Flames of Hope

by Cassandra L Shaw

  “What sort of wildlife you hoping to spot out this way?”

  “Heard there were elk around, and two weeks ago I spied a grizzly. Always keen on birdlife.”

  “Grizzly, eh? My wife’s into recording the wildlife, and grizzles are hard to come by in this area these days.”

  “That’s why I was so excited and wanted to return.”

  The other officer scanned over the Drainer’s car with a blaster residue wand. He stepped away, ran the data and held up a small tag of paper. “Clear.”

  “Take care out there, Sir. Grizzlies are cantankerous.”

  “Plan to, officer.” He said goodbye, got back into the car, drove off, and wondered why the police stood there watching him leave before getting into their car. Just in case, he took a left-hand turn farther up. He’d go for a walk with his halo imager, hopefully find a squirrel to take an image of, before he headed for the cave and bunker.

  The police officer took a halo image of the vehicle. “Same vehicle was recorded leaving that abandoned settlement up north. And he’s been out this way every few days in the past two months. Wildlife spotting, my ass.”

  “Yeah, but what’s he up to?”

  “I don’t know. But something tells me it’s not good.”

  “You hear the FBPI are in the area hunting for Crea and Eli kidnappers on the QT? If we can help, we might get into the agency. Nearly three times our pay.”

  “Be nice to afford a bigger home.”

  “Yeah. Let’s keep this to ourselves. Get more facts.”

  14

  Chapter Fourteen

  Jasmine wandered out of the bathroom, a towel in her hand. Damp and flushed from her hot shower, ringlets dripping, her fine skin clean of enhancers and lip stain, she looked innocent and a touch naive.

  A lie people would believe if they didn’t see the scars in her eyes, or watch her mad skills with her knives. She looked like the Jaz Xylvar carried in his heart throughout the years of his self-imposed army exile.

  A droplet formed at the end of ringlet, a crystal tear, clinging by neither luck nor design.

  Gravity did its job and the droplet fell, hitting her bare shoulder, trickling at first fast, then slowly, down and over the swell of her breast. The towel darkened as it grabbed and absorbed the moisture.

  She looked over and then away. It reminded him of the guilty, hungry looks they’d shared in another time and place. Xylvar could almost feel a slip in time. Sliding him back to a past when he loved a friend like a brother, and fell in love with a girl who was in every way forbidden.

  The girl of his dreams, literally. Day and night, until a bomb turned dreams into nightmares.

  He kept his face as impassively cold as possible. “I’ve contacted Dan in Katoom. They’ll check into that warehouse. We can do some more dirt-digging on the leaders.”

  She pulled on an oversized T-shirt that covered her towel to her thighs. With an tug, she pulled her towel from underneath and tossed it back toward the bathroom, where it hit the towel rack and slid to the floor. “Shit.” She stormed over and put it right. Grabbed some underpants from a drawer and shimmied them on.

  At the door she paused, silhouetted against the soft glow of the bedside lamps. Xylvar closed his eyes for a brief moment, and cleared his suddenly dry throat. Did she have even the smallest inkling of the picture she made, understand how she stroked, strummed, tortured his soul?

  If so, time had turned her into a sadist.

  “I’m not feeling it. Everyone at the church today seemed friendly enough, but not overly so, which is creepy in its own way.”

  “They were all damn good at skittering their eyes away from me. Hard enough through these contacts to get a read on the bastards, but not one of them would look me in the eye.”

  “Shocking. You? Making people nervous? Unheard of.” She gave him a cheeky smirk.

  “I’m much more likeable as Todd.”

  “Sure.”

  He slapped his right hand on his chair’s arm. “Fucking knew I couldn’t pull off a Todd.”

  “Even mellow you’re intense.”

  He sneered. “Scary, you mean.”

  She shrugged and ran her fingers through her hair, the ringlets springing back to surround her delicate features. Couldn’t she have grown ugly over the years?

  “Well, you do carry your self-loathing on one shoulder, while ruthless anger clings tenaciously on the other. You think you’re surveying the crowd, but it looks like you’re scouting prey. Todd’s certainly less scary than Xylvar, but acting can only mask so much.”

  “Knew this wouldn’t work. They saw us and knew such a couple couldn’t exist. Kaid must have been on Mule to think we’d look the part.”

  “I doubt they thought we didn’t belong together. I’ve seen some surprising partnerships.” She turned and headed back into the bathroom.

  “Because I’m scarred, or because I’m a cripple?”

  “Get off the pity horse. The animal’s got saddle sores.” She walked toward the kitchen, her T-shirt hitching to just below butt height with each step.

  “I bet your ass looks hot in those lacy pants. Do my heart good if you bend over.”

  She turned and gave him a slit-eyed glare that would burn any other man to a crisp. “Tell me, did you become a total ass before your accident, or does the wheelchair osmotically impregnate asshole into your cells? You need to treat me as a friend.”

  He sat back in his chair and gave her toothy smile. “Just stating what I see. Besides, our job does not require us to be friends.”

  “Oh, I don’t think us being friends is going to be an issue. But if you want to work with me, eliminate the sexual innuendos. If you touch my ass once, even by accident, I will punch you in the throat.”

  “You’d attack a man in a wheelchair?”

  “In a heartbeat. Now back off and let’s just do our job.” She threw open the cooler. “Want a drink?”

  God damn, she was hot. He put his hand to his throat. Yeah, she’d do it, too.

  What a woman.

  #

  With its dusting of trillions of stars, the night sky gave Xylvar little hint of the time, but he knew it was just past midnight, and his target would glide over this point on his silent air-scooter in twelve to fifteen minutes. Time enough to rewire the inactive device and make it active.

  A scorpion, as poisonous as it was ugly, scrambled over Xylvar’s softgel, low-sand-impact combat boot. Using his smallest trowel he scraped the dusty sand aside, then slid the device he’d designed and made with care that very day into the impression and unscrewed the top flap. A dull green light blinked, telling him it slept. With skill and hands steady as a neurosurgeon’s, he rerouted four wires. He could have set it up as a remote detonation, but that left traceable signals. And electronic signals always contained an address, and often a signature.

  Special Ops heads frowned on assassins leaving calling cards.

  A dull orange light flashed. Cover screwed back on, he sprinkled sand over the dun-colored shell. When the sand leveled, he walked a pace way and pulled out a small hand fan, blowing the sand until it shifted and settled into more natural patterns.

  The scorpion, attracted by the movement, turned and started to scramble back toward Xylvar. The barely discernable humming-hiss of an air scooter made Xylvar smile. He barely saw the snake lurch out of the tussock but dived forward to knock the snake away before it hit the device. Devlin couldn’t be forewarned he was a target, his assassination sanctioned by Special Operations.

  Xylvar’s gel boot spread, the tip nicking the device’s edge. A dry electronic poof shock-waved the air.

  The football-sized device shattered into a thousand pieces.

  Xylvar flew, arched toward the star-studded sky, while the snake’s head flew past his. The last thing he remembered was iced agony in his back, and feeling bad for killing the snake.

  “Xylvar. Wake up.” Someone kept shaking him. But he was dead. No, he wanted to be dead, beheaded like t
he snake.

  Instead he lay in a car-sized cavity in the desert sands, where everything hurt, and not enough hurt. The star-studded sky mocked him with its beauty. The savage cold the night’s yin to daytime’s oppressive heat yang. At least either the heat or the cold would kill him.

  “Xylvar. Jesus, will you wake up?” Something shook him again, then patted his face. “Xylvar.” The voice was strident, and full of command. He hated following orders.

  “Fuck off.” He slapped at his dream.

  “Wake up. Christ, you’re even an asshole in your sleep.”

  He opened his eyes, and it was like the desert sun blazing down into his eyes again, trying to burn, blind, roast him to death, the death that never did come. He threw his arm over his eyes. “Jesus.”

  Damn, he was covered with sweat. If he’d been able, he’d roll out of bed and storm into the bathroom, but instead he lay still and breathed through the horror of his leftover dream, and the bigger horror of Jasmine witnessing his memories.

  “Do you want a hand to sit up?”

  “Fuck off.”

  She sighed. “Great vocab.” She slipped out of bed and stomped out into the kitchen. A minute later she returned, and tapped him on the arm still covering his eyes.

  “Here.” Her voice was gruff, annoyed, but with a note behind it he didn’t want to hear or acknowledge. He did not need someone giving any amount of shit for him.

  “Oh, for mercy’s sake, I want to go back to sleep. Here.”

  He moved his hand and saw a glass of water in one hand and then she opened her palm. “I don’t need a painkiller.”

  “It’s a soother. Natural. Might help you sleep better.”

  He looked into her incredible eyes and pulled himself to a sitting position before accepting the glass and tablet. “Thank you.”

  As soon as she turned, he put the tablet under his pillow. But sipped the glass of water gratefully. Jasmine pulled open his cupboard and stared at the small pile of clothes he owned, grabbed a black T-shirt, and came back to the bed. “Take off your wet shirt and put this on.”

  He scowled, but, feeling like a kid being glared at by his mother, took off the wet shirt.

  “Holy-mother-of-all-hell, Xylvar.” Arms stretched out, the T-shirt dangling from her fingers, her eyes were locked on the scars that crisscrossed his flesh in thick, silvery, puckered lines. He tried not to flinch from the horror on her face, but couldn’t manage it while still so raw from his nightmare.

  In an era where scarring was unusual and minimal, due to spray-on skin grown from a person’s own cells, and laser repair of wounds, his scars, wounds left open and raw and infected for days, had been hard to repair. Miracles, his surgeons dryly stated, rarely happened. Only a plastic surgeon flown from New York, who donated his skills, stopped Xylvar’s face from being a jigsaw puzzle of flesh. Only the major laceration, the one almost halving his face, had left a lasting scar.

  He snatched the shirt out of her hand and slipped it on, pulling it down, running his hand over the fabric.

  “I didn’t know. You must have been nearly cut in half to have such scars. You poor man.”

  Pity seared him, branding him deeper than any bomb could manage. “Fuck you.” He reached out, grabbed his chair, dragged it to the bed edge, ignored the hoist, and levered himself into the chair. Without a backward glance, he rolled out of the room. After his dream, it wasn’t likely he’d sleep anyway. Might as well watch some crap halo repeats.

  He hit the remote, and the skyline of a medieval English castle appeared, with men in costume firing fake arrows at each other.

  “What? I can’t make an observation? Feel for a fellow human, for a man I once knew as a friend, ache for the pain he must have suffered?”

  “It’s over. I lived. I have scars to show for it. Soon I will walk again.” He ran his finger over the scar of his face. “I’ll just always have proof of my injuries.”

  “Do you need proof?”

  His link started the metallic chiming he’d set for a coded, self-erasing message. He snatched the link out of his chair pocket and hit the open button.

  Meet at Blue’s ten, second booth from back. Bring credit for 2 gold mines. The recipient nicely called himself Blood Drainer. The message started to delete, which didn’t matter. Xylvar would remember it, word-perfect.

  “What was that?”

  Xylvar pocketed the link. “Nothing.” Blue’s was The Blue Bar, he guessed, since two other messages which had first led him there used the term Blue’s. The bar, on the seedy side of dingy, wasn’t a place he’d be taking Jasmine. Nor would he be taking the vehicle Todd drove. Somehow, he needed to ditch Jasmine tomorrow, hit his own crap flat, and take his van for a spin.

  “Go back to bed.”

  “You’re not?”

  He turned. “Not tonight.”

  “Did you take the soothing tablet?”

  “Sure.” He did. And put it under his pillow.

  “Well, when it hits, come back.”

  “’Night.”

  #

  With dawn no more than a pale smudge on the eastern horizon, Xylvar wheeled outside, hit the recycled cemenplas sidewalk, and connected the electro-controls of his chair. At a steady and illegal-on-sidewalks fifteen miles an hour, Xylvar left the middle-class suburbia Katoom clan provided as a temporary home for Todd and Storm and headed for one of the poorest areas sitting snugly next to the heart of the city, and, perversely, also next to one of its most elite suburbs. All new builds in the past twenty years since a fire wiped out that part of the city, so now the rich kicked back alongside poverty.

  Half an hour later he slowed and entered his street. The potholes still looked the same, the dead grass in his front yard was still just as crisp and sparse, and most of the paint on his door was still cracked or flaked.

  Home, dump, home. He coasted to his door, keyed in the code, and pushed it open. Stale air welcomed him, but he didn’t enter. No sounds came from inside, and the six laser beams of his cheap security shifted randomly around his room. All appeared to be as he left it. He’d spend his day here, researching on his link, and marking time till tonight.

  Jasmine would be pissed, but The Blue Bar wasn’t the sort of place Todd and Storm would go. At The Blue Bar, he needed Xylvar—every cold, calculating, cruel ounce of him.

  15

  Chapter Fifteen

  Jasmine woke and stretched. The bed beside her was cool and vacant. Nothing unusual, since Xylvar tended to rise earlier than she did most days. She stumbled to the bathroom, then got out some daytime clothes and changed. This whole wearing clothes to bed thing was getting old.

  But it was the slow going of the investigation really eating at her. Every day put her colleagues and friends in more and more danger. If they were even still alive. And more Eli and Crea kept disappearing. And probably in far higher numbers than anyone knew. If blood was being drained to harvest precious metals, how long before all Eli and Crea were subjected to such atrocities?

  Until once more they were herded like cattle, as they had been hundreds of years ago.

  And then there’d been the ninety-one-year worldwide war that at last brought a stop to such acts. At the end, a world-wide foundation of laws and treaties were developed. But, no matter the laws, Jasmine knew that every so often evil crawled to the surface and scratched around until it found others equally malevolent, allowing history to repeat itself, over and over.

  And history proved the human capacity for cruelty and greed truly knew no bounds.

  Jasmine walked into the open plan living/dining/kitchen area, dressed and ready to go for a good, hard run and stopped. “Xylvar?” At the front window, she flicked the switch on the blinds to view out, but Xylvar wasn’t outside, not even behind the vehicle. At the back of the unit, she checked the yard. Bugger must have gone for another one of his morning excursions to the gym. Why he couldn’t use his own equipment instead, she didn’t know.

  In the kitchen, she went to grab a water
for her run, then saw her link flashing.

  Have stuff to do, be back tomorrow.

  “Bastard.” Sure as she loved coffee, he was out doing something dumb. Jasmine tapped the link against her chin. What stuff would Xylvar be doing, and where would he go to do it?

  Could this be his reaction to her shock at his scars? She’d never seen scars like his before, and hadn’t meant to stare. Huh, stare. Yeah, her eyes had nearly popped out of her head.

  At first when she turned, she locked onto his naked chest, the dark nipples, one with a silvered scar slicing through it, the other pieced with a silver dumbbell. She’d noticed but dismissed the over-shiny skin on his left shoulder, where it looked like spray-on skin newly laid over muscle and bone.

  Fine black hairs dusted the top of his chest, highlighting his bulging pecs, and then ran down toward this stomach…and then she’d seen the rest. Puckered and thick, raised ropes of red and silver scars crisscrossed in a map of horror over the bottom left of his body, wrapping around to god knows what on his back.

  What in the hell happened to him? And why hadn’t his body been repaired correctly? Was this why he lost the use of his legs? Did someone fail in their job of mending his broken body?

  She kicked the wall, marched outside to the pavement, and started to stretch and warm up. “I shouldn’t have stared.”

  An hour later she jogged in a slow cooldown back into the house, covered with sweat, and still wondering if she should call Bliss or Kaid and report Xylvar AWOL, or just let him have the time he wanted. Inside she headed for the shower just as someone knocked on the door.

  She pulled open the door. “Oh, hi.” Great, the last person she wanted to see. Jasmine glanced past Vanessa’s shoulder, but couldn’t see James.

  Vanessa gave her a Hollywood-worthy saccharine smile. “Saw Todd leave earlier, knew you’d just finished your run, thought you might appreciate some girl company.”

  “Oh.” She needed a shower and a gallon of coffee, not chitchat.