by Rob Thurman
She held her hand up imperiously for such a small thing, a small thing who hadn’t even been made of flesh and blood for a long time. I could see that now. A stray beam of sun had struggled through the bedroom window to find its way to and then through her. She wasn’t transparent. She was luminous and delicate, made of the wings of butterflies.
“Charlie.” She wriggled her fingers impatiently. “Chaaaarlie, I have to go. I’m late. It’s my birthday party. Hurry up.”
Her hand disappeared in a ripple of air and returned holding on to a much larger one. The rest of the body stepped through a larger ripple, and I saw the messy hair and big nose I hadn’t forgotten. They were as homely as ever, and Charlie’s smile was as wide and pleased. “You found me.”
“Everything that’s lost is found sooner or later,” she said solemnly. I saw her hand tighten around his to squeeze reassuringly. “It’s time to go home, Charlie. You’ll love it. It’s everything and everything and everything.”
He nodded. “I can’t wait to see.” He was so close to Hector that their shoulders rested against each other’s, and Charlie bumped his harder, judging by the sudden tilt to Hector’s stance. An older brother’s affection. Pale blue eyes to pale blue eyes, he added warmly, “You did good, little brother.”
“Charlie.” Hector said it with the purest of belief and relief.
“You found the one guy who could help you save me. I owe you big.” Then Charlie turned his gaze to me. “I knew you’d answer my call. Just like you promised at Cane Lake.”
“One helluva long-distance charge,” I managed, my tongue as numb as my face and lips. I wasn’t Hector. I had nothing this trusting or this deserving in me. No faith. This couldn’t be real. As much as I wanted it to be, it was the denial of what I’d believed for almost my entire life. How could I believe it? All of it?
A kiss brushed across my cheek, and I turned with what had to be half-crazed eyes to look into those of my sister, still five years old, still beautiful.
“You won’t forget this, Jackie. You’ll try, because you’re a boy, and boys are stubborn. But I won’t let you. No way you’ll be able to ignore me now.” She smiled again, a little sadder, the kind of sad that broke me with her next words. “It wasn’t your fault you didn’t save me. We all take turns. It wasn’t yours. But it’s my turn to save you now. And I will.”
They were gone, the two of them, as if they hadn’t been there to begin with. Couldn’t have been there, and my thoughts clamped onto that firmly, because that made sense. Impossible shoes, impossible sisters, they don’t happen. Hallucinations from blood loss, that happened. Some damned ether disruption went screwy and messed with your mind, that happened, too. But the long lost? They don’t come back, and they don’t speak to you. They don’t absolve you of things that can’t be absolved.
“You’re already doing it, aren’t you, you stubborn bastard?” No matter what he said, Hector sounded unnerved. Amazed, too, but he’d definitely had his world tilted on its axis. “Going straight into denial of a full-blown miracle.”
“You shot me. That means you don’t get any say into what I do or don’t do. And there are no miracles. It’s not like the Vatican is behind funding your project.” I lifted an arm, swallowed bile that scorched my throat at the pain the movement caused, and demanded, “Help me up. We need to check on Meleah.”
He was already as pale as he could get, but I saw the apprehension etch its way into his face.
“She’s going to be all right.” I thought she was, and right now, that was the best to be hoped for. “She was quicker.” I didn’t want to finish the rest of that sentence, and I didn’t. “I think it looks worse than it is.”
I was on my feet, thanks mainly to Hector hoisting me up with one hand while the other held the shotgun. I hadn’t seen him bend over to pick it back up. I knew I hadn’t, but there it was. I could’ve missed it.
I knew I hadn’t. But I could have. It didn’t have to be Tess who put it in his hand. And why would she? Why would he need it now? He wouldn’t. I held tight to the last thought, because denial needed help now and again. Back where I’d left her, Meleah remained sitting on the floor. She managed a smile at our appearance. “Hector. Jackson.” The cloth around her throat and under her hand was only half scarlet. The bleeding had slowed. I’d been right. She would be all right. Hector, her, me—we were going to walk away from this, unlikely as that would’ve seemed minutes ago.
Which proved once and for all that I was limited to reading objects, places, and people. While bullshit illusions were wide open, the future was closed to me. I’d always been grateful for that.
Until now.
Stepping through the open front doorway, as cheerful and smiling as always in the face of adversity and carefully designed plans gone wrong, Eden glowed with the same inner joy she’d never failed to show. She stopped when she saw the two of us, standing upright.
“This is inconvenient,” she noted, not dressed in nursing scrubs anymore, frowning a little. “All good boys and girls should be dead now. I did expect maybe Thackery would’ve survived, being the obnoxious ass that he is. I was rather looking forward to finishing him off as a loose end.”
Eden. My nurse advocate. On my side against all others who would use me without regard, when really, all along, her own regard had been as predatory as a silent fin slicing through the water. And considerate enough to wear latex gloves always around me, to save me from an unwanted reading. Too bad I hadn’t seen that a reading was more unwanted by her than by me. Eden, who came bearing the gift of an injection of painkiller and sedative in the middle of the night.
“What was in the shot you brought me last night like a good little Florence Nightingale?” I asked, propping myself against the nearest wall, the easier to ride out the waves of pain radiating from the buried shotgun pellets.
She smiled, the dimple flashing beside her mouth like the morning star. “An overdose of Flecainide. A therapeutic dose is just the trick for an arrhythmia. Too much stops the heart altogether. It’s what I gave Dr. Allgood, along with the sedative he normally received in his preexperiment physical. Fifteen minutes later, he’s in the transplanar, and in fifteen more minutes, he’s dead. It’s a good drug for falling through the cracks of a toxicology report.” She flashed the same smile at Hector. “You wondered why you couldn’t find what was wrong with your little toy. That’s because nothing was. Charlie was a dead man before he climbed into it.”
Her gun, the same nine-millimeter Hector carried on base, was trained on him. He was the only one of us armed. And wasn’t that lucky? The shotgun in his hand, the one I hadn’t seen him pick up, the one that if he’d thought about it, he wouldn’t want to pick up again after turning Thackery’s face to hamburger with one barrel and taking me down with the other one.
“But you didn’t want the shot, Jackson, and as you were so certain you were leaving today and no more readings were in the works, I backed down. No one likes a pushy nurse. And I’d had my three other shots at you. It seemed only fair.” In keeping with her bouncy Eden persona, she was wearing whimsical fairy earrings. I didn’t want to die period, but I really didn’t want to die at the hands of someone wearing fairy anything. “It was fine with me if you escaped with your life. I only kill people who are in the way. I get paid for my work. I’m not into extra credit. I don’t even mind all that much about Fujiwara. He was a good partner, but with this job, I have enough to retire, and with his share, I might get two villas instead of one.”
“You killed Charlie.” Hector sorted through it all to home in on what had started it all. The project breakdown, giving Fujiwara enough time to gather all of the data about it. She couldn’t have foreseen what would happen with Charlie, who wasn’t quite as dead as she’d hoped, but what a lucky break for her. Charlie had caused more confusion and crippled the project even further. Until I came along, everything was as sweet as those blackberry pancakes she’d made me. And even then, I hadn’t been a threat to her or Fujiwa
ra, who deserved an Oscar for his acting skills. But Eden was as competent a killer as she was a nurse. No sense in taking chances. It was only after three failed attempts outside the infirmary that she was willing to risk taking a run at me inside it. I imagined that if she’d gone through with it, she’d already be in another country by now with the information Fujiwara had gathered. This plan—my house equipped with the weapons of the past—was nice for cleaning up a few loose ends like Hector and Thackery, who might eventually have figured things out about Fujiwara, but it hadn’t been strictly necessary.
But some killers embraced the better-safe-than-sorry standard.
And so did some scientists.
Hector wasn’t waiting for more talking—if there was going to be more, which I highly doubted. Eden was happily polite in her murdering ways, but she was one for getting things done. The shotgun in Hector’s hand, put there by Tess I now knew, wasn’t pointed at Eden, not specifically. The muzzle was tipping halfway between waist high and the floor as he faced her. It wasn’t a chest shot, but right then, any shot would do, and he took it.
The roar of the gun firing came at the same time as she disappeared, lunging to one side. Standing as she had been in the doorway, that put her outside and out of view, either with shattered legs or unhurt but not nearly as cheerful as before. Hector started for the door, pumping the shotgun as he went. I was right behind him, a little slower, as he’d already used it on me, and the pain of that didn’t fade like a scraped knee. It only grew more white-hot with every passing minute.
That didn’t stop me from grabbing a handful of his shirt and yanking him off his feet as I dove toward the floor. The faint shadow of the gun I’d seen through a window filmed in red dirt turned into an explosion of glass and three bullets that passed over our bodies to embed themselves in the wall. Hector growled and this time was at the door long before me, out into the sun and gone. I did follow, but I couldn’t catch up. Shot once today, shot once the day before with a broken rib to show for it, it took the marathon out of my running. But I kept moving doggedly through the grass growing taller into fields I still recognized from sixteen years ago, following a path I’d once run as the colors of the day all faded to black and white behind the horrible truth I’d known.
It was in that tall grass that I found Hector, down and swearing, with a bullet hole through his upper leg. “Go after her,” he gritted between his teeth. “She missed the femoral artery, but she hit the damn bone. It’s broken. Don’t let her get away, Jackson. Not after all she’s done.” He held the shotgun up to me.
She’d killed Charlie. She’d arranged for Meleah to have her throat sliced, me to relive something no one should relive, and my friend to be shot. No, she wasn’t fucking getting away from any of that.
I started after her, and Hector snapped, “No, you son of a bitch. You take the damn gun. Take it, or she will kill you, do you understand that?”
I shook my head. Everything in my life had changed or was trying to change since Hector had shown up, but this never would. “I don’t need a gun.” And for some reason, I believed it. Hector yelled that I was a “Suicidal bastard!” but I honestly believed it. I didn’t need a gun for Eden. It was crazy, completely insane, I knew that, but it wasn’t suicidal, because I knew. I just knew. Eden would be taken care of, no gun needed.
I was still running, my hand covering the slow bleeding where the Kevlar had failed me, when I saw her far ahead. Her hair was the brilliant shine of chestnut streaked with red and gold under the sun, and she ran like a gazelle. I didn’t say anything, but she must have heard me stumbling through the grass. Her head turned to take me in. I couldn’t see the green of her eyes, she was too far off, but I could see her smile. All triumph. Still running, she brought her gun up and over her shoulder to aim dead on me. I could feel the weight of it as heavily as the sun’s heat that pressed down. Eden’s smile widened.
And then she was gone.
I slowed down to a walk then. I hurt, and with every breath, my broken rib stabbed at the surrounding flesh. There was no hurry, anyway. I knew where Eden was, and she wasn’t going anywhere.
When I finally reached the well, it was quiet. Not a bird flew in the sky. The incessant hum of insects had turned to the quiet of a church. I looked down into the dark water that was a bare glitter and gleam thirty feet below and saw nothing else. No pale smear of a hand raised up. No body floating on the surface. Eden had gone to the depths … of a well that had been plugged with concrete by the county sixteen years ago after a young girl named Tess had drowned there. There was no concrete now and no sign that there had ever been.
Wasn’t that a mystery?
Her nine-millimeter was balanced on the edge of the stone, deadly as a water moccasin. I nudged it with my foot and dumped it into the well. With the distant splash, I murmured, “You forgot something.” Then I walked away and back to Hector. When he asked about Eden, I shrugged and answered.
“She wasn’t much of a swimmer.”
20
A month later, I was doing my version of cooking: microwaving four cheese pizzas, one after the other. While some things changed in life, the combination of me and an oven remained a catastrophe of nuclear proportions. I also had bowls of chips and dip and a case of beer in the refrigerator. Abby had promised to bring cheesecake for dessert. Houdini was intrigued by the smell of so much extra food, but he was suspicious, too. He wanted to believe that it was all for one big Houdini-and-Jackson buffet, but sometimes even dogs know when something seems too good to be true.
I gave him a slice of pizza and pointed toward his couch. “When Hector gets here, he’ll probably try to con you out of a seat whining over his broken leg. Don’t give an inch.”
Chuffing curiously, he trotted over, jumped up, and went to work on his dinner. He’d be surprised when Hector and Meleah, now engaged, showed up along with Abby. Abby he was used to. Add two more people to that, and, well, that was two more people than he’d seen in the house. As I’d thought, things change, and he’d probably adjust faster than I would. But adjust I would. I didn’t have much choice after what I’d seen, although half the days I still spent firmly lodged in denial. Blood loss, hallucinations, a statewide secret project to unplug abandoned and dangerous wells—possibly for population control—who knew? But there were the other days, and those days had changed me.
“I was perfectly fine the way I was, right, Hou?” I said aloud. “What’s not to love about cynical and sarcastic?”
The dog knew his cue when he heard it and gave a strangled rumble of agreement around his mouthful of cheese. That’s when a knock at the door came, and as he had almost two months ago when Hector had shown up on my doorstep, Houdini looked as shocked as if the roof had suddenly fallen in without notice. Once maybe, but twice? Insanity. He’d get used to it, and so would I. Fingers crossed.
I opened the door without bothering to put on my gloves. Hector, Meleah, Abby—they all knew by now why I wasn’t a handshaker. They were careful. I didn’t have to be on guard with them. But it wasn’t Hector, Meleah, or Abby who waited for me.
“Finally,” Glory said impatiently. “I am so sick of this thing, you have no idea. I was almost busted by the cops when I tried to sell it. It’s a complete leech on my social life. It’s nothing but trouble. And now, big brother, it’s your trouble.”
She pushed the blanket-wrapped bundle into my hands so quickly I almost dropped it. As the skin of her hand touched mine, I pulled the warm weight against my chest automatically before I nearly dropped it again.
Since the moment of our childhood separation, Glory had never let me touch her, and she had never touched me. No brother-sister hugs, even when she’d shown up on my doorstep after I’d given up on ever seeing her again. I learned later that she’d checked me out first, to see who I was, if I had enough money to make it worth her while to come calling to take me for everything that wasn’t nailed down. I didn’t know if she believed that I was psychic or was just Glory being Glo
ry and taking no chances when it came to her uniting with a potential pile of money. With each visit, few that they were, she’d been as careful every time.
Now I knew why.
When her hand touched mine, I saw it.
She saw it, too, in my eyes.
“God, yes, it was me. I wouldn’t think you’d need to be psychic to figure that out.” Her smile was the cruel smile of a five-year-old brat not getting her way. “She wouldn’t give me those stupid pink shoes, and I wanted them. They would’ve looked cute on me.” Her red-blond hair was pulled in deceptively cute if Lolita-esque pigtails and she twirled one, as casual as a high school cheerleader. “If she hadn’t been so stubborn. Mine, mine, mine—that’s all she could say.” She gave a shrug delicate and far too pretty to belong to a born monster. “So I took them. Or I tried to. I did get the one, but she fought and screamed, and it just wasn’t fun anymore, having a twin. The well was convenient and into the well she had to go.” Blue eyes identical to her sister’s but as empty as Tess’s had been full of every emotion under the sun. “My biggest regret was that I didn’t get the other shoe before I pushed her in. But there’s always something bright and shiny and new around the corner. You know that, Jackie.”
I’d known Glory, the last of my family, was a sociopath the same as Thackery. I’d known she’d done bad things as a teenager, bad things as an adult, and would keep doing them. Bad to worse. But I hadn’t thought that at the age of five … I’d never thought that a monster was already a monster that young.
“Don’t look all grim and holier than thou.” She snorted. “You killed Boyd for something he didn’t do. Or did you kill him for something he did do? Like stab our bleating sheep of a mother in the throat. She was worthless. I could see how he was tempted. I guess in the end, it’s really no one’s fault. Can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, and can’t get a pair of pink shoes to save a life.”
