He grabbed me under the arms and kicked for the surface. We burst into the air gasping and spluttering. The water wasn’t as high, here, and it wasn’t rising as fast because it could only flood in through the narrow slot in the door.
I grabbed hold of a pipe so that Calahan could free his arms. Immediately, he swam back to the door and heaved at it: maybe we could push it open from this side and let Josh through. But however hard he pushed, the door didn’t budge. I climbed hand-over-hand along the pipes until I reached the door and then joined him, dangling from one hand while I pushed with the other. But the pressure on the other side was just too high. We looked at each other helplessly. Then I stared at the door, imagining Josh running out of air on the other side.
Calahan slipped an arm around my waist to support me. “There’s nothing you can do,” he said gently.
I could feel the hot tears running down my cheeks. Josh! Then I pressed myself close to the door and felt underwater for the slot. When I found it, I slipped my hand through.
There was one thing I could do. He didn’t have to die alone.
At first, I thought it was too late. Then I felt Josh grab my hand and squeeze tight, and I squeezed back. I screwed my eyes shut, sobs wracking my body. Calahan said nothing, just held me close and curled his body around mine, his lips pressed to the top of my head.
Josh’s hand gripped mine tighter and tighter. It’s okay, I thought. I’m not letting go. I’d left him once, when I was rescued and he wasn’t. I wasn’t leaving him again.
Josh gripped me so tight it hurt. I welcomed it, wished I could take all his pain and fear. His hand trembled….
And then his fingers slowly uncurled and he was gone.
I let out a wail and Calahan pulled me even tighter against his body. Then he was pulling me across the room to the stairs, swimming and then wading and then finally climbing, carrying me up out of the dark towards the light.
Epilogue
Yolanda
CALAHAN CARRIED ME up the final flight of stairs from the bunker and we emerged, soaked and shivering, onto the street. His legs shaking from carrying me up ten floors, he carried me to his car, set me carefully down on the passenger seat...and then slumped down on the sidewalk next to me, utterly exhausted, his head nestled in my lap like a dog,
We sat like that for a good fifteen minutes before Calahan got up the strength to move. And as I sat there stroking his hair, I thought.
My brother had done awful things. But he’d done them because his mind had snapped, down in the dark of the bridge wreckage. The person who’d killed Daniel Grier and Sharon Kubiak...that wasn’t him, not really. The guy who’d given his life to save us, that was my brother. But he’d be remembered as a murderer. Unless….
No one except Calahan and I knew that Josh was the killer. Calahan hadn’t told Carrie yet. Josh had never been arrested so his fingerprints and DNA weren’t in the FBI database. He’d been living off the grid for a year, using false identities, so I knew they wouldn’t find Josh’s driver’s license or any other ID on his body. The killer would never be identified. The families of Daniel Grier and Sharon Kubiak would still get closure: the killer was dead, drowned in the bunker after kidnapping and trying to kill me. And my parents wouldn’t have their memories of their son torn apart and have their lives ruined by TV reporters hungry for a story.
All we had to do was keep quiet.
Calahan finally managed to clamber to his feet and went down the street to the nearest store to call the FBI. When he returned, I tentatively put the plan to him. I thought he’d be against it. More than anything, he was a crusader for the truth, for people getting justice. And he was an FBI agent. He sat there brooding for a long time and I was sure the answer was going to be no. “I want you to know,” I said awkwardly, “If you need to tell them...I understand.”
He sighed. I could hear sirens approaching: we only had a few minutes before the FBI showed up. “I remember what you were like, when I came to your apartment and you’d been writing those equations all day. It was like you weren’t you, anymore.”
I remembered that, too. How I’d actually been eager to get rid of him. I’d been addicted.
“Josh was around that stuff for a whole year,” said Calahan. “I’m not saying I believe in this shit. Maybe it was something controlling him, maybe he was just in some kind of psychosis. But I know he wasn’t him, just like you weren’t you.” He rubbed at his stubble. “I don’t think it does anyone any good for him to be remembered that way. So I’ll go along with it. But you gotta promise to do one thing for me, when all this is over.”
The sirens were only a few streets away, now. “Name it.”
He leaned close and whispered in my ear.
I hesitated. And then I nodded.
Calahan
One Week Later
When Carrie, Alison and the others had shown up at the bunker, we’d told them a story that was mostly the truth, leaving out only the identity of the killer. Yes, he was dead, drowned while pursuing us through the complex as it flooded. No, we had no idea what his ultimate plan had been.
We’d had a few days of holding our breath but as we’d hoped, Josh’s fingerprints and DNA weren’t in the database and the case was closed with the killer as a John Doe. That just left Yolanda’s promise to me.
“This feels wrong,” she said, staring at the chalkboards. “We’re destroying something we can never get back. The FBI doesn’t have the bits I recreated when I was on LSD. This is the only full record of all the equations. The only one in the world.”
“It’s the right thing to do,” I told her, and pressed a wet rag into her hand.
She stared at it, going rapidly pale. I knew she thought I didn’t understand, but I did. The equations were literally a work of genius. Beautiful, compelling...addictive. I could see the way she was drawn to them, even now. That’s exactly why they had to go. “You promised,” I reminded her.
She nodded. Gulped. She actually looked ill at the thought of doing this. She took a deep breath...and swept a big arc of shiny wetness across the board. As soon as it was done, she stiffened: God, what have I done? I saw her eyes go to a piece of chalk: she was wondering if she could grab it and recreate them from memory, before she forgot them—
She closed her eyes, gathering her courage. Then she opened them and quickly wiped the rest of the board. With every number that disappeared, she relaxed a little. When the board was clean, she started on the next one. Then she wheeled herself into the bathroom and scrubbed the marker pen from the tiles. Then together, we fed all her paper notes into a shredder. And finally, she wiped all the photos from her laptop’s hard drive.
When it was done, she blinked and looked around in amazement. I felt it, too: something had lifted from the place.
I told myself it was just because the equations were creepy. And I told myself that, down in the bunker, when it had seemed like maybe this stuff might be real, that had just been our minds playing tricks on us. All of us had been under incredible stress, Josh had been in the grip of psychosis, Yolanda had only just surfaced from a bad acid trip and none of us had slept properly in days. We’d all wanted to undo the bridge disaster—who wouldn’t? And combined, that had been enough for us to buy into Josh’s delusion, just for a few minutes. It didn’t mean any of it was real.
I told myself all that. But I wasn’t a hundred percent sure. All I knew was, I was glad the equations were gone.
I bent, slipped my arms around Yolanda and lifted her, crushing her to my chest. My arm was still in a cast and I wasn’t really meant to do things like that yet, but when did I ever follow the rules? I loved her, dammit.
“Well done,” I growled in her ear. “Now grab your stuff. I got a surprise for you.”
Yolanda
It was amazing. I was light as a feather, soaring high on rising warm air and then swooping down to glide effortlessly over fields and forests.
“You’re a natural,” said the instructor from beh
ind me. “You sure you haven’t flown a glider before?”
I shook my head. I figured it would be a bad idea to mention I’d been illegally flying a drone around downtown New York. And this was so much better! There was no VR headset, no jarring shock when I had to take it off. This was real: I was here, up in the sky. Free.
The gliding lesson had been Calahan’s surprise. We’d driven way out into the country to reach the place and when I’d seen the gliders ahead of us, sleek and white and graceful, Calahan said my face had lit up like it was Christmas. I’d just never considered flying a glider before. It was something that had to be done out here, in the real world, and that had been off limits to me...until I’d met him.
“How you doing?” asked Calahan on my headset. He was in another gilder, with his own instructor.
“Incredible,” I breathed, and pulled a steep turn, standing the glider almost on its wingtip. I was already going through my calendar in my head, figuring out when I could have another lesson. “You?”
“Yeah,” he muttered. “Great.” And then a thermal caught his glider and he unleashed a stream of curses as the ground dropped away from him.
* * *
When we landed, Calahan did everything short of kissing the ground. We reached an unspoken agreement in that moment: gliding was going to be a hobby for just me.
We climbed into my new car and set off, but not back to the city. We had something else planned, that afternoon. Our diaries were filling up fast: I wanted to try all the things I’d been missing out on. There was a place not too far away that offered horse riding for people with injuries like mine, and I wanted to try a shooting range too. Plus my folks had been to visit and would be coming again soon. They’d loved Calahan, who’d shocked me by smartening up for the day and calling my mom ma’am. He was reassuringly disheveled again an hour after they left.
Calahan gripped the dash as we sped over a hill, catching a little air. He still complained I drove too fast. “Carrie’s been making noises about you helping us out on a few cases,” he said.
I thought about it. It was good that Calahan was back in Carrie’s good books. They’d closed the investigation into his conduct, finding no wrongdoing. And there were probably a lot of times the FBI needed something decrypted, or hacked. But me, work for the FBI? I’d have to play by the rules…. “Only if I can have a red flashing light for my car,” I told him at last.
He nodded and we drove in companionable silence. I loved that we could do that. Neither of us were exactly people persons but together, we worked. He balanced me, grounding me and stopping me going too deep into my own head, and he said I cleansed him, after a day at the FBI seeing the worst of humanity. What we had was deeper than love. I was pretty sure I’d found my soulmate.
We came over the brow of a hill and our destination crept into view ahead of us. I drew in my breath and unconsciously slowed the car a little, the nerves spiraling up from the pit of my stomach.
Calahan leaned over and covered my hand with his big, warm one. “It’s time,” he told me.
And he was right. It was high time I did this. I’d realized something, after the bunker. Whether the spell was real or not, I’d believed in it because I wanted it to be real. I’d wanted to turn back the clock and undo my injury just as much as Josh. It was all I’d been wishing for, since the accident.
It wasn’t like I was suddenly overjoyed with what had happened to me. But maybe I’d reached what that counselor had called acceptance. All I knew was, my wishes now were all about the future, not the past.
I floored the gas and the car leapt forward. A few minutes later, we arrived at a quaint little inn tucked away by a bend in a river. The car was almost silent as it pulled up but someone inside had good ears because I’d barely got out and into my chair before I was slammed into from both sides and became the filling in a hyper-excited female sandwich, garnished with a lot of squees.
They finally moved back...and for the first time ever I was looking at the other two Sisters of Invidia, live.
“You’re shorter in person,” Lilywhite deadpanned.
I hadn’t wanted the wheelchair to be a shock but I hadn’t known how to broach it so I’d wound up putting off telling them until the very last minute. Lilywhite was literally about to leave to get her flight when I finally messaged both of them in our private chatroom, feeling sick to my stomach, and just spat it out.
yolanda> Look, I use a wheelchair
lilywhite> Okay
diamondjack> OK
And then we’d started discussing which in-flight movie Lilywhite should watch. I’d sat back from the screen, blinking. Is that it?!
I made the introductions. The woman in the jeans and plaid shirt who’d just flown in from Montana was Lilywhite, who’d used to be known as Lily before she went into witness protection and was forced to change her name. She went by Mary, now. And the huge cowboy with his arm around her waist was Bull, now rechristened Luke. Calahan and Lily went way back and he gave her a huge hug, then was almost crushed by Bull, who lifted him clear off the ground.
The woman with the soft, dark hair in sweater and jeans was Gabriella—diamondjack. And that meant that the tall guy with the Russian accent had to be Alexei. He gave us all European-style double-cheek kisses, but regarded Calahan with more than a little suspicion. To be fair, he was former Russian mafia and Calahan had spent a lot of time trying to bring down one of the big Russian crime bosses: there were always going to be trust issues.
After all the rain, spring finally seemed to have arrived and it was comfortably warm. “Is this place okay?” I asked Lily as we all moved to the table the inn had set out for us in the garden. “It’s a long way from the city, but….” I looked nervously over my shoulder. There was no one else around but I knew the risk she was taking, coming back to New York. There were people in New York who’d kill her on sight, hence the new life in Montana.
“It’s perfect,” said Lily as she sat down. “Thank you for organizing it.”
“I booked out the whole place,” I said seriously. “Just to be sure.”
She pulled me into a hug. “You’re the best.”
Since we were the only guests, the inn had really pulled out all the stops for us. The table was decorated with spring blossoms and there were pitchers of cocktails, an ice bucket with cans of coldly sweating beer, platters of cheeses and cold meats, freshly-baked bread and olives. Fairy lights were looped overhead, ready for when they served dinner that evening. We weren’t going to have to move all night.
“How’s teaching?” I asked Lily. It was strange, talking to her face-to-face after all this time, almost as if a movie star had climbed down off the screen. But it was feeling more normal with each passing second.
“I hate it,” she said. “And love it. Part time seems to be working: I hack, and that’s great, but after a few hours it starts to feel pretty lonely. And that’s about the time I need to go teach class, and the kids are a nice relief. And then by the end of the day, I’m ready to kill them and all I want to do is disappear into some code and be anti-social...so it balances, you know?”
I nodded and looked thoughtfully at Calahan. Maybe that was another reason to accept Carrie’s offer and do some work for the FBI. I had enjoyed being part of a team.
“And Bull just made sergeant in the sheriff’s department,” said Lily, squeezing Bull’s huge forearm. He grinned as if embarrassed.
Alexei rolled his eyes and muttered something in Russian, but it sounded good-natured. Probably something about being surrounded by law enforcement.
“And what about you two?” I asked Gabriella. “What have you been doing?”
She told us about how they’d been to Russia to visit some of Alexei’s family, and how Luka Malakov and Konstantin Gulyev, the two big Russian crime bosses in New York, had both tried to tempt Alexei to rejoin the mafia and come and work for them. “I think once one of them heard the other was after Alexei, it almost became a competition,” said Gabriella,
her eyes huge. “It was like, what do you want? Do you want money? A sports car?”
“But I said no,” said Alexei, bringing his fist down dramatically on the table. “No more trouble.” He turned to Gabriella and looked at her with absolute adoration. “Have all trouble I can handle, right here.” And he kissed her tenderly.
Lily leaned forward. “We, um...have something to tell you,” she began.
And then she took Bull’s hand and squeezed it in a very particular way.
My jaw dropped. Oh God, are they—
Lily showed us her left hand, which she’d been carefully hiding under the table until now. The diamond caught the setting sun and glowed like fire. Gabriella and I shrieked, and I’m not someone who shrieks often. We immediately wanted to know when, where, how? Which she told us was yesterday, when they were camping out in the wilds, as they were watching the sunrise.
Lily looked at Gabriella and me. “If it’s okay, I’d like you two to be my maids of honor.”
I gawped at her. “Of course it’s okay! But...don’t you want...you know, your real life friends for that?”
Lily put her hand on mine. “You idiot,” she told me. “You are my real life friends.”
* * *
Lily, Gabriella and I spent the rest of the evening talking dresses, table layouts and bands. The three men huddled together at the far end of the table with the bucket of beer. By the time the yawns became infectious and we all agreed we should continue the planning over breakfast, it was after two in the morning. Alexei seemed to have gotten over his suspicions and was laughing and joking with Calahan and Bull as they said goodnight. I rolled over to my man and we wandered together towards the inn and bed.
Hold Me in the Dark Page 30
