The Last Twilight

by Marjorie M. Liu

  Rikki had no time react. Amiri grabbed her around the waist, slinging her into his arms. Guns thundered. From the corner of her eye, she saw the mercenaries fling themselves to the ground, rolling, firing back on the rebels. Both sides caught bullets, blood spraying.

  And there was Broker, his body jerking as Jaaved pumped him full of lead, making his choice.

  Amiri ran, carrying her, but only as far as the fountain. Too many bullets were flying. He threw them both into the water, dragging her up hard against the stone. Shielding her body, pressing against her so tight she could hardly breathe. The firefight seemed to intensify. Rikki heard more shouting.

  Amiri grunted. It was a terrible sound, terrifying. A scream built in her throat. Rikki wished she could see. He made another low groan, and then, quite suddenly, was pulled from her.

  Jaaved was above her. His eyes were wild and he was covered in blood. He held a gun in his hand … but when he pulled the trigger, it made a clicking sound.

  Amiri snarled, swaying. He bled freely from a hole in his back, and blood flecked his mouth. He lunged at the man and they both went down in the water so hard that a koi was knocked free of the pool. It flopped wildly on the floor, suffocating. Rikki knew exactly how it felt.

  Jaaved pulled a hidden knife from the small of his back and slashed at Amiri … who moved too slowly. The blade cut deep. Amiri staggered, and golden light rose from his skin. Shining like the sun. Jaaved blinked, taking a step back. Raising a hand to his eyes.

  Amiri lost his human body. He melted, he transformed, he flowed like liquid gold into a skin that was spotted and lean and hungry. Cheetah. Eyes blazing, body bleeding. He lunged. Jaaved stumbled, horror in his eyes—too shocked to defend himself. Amiri snapped his jaws around the man’s throat and ripped it out.

  Rikki stared, breathless. All around them the gunfight was dying down, and then it stopped completely. She hardly noticed. All she could see was Amiri. She rose to go to him. Amiri turned to meet her gaze. Blood covered his mouth.

  One more gunshot split the air. Amiri jerked, blood spraying from his shoulder. Rikki gasped, lunging toward him, and saw Broker, resurrected, gun in hand. Finally going for the kill.

  Rikki no longer had her gun. She did not think, she did not look. She ran, throwing herself directly in front of the danger, shielding Amiri’s body. Broker had already begun to pull the trigger again; she saw it on his face as time slowed down.

  The gun went off. It nicked Rikki in the side and pain crushed through her. She kept running, though. She could not stop, and Broker let her come—he did not want to kill her. That was his mistake. She threw herself at him in a long sweet dive, and slammed him so hard into the floor she heard his skull crack. She wrestled for his gun, nearly passing out from the pain, but she remembered knives and laughter and Amiri, and pried the weapon from his fingers, jamming it under his chin.

  She hesitated. Broker looked her in the eyes and very gravely said, “Until we meet again, Doctor Kinn.”

  Rikki pulled the trigger. His brains splattered. She kept pulling the trigger until the clip was empty. Numb, horrified, unable to stop. His head was pulp, almost gone. Murderer. She was a murderer, for a second time. Cold-blooded.

  Then, suddenly, she was not alone. A man fell beside her. A man with strong shadowy hands that reached into that bloody mess, pulling and twisting until Broker’s head was all the way gone. She heard a thud as the remains of his skull landed somewhere near. She wanted to vomit, but held it together. Peered up. Looked into a familiar impossible face. Rictor. Living and breathing. Green eyes staring back with something that could have been grim pleasure.

  “You’re alive,” she whispered.

  “I guess I didn’t lose everything,” he rumbled, and helped Rikki sit up. She could hardly move. Her side hurt like hell, and her head pounded. Dazed, almost delirious. She looked for Amiri. Found a lump of spotted fur crumpled on the tile floor. A sob tore from her throat.

  “Rictor,” she breathed, choking. He said nothing. Simply picked her up. She hardly saw the rest of the room, but she was dimly aware of the silence, the incongruous sight of men in olive uniforms bleeding to death and staring with pure horror, in their final moments, at a man with the head of a cheetah, his upright body covered in sleek spotted fur. And at his side was a golden chiseled giant, talons sprouting from his fingers, his arms rippling with long shining feathers. Gods and monsters. She was living inside a legend.

  She glimpsed Moochie, who was covering those men with his gun, eyes hard as stone. But that was all she saw, because Rictor set her down beside Amiri, and she curled her body around his, pressing her cheek into his fur. Clutching his paw. She could not feel him breathing. She could not hear his heart beat.

  Rikki closed her eyes and died.

  Just a little.

  Amiri had a very terrible dream when he died. It was of his father, and the old man was inside his head, screaming, holding up the body of Rikki Kinn, who was also dying. His father was weeping. There were tears on Rikki’s face as well, and it was awful, murderous. Amiri could not stand it. He could not stand to die that way, to have that as his last vision.

  So he woke up. Swam into pain. Glimpsed a woman above him, but not Rikki. He wanted Rikki, even if the face he saw was welcome. Brown hair, those round cheeks.

  “Elena,” he whispered.

  “Hush,” she murmured, and from behind, a large hand touched her shoulder. A man, pale and dark, lean as a hard winter. Artur.

  “Sleep,” said his friend, his Russian accent thick. “Go back to sleep. We are here now.”

  “Rikki,” he breathed, his eyes falling shut.

  “Safe,” Elena said, and he felt the heat of her healing hands course through his throbbing body, burning to the bone. “Rest, Amiri. You’re all safe.”

  Safe. A myth, he thought, but he fell away into sleep. Deep, dreamless. Aching for Rikki. Needing her with all his heart. Wishing so much for her presence that when he next opened his eyes it felt as though hardly any time had passed.

  But he was in a bed with white silk sheets, and there was a woman beside him who was small and warm and smelled like vanilla and spice.

  Rikki. Breathing. Alive.

  Amiri touched her. He saw a new scar on her side, but the flesh had knitted. His own body was sore, but he reached around and touched a rough patch where he knew there had been holes. The cut in his chest was gone, too.

  Elena. Elena had saved them with her magic hands. Ten minutes or twenty-four hours. His friends had arrived.

  Amiri smiled to himself and kissed Rikki’s shoulder. She stirred, and opened her eyes. Stared at him for a moment, like he was a ghost … and then, ever so gently, with almost more tenderness than he could bear, she touched his cheek, the corner of his eye, and said, “Hey, there.”

  “Mpenzi,” he whispered. “Rikki.”

  “Amiri,” she breathed, smiling. Tears leaked from her eyes. Tears dripped on her chin, but those were from him and he wiped them away with his thumb.

  “You are my home and my heart,” he murmured. “Let us not ever frighten each other this way again, Rikki Kinn. No more. My soul could not stand it.”

  A breathless teasing smile filled her face. “Scaredy cat. I thought you knew what we are.”

  “Dangerous,” he replied, laughing softly. Covering her mouth in a long deep kiss that journeyed down her throat, to her lovely beautiful scars.

  “I love you,” she breathed in his ear. “I love you so damn much.”

  And that was the last thing he let her say for quite some time after.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  There was a crematorium in the basement. Aitan knew all about it. Rikki supposed it made sense.

  There was quite a gathering when they incinerated Broker’s body, and his head: strangers and familiar faces alike. They threw in Jaaved for good measure. The process took two hours. They sat outside the room and waited. Grim. Quiet. Making sure he was dead. Even Francis was there—who, appa
rently, had been one of the first people that the woman, Elena, had been persuaded to work her magic upon.

  All of which was quite confusing to Rikki. Healing gifts aside (and she did not give a rat’s ass if it made Amiri squeamish, but she was going to talk to that woman about running tests) there was no physical way Elena or anyone else could have arrived so quickly at the facility. San Francisco to the Zairean Congo, in less than three hours? Like hell.

  Rikki had tried asking. She’d received, for her trouble, words and names, things like “Dean” and “teleportation” and “Oh, God, he really screwed that one up.” Which made no sense, but then neither did men who transformed into animals, or fellows who could resurrect themselves from the dead with hardly a burp. Life was strange. Her daddy would have loved it.

  “You think he’s really gone?” Rikki said, to no one in particular.

  Rictor grunted. “He said only one man can kill him.”

  “That would be me,” said one of the strangers from the agency, one more silent witness who had joined them in the basement. He was a tall and handsome man, dusky-skinned, with black hair and intense eyes. He called himself Blue. Rikki had no idea what his connection was to Broker, just that he had been more than happy to help shove the headless corpse into the cremator.

  And he had also shorted out the detonator placed at the base of her skull. Done the same for A’sharia and Kamau Shah. Just with a thought. Rikki never felt a thing, not until they dug it out of her skin and placed it in her palm. Like a grain of rice—if rice exploded inside heads and killed people.

  “So,” said Moochie. “Does this qualify as dead? I mean, he’s being incinerated. How the fuck is his body going to heal that?”

  Until we meet again, Doctor Kinn.

  “Whatever,” Rikki said, battling a chill. “I give up. My life is going to be an endless array of sequels to bad horror films. I’ll pull back my shower curtain sometime next summer and Broker will be there, naked, with a knife in his hand.”

  Amiri frowned. “That is not amusing.”

  No. And neither was the idea that an organization was making biological weapons that could change the structure of someone’s DNA. Something Larry needed to know about—the military—the world.

  But what then? Betrayal, exposure? The risk of opening Amiri and others like him to the unrelenting scrutiny of strangers? The idea terrified her, in the same way those damn bats and their veins full of Ebola had. Because she knew some would panic at the truth, just like she knew some would want to use those bats—that disease—as a weapon. And who was to say that any government, any military, would not feel the same about shape-shifters and psychics? Who was to say that Amiri and friends would not be locked up for life, or coerced into untenable positions, if the truth was known? This was not some television special with a man claiming to speak to the dead—even if he could. This was blood and guts and magic.

  And how … how was she supposed to weigh the lives of potentially millions of victims over what her heart desired?

  “Because we’ll take care of it,” Max said softly. He sat beside her, and his voice was for her ears only—though she knew Amiri heard him as well. It was slightly disconcerting that he had read her mind. “We will stop them, Doctor Kinn. It’s a dirty war, but it’s our war, and we won’t let the Consortium continue.”

  “I don’t know you guys,” she said. “You’re asking me to abandon my responsibilities on a leap of faith.”

  “Have you not already done that?” Amiri asked.

  “More or less,” she said. “But this is something else entirely.”

  “Fair enough,” Max said. “But give us a chance first. Help us, even. We’ll need someone with your training. There aren’t too many doctors and scientists in our organization.”

  “I’m no psychic,” she said.

  “We’re not prejudiced,” Max replied with a smile. “But let’s face it … you’re not entirely normal, either.”

  Who is? Rikki wanted to ask him. But he had a point. And the idea of helping hunt the Consortium—and perhaps studying that virus—made a hot bolt of anger-fueled excitement pass through her gut.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said, and glanced at Amiri, savoring his quiet smile that was not triumphant, but instead humbling in its reassurance, its support. As though he trusted her. As though he had faith as well.

  It made her breathless. She had to blink hard and look away, finally focusing on the discussion going on around them: a somewhat grim and humorous argument about slasher flicks, and about how being hunted by crazed chainsaw-wielding serial killers compared to being hunted by crazed megalomaniac serial killers who hired men to carry the weapons for him.

  “We are such tools,” Moochie said, nudging Francis. His cousin smiled, but his face was pale, and he looked like he still hurt.

  Rikki caught his eye. “Was it worth it?”

  His smile gained strength. “Better than being dead.”

  “And now? Have you guys decided what you’re going to do yet?”

  “Still working on that better offer,” Moochie replied, glancing at Max. “Isn’t that right?”

  Max rubbed the back of his neck. “I think we can come to an agreement. Though there is a certain question of loyalty. Some things can’t be bought.”

  “You can trust them,” Rikki said, giving Francis and Moochie long steady looks. “Isn’t that right?”

  The men hesitated. Rikki rolled her eyes.

  The cremator clicked off, a sound so loud they could hear it in the other room. Rikki tried not to think about how many lives had been tossed into that thing since the construction of this facility. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. All the beauty and joy and pain of a human life, reduced to nothing. Less than a memory. Broker’s legacy to the world.

  They gathered the ashes and left. It was a long walk upstairs, through the facility. Rikki tried to memorize every step, the scent of the air, the crisp cleanliness of the floors. Amiri touched her hand. Rictor walked on her other side. Blue held the box of ashes. They were all suspicious that way.

  Ahead of them all walked Aitan. At his side, Kamau Shah. Immense, striking, powerful. He wore only slacks. Still caught between man and bird, with long golden feathers running up the lengths of his arms, meeting between his shoulders like an odd cape. His hair was tangled with feathers, his fingertips ending in black talons.

  No remedy, or so Amiri had told her. If Kamau were to find his way back to one body or the other, it would have to be on his own.

  And if he has family? Someone he was taken from? How will he return to the life he had, looking like that?

  Questions. Always more questions.

  Rikki glanced up at Amiri, and found him watching his father. She tugged on his arm and he bent down, just enough for her to whisper in his ear, “He loves you.”

  Amiri took a breath, hesitating. “He is my father.”

  But that was all he said, as if the words were caught in his throat. Rikki understood. She squeezed his hand. Sometimes silence was all you had.

  Upstairs, controlled chaos. Parts of the facility still looked like a war zone, but it was a war zone that now belonged to Dirk & Steele, and Amiri thought that made it somewhat lovely indeed.

  The scientists had been rounded up, locked away, while their experiments—more than thirty women, most of them pregnant—now roamed free, even if they had been asked to stay within the west wing.

  He thought he saw Mireille across the main hall, talking to the one of the pregnant women. No doubt preparing an insurrection. He and Rikki had been the ones to release her. She had not been pleased to see them, though the look in her eye had been more of shame than anger. A feeling he shared, when he thought of how he had frightened her. And what might have happened to her, in this place.

  “So,” Rikki said, holding his hand. “Big powerful detective agency. What are you going to do about all those people? This facility, even? Are you going to tell anyone, or just … sweep it under the rug?”
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  “I do not know,” Amiri said, glancing at her. He found the other men doing the same, with troubled frowns.

  Aitan gave them all sharp looks. “You must make up your minds. The unborn those women carry…. none of them are human.”

  Everyone stopped. Moochie said, “What do you mean, not human?”

  Kamau Shah rumbled, golden eyes glinting. “They took sperm samples from me. Aitan, as well. No doubt others. And if not shifter blood, then their scientists tinkered in other ways.”

  No one else said a word. Amiri went very still inside his heart, trying to wrap his mind around such a thing. He could not. The problems, the questions, were too vast. They all stared at each other, disbelief and a terrible dawning comprehension cutting across their faces.

  “What do we do?” Max said. “Do they know what their children are?”

  “No,” Aitan replied. “They were never meant to raise them.”

  “And if we explained?”

  “They will not understand.”

  “They might,” Blue said. “My wife is a shape-shifter.”

  Aitan’s eyes narrowed. “And would you be willing to risk the safety of your children on the whim of another?”

  Blue said nothing. Max ran his hands through his hair. “How do we handle this? We can’t just … return them home. Even if they weren’t carrying those children, they’ve been through too much. They need help. But to have shape-shifters as babies? That affects us, too.”

  “They will be called demons,” Aitan said grimly, glancing at Kaumau. “The women and the babies, once they begin shifting. They will be killed or turned over to the authorities. You cannot allow that. You must take the children. Raise them with those who will welcome their existence.”

  “But where?” Rikki stared. “You’ll have to keep the women here until they give birth. And then what? You’ll steal their children? Are all of you kidnappers now? You’ll be no better than the Consortium!”

  “That cannot be allowed,” Amiri said. “You must give the mothers the choice.”