Epitaphs (Echoes Book 2)

by Knite, Therin

  “Ms. Herrera,” I say, ignoring her lusty gaze, “do you happen to know which way Delacourt might go to make a futile escape attempt?”

  She takes a long drag off the cigarette and puffs it out through grinning lips. “I imagine he’d take the raid contingency route, as it leads to a nice, often-deserted alleyway over on Queen’s Street.”

  “What’s the raid contingency route?”

  “Privileged information.” Her fangs poke out, and as she smiles wider and wider, one of them pierces the cigarette butt clean through. “I’ll trade you for it though. I do love a good bargain.”

  I straighten my back until it cracks. “Are you telling me you care so little about punishing Delacourt for his misdeeds that you’d risk him escaping just to play a meaningless game with me?”

  “Oh, boy. Don’t feign naïveté. You know damn well I’ll skin Delacourt like a mangy cat, sooner or later. What’s an extra day to me? Two? Or three? Or four? As long as I extract my due and it’s on the books by the end of the month, the exact timing of my knife sliding through his throat means nothing.”

  She plucks the cigarette from her mouth and taps the ash onto the tile floor. “But for you, it means everything, am I right? You have a murderer to catch, a case to solve, a justice hammer to bring down on some fool’s head. And the longer it takes you to find that head, the less likely it becomes that you will at all. So, you see, Delacourt can escape my tunnels now, and perhaps I will find him in Richmond tomorrow, or Charleston the next day, or Miami the day after that. But if Delacourt evades EDPA, you lose a vital source of information.”

  Raw irritation rubs at my brain. “What makes you think I didn’t already get all the information I needed from him?”

  “Because if you had, you wouldn’t have bothered to ask me where he went in the first place. You’d have let Chamberlain run him down herself. That’s what she’s good at, after all. The dirty work. The bloody work. The work that requires hour-long showers to wash away the stains on skin, the grime stuck underneath fingernails. That’s Chamberlain in a nutshell.”

  “That’s also you,” I reply. And then realize that saying such a thing to a mob boss is the perfect way to paint a bull’s eye on my ass.

  But Herrera only smiles wider, no, longer, lips curled thin like a slithering snake. “Touché.” She sticks the cigarette back into her mouth and inhales cranberry-flavored smoke, eyes on the ceiling, thoughtful, for a second. Then she snaps her fingers, the sign of an impending command, and says, “Lunch.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “That’s my fee for your vital information. Lunch. With me.”

  “You…you want to go on a date with me?”

  She cackles. Literally. Like a villain from an old war spy flick. “Boy, I want to fuck you senseless. But I’m being realistic: you’ll never go for that. Too guarded. Too smart. Too emotionally broken to dare trust another with any measure of power to hold you. All you see when you look at me is a snake ready to strangle you. Same with Chamberlain. Same with most of the figures in your life, I’d wager, all authority figures in high places.

  “So, no, I won’t push you too far. You wouldn’t go that far, not even to catch Delacourt. But I will get to play with you, one way or another. So, lunch? We can schedule up to three weeks in advance.”

  My boiling pride bubbles up my throat, but I swallow it down before it makes me do something that ends with my body in a ditch somewhere. Instead, I wrench my own lips into a mockery of Herrera’s smile and nod. “Lunch. At your earliest convenience, please.”

  Because as much as I hate to admit it, she’s right. I don’t have all of Delacourt’s vital information; as a mob broker, he’s clever enough to hold back as much as he thinks he can use at a later time to weasel his way out of other tight places. There’s more he hasn’t told me, and though the puzzle pieces are quickly slotting into their mental places, I’m still missing key connections between DuPont’s death and Stiegel’s death, the heist and the sandstorm dream.

  “Wonderful. I’ll call you.” Herrera’s tongue pokes at the cigarette. “Take the tunnel on the right a quarter of a mile, turn left, and merge right again at the fork. It’s a shortcut. You should be able to round off Delacourt as he’s climbing the stairs toward the street-level exit. Given how fast Chamberlain can run, I imagine she’ll be right on his tail. With you in front and her in back, the fool will have nowhere to hide.”

  I peel the false smile from my face and bite the inside of my cheek. “Thank you, Ms. Herrera.”

  A haze of red smoke obscures her face. “You’re quite welcome, Agent Adamend.”

  * * *

  Five minutes later, my feet are dashing up a steep incline toward a set of rusty stairs with poor illumination. My hand is clutching my gun, safety off. And my brain is calculating the probability of Delacourt shooting me in the family jewels a second time and adding another week’s worth of limping to my current surplus. The lights on the walls are too dim and too orange-washed to define more than the outline of the stairwell, but now that I’m closing in on Delacourt’s escape hatch, my ears pick up the sounds of a rapid pursuit in an adjoining tunnel. The swift, soft steps of Delacourt’s expensive dress shoes. The hard, pounding beats of Dynara’s army-grade field boots. A gasp of fear and panic and exhaustion. A growl of growing annoyance.

  Dynara could shoot Delacourt with a VERA bullet and end the chase right now, but if she does, the broker will be unconscious for at least an hour, and every minute we wait to extract the information we need to solve this case, the more time the competition kids have to flee the city, the more time DuPont’s killer has to vanish into the night. And that’s barring a repeat performance. We can’t operate on the assumption that DuPont was the only target, not now, not when I know his death was a revenge murder.

  Because who’s to say that the killer won’t go for broke and kill the entire GM Poly team?

  Who’s to say DuPont was the only one blamed for Stiegel’s death?

  My feet hit the first step of the rickety structure, and the entire spiral well, which ascends to a thin metal platform that leads to a thick metal door, all rusted over, creaks and groans like I weigh three hundred pounds. I dead stop. One hand on the railing. Worried that Delacourt may have heard me approaching his position from the opposite side of the wall that separates us.

  But his quick flight continues at the same pace. So the moment I hear his own shoes reach the twin set of stairs behind the dilapidated, inch-thick barrier between us, I restart my climb to the top.

  If Delacourt notices his noisy effect on the stairs seems to double for no reason, he doesn’t let that stop him. We reach the platform at the same time, and I bring up my gun, aim at his chest as I shift direction to block his access to the door. At first, he’s peering over his shoulder to keep track of Dynara, but when I break our matching movements, he realizes he’s not alone at the top of the most unsafe staircase in the entire District of Columbia. He brings up his own gun, trained on my head, and then blinks, confused, when he recognizes my face.

  “You. How did you…?” His finger tightens on the trigger, and he glances back at the staircase again, at Dynara’s small form ascending through the shadows. He has twenty seconds, maybe less, to make a break for it or surrender.

  “Your boss can play not-entirely-evil on occasion.”

  He sneers. “No, she can't.”

  “Close enough for me.” I shrug and motion to his gun. “Drop your weapon and give up, Delacourt. You come with me to EDPA HQ, and we’ll make sure you stay alive long enough for a hearing, at least.”

  “Tough chance of that, kid. Last guy who tested the Snake got snatched right out of lockup. They found him in a dumpster in fifteen pieces the following week.” Delacourt shuffles to his left, mimicking my own movements toward the escape door.

  “You think Dynara can’t prevent that?”

  “I think Chamberlain doesn’t care enough to prevent that. I’m no better than a gum wrapper to her: she’ll
take the yummy, chewy meat out of my middle and toss my papery ass into the gutter without a second thought.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Delacourt”—I brace my feet against the metal panel flooring and prepare to leap for the door to block his exit—“you made your bed, so lie in it. It’s as simple as the flip of a coin: either you come with us and extend your life by, yes, perhaps a marginal amount of time, or you die here, now, by my gun or Dynara’s…or by the less timely and efficient tools your boss probably favors. Those are the only options you have left, man, after crossing the great and powerful beasts you knew better than to stir.”

  “Those are my only options, eh, Adem?” He wipes more sweat off his face with an already dark-drenched sleeve and glances to his right. “I think you may be missing one.”

  “What—?”

  Dynara barrels up the last step, gun at the ready, but the lack of light at the top of the stairs costs her a second too much. By the time she differentiates Delacourt from me, the broker’s whipped his gun around and aimed at her clearly visible face, which almost glows in the dark beneath her stark white hair. My fingers are paralyzed for two-tenths of a second, at Delacourt’s boldness, at the sheer stupidity of the decision he’s about to make, and so when they start moving, start pulling the trigger to drive a bullet into his chest, he’s already pulled his own…and shot true.

  The bullet eats into Dynara’s face, right underneath her eye, and her body staggers backward into the rusty railing. Then my round pierces Delacourt’s chest, tears through his lung, and bursts out his back, settling inside the wall behind him. He collapses. His gun slips from his fingers, over the edge of the metal flooring and down the staircase, clattering all the way. Wheezing rattles up his throat and out of his mouth, wet and wretched. One hand clutches at the blood gushing from his wound.

  I lower my gun and track my gaze toward Dynara, who’s slumped, half standing, against the railing. A trickle of blood runs down her right cheek, over her chin, and onto the front of her field uniform, soaking into the black fabric. For five, ten, fifteens seconds, she doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe, and the truth of the situation drops onto my back like a ten-ton block of concrete. I sink to my knees, gun lax in my hand, breath stuck in my throat, thick as tar.

  Dynara Chamberlain is dead. Dead. One of the most powerful people in the world is dead…because I fucked up and let a petty broker get a lucky shot in.

  Oh, Gods.

  Oh, dear Gods Almighty.

  Six weeks at EDPA. That’s all it took for me to screw up badly enough to kill my boss.

  Murrough is going to crush me.

  Chai is going to strangle me.

  Lance is going to…do something.

  And the Chamberlain Corp. Board is going to flay me alive.

  I’ll be lucky if there are ashes left of me by the end of it all.

  My hands rise of their own accord and press hard against either side of my face, squeezing my skull already sore from an impending migraine. My gun rests against my thigh, cooling from the shot that downed the broker now drowning in his own blood on the other side of the floor. My breath comes in short spurts, a budding panic attack. Like the ones I had for six months (or was it twelve?) after I walked into my living room on Christmas morning to find my mother ripped to bloody pieces on the floor. My thoughts go on the fritz, frenzied, disorganized, static in a hundred shades of gray, buzzing like flies. My tongue tastes copper in the air, thick and tangy, and I’m on the verge of vomiting up Jin’s dinner leftovers…

  …when Dynara’s corpse moves.

  It’s a twitch at first, a spasm in her left hand, fingers curling inward, and I’m sure it’s some residual motion from an errant current in her spine. But then her other hand repeats the motion, and her fingers form a tight grip around the middle rung of the railing. Her head, hung low, begins to fidget, and when I tilt my face slowly downward, I realize her mouth and tongue are working, teeth grinding, toward some end.

  At this point, Delacourt notices her zombie resurrection, too. He cries out through the blood clogging up his throat, rolls over and tries to drag himself toward the door. I let him go. He won’t make it far in his condition, and I suspect that Murrough will be waiting near enough to the escape door to catch him in time, even if he has a getaway vehicle in the vicinity.

  Instead, I focus on Dynara’s clearly animated body. As her head rises, eyelids flicker open, revealing those manic wintergreen irises, pupils wide and dark inside. As her back straightens, knees unbend, arms hoist her up into that all-arrogant posture of feigned apathy she favors. As her tongue moves something up to her teeth, and her teeth grip that object, and her lips curl back to reveal it: the bullet.

  She spits it out. It clinks across the metal floor and comes to rest next to Delacourt’s crawling, moaning, wormlike form on the ground. His eyes snap toward it, the bloody round bent and warped from the impact against the bones in Dynara’s face. Then his gaze tracks back toward the woman who should be dead, who I was sure, one hundred percent, had succumbed from a bullet to the brain. A cry of utter terror dies on Delacourt’s lips, and one of his hands grasps blindly for the handle to a door he cannot quite reach.

  Dynara pushes herself off the railing and strides forward. She raises one gloved hand and wipes the blood off her face. And in doing so reveals the truth beneath: the bullet hole is gone. Healed. Completely. All that’s left is a round red mark of irritation on her cheek.

  She spits, once more, on the floor, a glob of red speckled with white bone shards. Then she says, “The hell are you two staring at?”

  Lance once said that Dynara Chamberlain has not aged in thirty-seven years. Due to a mishap in the early days of echoes, an event inside a dream that froze her physical appearance. But as I come to understand on that metal, rusty floor, in the tunnels of the den of the Crimson Snake, Dynara Chamberlain does not change at all. Not in appearance. Not in true age. And not in bodily function.

  Dynara Chamberlain is immortal…

  …and nobody fucking told me.

  Chapter Eleven

  Oscar Delacourt makes one more break for freedom. It ends with a door to his face.

  To be precise, it ends with Rupert Murrough ripping the eighty pound escape door off its hinges after Delacourt opens it to flee, swinging it back like a baseball bat, and slamming it into the broker’s prone body with a resounding crunch that resembles a fly swatter crushing a hard-shelled bug. Delacourt crumples, blood spurting from the hole in his chest, his now busted nose, and two torn lips. He doesn’t get up again.

  Murrough tosses the door aside like it’s a paperweight. Next, he radios the operation techs to call for an air evac copter to spirit away the fallen mob man. Finally, he peers through the doorway into the dimness of the rusty stairwell and seeks out Dynara, who sends him a nod to signal the situation has been fully handled.

  Dynara, without a word to me about her apparent immortality, grabs a fistful of my field uniform and hauls me up to my wobbly legs, pushing me toward the exit. As I shuffle forward, she bends down behind me, retrieves my forgotten gun, and tucks it back into my holster before her hand shifts to my ass to prod me on.

  That I am not to say a single word about her condition is implied with her silence. And the past silence of my other teammates. Who, I now realize, said nothing to me about this because this is the unspoken, the taboo, the pretend-it-is-not-real-and-does-not-happen topic I incorrectly assumed EDPA did not have.

  A dumb mistake, on my part. There is always a secret you do not speak of because its existence could change the world, even if the world in question is only yours. But in Dynara’s case, that world is the entire planet Earth, equator to poles and every soul in between.

  Immortality. The unachievable achieved by accident. A cosmic joke.

  I zip my lips and let her lead me from the Snake’s den.

  The next two hours pass in a blur. Of wintery city streets viewed through tinted windows. Of uncomfortable plastic chairs with sunken cushions
in hospital waiting areas. Of the swish of white coats, the shuffle of pastel scrubs, as my whole team, now convened, is led to Delacourt’s post-op room by an ill-toned doctor angry that the government is disturbing her patient’s “well-earned rest.”

  Our homicide case claims don’t get a rise from her sympathy gauge, and she agrees to give us only twenty minutes with the beat-up broker unless we produce a court order from a city judge. The second after she snarls that warning, Dynara, still blood-stained, is already typing a message into her Ocom that begins, Dear Honorable Judge Jones, which is followed by what I can only assume is a threat of absolute destruction veiled as a polite request.

  Adrenaline now cold and slow as creeping frost, I can finally think straight again for the first time since Delacourt shot me in the dick. (Gods, I hope Herrera didn’t catch that on a security cam.) I review the most harrowing half an hour of my life since Brennian kidnapped me six weeks ago:

  1) Failing to frisk Delacourt for weapons the mooks missed—pure idiocy. I know better than to trust others’ abilities in strenuous situations. People falter under pressure, myself included, so it never hurts to triple check. Especially when the cost of a misstep could be my life.

  2) Letting Herrera trap me in an agreement for further contact—foolish and weak willed. I let my pain and panic cloud my rationality at a crucial moment, and in the future, I’m going to pay for it. (And Dynara sure as hell isn’t going to bail me out.) If I’d forced myself to calm down and think before I opened my fat mouth, I could have outmaneuvered the Snake, escaped without a black mark on my soul.