I nodded. “Understood. I should get going. My friends don’t know where I am.”
“I would not dream of standing in your way. Mr. Tailor will take you wherever it is you wish to go.”
“Thank you for your help. I’ll be in touch.”
“Godspeed, Mr. Valentine.”
LORENZO
Paris
September 28th
As soon as it was safe to move Jill—and even that was questionable—we’d taken her back to one of her hideouts. We picked the flat in the boring working-class neighborhood because it was the least likely to get noticed. The doctor had said it wasn’t safe to transport her, she was better off staying, and that nobody at his clinic would talk, but I didn’t trust him or his people to not get greedy. So I’d stolen a work van, rolled the gurney right into the back, and left as soon as we could. I also had Reaper take any medical equipment and supplies he thought might be useful, but to make up for it I paid the doctor a lot more than the doctor’s agreed-upon fee. He’d saved Jill’s life. He could consider it a tip.
She had lost a massive amount of blood and was lucky to be alive. Deprived of actual medical care, she could still die here. The next twenty-four hours passed in a haze, with me sitting next to Jill’s bed, sleeping occasionally, and waking up from nightmares to check on her. It gave me a lot of time to fret and to think.
There was a two-sided conflict going on inside my head. Part of me wanted to lash out, pure violence, vengeance. If couldn’t get to Anders, I’d find someone, I didn’t care who, but I’d dismantle Kat’s organization brick by brick, man by man. I didn’t need a plan. I’d leave a pile of mutilated corpses across this city, and eventually I’d get the right one. On the other side of my internal debate was the mature, rational, sane part, which knew that was stupid. Sure, I could start popping more Montalbans, but I’d eventually get killed or caught before I stopped them all. We needed to continue with the plan, looking for opportunities to ruin Blue. That side of me was right, but useless.
So I spent a day being useless. Antoine came by to drop off some supplies, check on Jill, and gave me a quick rundown of what had happened with Valentine and Katarina, and the resulting clusterfuck with Underhill.
I sat next to Jill’s bed, she was still unconscious and I was in a daze, while Antoine stood in the doorway to the tiny bedroom. “So Kat is still out there, plotting, only now she knows exactly who’s gunning for her.”
“She will be hunting us,” Antoine said. “Worse, Majestic will do nothing to stop her. They will not risk starting a war. The Illuminati are fickle allies at best. It is up to us.”
“It always was. Damn it. I wish Valentine would have gotten her. Regardless, tell him thanks for trying. I mean that.”
Antoine seemed a little surprised.
“What?”
“You do not strike me as the gratitude type, Lorenzo.” I’d grown to like Antoine during our rescue mission at North Gap, and I’d saved his life in the Crossroads. He and Shen were good dudes, honorable men, and I didn’t have many friends like that. I actually kind of gave a damn what he thought about me. “I know Valentine has caused you quite a bit of trouble over the years.”
I could understand his confusion. Normally when I was in this bad of a mood, I’d be tempted to rip apart any convenient target, but I was just too damned worn out. Today, I was the only convenient target. “Valentine has been a huge pain in my ass. But that was a crazy stunt, and he’s lucky to be alive. Walking right in there like that took guts. I can respect that.”
“Valentine has changed much since we first met. I saw great potential in him, to be not just a fighter, but a leader. The importance of this mission has brought together the noble. Together, we are a force for good.”
“Not counting me, obviously.”
“Ha! Of course not! Such a terrible man, sacrificing himself to save the wounded after taking turns carrying them on his back across a mountain all night.”
“Don’t let that get out. You’ll ruin my image.” Like the Pale Man said, death followed me, and there had been a lot of death on that mountain. I didn’t even know who else had made it out. This was the first time Antoine and I had gotten to really talk since I’d gotten out. “Since you mentioned it . . .”
“The rest of us made it because of you. Svetlana had to retire due to her injuries. She’ll be glad to hear you’re alive. You did good there.”
“Yeah? Well, I blew it here.”
Antoine looked at poor Jill, drained and sleeping. “Jill is a strong woman. She will pull through.”
“I know she will.”
“Call if you need anything else.” Antoine turned to leave. “We will continue the search.”
“Hey,” I called after him. The big Exodus operative paused. “I know what I look like right now. I know I look all fucked up, but don’t worry. I’m still in. No matter what, I’m still going to finish this.”
“I know. I can see it burning in you. You want to strike out. But for now, we have this. Even if she can’t speak, savor this time with her, Lorenzo.”
“That’s easy for you to say. I need to do something, man.”
“I have been there.” When Antoine folded his thick arms, he was truly an imposing man. “When I was young, rebel militia raided my village. While my wife lay dying, I had to abandon her. I could not be there with her at the end.”
“Why?”
“Because they’d stolen my daughters. I had to leave my dying wife to chase after them.”
Other than knowing he was from West Africa, I’d never heard him talk about his life before Exodus. “Did you get them back?”
He shook his head.
“I’m sorry.” It was a trite thing to say, but that’s all I had. That certainly explained why he’d become a warrior for Exodus.
“Keep your loved ones close while you can. The killing time will come soon enough. I can feel it . . . And whether you like it or not, you are on the side of the angels now, Lorenzo. Goodbye.”
After he left, I’d cleaned some guns, changed some bandages, and continued being angry.
Reaper had gone back to shaking the trees to see what would fall out, but even he had limited success. Kat wasn’t stupid. If she knew I was involved, that meant Reaper was involved too. She would hunker down and send her legions of minions to search for us. She had always hated my little sidekick, as she’d derisively called him, but she knew what he was capable of. She also had enough money to hire the best nerds possible to counter him. The idea of, hell, I don’t know what to call them . . . anti-Reapers scouring the digital world for traces of us was frankly terrifying. I don’t know what Reaper took as the bigger insult, them shooting Jill, or Kat thinking some other hackers could beat him on his own turf. I didn’t know what Reaper had been up to in the other room for the last day, and he didn’t have time to slow down and explain it to me. He was acting like he was waging his own private war. Whatever, at least when he was working, he wasn’t being all weird and traumatized about the Crossroads.
Meanwhile, I played nurse or watched Jill sleep, knowing that she’d almost died because of me. Damn Ling for contacting her. It was better for everyone when she’d thought I was dead. I was a fool for not doing this on my own. But that damned rational part of me knew that was bogus. I hadn’t dragged her into this. She’d been hunting Montalbans the whole time I’d been imprisoned. It was a miracle she’d survived as long as she had.
The irrational part of me suspected that this was all the Pale Man’s doing, and that he’d tried to take her from me, because love was a distraction. It made no logical sense, Anders had pulled that trigger, and Sala Jihan was a continent away, but I still knew it was true. My brand ached as I thought about it, but if Jill died, then I was going to go back to the Crossroads and make the devil pay.
She woke up the next morning.
“Lorenzo?”
Jill’s voice was barely a whisper, but I woke right up. I’d been sleeping right next to the bed, drea
ming about Kat finding us somehow and Anders kicking the door in to finish what he’d started.
“You’re awake.”
“Hey,” she croaked. Her normally olive skin was far too gray, and her eyes seemed sunken into her face. Her black hair was spread across the pillow, and the contrast only made her look too pale and small. “I’m thirsty.”
“I’ve got you.” Of course, an IV would keep you hydrated but it just wasn’t the same. I should have thought of that ahead of time. I ran to the kitchen and came back with a cup of water. I held it to her lips. “Easy.” I sucked at this sort of thing and ended up spilling most of it down her chin. I was going to have to find a straw.
It took Jill a few seconds to collect herself. That was normal when you’d nearly bled to death and been unconscious for days. There were huge dark circles under her eyes. I’d never seen her looking this frail before. I was scared to touch her. I thought she might break.
“What happened?” At least with the water her voice sounded a little better.
“You got shot.” I didn’t know how much she would remember. She was still on a lot of painkillers, and would be for quite a while. They’d had to cut her wide open to stop all the internal bleeding. I didn’t know how many stitches and staples were holding her side together, but I’d seen them when I’d changed the bandages, and it was a mess.
Jill blinked a few times. “I remember driving backwards. Then this pain, like a lightning bolt. It hurt a lot, and that’s it. Is everyone else okay?” Now she was looking at me, panicked. She was more coherent than I expected. “Did you get hurt? Where’s Reaper?”
“Try not to move too much.” I put a gentle hand on her shoulder to keep her from trying to sit up. Of course, Jill would be worried about the others before she even thought about herself. That was just the kind of person she was, and one of the reasons I fell in love with her to begin with. “They’re fine. Everyone else is safe.”
“Did Anders get away?” Suddenly, it was the new, focused, scarier Jill talking, and I was still getting used to her. “Please tell me you got that son of a bitch.”
I shook my head no.
“Damn it . . .” Jill winced and started to move one hand to her side.
“Seriously, don’t move. If you start bleeding again, we’re screwed.”
“How bad is it?” From the look on her face, even with the drugs she was still in a lot of pain. “I feel terrible.”
“Anders shot you with a shotgun.”
Jill blinked slowly. “I should be dead.”
No kidding. At close range a 12 gauge hit like a meat hammer. If you got nailed in the torso up close with one, it was game over. A dozen pellets—each one with as much energy as a .380—hitting you in one instantaneous clump made a real mess. Like you could put your hand in the hole and have room to wiggle your fingers kind of mess, but get a little distance and the pellets spread out and bled energy fast. “You’re lucky. He was far enough away that the door slowed them down, and the seat caught most of them. There was still a lot of internal bleeding. It was really close.”
“How close?”
She’d damned near bled to death while that fat bastard doctor had taken his sweet time, but right now she needed to remain upbeat. “You just need to rest. You’ll recover just fine, but it is going to take a while. That was pretty badass though. I didn’t even know you knew how to drive a big truck.”
Jill gave me a very tired smile. “I drove a dump truck one summer. My dad got me a job at his friend’s construction company so I could pay tuition. That truck I stole handled like a sports car in comparison.”
“You’re one tough chick.”
She started to laugh, then grimaced. “Ouch. Don’t be funny.”
“I rarely am. You just think I’m funny now because you’re high.”
“I feel like shit.”
“The doctor said that’s expected.”
“Doctor?”
“Some Serbian war criminal Reaper knew.”
Jill sighed. “You called, needing a way out. I couldn’t figure out what to do. But this poor trucker had just pulled in to get diesel. I just reacted. I stuck my pistol in his face and stole it. I think I scared the hell out of him. I feel awful about that.”
“You saved my life.” I lowered my head and gently kissed the back of her hand. “Thank you.”
Jill didn’t say anything in return, she’d gone back to staring at the ceiling. Beyond the pain and the weakness, there was something else there. Jill was really troubled.
I tried to cheer her up. “Carjacking? That’s some straight-up hoodlum level stuff. I’m impressed. When we met you were a law-abiding citizen. I’ve been a terrible influence on you.”
Her eyes looked shiny, like she wanted to cry, but was trying hard not to. Her lip began to quiver. “I’ve done some bad things, Lorenzo. I’m not a good person anymore. You were dead. I lost myself. I didn’t know what else to do. But I still had to stop them, you know?”
“I know.” I’d been thinking about what Anders had said, both about the Montalban body count and the attempted bombing in London. I’d been hoping he’d just been trying to mess with me, but that damned rational part had been worried he had been telling the truth. Barely conscious, life passing in front of her yes, Jill had declared that she deserved this. “Believe me, I know.”
“I lied to you. I lied to you about what I’ve done.”
“I don’t care.”
“I thought I had Kat in London. I’d put so much work into it. I damn near died finding out where she was going to be. There was this crew she was trying to arrange a meeting with. They caught me snooping, but since they just thought I was one of the working girls trying to steal some credit cards, they only beat the shit out of me and left me in a pile of garbage.”
“Who?” I immediately felt the need to find and kill them.
“Some British mercs. They took turns kicking me, but I didn’t fight back, because I’d heard what I needed, so I took that beating. It was awful, but there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do to stop her.”
“Whatever you did, whatever you had to do, it’s in the past.”
But this was her confession. I’d spent my life around criminals. I’d seen it before, when the weight someone was carrying simply became too much, and they needed to dump it on someone else. Jill pushed on. “They’d arranged to meet in a little outdoor restaurant on the Thames. It was like a nice little garden inside a wrought iron fence. Great view of the Tower Bridge. I limped straight there, climbed the fence before they opened, and hid my bomb in a planter. That evil killer bitch thought she could kill you and then do her business right out in the open because it was a pretty day.
“I was watching from the bridge, lots of foot traffic so I could stay hidden. Anders and his guys got there twenty minutes early and swept the place, but they missed my bomb. The British merc she was meeting with showed up right on time. Last time I’d seen him was when he was kicking me and calling me a whore, and he sat down not ten feet from that planter. I was really tempted to just blow him up as payback right then, but I waited for her. It was risky, out there in public, but I wasn’t just avenging you, I was stopping Kat from doing something horrible, right?”
“Yeah . . .” I held her hand. Saving the world, according to Valentine’s mystical teenager. “You don’t need to tell me this. I’ll always love you, no matter what.” I didn’t know if I’d tried to stop her for her own good, or because I really didn’t want to know.
“There were people around, but they were far enough away I was positive they wouldn’t get hurt. Sure, I felt bad about blowing her to pieces in front of all those witnesses, but she deserved it.” Tears began to roll out of her eyes and down her cheeks. “She was supposed to have the whole place to herself. That’s how she operates. But then this young couple showed up with sack lunches. They walked past the restaurant, but then they stopped on the railing on the other side of the fence and watched the river, eating sandwiches. I kept p
raying that Anders would chase them away, but he didn’t.”
“Oh, Jill . . .”
“Kat showed up ten minutes late—longest ten minutes of my life—sat down, and started talking to the British merc. And I was screaming inside, telling that couple to move, to get up, go to the bathroom, get a drink, go for a walk, something. But they sat there, stupid and laughing. Maybe they were on their honeymoon. I don’t know. They looked so happy, like we were on Saint Carl, but I just needed them to fucking move and they wouldn’t! Kat finished her meeting, all that and she didn’t even bother to eat. It was too short. She got up and started to walk away, and I knew I was going to lose her. I had the phone in my hand. All I had to do was push a button.”
It sucked. It hurt. I knew exactly what had gone through her head in those fateful few seconds. “You did the math.”
“Months, Lorenzo. That’s all I’d thought about, all I’d lived for, was stopping Kat. I was standing there, with a concussion. My face covered with a scarf, not to hide from Anders, but so the pedestrians and tourists wouldn’t see I was still bleeding, one eye was swollen shut, and I was wheezing from the broken rib I’d gotten a few hours before. Were those innocent people far enough away to not get killed? It wasn’t a very big bomb. Probably. But I didn’t know for sure. But right then I convinced myself they were out of the blast radius. They’d probably be okay.” She turned her head to look directly at me, stricken with guilt. “And I pushed the button.”
“But it didn’t detonate.”
“How’d you know?”
“Anders told me.”
She began to sob. “It doesn’t matter. I’m a monster. I risked innocent lives to get what I want. I had no right. There’s no way to justify what I’ve done.”
This was killing me. “That’s not true. Jill, listen to me. You know I worked for Big Eddie. Kat and I did his dirty work. You know I’ve hurt people, good people, on accident, and sometimes on purpose. But you still had faith in me. You pulled me out of that hole. You gave me something to live for beyond looking for the next challenge, the next thrill. I only survived the Pale Man because someone good loved me.”
Alliance of Shadows (Dead Six Series Book 3) Page 27
