Midnight Dawn

by Jocelyn Adams

  I stared at the tin. No, that wasn’t right. Thoughts danced outside of my understanding. “That’s not the stuff you normally use, is it?” A sense of wrongness put a twist in my spine that wouldn’t go away no matter how much I shifted my body. WTH?

  He held it out to me, wearing a half-cocked smile, only his eyes were too cold and empty to pull off the humor. “Did you hit your head when you fainted last night? I’ve been using this brand for as long as I can remember. I picked up an entire case of it back in 1940.” He’d been working for the Machine for the last sixty-five years, drafted when he was around twenty-one by my estimate, so it wasn’t as far-fetched as it sounded. We were demi-immortal and would live forever without aging, as long as we weren’t damaged in our vital parts.

  I took the tin from him and turned it around. It did appear old-fashioned, the metal holding a dull patina and imprinted with a letter R on the top, but something felt wrong about my lack of recognition. The stuff inside didn’t smell like anything but wax. Maybe I had seen him with it before, but my scrambled brain was having a blond moment.

  I gave a halfhearted shrug and handed it back to him. “Now, let’s go. This place feels like it’s full of ghosts of Addison past, and the pages are getting impatient.” Strange I hadn’t really noticed the pull of those pages until I went looking for Mom a few minutes ago, and now they wouldn’t leave me alone. Was this part of the evolution Izan had mentioned? How much more would I change?

  “Wait.” A heavy breath leaked out of him as he stared at something over my shoulder.

  Seconds passed, maybe hours. I ached for him to look at me, but he didn’t. “Just how much waiting do I need to do, sentinel? We kinda have stuff to do, as you’ve been reminding me all night.”

  The corner of his mouth twitched. “When you were twelve, before your father owned his own business, he didn’t have a lot of spare cash, so he saved up money for a whole year to take you on a trip to New York for three days over Christmas. This was one of the places you most wanted to go, along with the Metropolitan Museum and the Guggenheim, and he took you to all of them.

  “You had your first stay in a hotel not far from here, but you spent the nights watching the ceiling for rifts and ended up almost passing out in the gift shop right over there from exhaustion on the third day.” He pointed to a small window in the corner full of souvenirs. “After wrapping you in his coat, he carried you all the way back to your room through blowing snow and didn’t let go of you until you woke up the next morning. He tried not to let you see his worry and ran up his credit card to stay one more night so you’d be able to come back and see the displays here you missed.”

  Tears sprang to my eyes, and I turned only long enough to wipe them away. “So…he was a good man, then. I mean, someone who would go to so much trouble for his daughter would have to be, right?”

  “Yes, he’s a good man. One of the best I’ve ever known.” There was affection in his voice, deep and aged. A smile carved his lips as if he’d slipped into a beautiful memory I’d have done anything to see along with him. “And you like the rain because of the way it sounded against the roof of your house and how it felt on your bare skin while you played in the puddles and because of how it smells fresh and new. Your birthday is September eighteenth.”

  When I wrangled my voice out of its wobbly mess, I said, “My dreams of him keep me sane.”

  His voice, when he finally spoke, had fallen quiet, and he stood statue-still. “Are you sure you don’t dream of anything else?”

  “I told you I don’t,” I lied. “I mean, I have moments of déjà vu and emotional hauntings, but I’m sure it’s just stuff leaking through from my old life.” When he said nothing, I added, “Thank you. You know, for telling me.”

  I wondered how he knew all that, but he’d probably been watching over me from the Shift during the trip. Maybe that was why he resented me, because he’d been stuck looking out for the future Architect for years.

  “Don’t mention it.” His hand balled inside his pocket.

  I watched his fist moving inside the fabric, and then glanced at his face. The ever-present tightness in his jaw had relaxed. “Hey, why do you keep doing that?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Every time you get all tense, you dive for your pockets. What do you have in there?”

  He glanced down as if he didn’t realize what he was doing, and pulled his hands out. Pink rose in his cheeks. “You have your silk, and I have mine. Let’s just leave it at that.”

  I fished out the piece of soft fabric Sophia had given me that I used to calm my nerves. “You mean you literally have silk in your pocket? I didn’t think you were much of a touch guy.”

  A sad smile arched his lips. “No, not silk. It’s something that belonged to someone I care about. I like having it with me so I can feel close to her even though I can’t be.” Wow, was he talking about his feelings? Epic.

  “Was it your mom’s?” At his sudden stiffness, my heart fell, and I said, “Never mind. It’s none of my business.”

  He stared inward as if picturing her, and I got the feeling he needed to talk about whatever he was seeing. “No, not my mother. Someone beautiful and witty and fascinating. And her soft lips will haunt me for the rest of my life.”

  Screeching tires in my head. “You love her.” No, that was all wrong. My guts shrank in on themselves. I stared at his profile, usually unreadable but now radiating a longing he probably wouldn’t want me seeing. “Is she from your life before the Machine?” How had I not known? He’d always been a private guy, but I’d never heard him mention a girl, ever. Why did she have to be smart and funny?

  “No, more recent than that.” He stared at me, as if desperate for me to understand something he couldn’t say.

  Had it been going on the entire time I’d known him? Not that it had been very long, and it wasn’t like I knew much about him despite my prying. “Well…what happened to her? Where is she now?” I wrestled with tears. Why was I being such a sissy? He loved someone else, and he wasn’t my conduit anyway. No wonder physical contact between us made him mad and probably guilty. He’d been trying to tell me he didn’t have feelings for me, but I hadn’t really believed him. Not until now.

  He swallowed, wincing. “I had to leave her behind. Sometimes we have to hurt the ones we love, and we can’t even tell them why.”

  “Can you tell me why? I mean, you can talk about it if you want to.” I got the feeling he wanted to even though I resisted an urge to plug my ears and sing a chorus of la-la-la so I couldn’t hear him, but I wasn’t about to stopper the dam now that it had broken. “At first I thought I might hurt her because of my anger issues, but it’s more than that. Every time I got close to her, my mind would go haywire, and it was almost like…I felt her die, like a premonition. When I stayed away, it stopped, so I left her. Everything I do is so she can have a life someday, and every night before I go to sleep, I whisper to her, even though she doesn’t hear me.” He choked on a sad laugh.

  So she was a regular mortal? Because no guardian would ever have a normal life. I would have done anything to give him back whoever he’d lost even though my soul bled over the final door slamming on my idiot crush. No wonder he’d been avoiding me, because I’d been lusting after him like an inconsiderate fool.

  “What do you say to her?” I said.

  He drew in a breath and closed his eyes, the words flowing out rich with pain. “I ask her to forgive me for hurting her.”

  Sweetest thing ever. My heart broke for a thousand reasons. “Are the premonitions new since I came? Because I seem to be changing, and maybe you are, too? And you can’t possibly think just being around someone will kill her.”

  “Yes, it’s new for me, and I don’t think I’ll literally kill her, more that our relationship is the catalyst for something terrible to happen, and it involves more than the two of us. I think maybe Baku’s appearance might be part of it. I can feel it in my soul that if I give in to my need for her,
that somehow our relationship will end her life, and the Machine will never function.”

  He needed me to end that threat. No wonder he was so protective of me. “Well, you should bring her to the facility, then, so we can protect her.” I wanted desperately to draw him into my arms and hold him tight, but I didn’t want to make him uncomfortable.

  “No,” he said loudly, and then lowered his voice. “I keep her as close as I can. I’ll take care of her myself.” His face shut down. “If you’re really sure we need Kyle, I can call him without going anywhere.”

  I squinted at him, drowning in dark, selfish feelings I didn’t want to have. “Need Kyle for what?”

  “We’re on a job, Plaid. You said you wanted Kyle to disable the security system, before you got us off track.”

  I crossed my arms all casual-like. “Oh yeah, right. I forgot you could contact the others through the Shift. When are you going to teach me that?” To lighten the mood, I drew up some humor from my limited acting arsenal. “And if you say never, I’m going to hit you.”

  He flashed a grin before wiping it away with his hand. I’d have made jokes for the rest of my life if he’d keep smiling like that. He acted aloof most of the time, but it was a mask. He was a good man, like my dad. Nobody else would have suffered like that so his girl could be happy. I hoped someone loved me like that someday.

  He closed his eyes. Ignoring me again. Super. After a few seconds, he sucked in a deep breath and opened his eyes again. “He’s coming.”

  “Just like that?”

  “You’re not the only one who ‘just knows’ how to do things around here, Plaid.”

  “I told you to stop calling me that.”

  “And I keep ignoring you. I’d have thought you would have given up trying by now.” The grin came through his voice even though it didn’t hit his lips. God, I loved hearing him lighthearted.

  “What about Iris?” I asked.

  “She’s not listening to me. She never does, and she’s good at hiding. Most of the time I can’t find her even when I go looking.”

  “Not listening, huh? Gee, I wonder what that feels like,” I grumbled to myself.

  Kyle’s energy pressed on me before he emerged beside us in dusty jeans and a green bowling shirt. He mustn’t have been invited to hunt wraiths with the others, or maybe he was supposed to have gone out in the next round of hunting. Or maybe the hunt had been a bust, and they were back already.

  “What’s up, Addy?” he asked.

  “Addy?” Asher glared at the guy the way I’d stare at someone who’d sucker punched my grandma, the sweet protector of one lucky girl I’d just met disappearing behind the mask again. Would I ever see that part of him again? Probably not, but I liked knowing he was in there, and that I wasn’t totally off my rocker caring about him, even if he didn’t return it.

  I took a trick from his book and turned my back on him, directing Kyle’s attention to the museum below. “Do you think you can disarm the security in a section of this building?”

  He crouched down and had a look, his copper-red hair standing in disarray as if he’d been tugging at it. “Give me a minute to check around a bit, see if I can find out what kind of system it is and where its heart is.”

  “Okay, but we’re kind of in a hurry.”

  “You can’t rush a master geek, but I’ll see what I can do.” He smiled and disappeared.

  The tension between Asher and me turned into a brick wall with a covering of thorns. Did he regret pouring his heart out to me? I wouldn’t dare bring it up again unless he invited me to.

  After a short, heated silence, he asked, “Just how much time have you been spending with Kyle that he’s familiar enough with you to call you Addy?”

  Huh? “I thought sharing time was over, but tell me why you care, and I’ll consider answering a question that’s none of your business. It isn’t like you’ve been around to hang out with me.”

  The crocodile glared at me through his alien blue eyes. Before he could chew my face off, though, Kyle popped up in front of me. I let out an embarrassing squeal. I really needed to stop doing that.

  “This place is rigged up tight.” He grinned at whatever idiot expression I flashed at him. “Every doorway, window, even the roof, is rigged with sensors, along with motion sensors in every room and hallway. They’re all connected to a network that leads to a server in the basement.”

  “Just tell us the time instead of telling us how to build the goddamned watch,” Asher barked. “Can you do it or not?”

  “Easy now,” I said. Turning to Kyle, I asked, “So, can you?”

  “At first I thought, hell no, but short answer is I think I can. It turns out I don’t need to be in the true reality to access a network or the internet.”

  Asher made an annoyed sound and tossed up his hand. “Then do it.”

  I skewered him with a stare. Had I imagined sweet, sensitive Asher? “Didn’t anyone ever tell you the whole ‘you get better results with honey than vinegar’ saying?” To Kyle, I said, “Okay, let me figure out which room the page is in, and then you can do your thing.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask me how I’m going to do it?”

  I shrugged. “If you’re anything like me, you probably don’t even know how you do half of what you do. You can tell me later if we survive the week.”

  He grinned wider. “I’m so glad you’re here. Screw the Colonel. He couldn’t lead a lemming off a cliff.”

  Laughter blasted out of me, and it was such a rush. While Asher muttered to himself behind me, I followed the thread farther into the building, up to the second floor, still in the safety of the Shift. “I don’t suppose you can also get into the display cases?”

  “Um…no,” Kyle said. “I guess you’d need some sort of lock-picker dealy.”

  I chuckled. “Yeah, like Iris.”

  “We’ll smash it,” Asher offered.

  “No,” I said. “Can you please stop trying to kill me with your eyes, find Iris, and ask her nicely to come here? I know inanimate objects don’t mean much if we all die trying to save them, but my instincts are telling me this is what we need to do, which means Izan needs us to learn something from the process, or maybe work as a team. She can get into any of those locked doors in the facility.” When he narrowed his eyes, I added, “And if you go off on her about her little B&E adventures, I will mess up your sock drawer and jump all over your perfectly made bed if I ever find out where you lay your grumpy head at night.”

  Had he ever taken his girlfriend there? Really? Would I start imagining every way they’d messed up his sheets, too? Jesus.

  A flash of such a drawer awakened in my mind before it sped off again. Black socks on the left, growing lighter all the way to the white socks on the right, all folded neatly. Huh? Maybe the faceless man from my former life had also been meticulously groomed. That might explain why I had a strange fixation on Asher, because he reminded me of someone I liked. Maybe loved, the way he loved smart and funny whatshername.

  “Plaid?” Asher snapped his fingers in front of my face.

  I blinked, clearing my head of ghosts. “So, did you call Iris, or what?”

  “She told me to… She’s not listening to me.”

  “Gave you the one-finger salute, did she? About time someone did. Go get her, and tell her I sent you and I’d like her help with something. And be nice. Kyle and I will find the artifacts and get ready to grab and run.”

  Jaw flexing, Asher stared me down before turning to Kyle. “Anything happens to her, and I will hold you personally responsible.”

  Kyle offered a smile that was innocent and smug all in one. “Anything is a pretty broad term, sentinel. You gonna kill me if she stubs her toe? Since you seemed to have missed it, she’s quite capable of taking care of herself. Maybe it’s time you step back and let her do her job.”

  “Whoa, stop,” I shouted when Asher opened his mouth to unleash the beast. “Asher, get Iris. Kyle, shut your trap and follow me. Jeez, men.
Are you all so freakin’ dramatic?”

  After Asher disappeared on the wake of a few sharp words, I followed the thread again, having to go slower to pinpoint where we were headed. Down a hallway. Left? No, not…maybe. “Crap, I think there’s more than one here. I’m going to follow the strongest one first.”

  “What’s that guy’s problem, anyway?” Kyle asked when I sped into the Shift above a room full of display cases.

  I considered telling him a watered-down version of what Asher had told me, but even that seemed like a betrayal. “He’s got demons, just like the rest of us, and his have some pretty sharp teeth. So stop pushing his buttons, okay?”

  “I don’t get why you defend him when he treats you like a stupid little girl.” He sighed. “Though I did see him standing outside the infirmary after you got stabbed. He was all bent over as if someone kicked him in the nuts, so maybe he does actually give a crap about what happens to you.”

  I wasn’t sure why that shocked me after the way Asher had reacted with Baku in Chicago, and now that I knew that he needed my help to protect his loved one, but it did. “No, he wants me to save us. He’s got my back, and that’s all that matters.”

  I couldn’t shake the odd zings having their way with me. I tried summoning the events of the night I got stabbed, but pain ripped across the top of my head, adding to the ache between my eyes. I rubbed my temples. That was after my induction, so why couldn’t I remember all of it? Maybe I’d come closer to dying than I’d thought, and it messed up my gray matter.

  Kyle shrugged. “Guy’s a Neanderthal, but if you say he’s got reasons for his issues, that’s enough for me to go easy.” Scanning the room, he said, “So, is the page in here? Do you know what might be on it?”

  “I have no idea, but I need to get out of the Shift to pinpoint it. Can you turn off security in this room? The alarms aren’t tied to the lights, right?”

  The main fluorescents were off, but security lighting lit the room enough for me to move around without crashing into anything. Without them, we’d be mostly blind.