violent cough that sprayed the table with dark-red droplets. Fojtik stared at the blood in obvious and total terror, and for a moment he was absolutely stock-still. Then he uttered the loudest shriek I’ve ever heard come from a human throat. It soon disintegrated into a violent fit of coughing. He couldn’t cover his mouth because of the cuffs, so each cough misted the air around him with pink, and each cough hit him like a solid body punch. He twitched and spasmed as his lungs convulsed.
He uttered a shriek that stabbed the ears and punched us in the face and tore the air to rags.
“Joe!” shouted Sean as he shot to his feet, but I was already up and moving around the table.
“Please!” Fojtik gasped, fighting to get the words out between coughs. “No … no … no! I did … not tell them … anything. You cannot…”
“What’s wrong?” demanded Sean, but Fojtik bent forward and grabbed his head and began twisting from side to side as another scream ripped its way out of his lungs. Blood streamed from his eyes and nose and ears.
“He’s having a fit!” Sean yelled. “Get a medic.”
“No-no-no-no!” cried the prisoner. He turned and stared at the door. “No! Do not do this. I—”
Anything else he might have said was drowned by a vicious burst of coughing that spewed from his mouth. It splashed the table and spattered us. His eyes bulged from their sockets and a deep shudder ripped through him. He croaked out a single, final word in a wet gurgle—“God!”—and then he fell sideways, thrashing and jerking. If it hadn’t been for the cuffs, he would have fallen to the floor. Ghost began barking in fear and panic.
“He’s going into convulsions,” yelled Sean. “Joe, help me!”
I turned toward the pane of one-way glass and bellowed for a medic. Ghost shot to his feet and began barking furiously, muzzle wrinkled, teeth bared.
Which was when Fojtik tore the D ring out of the table.
It’s not supposed to be possible. Not sure even Bunny could do it. But Fojtik surged up with a bellow and in three sharp, savage yanks tore the setscrews out of the hardwood and metal. The D ring flew through the air and hit Sean in the shoulder, spinning him so hard that my brother smacked face-forward against the wall. Fojtik was still coughing, but now there was another sound coming from him between the coughs.
Growls.
Low, savage, and feral. It was not a human sound.
Not even a little.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
THE WAREHOUSE
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
SUNDAY, APRIL 29, 11:56 AM
Ghost backed away from him, barking furiously. Ghost isn’t afraid of much, but there was panic in his eyes.
Fojtik stood wide-legged, coughing, panting, blood running down his body, eyes wild and inhuman. That’s the word for it. I looked for the man in there, but there wasn’t even the fear that had been evident a moment ago. It was gone, and all other human emotions had fled from that face. All that was left was a thing. The eyes were glazed for a long moment, then they shifted toward me … and changed. It was not a physical change; they didn’t actually turn a different color. No, this was subtler and somehow more frightening. Those eyes filled with a level of hatred, of raw hunger and unfiltered savagery. They were the eyes of something so wild it was beyond itself.
Without anot
her moment’s hesitation, it came at me.
For me.
Reaching with its cuffed hands, the fingers twitching and scratching the air as if clawing through it to me. Fojtik slammed into me and drove me back against the wall, snapping at my throat with bloody teeth. I hit the wall hard enough to rattle my teeth, but I managed to get a forearm up under his chin, and those teeth snapped shut with a klak! an inch from my Adam’s apple. I brought my right knee up and braced it against his stomach, and then used my free right hand to swing over his forearms and smash him across the jaw with a palm-heel shot. It turned his head just as he spat blood at me. The wetness splashed the side of my neck and shoulder but didn’t get into my face. The blow staggered him only for a moment. He snarled and tried to choke me, but I was pivoting now, using all the strength of my standing leg, hips, waist, and shoulder to put torque and speed behind a series of chopping punches to his floating ribs, upper ribs, and ear. He lost his grip and stumbled sideways as I slid down the wall and landed hard on my ass.
Fojtik whirled into Sean, hitting him hard, knocking them both down, grabbing as they fell. Sean saw those teeth and rammed his palms under Fojtik’s chin even as they fell, but the impact dislodged his hands. Fojtik lunged forward, trying to bite Sean’s face, but the angle was wrong, so instead he bit my brother’s chest, clamping teeth around cloth and pinching the skin beneath. Sean cried out in pain, and my heart nearly froze in my chest. Was he bitten? Did the bite break the skin?
What was this?
There were too many ugly possibilities. Too many ways this could spin downward into bloody ruin.
And the memory of that single word of warning on my cell phone burned in my brain. It seemed to scream at me.
Run.
I didn’t. Instead, I scrambled up and flung myself at Fojtik, smashing into him with my crossed forearms, hitting him on the side of the head and shoulder, slamming him away from Sean. His teeth were so tightly clamped that the impact jerked Sean sideways like a fish on a hook. I swarmed atop Fojtik and drove a series of two-knuckle punches into his cheek just below the nose, crunching his teeth, snapping them, ruining his mouth until his bite released, and then I whipped his face away from Sean with a left-hand slap that emptied his eyes for a moment. But he blinked once and the animal fury was right back there. He snarled again and tried to crane his head forward, coughing as he did so, but I twisted away again and took the bloody spray on my side. I pivoted back and jammed the heel of my left palm against his forehead so hard that it smashed the back of his skull onto the hard floor, and then I punched him in the throat.