* * *
The pump clicked off. Forty dollars in the tank would get them a little farther down the highway. As Marie holstered the fuel nozzle and wrenched the gas cap back on, she took a mental inventory. Credit cards were useless: she was a fugitive, and by now Nessa had to be wanted as an accessory to her flight. They had enough cash to get them to Bloomington, if they were frugal, but from there…well, from there, everything depended on Carolyn Saunders.
She still couldn’t process it. All these years, ever since she was a kid finding that stash of dog-eared fantasy novels in her foster parents’ basement, she’d loved Saunders’s work. Maybe I knew on some level, she thought. Her books taught me that a girl could become a knight, and that was the lesson I needed back then. Some part of me knew that they weren’t just stories.
Now she knew it for a fact. Thanks to the dose of ink Savannah Cross had forced into her veins back at Vandemere, she’d seen a flood of visions from her past lives. She’d been a sickle-wielding avenger, a scarred and tattooed warrior with muddy feet and lethal instincts, a mechanized Valkyrie in sleek black power armor…and always, in every life, across a hundred parallel worlds, a knight.
The truth should have brought clarity. It just invited more questions. If anyone should have known what being a knight meant, it was Marie, but she found herself lost in a quagmire of conflicted memories. What was the core of knighthood? Was it devotion to her liege? Upholding a cause? And what made a cause worthy, if every world she’d lived and died upon had its own history, its own cultures, its own understanding of things? Was she supposed to adapt to her world’s ways or transcend them?
Transcend them, she thought.
She was certain about that much. She’d tried being a knight of the NYPD, upholding the law and giving her fealty to the badge. For her pains, she’d been cast out, punished, marked for destruction. Whatever she was supposed to become, whatever ideal she was supposed to embody, her work wasn’t finished. She was just getting started.
A sharp, shrill cry from inside the station ripped her questions away. She barreled toward the door, hitting it shoulder first, and burst over the threshold. A second scream echoed from the open door of the stockroom. Her hand dropped to her hip, instinctively reaching for a service pistol she didn’t have anymore, as she charged headlong into the fight.
Not a fight. She skidded to a stop on oil-spattered concrete. The station attendant was down on the floor, his back to a steel supply rack and his hands cupped over his left eye. Blood drooled between his fingers and his sweaty face twisted in a grimace. Nessa loomed over him, one hand on her hip, the other brandishing her slender quill knife. Cherry-red glaze, like watery syrup, stained the tip of the blade.
“What happened?” Marie said, catching her breath.
“Caught a Peeping Tom.”
“I didn’t do nothin’,” the attendant whimpered. He looked to Marie like a prisoner arguing in front of a judge. “I didn’t do nothin’. I swear I didn’t do nothin’!”
Nessa’s lips curled in a hungry smile.
“That’s not the face of an innocent man. Maybe I need to make a few more alterations. Snip, snip.”
Marie’s mouth hung open. “Nessa, you can’t—I mean, we’re supposed to be keeping a low profile!”
“Right, he might tell the police, especially now that you just said my name in front of him, Marie.” Nessa flicked her gaze to the heavens. “Oh, look, now we both did it.”
“I won’t say nothin’ to nobody,” he groaned. A long rivulet of blood, mixed with something watery and white, trickled down his arm and dribbled into a dark pool on his dirty overalls.
“I don’t believe you. Can’t imagine why.” Nessa began to pace, a slow stride back and forth in front of him, as she twirled the knife between her fingertips. “You know, when Actaeon spied upon Artemis bathing in the woods, she transformed him into a stag. His own hunting hounds tore him to pieces. Considering he was a hero of Thebes and you’re a nasty little pervert who likes to watch women pee, you’ve got to admit you’re getting off lightly by comparison.”
“Let’s just go,” Marie said. “He’s not going to say anything. If he calls the police, he’ll have to admit how he got stabbed in the first place.”
Nessa wrinkled her nose. “You know better. No, by the time the authorities arrive he’ll already have a different story concocted. Something about how he heroically held us off when we tried to rob him at knifepoint. And do you think they’ll listen to our side of things?”
She wanted Nessa to be wrong. She needed Nessa to be wrong. All the same, her logic was a wall of iron and Marie didn’t have a weapon strong enough to dent it.
“I don’t have to kill him,” Nessa added. “I could take his other eye and his tongue. That would slow him down enough that we’d be long gone by the time he managed to tell his story to the police. What do you say, Marie? I’ll let you choose his punishment. Death or mutilation? Pick one and I’ll carry out his sentence.”
Marie took a step back. The attendant was blubbering now, one eye weeping red and the other cheek slimy with tears and sweat.
“I can’t do that. I can’t make that choice.”
“Why not?” Nessa’s voice was light, casual, as if she was asking Marie to pick a restaurant for dinner.
“Because I…I don’t want to.”
“Doing nothing is not an option, my sweet. He knows our names, our faces, he’s seen our car. If we leave him like this, we’ll be arrested before we’re twenty miles down the turnpike. I can either kill him or make it harder for him to talk. Choose his punishment.”
Nessa approached her, sauntering close, a panther on the prowl. She dropped her voice and tilted her head, purring her words into the nape of Marie’s neck.
“Or you can admit that you’re much, much happier when I make the decisions. Turn around, go back to the car, and wait for me. You don’t have to watch this. I’ll finish up here, as I please, and join you in a few minutes.”
She wanted to. Marie had enough clarity, enough self-awareness, to know how badly she wanted to. She was happier, more content, when Nessa took the lead. She felt safe—for the first time in her life—in her hands. If Marie walked out, she’d never have to know this man’s fate, and she could even convince herself she wasn’t complicit.
But she could imagine what Nessa would do to him. And she knew that he’d suffer far more than he deserved. Marie was still figuring out what it meant to be a knight, but this…this wasn’t it. If it took getting her hands bloody—literally or metaphorically—to do the right thing, that’s what she’d have to do. She locked eyes with Nessa and spoke in a calm, strong voice.
“I want you to kill him,” Marie said. “And I want you to do it quickly and cleanly.”
Nessa’s eyes glittered. “There we go. Was that so hard?”
She turned and crouched down. His next scream turned into a wet and ragged gurgle. His legs kicked, heels hammering the oil-stained concrete, then went limp. When Nessa rose again, he wore a scarlet necklace from ear to ear.
Nessa flipped the Closed sign and locked the station door on their way out.
Ten
They didn’t talk. Marie gripped the steering wheel, wrenching the Eldorado back onto the turnpike, and stared at the road like she wanted to punch it.
“You’re quiet,” Nessa said. She was wiping her quill knife down with a fold of tissue, smearing away the blood.
“I—” She shook her head. “I am really pissed at you right now, okay?”
“Why?”
The question weighed on her like a pressure front, driving the air out of the car, squeezing her throat with the impossibility of an answer.
“Because you can’t—you can’t just kill people!”
“Why not?”
“Stop it,” Marie snapped. “Just stop it. You aren’t Socrates or Plato or…whoever that philosopher was who answered questions with questions. You know what I mean.”
Nessa didn’t answer
right away. She finished cleaning her blade and slipped it into her handbag along with the rumpled and bloody tissue.
“You were right the first time,” she said. “Plato wrote about Socrates, but he actually preferred the dialectic method.”
“I’m sorry I’m not as smart as you are.”
Nessa’s mouth curled into a dour frown.
“I hate it when you do that. You put yourself down like you were trained to do it. Like you can’t see your own value, or you were taught not to see it.”
“Well, great.” Marie lifted a hand from the wheel, flipping her palm to the darkening sky. “I hate when you murder people, so we’re even.”
“Should I have let him get away with it?”
“Of course not,” Marie said. She felt the jaws of the trap snapping shut around her, even as the words blurted from her lips.
“Then give me an alternative. Tell me what I could have done differently. We’re fugitives, Marie, we can’t go to the authorities. The only authorities we can trust, the only ones we can rely on now, are us. We have to defend ourselves. No one else is going to.”
Marie glanced over her shoulder, checking the blind spot before she clicked the turn signal. The Eldorado swung into another lane and eased around a slow-moving semi.
“I don’t know,” she said, her voice softer now. “No. I don’t think you should have let him get away with it. But it just feels…out of proportion to the crime. You don’t die for being a Peeping Tom. That’s not how the law works.”
“Who wrote the laws?” Nessa asked.
“I don’t see how that’s relevant.”
Nessa leaned back in her seat. She stared out the window, watching the traffic roll by, her silence almost pensive before she spoke again.
“When I was in ninth grade, the principal at my school also taught gym class. Mandatory. I hated gym class. Anyway. He was a very big proponent of safety and proper equipment. For instance, he was a stickler for making sure the girls were wearing sports bras, and making sure they fit properly.”
Marie glanced sidelong at her. “He didn’t—”
“Mm-hmm. And I remember…I was fourteen years old, and this fifty-something man was crouching in front of me, feeling me up, with this insanely thin pretense to justify it. And I felt…so powerless. So humiliated. What really got me, though, is the way he looked me right in the eye. Like he was daring me to say something, to acknowledge that we both knew perfectly well what he was doing to me. What he did to almost all the girls in my class.”
“And did you?”
“No,” Nessa said. “Because he was the principal, and a man in authority, and I was a girl in ninth grade. It wasn’t until years later I realized that if I’d spoken up, if we had all spoken up, together, we could have exposed him for what he was. But I had been indoctrinated into a system that taught me a toxic lie. I was taught that he was strong, that I was weak, and that was just the way of things. By the time I knew better…well, by the time I knew better he had died of pancreatic cancer, good riddance, but that isn’t the point.”
“I’m sorry,” Marie said.
“Thank you, but I’m not asking for your sympathy. I’m asking you to look through my eyes. Crimes against women are punished with a slap on the wrist, if they’re punished at all, because we aren’t valued. But think about it. We outnumber them. And if we could reach enough women and show them their real power…imagine a world where we act on it. Collectively. Imagine the news, the first week that rapists turn up castrated. Pedophiles with their hands cut off and their eyes gouged out. The first time a big-shot politician or Hollywood mogul—the kind of man who’s spent his life treating women as disposable commodities—ends up with his head on a pike and his crimes written on the wall behind his cold dead body. Imagine the panic.”
She smiled. It was a cold and reptilian thing.
“I want you to imagine a world where powerful men are afraid, the exact same way they’ve made us afraid for centuries,” Nessa said, “and how beautiful that would be.”
Marie chewed that over. She watched an olive-green sign glide by on their right, welcoming them to Ohio. One more state line down, two to go. Indiana next, then they’d cross over to Illinois and…then the future, a brass question mark in the far distance.
“I want a just world,” Marie said. “A world where everyone can be happy.”
“And the only reason we don’t live in one, right now, is because people in power have an incentive not to allow it. Which raises the question of what’s to be done about those people. You may come to a place where you have to decide what’s more important: being a ‘good person,’ as you’ve been taught to understand that concept, or being right.”
Nessa drummed her fingers on the armrest. Unspoken words hung in the air between them, clinging to the tip of her tongue.
“Also, I’m sorry.”
Marie glanced at her. Nessa gave a little shrug. The sun had gone out now, leaving nothing but an amber glow and long shadows behind, and Marie turned on the headlights. In the gathering dark, Nessa’s eyes became black pools behind the rounded frames of her glasses.
“I make it sound like that was part of some grand manifesto, back there,” she said with a tired chuckle. “The truth is, I felt violated, I was angry, so I lashed out. I took his eye because I felt like it. I killed him because I wanted to kill him. I didn’t think about the danger it might put us in, or how it would make you feel. And I’m not sorry for killing that man, but I am sorry for making you unhappy. That wasn’t my intent. I’ll try to be…more restrained, in future.”
“And I guess I’m still thinking like a cop,” Marie said. “I didn’t see it from your point of view. Part of me is still clinging on, you know? Like if I follow the rules, if I toe the line, someone’s going to come along and say, ‘sorry, this was all a big mistake, here’s your badge back and also you’re not wanted for murder anymore.’”
“It’s a potent fantasy. The best lies always are.” The tip of Nessa’s tongue played over her pearly teeth. “We’re outlaws now, Marie. And to be honest, I think a little anarchy would be good for you.”
“Maybe.” Marie paused. “Did…we just have our first fight as a couple?”
“I believe we did. And here we are, still together.”
“Still together.”
“Tell me something.” Nessa’s glasses caught the passing beam from a billboard light, gleaming in the shadows. “Are you as turned on as I am right now?”
Marie’s head bobbed. “Oh, yeah. If we weren’t doing the whole date-with-destiny, hunting down the wellspring of magic to defeat an ancient curse thing, I’d be looking for a place to pull over. You know, this car has a really big back seat.”
“Next time we stop,” Nessa said, “I’m going to do terrible things to you. I think I like it when you argue with me, just a little bit. I like seeing that strength come out.”
She reached over. Her fingernails trailed along the curve of Marie’s neck, grazing tender skin, before curling to caress her cheek.
“Mine,” Nessa said.
Marie leaned her head to the side, rubbing against Nessa’s fingertips like a cat. They shared the moment in contented silence. The calm between storms.
“Maybe she knows we’re coming,” Marie said.
“Hmm?”
“Carolyn Saunders. Maybe she knows.” Marie nodded over her shoulder, to their suitcase in the back seat. “That book of spells was written just for you. And somebody sent you that mirror. If we didn’t use it when we did, if we hadn’t gotten the message you recorded for us…well, maybe we’d have pulled through, but there’s a good chance we’d be dead or behind bars right now.”
“True. Whether it’s your dear author or someone else, we appear to have a benefactor behind the scenes. They’re willing to give us a little nudge in the right direction, but nothing more than that. They’ve left the heavy lifting—and the danger—on our shoulders. Which leaves me with two questions.”
“W
hich are?”
“One,” Nessa said, “why won’t they show their face and simply talk to us directly? And two, what’s their endgame?”
Eleven
Darkness swallowed Las Vegas. The city responded with a full-throated electric shout and a million tiny suns. The onyx-black sky flipped onto its back, with all the stars blazing at street level in a cacophony of light. In the middle of the Strip, the Flamenco stood as a monolith of white and hot-pink neon.
Tonight, the executive conference room had been rented out to a special party of high rollers. They filled every chair at the long oval table, mahogany topped with a ring of black leather textured like alligator skin. Each place was set with a notepad and a tall cylinder of Voss water, the perfect scene for a board meeting.
The woman at the head of the table would never be mistaken for a Fortune 500 CEO. Jennifer had dressed casual tonight, in a faded tank top that showed off her full sleeve of tattoos along one arm. The centerpiece featured Elvis as the Gautama Buddha. She took off her ice-blue Lennon glasses, folded them, and rapped them on the table.
“Hear that?” she said in a Kentucky drawl. “That’s opportunity knockin’. Donaghy Waste Management is out of commission, thanks to that unfortunate and inexplicable fire at their HQ, and the city needs a replacement vendor before the Strip starts smelling like week-old fish. Who did their homework?”
Eddie Stone, sitting like a peacock in a lavender suit halfway down the table, flipped a hand in the air and flashed a gold-toothed smile.
“I even brought an apple for the teacher. Sordi and Son is an outfit based in Mesquite, and they’ve been looking to expand. The old man’s a straight shooter. His kid, not so much. Got a love for playing the ponies, and they don’t love him back. Sordi Junior is into one of my boys to the tune of twelve grand. He’s so underwater he can’t even pay the vig at this point.”
Daniel Faust sat at Jennifer’s left hand. He adjusted the knot on his copper silk necktie and reached for his water glass.
Detonation Boulevard Page 7
