One Wrong Move

by Shannon McKenna

  He’d seen what went down on the street with her that morning with Kasyanov, through the tattered veil of Yuri’s memories.

  That pathetic fuck had been so easy to read, the torture hadn’t even been strictly necessary, but he had to make it look good.

  The scenario was that Yuri was a dealer and thief, gone into business for himself. There could be no mercy for such a man.

  Through Yuri’s memories, he knew that Helga had said that there were two doses of this Psi-Max 48 left. Then Kasyanov had shot up Nina Christie with one dose before she spazzed out. This left one dose unaccounted for. They’d searched Christie’s house and found nothing. He had to find Nina before Roy killed her.

  Because that dose was his.

  He wasn’t satisfied with these pissant ten-mg tabs. He wanted the real deal. The new stuff. Permanent change, that was what Kasyanov had promised them. Rebirth, as his true self. His best self.

  Dmitri circled the fucked-up Lincoln. He wrenched the door open. He’d need a tab tonight to deal with Oleg. That evil old goat was so good at mind-fucking, he didn’t even need psi-max to help him do it. He knew what he would see in Oleg’s head, though. Sasha. The long-lost, perfect son who’d had the good sense to disappear twenty years ago.

  Oleg said that Sasha would come back now that Tonya was dying, but why? Dmitri couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to see that crazy old hag. Sasha. Always smarter, stronger, tougher. Dmitri had fantasized since boyhood about slicing open Sasha’s abdomen, pulling his guts out loop by loop so he got a good, long look at them. The daydream drifted through his mind as he yanked open the glove box.

  If he got that dose, Sasha would be in his power. Sasha’s eyes, wide with fear, cowering, pleading. His secrets, naked to Dmitri.

  Yes.

  He sifted through the broken glass on the floor, and was rewarded by a battered Samsung smartphone that had slid under the seat. He held it up, and his thumb lit the display, showing a text message.

  On the way. Hang in there.

  The screen was still unlocked. This gift had come to him even without the psi-max. And Sasha would come to him, too.

  Chapter 9

  He should be grateful, Aaro reflected. She’d saved him from his own idiocy. Good thing, too, because he wasn’t free to fuck her brains out, anyhow. He was going to Aunt Tonya. A hospice visit was a guaranteed buzz kill. He’d been talking with his dick. It wasn’t real big on details like timing.

  He should be on his knees in front of her, kissing her feet to thank her for her strength of will. Kissing his gratitude up over her instep, her ankle, her calf, then up her silky thigh, right on up to heaven’s gate. He’d end up muff diving in a New York cab.

  His cock twitched. So much for situational awareness. Specu-lating about the flavor of her pussy made his jaw ache. It was going to be a long, painful while before he could schedule a tension-relieving appointment with his own hairy-palmed right hand.

  It had been months since his ill-fated tryst with the robot princess, the chick who’d been sent to spy upon him, during Bruno and Lily’s adventures six months ago. Naomi had been the name on her fake documents. Not her real name. Neil King’s robot spawn were dead now, so there was no one left to ask. Probably she hadn’t had a name at all.

  That somehow-less-than-human thing called Naomi had self-destructed before his eyes at the Portland cop shop the morning after he’d fucked her. Brainwashing-induced convulsions. Snapped her neck. So horrible, it had put him off sex, even a testosterone-loaded horndog like himself. He’d begun to wonder if he was cured of attacks of inconvenient lust. Maybe the trauma inflicted on him by the robot princess had simplified his life. Imagine, not having to feed the slavering beast ever again. Sweet, unbroken solitude. Ahhh.

  But think again. One look at Nina Christie’s naked body, and the beast woke up with a roar, ready to rock and roll. He was cured.

  And she was having none of it.

  Whatever. He’d just clench his teeth, keep the girl alive until he could pass her off to Bruno’s guy. Except that Aunt Tonya couldn’t wait for Bruno’s guy. He glanced at the car clock. Visiting hours were long since over. If he drove Nina to her rendezvous, that was another delay. If he waited for the bodyguard to drive to him, same problem.

  Nah. The zombies and mafiya thugs could all get fucked. He was going to Tonya now, and Nina would stay nailed to him, at the cost of dragging her with him to his aunt’s deathbed.

  That decision made, he concentrated on driving, not looking at Nina. Strange, that her repressed, buttoned-up vibe should turn him on so much. Her heat and softness, hidden, secret. The severity of her disguise jazzed him all the more. Like it was all just for him.

  Dumb fantasy. She wasn’t for him. She’d said no, remember?

  His hard-on was all alone in the world. So. Suck. It. Up.

  The cab driver pulled up outside the car rental, collected his fare, and accelerated away with a palpable air of relief, and for the second time that day Aaro rented a car. The line was shorter this time, and a good thing, too, with Nina clamped under his arm.

  Even under layers of fabric, he felt her heat, smelled that forest-in-the-rain scent. She was silent, tense. Vibrating at a crazy frequency. A high-pitched, constant buzz, silent to all but him. Like a dog whistle.

  And he was the dog. Heh.

  They finally took possession of a modest Toyota Yaris, which was all the place had available with no notice. By the time they were on the road again, his hot itch had subsided. The sexual frustration was still there, but now he was just irritated at Nina for provoking it, rather than at himself for feeling it. Which was unfair, but fuck it. A guy clawed his way up the cliff face of his day with whatever handholds stuck out.

  The urge to go on the offensive was too much for him. He needed a distraction. Tough shit for her. “So let’s hear about it,”

  he said.

  “What’s ‘it’? It’s been a full day. Be specific.”

  “Cut the sarcasm, and tell me what those guys wanted from you.”

  She looked bewildered. “I already told you everything!”

  “No,” he said. “That’s your cover story. I want the real story.”

  She looked outraged. “It is the real story!”

  “Three things,” he said. “One, you have that weird-ass closet, and something is up with that. Two, you recognized the car before the tinted window came down. Three, you lied to me back in the cab.”

  “What makes you think I lied?”

  “I have an ear for it,” he said. “And a person does not custom design an expensive secret hiding place in her bedroom unless she’s got something to hide. What do you keep in there?”

  “Nothing! I keep boxes of books in there! Pharmacological reference books! They belonged to my mother!”

  He grunted. “You made a false-backed closet to store your mom’s reference books? Come on, Nina, you went to college, you can do better than that. What is it? Drugs? Counterfeit money?”

  “No!” she hissed. “I made it for me!”

  This was getting stupid, and he was irritated already. “What do you mean, for you? Why, for you?”

  “After what happened to me today, you still have the nerve to ask me that? What do you think I was doing in there, Aaro? Playing with myself? I needed a place to hide!”

  She was shrieking at him. He’d driven her past the limits of her self-control. Another item from his short list of special talents.

  “That won’t fly,” he told her. “When normal people get paranoid about home invasion, they don’t build trick closets. They buy expensive locks, motion sensors, fancy alarm systems, iron bars.”

  She shrugged angrily. “So I’m not normal. What a surprise.”

  That put his teeth on edge. “Lady, I am risking my skin to keep you alive. Do not give me any fucking attitude.”

  She stared ahead. “I’m sorry. I appreciate what you did for me.”

  It made his ass clench. That super-controlled tone. He
preferred it when she yelled at him. “I don’t need apologies or thanks,” he said. “I just want you to be straight with me. What is up with the closet?”

  She twisted her fingers together. “It’s, ah . . . it’s hard to explain.”

  He waited a teeth-grinding minute. “Explain it anyway.”

  Her voice was small. “I guess I have got something to hide.”

  “Yeah?” He waited for it. “What?”

  “Me,” she said.

  His look demanded that she expand on that.

  “I need a hiding place,” she admitted finally. “Wherever I sleep.”

  They stopped at a long light. He took the opportunity to stare at her stark profile. She was looking into her lap, as if she were ashamed.

  He had no business poking into this woman’s private hang-ups. But he wasn’t going to be poking into anything else private of hers.

  So fuck it. He wanted to know. “Why?” he insisted.

  The weight of the silence compelled her. “It’s my stepdad.”

  Shit. This was going to suck ass. He braced himself for it.

  “Yeah?” he prompted, merciless. “What about him?”

  “He was an asshole,” she said. “Having a place to hide was important. The need stuck with me. I need to have a hiding place, a good one, or else I can’t sleep. That’s all the closet is for me. A non-pharmaceutical treatment for anxiety and insomnia. Satisfied?”

  “Not yet,” he said. He glanced over, at the tight braid, the pressed-flat lip, the baggy clothes. Nope, he wasn’t satisfied, not yet, and probably not ever, not with all that baggage draped over her. “He messed with you?”

  She squinted at him. “Excuse me?”

  “Sexually, I mean,” he said. “He abused you?”

  “No,” she said hastily. “Um. Not too much, I mean.”

  They drove for several minutes in silence while he chewed on that. “That explains it,” he said finally.

  “Explains what?” Her voice shook with nerves.

  “The bag over your head,” he said. “Girls usually go one of two ways when that happens to them. Either they go super-slut, start coming on to the whole world, or they shut down the sex thing and just hide.” He slanted her a quick, assessing glance.

  “That would be you.”

  “I do not need your cheap pop psychology bullshit personal analysis of my personality flaws, thanks very much,” she flared.

  “No thanks necessary. Going back to your stepdad. What exactly does ‘not too much’ mean?”

  “Fuck off, Aaro!” Her face had gone pink. “I don’t want to talk about that to anybody, much less to you, much less today!

  We’ve got more important things to talk about!”

  “OK,” he said, with a meekness that surprised even himself.

  He gave her a moment to chill before goosing her along again.

  “So, about all these more important things we have to talk about.”

  She sniffed, hard and angrily. “Yes?”

  “Talk about them. Start with the lies you told me before.”

  She stared at him, looking trapped. “Fine,” she said tightly.

  “But you’re going to think I’m crazy.”

  He shrugged. “Crazy’s okay, as long as you’re honest.”

  “OK, then. I think Helga’s syringe had something really, um, unusual in it.”

  “And you think this because?”

  A nervous, hitching sigh shuddered out of her. “Because since this morning, I’m, um, different. I see things. Hear things.”

  “Be more specific,” he prompted.

  “I don’t know where to begin,” she said helplessly. “There were these doctors, at the hospital. They said they needed to run more tests. I blinked, and suddenly they were, um . . . zombies.”

  That took him by surprise. “Zombies,” he repeated.

  She shot him a defensive glance. “Zombies! Familiar with them? Disgusting animated rotting corpses? They mostly popu-late cheesy horror films? They shamble around, grunt, eat human flesh?”

  “Ah.” He was at a loss for words. What the fuck was a guy supposed to do with a statement like that? “Uh, OK. What did these zombies do to you, at the hospital?” he asked cautiously.

  “Don’t do that,” she said, her voice quavering. “Don’t you dare!”

  “Dare what? Jesus, Nina, I barely spoke!”

  “Don’t use that super-careful voice, like I’m going to start frothing at the mouth! I know they weren’t real zombies, OK? I get that, I know I was hallucinating! But they chased me. That was why I left the hospital in such a hurry. I ran to the subway. I took the F train.”

  “To the East Village,” he supplied. “To Yuri’s apartment.”

  She looked relieved, that he was picking up the thread with no apparent freak-out. But he was good with weird. He’d grown up with Tonya; he hung out with McClouds. Weird was mother’s milk to him.

  Even so. This girl’s story was seriously out there.

  “So, the subway is when the strange part happened,” she faltered.

  “Stranger than zombies?”

  She was too intent on her confession to react to his sarcasm.

  “I hear thoughts,” she blurted. “It started on the subway. Then I heard Yuri’s daughter, Marya, when she came out of the house. I saw . . . what they had done to him. In her head. So horrible.”

  “Nina,” he began.

  “That was how I knew about the car.” She hurried on, like she was afraid he wouldn’t let her finish. “The guys who shot at us. It wasn’t their car that I recognized. It was their thoughts. I heard that they were going to kill us. Like they were shouting it at me.”

  He looked at her. He tried breaking it into smaller pieces, like fruit in a blender, wood chunks in the chipper. Zombies? Mind reading?

  It was too thick and gummy. It clogged up his pipes.

  “What?” Her voice was sharp. “What’s that blank look about?”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said helplessly. “It’s just, ah, extremely weird. Even by my standards.”

  “There’s more.” She looked almost desperate, words pouring out. “One of the doctors who chased me? He was at my house.”

  “I didn’t see any zombies at your house, Nina.”

  “Not in his zombie form,” she snapped. “I’m talking about the tall, big guy, with the red burn scar on his neck. He called himself Granger at the hospital. I heard him talking to Sergei. Do you believe me?”

  He lifted his hands. “Nina, where do I even start with this?”

  She looked away. “I understand,” she said, coolly. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I guess I just made things worse.”

  He was cautiously impressed. She’d gone through hell, then been forced to deal with a snarling bonehead like him, and she still came across as regal. “Are you having hallucinations now?”

  he asked her.

  She sniffed. “Not as far as I know. Are you a hallucination, Aaro?”

  “Trust me, your mind couldn’t spontaneously make up anything as irritating as me. So, visual and aural hallucinations. A lot of stuff could have that effect. Common recreational drugs. LSD, psilocybin.”

  “But what about Marya? Yuri’s daughter? I saw what they did to him, through her eyes! It was horrible, and it was real! I swear to God.”

  “You could have imagined it,” he said. “I’m imagining it right now, and I wish I wasn’t. Doesn’t take much to fill in the details.”

  “Then what about the Audi? The guys shooting at us? How could I have imagined hearing them?” she demanded. “It was real, Aaro!”

  He shook his head. “I’m withholding a conclusion for now.”

  She pressed a trembling hand to her mouth. “You think I’m lying.”

  He thought about it. “Nope,” he said. “Stoned off your gourd on some severe hallucinogen, maybe. But not lying.”

  She choked on her giggles. “I don’t think I should find that statement comforti
ng, Aaro. Yet strangely enough, I do.”

  He was taken aback. “Treasure the moment,” he advised her.

  “I don’t do comfort very often. Blink, and you’ll miss it.”

  That earned him another giggle, one he hadn’t known he was fishing for, but he liked it. And he’d better stomp that shit right now, and hard. He could not let himself be entertained by this freakfest. That way lay disaster. An unsettling thought occurred to him, all at once.

  “Are you reading my mind right now?” he demanded.

  “Um, no.” She looked nervous and defensive. “I, um, can’t seem to read yours. Maybe it comes or goes. Or it depends on the person.”

  “Huh,” he said slowly. “Is that so. Just me.”

  Her face tightened. “Please, drop it.”

  He shook his head. “Go over it again. In sequence. And don’t leave out any of the weird stuff this time.”

  To her credit, stressed out as she was, she gave him a detailed and yet cogent debrief, starting that morning with Helga’s attack on the street. He listened without comment, up to the part where he pulled her from the closet. There she stopped, and waited.

  “So?” she said. “Any blinding insights, Aaro?”

  He ignored the sarcasm, too busy feeling the bars of an invisible cage materializing around him. Dismay, weighing him down like a ton of cold lead. This felt like some heavy shit. These bad guys weren’t going to be scared off easily.

  “You heard the zombie guy say that the cops were on their way,” he repeated slowly. “That was before I shot out the lock.

  You were smart not to wait for the police. They got tipped off when Lily called nine one one. This is something big, well organized. Lots of resources, if they have an informant with the cops.

  What did zombie dude say, exactly? That he should’ve been able to pick you up from this range?”

  “Yes, he said, um . . .” Nina squeezed her eyes shut. “He said it was something like . . . simax. He said, ‘the bitch is totally blocking us.’ ”

  “You know what he was talking about?” Aaro prodded. “A blocked radio frequency, maybe? Could someone have planted a trace on you?”

  “Not unless it was in that syringe,” she said. “No one else has touched me, except for the doctors at the hospital. The real ones.”