Francis got on the radio. Broker took the satellite phone and began dialing. Marco went with him, still holding his nose, his attention thankfully on Moochie instead of Eddie. One-track man. No imagination for multiple acts of revenge.
Rikki focused on Moochie, too. “Thanks.”
But the man spit on his knuckles, rubbing them hard, and said, “Being nice isn’t going to get you free.”
“No,” she replied. “But maybe you won’t want to hurt me.”
“Wanting and doing aren’t the same things, lady.”
“He paying you that much?”
Moochie glanced at Francis, who was eyeing them both. He finished talking into the radio and said, loudly, “ETA, ten minutes.”
Broker glanced at him, covering the mouth of his phone. “The cooler and dry ice?”
“Coming,” Francis said, but that was all. The edge of the jungle exploded.
Fire. Trees cracking. Black smoke billowing.
Everyone flinched, except Broker. In his eyes, an eerie light bloomed. Excitement. Anticipation. His mouth opened, just slightly, as though he wanted to taste the air, and he looked at the men. “Go.”
Marco started running before he hardly had the word out of his mouth. Moochie followed, hugging an assault rifle to his chest. The grass came up to their waists.
Francis was slower. He paused by Broker. “Instructions?”
“Alive.” Broker set down the satellite phone and took out his gun. He shot the device. One bullet, shattering the casing and components. Rikki wanted to kill him.
Francis stared, his expression inscrutable. Turned on his heel, walking fast. As he passed Rikki, he kicked a rock at her. It was flat. And up close, it was not really a rock. Not unless a stone suddenly had the power to transform into a very tiny pocketknife with matte black finish on the handle and blades. She looked at Broker, but he stared at the fire.
Rikki scooted forward, fingers scrabbling in the dirt. Her bindings were made of nylon cord. The knife fit nicely in her hand. It cut very well. She kept her hands behind her, and scooted backward, hard against Eddie. She curled her legs, fingers grabbing the toes of her shoes and pulling. Broker still did not look at her, but she suddenly had the terrible feeling that he knew exactly what she was doing.
And then, behind the man, the tall grass parted. Rikki met a familiar golden gaze: sunlight caught in amber, spinning heat and fire.
Then the world pulled back, and she realized that no, she wasn’t seeing Amiri; she was looking at a cheetah. A big animal—too big, almost the size of a leopard—sleek and lean, muscles rolling with power. An unnatural sight. Cheetahs did not inhabit the jungles of the Zairean Congo.
The animal stared at her. Rikki stared back. Broker said, “Amiri.”
She tore her gaze away to look at the blond man. He was smiling, ever so faintly, still staring at the fire. Rikki looked around for Amiri—terrified, relieved—but then Broker turned, slowly, to face the animal.
“Amiri,” he said again, so softly. “Finally.”
The man is crazy. Rikki began sawing at the bindings on her ankles, no longer caring if he noticed. The cord snapped. She stood, swaying. Broker did not look at her. His entire focus was on the cheetah.
He drew his gun. Fast, his arm a blur—that gun flashed silver. The cheetah lunged, snarling. Their bodies crashed together. The weapon flew out of Broker’s hand. He scrabbled to reach it.
Training took over. Rikki ran, tumbling forward in a tight roll that brought her up low and fast, almost on top of the weapon, perilously close to those flashing teeth and claws. Her fingers closed around cold steel and she did not give herself time to be afraid. She went nose to nose with that raging cheetah and slammed the weapon down, butt first, against the exposed side of Broker’s head.
He was thrashing, and the first blow was glancing. She hit him again, double-handed, like holding a hammer coming down on a cockroach. The cracking sensation traveled up her arm. Broker grunted. Rikki held her breath. Slammed down the gun again—so hard she felt something squish. Broker went still.
Rikki fell back, shuddering. Her lungs could not get enough air. Her hands felt numb but she did not drop the gun. It was pointed in the wrong direction, but her fingers refused to loosen. She wondered if this was how her father felt, all those years ago.
You’re in shock, she thought, again and again, as though it would cure her. She stared at Broker, at the dent in his skull and the blood seeping through his blond hair. He was dead. She could tell just from looking. She had never killed anyone before. She thought she might puke, and that surprised her. After all these years, she assumed she would have been harder, sterner, her heart made of stone. She had practiced enough murder in her mind.
The cheetah stepped lightly off the man. Rikki tore her gaze from Broker’s head and looked into the animal’s eyes. Golden, calm, elusive—and if she could ignore the fur, the face, if she looked only into that hot gaze …
Amiri, she thought.
It was insane; she knew it. But this—what had begun last night in the refugee camp—had crossed the line so far into crazy she did not know how to find her way back.
Same way you did before. The way you always do. Push on.
The cheetah did not move. Rikki stopped being frightened. She stopped caring. Her hands loosened and she placed the gun on the ground. Crawled back to Eddie. The young man was still, barely breathing, so deep in sleep it might have been a coma. His skin felt like fire to touch.
Another kind of warmth pulsed against her back; like sunlight pushing through a cloudy sky. Rikki did not turn. She held still, waiting, and when those strong dark fingers grazed her shoulder she knew who it was without looking. She closed her eyes. Forgot how to breathe and leaned into that touch. She did not understand—not why or how—but it was enough. She could suspend belief. She had done as much for Eddie.
Amiri’s hand never left her shoulder as he moved around her. He was naked, long muscles rolling beneath his rich smooth skin. She was so damn glad to see him, she wanted to cry.
“He’s dying,” she said. Amiri smoothed back the young man’s hair, his fingertips lingering on that pale cheek.
“Rictor,” he murmured. Rikki frowned, wondering, but Amiri’s shoulders stiffened and he stared up at the sky. She followed his gaze and heard, in the distance, an odd rough chopping sound.
“Helicopter,” he said, and in one smooth movement grabbed Eddie’s arms and hauled him over his shoulder. Rikki felt like she was having an out-of-body experience—floating, lost, her vision filled with stars—but she rose with him, grabbed the gun and the knife, and one of the packs.
She looked. Imagined movement on the edge of the jungle around the explosion, but no one shouted at her. No guns thundered.
“Rikki,” Amiri growled. She hesitated, then turned around, frantically searching for the case holding the samples of her blood. She found it and undid the latch, upending them all. She stepped hard on the glass tubes. They shattered beneath her feet. Blood soaked the grass.
She looked up and found Amiri watching her. His gaze was raw, wild. Dangerous. Just like her heart. She saw the cheetah in his eyes.
She ran toward him. The helicopter was loud. Just as they reached the jungle’s edge she glanced over her shoulder and saw the first shining edge of a black rotor. It filled her with fear, loathing; she felt again the crack of Broker’s skull radiating up her arms; and worse, his eyes, his cold voice drilling down to her bones.
Amiri grabbed her hand. Behind them, in the clearing by the river, the helicopter began to land. Amiri shifted Eddie to a higher place on his shoulder. They did not wait to see who jumped out.
They slipped into the twilight shadows, running until all they could hear were the birds and trees, pounding hearts and roaring blood, and Rikki found herself like a ghost, lost between worlds, her only anchor the man in front of her.
A man who was not human.
Chapter Ten
The grenade had been easy
to carry in his mouth. Amiri had gone back, specifically for that. Found one more on the body of the first man he had killed. And then ran. Ran fast.
He was still running. Rikki was behind him now. It was getting dark. No sounds of helicopters, no voices of men. Amiri kept pushing. Taking nothing for granted.
He took them away from the river, deep into areas where the air was full with the rich scents of decay, so closed and hot it was like being inside a giant mouth—a place where the scents of men did not carry—and when he found a small clearing where the trees loomed, ancient and twisting, roots as thick as bodies angling into the earth, he stopped, and set down Eddie, and caught Rikki as she fell on her knees, gasping for breath. There was water in the pack she carried. They drank. They slept. Rikki, curled in his arms. Amiri, cradling her with his body. No words. No questions. Too tired.
Warm and safe. He had found her. He had found Eddie. They were alive. That was all that mattered.
There was a proverb from Cameroon that Amiri had been gifted with in years past, during a long bus ride along Nairobi’s twilight roads, traveling home from a job of manual labor. His first job ever. He was tired and hungry and discouraged, a stranger in a strange land, still coping with the burden of making a life in the human city.
That night, he had found room on a hard seat beside a beautiful woman. A woman with cheekbones the color of polished obsidian; large sleepy eyes, high round breasts and smooth legs; long hair bound in ropey braids that touched his arm and smelled like musky skin and damp sheets.
Amiri remembered being twenty years old. Never having known a woman naked. Suddenly wanting that woman naked more than anything. His body instantly hard, cruelly indifferent to the embarrassment of knowing that everyone could observe his arousal, tall and strutting within his flimsy pants.
Now, years later, he could still see her—that sly smile—as she looked down at his groin and whispered, “Careful. Thought breaks the heart.”
Too much thought. Not enough. Amiri had learned heartbreak well and good from that woman. Angelique Amubodem, an immigrant from Cameroon. Her body—two years after she had taken him into her bed, becoming his part-time lover—had still not, and never would be, found.
Thought breaks the heart. Words that whispered inside his head when he awakened in the night, drinking in the scent of another woman. Rikki.
She was no longer in his arms. She sat beside Eddie. Holding a water bottle to his mouth. Water dribbled past his lips. Something white and damp covered his forehead. A long sock.
Amiri sat up. Rikki smiled briefly, but it was tremulous. She rummaged behind her in the pack and pulled out black underpants, which she tossed to him. Amiri did not want to wear the clothes of the enemy. But he looked into her face and could not protest. He rose, and dressed. Rikki did not say a word.
The night was soft and warm. Quiet as a coo. No breeze. Only movement would cause the air to stir, here. Nothing else. They were safe.
He sat down beside her. Their shoulders rubbed. He expected her to pull away. It was a test—he was testing himself, testing her. He did not know why, but he could not help himself and it terrified him, it terrified—but he did and he waited and she gave him his answer. And it was shocking.
She swayed close. Leaned into him.
Amiri held his breath. He hardly dared move. Her slow heartbeat sounded like music, some drumbeat primeval, searching out his soul. He wanted to press even closer. Mingle songs.
“Eddie,” he said, hoarse. “How?”
“He got sick after you left. Went downhill, fast.”
“I thought we were not contagious.”
“Conjecture,” she said. “But in his case, I blame the canisters. Based on something I heard back there, it sounds as though this disease is contracted through inhalation into the lungs. It’s possible he breathed some of that powder we found. Unless he caught something at the refugee camp. Broker and his men certainly weren’t concerned.”
Amiri felt cold. “What did you say?”
Rikki hesitated. “Broker. The blond man that I … that you fought. That was what he called himself.”
“Impossible,” he murmured, but even as he said that word, he knew in his gut it was true. Broker. No one had ever found the man’s body.
And those photographs he had received in Kinsangani suddenly made more sense.
Rikki turned. “Do you know him?”
Cold name, colder heart. “He is supposed to be dead, killed in Indonesia less than a year ago. He represents an organization with strong ties to organized crime.”
“No surprise,” she muttered. “But he also knew about the both of you. What you are.”
Amiri’s breath caught. Not because of Broker, but for the casual—even concerned—way she said those words. So easy, like it was nothing. He searched her gaze for fear, some cold awful horror, but Rikki looked at him, unblinking, and he saw little in her eyes but exhaustion and that same shadowed uncertainty that was a mirror of his own heart.
“And what do you know?” he asked, aware it was a stupid question, but unable to help himself.
“That you’re both different,” she said, just as carefully.
“Different,” he echoed.
“Different,” she said again, and raised an eyebrow. “Don’t make me spell it out.”
Amiri certainly would not. He tried to speak, caught himself, and cleared his throat. “You truly are not afraid?”
Rikki had to think about it for maybe ten seconds—which felt like ten hours, or ten days, or perhaps even ten lifetimes of trouble. “No, Amiri. I’m not. Unnerved, yes. Dismayed, totally. Ready to run screaming, you bet your ass. But not because of fear.”
“You are handling it well,” he said, feeling like a fool for such inanity. Handling it well. As though men shifted into animals most days of the week. Simple as American pie.
Rikki took a deep breath. “I’m a good actor.”
“No,” he said. “You are strong.”
“Strong,” she whispered. “I’m a scientist. Sensible. Rational. And I could be bullheaded and pretend that what I’ve seen is just … the product of stress. Delusion. Illusion. But I’m not that stupid. I’m not that blind.”
Amiri struggled. “What will you do?”
She looked him in the eye. “What do you want me to do?”
He could not answer her. What he needed to say was too complicated; what he wanted, a matter of life and death. His life, the lives of others. His world, fragile as the truth, as one bad mistake. He had made that mistake. He had paid. He still paid.
Rikki said, “I made a promise to that boy. I promised to keep him safe. Do you think I’m a woman of my word, Amiri?”
He said nothing. She stared, then looked away, exhaling sharply. The hurt in her eyes cut him like a knife.
“Rikki,” he said, but she held up her hand.
“No, I get it. I really do. You don’t know me for shit. You don’t trust me. Eddie said as much.”
Amiri glanced at the boy, wondering just what they had talked about. “How much do you understand?”
“About you and him? Not much. Only that he can start fires with his mind. And that you …” She stopped, frowning. “Just what is it that you do?”
“I change my shape.” His mouth felt numb. His words were hardly coherent. He could not believe he was admitting anything, but she had already seen too much. And he wanted to believe. He wanted to take that leap. Here, trust. Here, a friend.
Rikki stared, swallowing hard. “You … change.”
“I become a cheetah,” he added, trying to help her. Trying to help himself. “Only a cheetah.”
“Why one animal? If you can shift your shape—”
“I do not know,” he interrupted. “There are legends, myths, amongst my kind. That there was once a time when we were not constrained to one form, but free to choose as we wished. But other creatures became jealous, and so confined us, limited us. We became what we are. Shape-shifters, bound.”
“There were many more, long ago. Now … our numbers dwindle.”
Rikki closed her eyes. “And Eddie? Are there more people like him?”
“I have never met anyone like Eddie,” Amiri replied, with a faint smile. “But there are others.”
She leaned forward, out of his arms. Stared at him, then Eddie, whose face was red, his hair slick with sweat. Blood dotted his nostrils. He smelled sick, a bitter ugly scent, salty and filthy, acrid as old ashes. He was sleeping like the dead. A coma.
Amiri preferred to think of it as enchantment, waiting for a miracle. As long as Eddie lived, it was possible. He did not want to think of the alternative. The boy was his responsibility. His charge, to keep safe.
You cannot run faster than a bullet, Amiri heard his father whisper. You cannot run faster than a friend, or a woman of ten thousand suns. Bring any of those into your life, and all you will find is suffering. Death.
His father, the optimist—but speaking truth, after all. There had been bullets and friends, suffering and dying, and as for the woman …
She reached across his lap to touch the young man’s hand. “It should be us.”
“And yet,” he replied, softly. Rikki’s breasts grazed his forearm. Her shoulder rubbed his chest. The urge to touch her was overwhelming, but he held himself back. Placed his hand flat against his thigh. Tried to control the response of his body, the quickening of blood in his loins. Found himself trembling with the effort.
Rikki looked at him. Her face was close, her eyes dark. “You’re shaking.”
“It is nothing,” he said.
“You’re sick,” she whispered.
“No,” he told her, but she twisted, rising up on her knees to press her fingertips against his cheek. Her scent rolled over him, warm as her body, and he could not help himself. He placed his hand over hers; trapping her, as gently as he could. Savoring the contact. Her skin.
Her breath caught. Amiri said nothing. He had no words, not even for himself.
You want her, taunted his father. You want to take her. You want to mark her, make her yours. Your woman.
The Last Twilight Page 15
