by James Moore
“Cody?” Oh, how her voice broke and shook and he hated knowing that he was the cause of her tears.
“Hi. Listen, I can’t talk long. I just wanted to let you know that I’m okay. I’ll be home as soon as I can, but there’s stuff I have to do.”
Lies. All lies. He wasn’t okay. He felt like crap. His skin was clammy and he had a bad case of the shakes and he thought maybe he was going to puke his guts out if he looked at Chinese food ever again. Maybe it was food poisoning; but if so, he was the only one who had eaten anything bad.
“Cody, honey, you have to come home. Please. I need you here with me.” Guilt twisted his guts into a new and even more unpleasant shape as he listened to her words. He’d never wanted to leave home—never wanted any of what was happening—but having his Other hanging around was like carrying a loaded gun in each hand and then juggling. Sooner or later one of the damned things would go off and someone would get hurt. He wasn’t as worried about himself—well, okay, that was a consideration but not a big one—as he was about Hank hurting his mom or his dad. The male parental unit liked to yell, and Hank liked to kill things that annoyed him, so, yeah, best to keep the two well away from each other.
“Mom. It’s for you and Dad, okay? There’s some serious stuff going on and I don’t want to take any chances on you guys getting hurt.”
“Cody, we can take care of ourselves. We can take care of you. If there’s a-a problem with the police, we can get you a lawyer.” So much desperation in each word that came from her mouth and he could see her in his mind, her wide eyes starting to water, her lips trembling, and the very thought made his stomach twist again because she was one of the best people he’d ever known.
“Mom. I love you. Just remember that. I’ll be home soon.” He killed the call before she could hear him cry. God, he missed his parents.
Tina took the phone from him and gave him a quick hug. He didn’t expect it and had no idea how to react, but he took the comfort she offered just the same.
Chapter Sixteen
Kyrie Merriwether
KYRIE WATCHED GENE’S FACE work through a storm of emotions before he finally lowered his brows in frustration and almost threw the phone to Tina. The other girl caught the phone and walked it over to Kyrie.
After that, it was only a matter of getting up the courage to call her dad on his cell at work.
He was on another call, so she made it quick and left a message on his voice mail. “Hi, Dad. It’s me. I’m okay. I think maybe I could be back as early as next week. I love you and Mom and everyone. Okay. Bye.”
She gave the phone to Tina and moved away, hugging herself in the bright sunlight. The sun was doing its job, but the air still had a chilly edge. Or maybe it was just that she missed her family. She couldn’t really say.
Tina opened the back of the phone and pulled the battery from it. A moment later the phone went in the trash can and the battery went into Tina’s pocket. Kyrie understood the logic. Tina was afraid that they could be traced through the cell phone calls, and she was probably right about that. Still, despite everything, she thought maybe Tina was being paranoid. Not that she would have said that to Tina’s face.
Tina didn’t speak to any of them. Kyrie could see her struggling, fighting against whatever grief she was feeling. They’d known each other for less than three days—she thought it was three days; the sense of time she used to know no longer made sense—but all of them knew that Tina’s father was long in his grave and that her mother had been killed and dumped in the river near her home, probably by the same mobsters that Tina’s Other had robbed.
Tina was tiny, but she was also hard. She almost never let anyone see anything but what she wanted them to see. Kyrie didn’t know if she envied the other girl that trait or felt sorry for her because she was so good at it. Kyrie herself had been raised in a very different world, with two parents and five brothers and sisters.
But they had things in common just the same. They were the two girls in a group of five, and they had Others.
Near as Kyrie could figure out (and she was thinking about it constantly), Joe Bronx had managed to wake up their Other selves. She wasn’t completely sure about that, but she knew that he knew things he shouldn’t about all of them, from the way he’d talked before. And she knew that her Other had come along and, at the very least, had stolen a truck full of weapons for Joe Bronx before she even knew that she had an Other.
Her Other scared the heck out of her. And that was one more reason to rub her arms in an effort to stay warm, thank you very much. She didn’t remember much of anything about the change happening, but she knew that when her Other rose up to take over, she was always, always angry. She could feel the fury that boiled underneath the surface of the Other’s mind, like a bad aftertaste. Her Other was hungry—not just for experiences, but for everything. She resented being forced down by Kyrie. She resented Kyrie’s existence.
She looked over at Tina again, her eyes tracing the length of the snake tattoo on her arm. It was a beautiful piece of work. No two ways about it. Highly detailed. And that worried her a bit. Because while she didn’t have any tattoos herself, she knew a few people who had them, and much smaller tattoos than the one on Tina’s arm had taken hours to finish and sometimes several sessions.
Either Not-Tina had met up with an amazingly fast artist, or several people had worked on her arm at the same time, or they had been out for longer than one day. And that, well, that was definitely enough to make her skin feel cold. She had no way of knowing how long she’d been away from home anymore because everything was blurred in her mind. Her memories didn’t feel right: they felt fuzzy and distorted.
She pulled herself out of her musing as Hunter approached, his face as worried as ever. He was cute, but she didn’t let herself dwell on that. There were lots of cute guys back home too. Luke and Dan and Erik came to mind, and she knew them better.
Still, she loved the way his face softened and almost relaxed when he looked at her. It made her feel good about herself. It was even a little flattering—and a lot annoying, thank you very much—the way he’d acted when she and Gene went to get food, but that was just another thing she didn’t really want to contemplate too carefully.
Then he opened his mouth and ruined it.
“We have to go. We need to get to a store and buy some clothes, and then we have to scope out the address we have and see if it’s a trap.”
Gene looked back at him and frowned. “You’re not going to like me for saying this, but we’re not the best ones to do this.”
“What other choices do we have?” Hunter shook his head. “We can’t exactly go hiring a private detective, can we?”
Kyrie didn’t like the look on Gene’s face. She knew what he was going to say before he said it.
Tina beat him to the punch. “He means the Others. He wants you to let Joe Bronx out so he can maybe take a look around.” As she spoke, she stared hard at Hunter. Her face was completely neutral—her eyes gave away nothing.
Cody coughed into his hand and looked away, his skin pasty. Kyrie saw that a thin layer of sweat was forming on his forehead. He looked like he was going to get sick any second.
Hunter opened his mouth to object, and Tina cut him off. “He’s right, too. Joe’s been doing this stuff for a long time, and him and the Hydes, whatever we might like or not like about them, they’re better at this than we could ever be. So you need to let Joe out to do his thing.”
“Hydes?” Gene interrupted, that puzzled look back on his face.
“It’s a joke.” Tina waved her hand dismissively. “We’re Jekylls, they’re Hydes. We behave”—she pointed at her arm—“and they get us in trouble.”
Even as Tina was explaining the terminology, Hunter turned his eyes to Kyrie. “I don’t know how.”
Tina shrugged her narrow shoulders and beat Kyrie to the punch. “Just stop fighting him. Let him win.”
Kyrie knew Tina was right. That was all that Hunter had to
do: just give in to the thing that was hiding inside of him. And that, too, made her shiver.
Chapter Seventeen
Sam Hall
THEY WERE SLEEPING, THE whole lot of them, when Sam Hall opened his eyes and rolled carefully out of the bed. Hunter might have wanted to save money, but the females with him had won their fight for a separate room. Hunter slept on one bed and Cody slept on a rollaway bed near the closet. For just a moment, Sam thought about killing both of them, not because he had anything against them, but merely because he knew it would bother Gene to no end. Precious little Gene didn’t like violence—or at least he told himself that he didn’t like it.
Sam sniffed the air and looked toward Cody. The boy was soaked in sweat and shivering in the heated air of the hotel room. He was sick. He smelled like death, like something inside of him was falling apart and rotting and the rest of his body was working on catching up. Gene was stifled by narrow senses, but Sam did not suffer from the same flaws. He could see and hear and taste and smell so much more than his Other. If he’d had the time, he could have spent hours simply experiencing the differences between himself and the weak little boy that shared the same space with him.
And Gene was weak; there was simply no other way to put it. Gene was willing to listen to Joe Bronx and Hunter and accept their orders without question. Sam didn’t much like that notion. What Sam didn’t like, he fixed.
Perfect example: the Right Revrund Robbie—the preachy drunk who was the best friend of Gene’s adoptive father and the first victim of Sam’s anger when he hurt Gene’s feelings by telling him he’d been adopted. The man thought he knew everything there was to know about how the world worked. Booze made him think he was something special. Gene always listened to the pompous bastard prattle on and just took it. Sam had taken matters into his own hands. He was just a little surprised to hear the loser had survived being thrown off a three-story balcony. That was okay. He could always fix that problem when he got back home.
Moving with stealth that would have surprised almost anyone, Sam slipped from the room and snuck down the hallway to the stairs leading to the main floor of the motel. It was a dive. No surprise there. His stomach grumbled, and he noticed that there was a restaurant nearby. He deviated from his plans long enough to grab two burgers and flirt with the waitress for a few minutes before heading to the pay phones in the parking lot of the motel.
Three phones. The first one was broken. The second one worked just fine. He dialed the numbers after a very brief struggle to extract them from his memory. Gene might have worried about how Sam could possibly know his home phone number, but Sam didn’t care. He had what he needed, and that was all that mattered.
An unfamiliar voice answered the phone after the third ring. He was expecting the voice of one of Gene’s parents. His plan was simple, really. He was going to offer to bring Gene back in exchange for the reward. It was a lie, of course, but by the time they figured that out, he’d have the money secreted away somewhere. He wasn’t even sure of the details, but he knew he could figure them out given enough time. It would take at least a day to take a bike back from Chicago to New York.
All of that went away when he heard a stranger say hello.
“Who is this?”
“I was about to ask you the same question. It’s a bit late to be calling a family at home, don’t you think?”
He actually hadn’t given it any thought. He didn’t care if he woke the bitch before promising to bring back her little boy.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Evelyn Hope. And you? What name are you going by?”
That was a strange way to phrase the question, and it made the hairs on his neck stand on edge.
“You can call me Sam Hall.”
“Hi, Sam. Why were you calling the Rothsteins so late at night?”
“I have a business proposition for them.” He almost growled the words. He didn’t like this woman. She sounded too confident, and he resented her for it.
“Sam, are you Gene’s Doppelganger?”
“What? How could you know—?”
“Sam. I made you and your friends. There are certain tricks I’ve learned for understanding who I’m dealing with.”
For the life of him he couldn’t decide if she was bluffing.
“What do you want, then?”
“I’m sorry?” Hope’s voice was taken aback. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I called Gene’s parents. I got you. I bet his folks don’t even know about you because if they did, they wouldn’t want you anywhere near their precious little boy.” Sam smiled. She’d gotten almost as shaken up as him, and that meant she wasn’t anywhere near as confident as she was trying to sound.
“Well, I think we probably want the same things, Sam. Or at least we want things that can be mutually beneficial.” That little tremor was gone from her voice. He might have caught her off guard, but he had no doubt the woman he was dealing with was used to being in charge. He could respect that.
“Here’s what I want. I want money. And I want you to leave me alone. I don’t care about Gene. I don’t care about any of them. I want money, and I want to get rid of Gene, and I most definitely don’t want to get to know you better.”
The woman’s voice on the phone was soft, but she laughed. A short little sound that was followed by almost a minute of silence before she spoke again. “You’re very direct, Sam Hall. I respect that.”
He nodded. “Good. Then maybe we can come to a deal.”
“Maybe we can, Sam.” She paused again, a long silence that was filled with possibilities. “Maybe we can at that.”
“What do you want, Evelyn? What do you want in exchange for giving me what I want?”
“I want to know when and where I can find all of you. I want to get Subject Seven back as quickly as I can and without anyone getting hurt.”
That last part was a lie. He could almost sense it. She said it because she was supposed to say it. And who the hell was Subject Seven? Sam smiled to himself. There was only one possibility, really. There was only one in their group who said he’d been experimented on. Joe Bronx had to be Subject Seven.
“And in exchange, can you give me freedom? Freedom from you and freedom from Gene?”
“Freedom from Gene?”
“He bores me. I don’t want him around.”
“Is that what you want, Sam? Freedom from your other self?”
“Wouldn’t you?” He made himself calm down. He was too close to the hotel to start screaming. “If you found out there were two minds inside your body, wouldn’t you want to be free of the other one?”
She was silent for several moments, except for the sound of her breathing. They were already coming for her. Maybe she knew that and maybe she didn’t, but he thought he could use it to his advantage. This was a chance to bargain with her, to get whet he needed for what she would have gotten anyway. Perfect. Absolutely sweet.
“I suppose I would at that, Sam. I’ll tell you what. I get you along with the others when the time comes and I’ll see what I can do to stop the changes from ever happening again.”
“And I should trust you why, Evelyn?”
She sounded bored when she answered. “What other choice do you have, Sam? I’m the only person alive who could possibly fix your problem.”
“We’re supposed to look your place over tomorrow, see if it’s a trap. Only a couple of us, though. Not all of us. You want all of us, you have to work with me here. When we get there, I’ll either leave you a note near the door or I’ll call you back tomorrow night around the same time, whichever is better to avoid getting noticed. In exchange, I get freedom and you get the rest of them without a fight. Or at least with less of a fight. You’ll know when to look for us and whether or not we’re armed.”
“That sounds wonderful.”
“Evelyn?”
“Yes, Sam?”
“You made us, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then yo
u know how strong we are. You know how serious I am when I say I’ll kill you if you do me wrong.”
“There’s no reason to do you wrong, Sam. My goal has always been to get Seven back.”
“Just making sure we understand each other.”
He hung up the phone and moved back toward the hotel. That had gone better than he’d expected.
Chapter Eighteen
Tina Carlotti
TINA SAT UP IN the bed. The room was dark, but that didn’t bother her. Easily one week out of three while she was growing up was without electricity. You had to pay the bills, or they cut off the power. Her mom had never been very good at paying the bills on time.
She tried to push the thoughts of her mother away, but it was late and she was tired and the memories crept past her defenses and kicked the crap out of her heart yet again. There was nothing she could do about it, so she pulled her knees in close to her chest and lowered her head until her face was hidden. Then she cried as quietly as she could. It was quiet enough to avoid waking up Kyrie, who was softly snoring on the other bed.
She wanted to sleep. She hadn’t slept worth a spit in two days, and before that she was too tired to really relax. Instead she just closed her eyes and woke up a few hours later. Tina was used to remembering her dreams, and now she didn’t even seem to have any to remember. Maybe whenever she was asleep, her Other showed herself. That wasn’t a comforting notion.
She looked toward the wall between her room and Hunter’s and shook her head. He wasn’t interested. She knew that. She could take one look at the boy and see that his eyes were damned near superglued to Kyrie. He had the hots for her roommate in a big way, and who could blame him? She was curvy in all the right spots, had a smile that could light up a room and never seemed to lose her temper about anything. Not even when Cody had fallen asleep in the car and used her as a pillow, complete with a trail of drool from his mouth that got all over her shirt. Girl was practically a saint. Tina would have made sure Cody woke his sorry-ass up, no questions.
