The Outlaw Demon Wails th-6
Page 30
Closing his eyes again, Quen simply breathed, slow and labored. "I already told you why I asked you here."
The bureaucrat thing? "Okay," I said, wanting to take his hand to give him strength, but I felt funny about it, as if he would think I pitied him. That would just tick him off. "Then tell me what you did to yourself."
He took a ragged breath, then held it. "Something I had to," he said on the exhale.
Nice. Just peachy. "So I'm just here to hold your hand while you die?" I said, frustrated.
"Something like that."
I looked at his hand, not ready to take it. Awkwardly I scooted closer, the chair bumping over the low wooden mat. "Least you have good music," I muttered, and the creases in his face eased slightly.
"You like Takata?" he said.
"What's not to like?" Jaw clenched, I listened to Quen breathe. It sounded wet, like he was drowning. Agitated, I looked at his hand, then the journal on the bedside. "Should I read something?" I asked, wanting to know why I was here. I couldn't just up and leave. Why in hell was Quen doing this to me?
Quen started to chuckle, cutting it short to take three slow breaths until they evened out again. "No. You've watched death come slowly before, haven't you."
Thoughts of my dad surfaced, the cold hospital room and his thin, pale hand in mine as he fought for breath, his body not as strong as his will. Then Peter as he gasped his last, his body shuddering in my arms as it finally gave up and freed his soul. Tears pricked and a familiar grief stained my thoughts, and I knew I'd done the same with Kisten, too, though I didn't remember it. Damn it back to the Turn. "Once or twice," I said.
His eyes met mine, riveting in their gleam. "I won't apologize for being selfish."
"I'm not worried about that." I really wanted to know why he'd asked me here if he didn't want to tell me anything. No, I thought abruptly, feeling my face lose all expression. It's not that he doesn't want to tell me something but that he promised Trent he wouldn't.
Stiffening on the cool leather chair, I leaned forward. Quen sharpened the focus of his gaze, as if he recognized I'd figured it out. Fully aware of Dr. Anders behind me, I mouthed, "What is it?"
But Quen only smiled. "You're thinking," he said, almost breathing it. "Good." His smile softened his pained features, making him look almost fatherly. "I can't. I promised my Sa'han," he said, and I pushed myself into the back of the chair, disgusted and feeling the bump of my bag behind me. Stupid elf morals. He could kill a person, but he couldn't break his word.
"I have to ask the right question?" I said, and he shook his head.
"There is no question. There is only what you see."
Oh, God. Wise-old-man crap. I hated it when they did that. But I tensed when Quen's breathing became labored over the sound of the faint music. My pulse quickened, and I looked at the hospital equipment, silent and dark. "You need to be quiet for a while," I said, agitated. "You're wasting your strength."
A shadow against the gray of the sheets, Quen held himself still, concentrating on keeping his lungs moving. "Thanks for coming," he said, his gravelly voice thin. "I probably won't last long, and I appreciate you dealing with Trenton trying to cope afterward. He's having a hard…time."
"No problem." I reached out and felt his forehead. It was hot, but I wasn't going to offer him the sippy-straw cup on the table unless he asked. He had his pride. His pox scars stood out, and I did take the antiseptic wipe that Dr. Anders silently gave me, dabbing his forehead and neck until he scowled.
"Rachel," he said, pushing my hand away, "since you're here, I want to ask you a favor."
"What?" I asked, then turned to the door as the music rose when Trent entered. Dr. Anders went to tattle on me, and the music faded as the door shut and the light vanished.
Quen's eye twitched, telling me he knew Trent was here. He took a careful breath, then, softly so he wouldn't cough, he said, "If I fail, will you take my position as head of security?"
My jaw dropped, and I pulled away. "Oh, hell no," I said, and Quen's smile widened even as his eyes shut to hide that unsettling seeing-around-corners glint.
Trent came up beside me. I could sense his irritation at me for not waiting for him, and under that, his gratitude that someone, even if it was me, had been with Quen.
"I didn't think you would," Quen said. "But I had to ask." His eyes opened to fix on Trent beside me. "I had someone else lined up if you said no. Can I at least get you to promise to help him when he needs it?"
Trent shifted from foot to foot as his tension looked for an outlet. I went to say no, and Quen added, "From time to time, if the money is right and it doesn't compromise your morals."
The scent of silk and other people's perfume grew stronger as Trent became more upset. I glanced at his frustrated worry, then back to Quen struggling to take another breath. "I'll think about it," I said. "But I'm just as likely to haul his ass in."
Quen's eyes closed in acknowledgment and his hand rolled palm-up in invitation. My eyes pricked again. Shit. Shit. Shit. He was slipping. His need for support had surmounted his pride. I hated this. I hated it!
Hand shaking, I slipped my warm fingers into his cool grip, feeling his fingers tighten about mine. My throat closed, and I angrily wiped at my eye. Damn it all to hell.
Quen's posture eased, and his breathing evened out. It was the oldest magic in the universe, the magic of compassion.
Dr. Anders began to pace from the window to the dresser. "It wasn't ready," she muttered. "I told him it wasn't ready. The blending had only a thirty percent success rate, and the linkages were weak at best. This wasn't my fault! He should have waited!"
Quen squeezed my hand, and his face crinkled in what I recognized as a smile. He thought she was funny.
Trent left the sunken area, and I relaxed. "No one is blaming you," Trent said, a hand on her arm in solace. He hesitated, then said without emotion, "Why don't you wait outside."
Surprised, I turned to see her indignant shock. "Oh, she's pissed," I whispered so Quen would know, getting my fingers squeezed in return. But I think she heard me, too, since she stared at me with a prune face for an entire three seconds, fumbling for words before she turned on a heel. Pace stiff, she went to the door. There was a flush of drums and light, then the soft smothering of darkness returned. Takata's base thrummed through it like a pulse.
Trent stepped into the lowered pit of Quen's bedroom. In a fast motion of anger, he shoved a piece of expensive equipment off a low cart. The noise of it hitting the floor shocked me as much as his unexpected show of frustrated anger, and I stared as he sat down where it had been to put his elbows on his knees and drop his head into his cupped hands. Trent had once sat and watched his father die, too.
I felt my face blank as I saw him raw and stripped down to the pain in his soul. He was young, afraid, and watching yet another person who had raised him dying. All his power, wealth, privilege, and illegal bio labs couldn't stop it. He wasn't used to being helpless, and it tore at him.
Quen's eyes had opened at the crash, and I found them waiting for me when I turned to him. "This is why you're here," he said, confusing me. Quen's attention slid to Trent, then back to me. "Trent's a good man," he said as if he wasn't sitting right there. "But he's a businessman, living and dying by numbers and percentages. He's got me in the ground already. Fighting this with him is a losing battle. You believe in the eleven percent, Rachel." He took an arduous breath, his lungs moving in an exaggerated motion. "I need that."
The long speech had winded him, and as he labored to catch his breath in wet inhalations, I held his hand tighter, remembering my father. My jaw gritted and my throat closed as I heard the truth in his words. "Not this time, Quen," I said, feeling a headache start and forcing my grip to ease. "I'm not going to sit here and watch you die. All you have to do is see the sunrise, and you're home free."
It was what Dr. Anders had said, and unlike Trent, I saw it as a real possibility. Hell, I didn't believe in the eleven percent, I lived on it.
"It's not your fault, Sa'han," Quen said, his gravelly voice carrying a softer pain. "It's a mindset, and I need her. Because as much as it looks otherwise…I want to live."
His face riven, Trent stood. I watched him rise out of the sunken area and walk away, pitying him. I could help Quen—he could not. The door opened and shut, letting in a sliver of life before the uncertain darkness that hid the future cocooned us again in a waiting warmth and smothering stillness. Waiting.
We were alone. I looked at Quen's dark hand in mine and saw the strength in it. The coming battle would be fought by both the mind and the body, but it was the soul where the balance lay. "You took something," I said, my heart pounding at the chance that he might actually talk to me. "Something Dr. Anders was working on. Was it genetic? Why?"
Quen's eyes were bright, still seeing around corners. Taking a breath that it hurt to hear, he blinked at me, refusing to answer.
Frustrated, I took his grip more firmly. "Fine, you son of a bitch," I swore. "I'll hold your stupid-ass hand, but you're not going to die." God, give us the eleven percent. Please? Just this once? I hadn't been able to save my dad. I hadn't been able to save Peter. I hadn't been able to save Kisten, and the guilt of his dying to keep me alive was enough to bring me sobbing to my knees.
Not this time. Not this man.
"It doesn't matter if I live or die," he rasped. "But seeing me through this is the only…way you'll find…the truth," he rasped, his body clenching in pain. It was getting worse. His bird-bright eyes fixed on mine, and the hurt in him was obvious. "How bad do you want to know?" he taunted as the sweat beaded on his forehead.
"Bastard," I almost snarled as I dabbed it away, and he smiled through the pain. "You son of a bitch bastard."
Twenty-one
My lower back hurt, and my arms. They were crossed to serve as a pillow as I lay slumped forward in my chair with my upper body draped on Quen's bed. I was just resting my eyes while Quen had another span of time where he could breathe without my encouragement. It was late, and so very, very quiet.
Quiet? Adrenaline pulsed through me and I jerked upright. I'd fallen asleep. Damn it! I thought in panic, my gaze going to Quen. His horrible tearing breaths had ceased, and guilt twisted in me as I thought he had died while I slept—until I realized he didn't have the waxy hue of the dead, but a soft color.
He's still alive, I thought with relief, reaching to shake him back into breathing as I had numerous times that night. The cessation of his labored breathing must have woken me.
But my outstretched hand stopped and tears threatened when I saw his chest rise and fall in an easy motion. Slumping back into the leather wing-back chair, I sent my attention to the wide sliding door that led to the patio. The moss and stones, hazy with the reflected sunlight, grew blurry. It was morning, and damn it all to hell, he was going to make it. Eleven percent chance my ass. He had done it. If he had crossed the eleven percent barrier, fifty was nothing.
Sniffing, I wiped my eyes. There was the softest rattle in Quen's breathing, and his sheets were sweat soaked. His black hair was stuck to his skull and he looked dehydrated despite the IV, wan with stress wrinkles, making him appear old. But he was alive.
"I hope it was worth it, Quen," I whispered, still not knowing what he had done to himself or why Trent blamed me. I fumbled in my bag for a tissue, forced to use a nasty one with lint all over it. Jenks hadn't shown up, and I hoped he was okay. There was absolutely no sound anywhere. The thump of the music was gone, and I could feel the peace that had settled over Trent's compound. By the light coming from the patio, it looked a shade after sunrise. I had to stop waking up at this hour. It was just insane.
Dropping the tissue in the trash, I carefully scooted my chair from Quen's bed. The soft sound of the legs bumping against my discarded shoes seemed loud, but Quen remained unmoving. His night had been an ugly, painful ordeal.
I was cold, and with my arms wrapped about myself, I tottered out of the sunken pit and headed for the light. The outside pulled at me. I took a last look at Quen to assure myself that he was breathing and then carefully unlocked the patio door and pushed it aside with a swoosh of sound.
Birdsong filtered in, and the cold sharpness of frost. The clean scent filled my lungs to instantly wash out the warmth and darkness of the room behind me. A second look back, and I stepped outside only to jerk to a surprised halt when I ran into the spider-web touch of sticky silk. Disgusted, I waved my arms to clear the doorway of the delicate but effective pixy and fairy deterrent.
"Sticky silk," I muttered as I brushed it from my hair. I thought Trent should get over his pixy paranoia and admit he had an eerie attraction to them, like every other pure-blood elf I'd met. So he liked pixies. I liked double-crunch ice cream, but you didn't see me avoiding it in the grocery store. My thoughts drifted to Bis in the belfry and being able to hear and feel the city's ley lines when he touched me. No, that wasn't the same at all.
Arms wrapped about me in the chill, I watched the steam from my breath catch the sun. The light felt thin and the sky looked transparent. I could smell coffee somewhere, and I gingerly rubbed the soft beginnings of scarring on my neck. My hand dropping, I breathed deep and pressed my feet into the rough stone the patio was tiled with. Dampness soaked my socks, but I didn't care. Last night had been awful. The stuff of nightmares and torture.
I honestly hadn't expected Quen to survive. I still didn't believe he had. After the third time Dr. Anders had stuck her long nose in, I had escorted her out with a twisted arm, telling her if she came back, I was going to break her toes off and jam them up her ass. Quen had gotten a kick out of that. It had kept him fighting for about a half hour. After that, it got really bad.
My eyes closed, and I felt a prickling in my nose from the hint of tears. He had suffered longer and harder than anyone I'd ever seen, endured more than I'd thought possible. He hadn't wanted to give in, but the pain and fatigue had been so great…I shamed him into taking just one more breath, bullied him, coaxed him. Anything to keep him alive and tortured though his muscles ached and each breath tore my soul as it tore his body. I reminded him to breathe when he forgot or pretended to forget, disgracing his honor until he took one more. Then another, and another—enduring the torment and shunning the peace that death offered.
My stomach hurt, and my eyes opened. Quen would hate me. The things I said…Hatred had kept him alive. No wonder he hadn't wanted Trent in the room. Quen could hate me if he wanted, but somehow…I didn't think he would. He wasn't stupid. If I had truly hated him and meant what I'd said, I could have walked out of the room and let him die.
Focus blurry, I stared at the canopy of bare branches above me to the pale blue of an autumn morning. Though Quen had suffered and won, I was still feeling an inner pain, made worse by my utter exhaustion, both physical and mental. My dad had died the same way when I had been thirteen, and I recognized an ugly ember of anger growing in me that my dad had given up while Quen hadn't. But then the anger shifted to guilt. I had tried to keep my dad alive and failed; what kind of a daughter can keep a stranger alive and not be able to save her own dad?
Watching Quen struggle had brought back every little detail of holding my dad's hand as he died. The same pain, the same labored breathing…the same everything.
I blinked, and my focus on the trees cleared in a sudden crystalline thought. My dad had died exactly the same way. I was there. I saw it.
Socks catching on the rough stone, I turned to the dark room past the open door. Quen had said it didn't matter if he lived or died, but to find the truth, I had to see him through it. He wouldn't break his word by telling me why my dad had died, but he had showed me the connection by forcing me to endure his struggle with him.
The blood drained from my face, and I went colder still. Dr. Anders hadn't concocted whatever Quen had taken, but I'd be wi
lling to wager she'd been modifying it so it would work better. And my dad had died from an earlier version of it.
As if in a dream, I walked from the luminous morning and slipped back into the cocooning warmth of shadow. I left the door open so Quen's unconscious would hear the birds and know he was alive. He didn't need me anymore, and he had shown me what he intended to. What Trent had forbade him to say.
"Thank you, Quen," I whispered as I passed the bed, my pace never slowing. Trent. Where was Trent? He had to know. Trent's father had died first, so whatever had killed my dad, it had been Trent who made the decision to administer it.
Tense, I opened the door and heard the murmur of distant voices. The common area was empty but for the intern on the couch, his mouth hanging open as he snored. Silent in my socks, I went to the walkway and looked down on the great room.
The comforting sound of conversation and sporadic clinks drew my attention to the stage. It was empty but for the band roadies packing up, doing more talking than anything else. The morning sun lit the aftermath of the party with its scattered glasses, crumb-smeared plates, crumpled cocktail napkins, and decorations in orange and red. The ward on the window was back up, shimmering faintly, and in the far corner by the window, I found Trent.
He was sitting in silent vigil, still wearing the baggy clothes he'd had on last night. I remembered that the big leather chair and small round table beside it was his spot, near the huge fireplace and set where he could see the waterfall that burbled down the cliffs and encircled his backyard pool and deck. Though the rest of the room was a mess, the five-by-eight area he was in was clean and vacuumed. A cup of something steamed beside him.
My chest clenched. Grip loose on the rail, I took the stairs fast in my socks, bent on finding out what he had given my dad that killed him—and why.
"Trent."
The man jerked, pulling his attention from where he had been watching the water ripple on his pool. I wove through the couches and chairs, ignoring the smell of spilled alcohol and hors d'oeuvres crushed into the carpet. Alarm cascaded over Trent as he straightened. Fear almost. But he wasn't afraid of me. He was afraid of what I would say.