by C. J. Lyons
One thing they shared: the Lazaretto pragmatism.
“Do whatever you need. But find them. Tommaso and Angela Rossi. Bring them to me. Alive.”
“Yes, Mother.”
Francesca returned to the opulent dining room and resumed her seat. Marco acknowledged her with a slight nod, then stood. “Thank you all for coming tonight,” he began. “While it is traditional to look back upon our family’s many accomplishments over the past year, I’d like to, instead, look forward to our future.”
Usually, the holiday dinner was a long, dull night filled with reminiscing over past Lazaretto glories, but Marco’s opening words signaled a departure from tradition. The dozen men and women seated at the table, all Lazarettos leading various family enterprises, stirred. The Vatican faction smirked, obviously in on his plans, while the financial managers checked their cuff links and creases, trying to hide their concern. The men and women whose job it was to gather intelligence and eliminate the family’s competition kept their expressions blank.
Francesca took a cautious sip of her wine, certain that she was not going to enjoy whatever Marco had planned for tonight’s gathering.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Marco continued, “what I am proposing may seem radical, but I’m sure you’ll agree that it is the best way to ensure our family’s future.” He raised his glass and nodded to Francesca. “While we are all indebted to my sister and her people for the sacrifices they have made for our family in generations past, it’s become obvious to me that we no longer live in a world where that sacrifice is necessary. I propose to you that we end the Scourge once and for all.”
A murmur spread around the table, but no one seemed genuinely surprised. Of course not. Marco would have tested the waters before making his proclamation. Francesca set her glass down and dropped her hand into her lap, the better to hide its uncontrollable trembling.
“We have always protected family members afflicted by the Scourge,” she said, keeping her tone calm and unemotional.
Of all the family leaders, she was the only one suffering from fatal insomnia, the Lazaretto Scourge. The others led normal lives, free from fear, free from the excruciating knowledge of exactly how they would die. The price they paid for that freedom was to care for their brothers and sisters. For hundreds of years, countless generations, it had always been that way. What Marco was proposing would, in one fell swoop, erase an entire arm of the family.
“In return,” she continued, “those of us afflicted have served the rest of the family well. Securing you wealth and power—”
“But it’s been over two decades since the last Vessel appeared,” a distant cousin dressed in the robes of a Vatican bishop protested.
“And with modern technology, we’ve been able to steal what information we need without their use,” Marco added.
“We’ve also created new revenue streams via our medical research,” Francesca put in.
“Research that will be continued, of course. By talented, healthy Lazarettos with no fear of dying before the promise of their work can be fulfilled. You of all people should appreciate that, dear sister.”
Francesca pushed to her feet, the edges of her vision blurring. She inhaled deeply, forcing her fugue aside. No, not now. If she lost this battle, if she showed any hint of weakness, she would lose everything. Time, she just needed a little more time. Then she’d hold the power. She could save everyone—both afflicted and healthy.
“There are eighty-one of us as of the last census, dear brother. What are you proposing? Mass murder? Or would you like me and my sons and daughters, our cousins and aunts and uncles to drink willingly from the cup of death you offer us?”
“Francesca, always one for the dramatic. I’m simply proposing that we put that science of yours to good use and make sure this is the last generation to carry the Scourge. When they die, the Scourge dies with them. Until then, you are all welcome to live out your days on the island. We will care for you as we always have.”
Exile. He was proposing exile. Which would mean an end to all of her plans. It was bad enough he’d already shut down her financial resources, now he was going to imprison her and her people as well?
“Who are you to decide our fate?” she challenged him, hoping to rally the others to her side. “Are we not Lazarettos as well? Have we not served the family faithfully, without question? And have you all,” she favored each of her relatives with a sharp-eyed glance in turn, “each of you, not benefitted from our suffering?”
Without waiting for her brother’s answer, she swept her hand through the air, sending her wineglass crashing to the floor. She honestly had no idea if her action was the result of an impending fugue, a muscle tremor, or her fury. “Yes, we are dying. But no, we are not done living. And we will not go quietly. We will not go without a fight.”
Marco merely smiled, waving a hand to the wait staff to clean up the mess she’d created, banishing any evidence of her rebellion. “Then, dear sister, you will lose.” He turned to the others. “All in favor?”
Chapter 5
FROM THE BELL tower’s shadows I stared long and hard at Ryder until he finally passed out of sight, leaving me alone beneath the golden moon, silver wisps of clouds racing across its surface. I shivered and wrapped my arms around my chest, noticing the cold for the first time.
“Were you able to make contact with Louise?” I asked Flynn.
“Devon’s boys got a burner phone to her—smuggled it in inside a poinsettia. The cops watching her never had a clue.” Since we couldn’t trust the police, Devon had organized the former gangbangers he’d run with to be our eyes and ears on the street.
“Are Louise and her family safe?” Louise knew about my and the children’s fatal insomnia. Which meant she was a valuable asset to us—and a loose end for the enemy.
“They are for now,” Flynn answered. “Devon arranged for news of a family emergency in London as a cover story. Kingston Enterprises’ corporate jet will fly her husband and daughter to the UK, and we’re sneaking Louise into the tunnels.”
“No. She should stay with her family.”
In the dark, I couldn’t see Flynn’s eye roll, but I felt it in her posture and tone of voice. “Those kids need a doctor. Someone besides you—you’re barely functional. And you said yourself, Louise is the smartest doctor you know.”
“It’s too dangerous.”
“It’s her choice. You’ll have to live with it.”
Like I had to live with the echoes of Jacob’s death spiraling through my vision each time I blinked? I hunched my shoulders against the wind that had shifted to turn against me and gave her a nod of resignation.
As Flynn led the way down the bell tower’s spiral staircase and along the private passages that skirted St. Tim’s main worship area, I hoped she hadn’t noticed how distracted I was. It was becoming increasingly difficult to filter out the foreign memories invading my conscious awareness. In the space of a month, I now had the memories of five people swirling through my mind, bobbing to the surface randomly.
As I walked through the cathedral’s stone arches, incense and the murmur of prayers filled my senses. Most from here and now, but a good portion contributed by Sister Patrice, the nun who’d started all this last month when she spoke to me while I held her heart in my hand. A cascade of memories layered on top of memories clouded my vision.
Was this door I passed the hand-carved solid oak of St. Tim’s, or was it a blur of memory, another door in another house of worship from another time and another woman’s life? I stopped, reached a hand out, hating my weakness, but I had to know.
Relief swept over me as my fingers connected with a solid, very real, very here, door.
I was well aware that I was losing my mind. I had the memories of a murdered nun, a young girl tortured to death, the sadistic serial killer who killed her, my loving ex-husband who’d died because of me, and an elderly Hungarian woman all percolating through my consciousness...
And now Flynn was
taking me to steal the memories of one more person hovering on the brink of death: Daniel Kingston.
We traversed the steps leading below the cathedral, past Sister Patrice’s illegal clinic, and down two more flights of stairs into the tunnels. The tunnels always reminded me of what it might feel like being trapped in a warehouse store during a blackout. Impenetrable darkness, sounds echoing from every stray corner, the dank stench, and lack of fresh air all combined to create a strange sensation of overwhelming claustrophobia, despite the cavernous space.
Bad things happened in these tunnels. I hated that we’d been forced to retreat to them like rats trapped on a submarine sinking into an abyss.
Flynn, however, was in her element. If she had her way, instead of following the slow and plodding maze of twisting corridors lined with metal vault-like doors leading into equally vault-like rooms, she’d be racing silent as the night over the catwalks and pipes suspended above us.
Right now, it was taking everything I had to stay upright. Ghosts of memories—mainly from Leo, who had used these tunnels as his private killing ground—called to me from the rooms we passed in the dark corridors lit only by red lights spaced at intervals. Shrieks of pain and screams of terror surrounded me, echoes of the not-so-distant past. Despite the fact that the tunnels stayed at a constant temperature, my skin crawled with sudden fever sweat.
I tried to drown out the sounds with memories of my music, my fingers forming chords as we walked. Alamea, the young girl whose memories I sheltered, one of Leo’s victims and a gifted pianist, contributed music of her own, as did Jacob, creating a harmony of notes to drive back the horror.
“Remember,” Flynn was saying when I finally tuned back in to reality, “we need the names of the people behind Almanac Care—not the shell companies it’s hiding behind. Real names, real locations. I know Daniel—there is no way in hell he didn’t know exactly who he was doing business with.”
“It doesn’t work that way. It’s not like a search engine, where you just riffle through results.”
Her glance filled with curiosity. “What’s it like, then? Being in someone else’s head?”
How to explain? “Like falling down a dark well, then a light shoots out of nowhere and illuminates a handhold. That handhold turns into a path, and the world dissolves until it’s just the two of you.”
“You can actually talk with Daniel? Have a conversation?”
“Maybe. But not words alone. It’s difficult to tell what’s real and what’s my own mind trying to sort things out, make some kind of sense of the chaos. Sister Patrice showed me visions. With Alamea, we didn’t use words but communicated through music.”
“And Jacob?”
I flinched, the loss too fresh. “Music as well, but mostly words—always words with Jacob. The man could argue his way out of a locked room with no doors or windows.”
“You don’t keep their personalities, right? Just their memories?” She was thinking of Leo, her hand dropping to rest on the pistol holstered at her hip.
“Memories are colored by personalities.” As if to prove my point, a stray scream ricocheted through the space—a combination of Leo’s and Alamea’s memories. Flynn frowned at my shudder. “But it’s still me in charge.”
“Except when you drift off into one of those freaky fugues or start hallucinating...” She turned away before I could see her expression.
It was clear she’d rather be taking care of Esme than babysitting me but also very obvious that I needed watching. As our team’s ace in the hole, top-secret weapon—hell, our only weapon—I pretty much sucked eggs. More liability than advantage, that much Flynn had made clear, but I was all we had.
We reached the exit closest to the Kingston family mansion. A narrow metal staircase led up to a maintenance shed in the park across the street from the sprawling brownstone. While Flynn checked for any unwelcome surveillance, I waited behind a false wall at the rear of the shed. The air was dusty with fertilizer and mulch, making my nose itch and eyes water.
Finally, Flynn released me, and I stepped out into the night air, inhaling in gratitude. Devon wanted me to stay in the tunnels where it was safe, but I couldn’t stand being trapped below ground where the weight of memories was too much to bear.
We were surrounded by trees. The old, broken-down carousel was to our left, while across the street stood Millionaire’s Row, where the original coal and steel barons had built their homes. Now, in Cambria City’s current economic decline, they all stood empty or had been converted into multi-unit condos for the few who could afford the address. All except one: Kingston Manor.
Somehow the Kingston family had not only survived but thrived during the economic upheavals that colored the past decades. The family home, known affectionately as the Brownstone, sprawled like an English manor from a Jane Austen novel, including a Victorian-style greenhouse on the roof of one of the wings. Before his stroke, Daniel Kingston had made the Brownstone the hub of Cambria City’s social life and business world—nothing happened in the city without Daniel’s approval, involvement, and profit sharing.
Tonight no lights were visible in the Brownstone; even the outside holiday decorations were dark, as if the house stood in mourning, unable to celebrate while its master lay in a coma.
Flynn led me across the street, urging me to move faster, fearful we’d be spotted by some random vehicle. But there was no one. The entire block was silent, the only movement the wind rustling through the treetops in the park we’d left behind.
The gate guarding the drive swung open after Flynn entered the security code. We raced through it. On the other side, I pressed my back to the brick wall and froze.
Flynn continued several steps across the drive toward the house before she realized I wasn’t with her and turned back in annoyance. “What’s wrong?”
I shook my head, scrambling to catch a breath. I was hyperventilating, unable to speak, my hands and feet growing numb.
“Is it a fugue?” She pressed closer. I shook my head—my fugues left me unable to move, not even able to blink, so it was enough to answer her question. “Then what?”
It took me a moment to regain enough control to answer her. Breathe, just breathe, I ordered my rebellious lungs. Slow, slow, slow... “I can’t do it.”
“Do what? Talk with Daniel? Sure you can—”
I shook my head, closed my eyes against her logic. “No. You don’t understand. Every person I’ve connected with, they’ve died after I left with their memories. It’s worse than stealing—it’s more like, like...” My eyes popped open, wide with horror. “It’s a violation.”
“It’s mental rape,” Flynn supplied in her usual blunt way. “And who deserves it more than Daniel? The man was my mentor, but after what he’s done—what he had me do, what he did to Esme, his own flesh and blood—I owe him no loyalty. Hell, if I could, I’d do it myself. Go inside his head and rip out the information we need to save Esme and the other kids. Wouldn’t have a second thought about it. Those kids are worth it. They don’t deserve to die just so Daniel and whoever he’s working with can make a profit.”
It was the longest speech I’d ever heard her utter. But it didn’t change the facts. It wouldn’t be Flynn breaking every oath she’d ever made—as a physician, as a human being. My entire career, I’d worked as a victim’s advocate; now I was being forced to become the predator.
Flynn’s code of vigilante justice might work for her and Devon—they’d both do anything to save Esme—but it made me sick. If we hold one life to be sacred, shouldn’t we hold them all? When is it okay to justify torture, stealing someone’s entire life, all their private moments, secret hopes, and then leaving them to die?
In the ER, we’re trained in triage. In the event of a mass casualty, some patients, despite arriving with hearts beating and lungs breathing, are deemed as “black tags,” irredeemable, not without using up resources that could save other lives. They’re left to die while our efforts are devoted to the patients most li
kely to survive.
The algorithms are heartless, using research and statistics to justify a few deaths in the name of saving many more.
I understood that. Understood what kind of man Daniel Kingston was—more monster than man by my observation. Even understood what was at stake: the lives of twenty-one kids and possibly many, many more.
But was I ready to condemn myself along with Daniel? Was I ready to become as much of a monster as he was?
Flynn surprised me by resting her palm on my arm and squeezing gently. “Sometimes we all need to make sacrifices,” she told me. “This one is yours. For Esme and the children. We need you, doc. No one else can get the job done.”
I hauled in a breath, the cold air finally penetrating my frozen limbs. Couldn’t meet Flynn’s eyes but nodded. “For Esme and the children.”
God help me, I followed her inside.
Chapter 6
AFTER RYDER CALLED FBI HQ and verified Grey’s identity—although the desk agent refused to “confirm or deny” Grey’s current assignment or whereabouts—Grey did the same. At least Ryder assumed he did, based on hearing half of a cryptic conversation. Then they continued their stroll around the crime scene, engaging in a verbal tug of war. “Caustic lye—you think they used it to cover their tracks or because it was part of whatever they were manufacturing?”
The FBI agent didn’t answer right away—part of the power game, Ryder knew. Instead, Grey crouched, pretended to examine a shard of glass in the beam of his Maglite, nodded as if the mysteries of the universe had just been imparted to him, and finally stood. “They went to the trouble of converting the sprinkler system to use the lye, so what do you think?”
