Life. More life.
Now they’re in their bathrobes, sitting on the small balcony of their room, watching wind-wiped fog blow through the branches of the bent Monterey pines lining the shore, listening to the roar of the ocean waves, sipping wine like something out of a commercial featuring people who’ve never killed anyone. Somewhere out there, Graydon security guards are monitoring their every move, possibly even staying at this bed-and-breakfast. She spotted a few that afternoon on Main Street. But that, like so many other strange and extraordinary things, is a fact of their lives now. And security’s probably a good thing, given the feud Cole’s decided to start with his business partners over her defiance. More importantly, just for the length of this trip, she and Luke have agreed. No shoptalk.
Shoptalk. That’s how they’ve encircled and walled off the horrors they witnessed a few weeks before. Let’s see how long that works.
“I feel bad for your grandmother,” Luke finally says.
“That’s the thought sex leaves you with?”
“No, silly. Wine. We’re drinking wine.”
“Oh, ’cause she was sober?”
“She never got to do this.”
“She could do this; she just couldn’t do the wine part.”
“I know, but it’s probably not the same.”
“You know what she used to say to me?”
“Stay away from that Luke kid ’cause he’s dog shit.”
“She didn’t have to say that. We all hated you when I was in high school.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“And confessed. Anyway, she said to me that after she first quit drinking, she’d look at somebody having a glass of wine in a restaurant and she’d kind of feel . . . I don’t know, like, she’d grieve it for a second. Then she’d realize, I never had a glass of wine the way that person’s having one right now. Just one nice, pleasant glass of wine. She’d say, if I had one, I’d have ten and wake up the next morning with no memory of what happened. So when I looked at the woman having a glass of wine in the restaurant and mourned for it, I was really mourning for something I’d never had at all. So I stopped.”
“Profound.”
“She could be that, for sure,” she says.
“So, um, not sure that was the best lead-in, but I brought a bottle of your favorite Cakebread Cellars. It’s in that canvas tote bag from the Copper Pot.”
“Yeah, what a lead-in. You want to open it now?”
“Yeah, this one’s empty.” Luke upends the open bottle and pours so much into his glass it fills almost to the rim.
“Well, it is now,” she says.
“Just get the Cakebread. I don’t feel like going out. If we get hungry, I’ll go grab us something.”
“Fine.”
Even though she could swear she didn’t see it earlier, the canvas tote bag he just mentioned is on top of the television. When she goes to grab the neck of the bottle, she notices something off about the shape. That’s when she sees the ring box taped to the outside of the bottle’s neck, right below the cork. Her heart is racing as she tears it free. When she looks up, she sees Luke is on his feet, standing in the deck door, his eyes as wide and alert as when he first stepped into the back of Cyrus Mattingly’s truck.
“What a lead-in, right?” he asks.
But there’s piano-wire tension in his voice, and he’s watching her every move as if he’s afraid she’s going to bolt from the room.
“Luke . . .”
“Open it.”
She does, and the ring that glints back at her is simple and elegant. Is it the engagement ring of her dreams? There’s no telling because she’s never allowed herself the dream of even being engaged, not until recently, and so she’s never rehearsed this moment in her head, never expected it. And suddenly all the negative voices she’s held at bay during the course of this little vacation are on her in an instant, and they’re insisting her suspicions are right: she’s not meant to walk among the normal, the living. This is a gift for a normal girl who confines herself to a normal world.
“Now, though?” she asks.
It’s all she can manage to say, and when she sees Luke’s face fall, her heart lurches and she actually brings one hand to her mouth, as if her words have left a stain there she should wipe way.
“When?” he asks softly. Her response knocked the wind out of him. “When we retire? When we have a normal life again? We didn’t pick normal, did we? That’s kind of why I picked you. I’ve never wanted normal. I’ve always wanted a fight, as long as it’s a good fight.”
“So I’m a fight?” she asks, voice trembling.
“No. We fight the dark together. Always. And I’ll go wherever the fight takes us, as long as I get to go with you, Charlotte Rowe.”
“Luke . . .”
He moves to her, hesitantly at first. Then when she starts to cry, he takes her in his arms gently, and she knows as she says his name again and again that what she’s really saying is life, because that’s what he is and that’s what this proposal is, and that’s why she has no choice but to say yes.
45
Tulsa, Oklahoma
Zoey Long passes her sister’s phone back so she can swipe through the photos from her vacation and Zoey can hide how badly her hands are shaking by clenching them between her knees under the table. Only once since returning home has she taken one of the pills her new friends have given her for moments like these. She speaks to the psychiatrist they’ve provided for her every night, a gentle, patient woman who’s warned her that for the foreseeable future even basic uncomfortable emotions will feel coated in a layer of tremor-inducing anxiety.
No wonder her hands are shaking. She’s been lying to her sister. Yes, she actually is leaving town on a plane later tonight, but the reason she gave for the trip is a fiction.
For the time being, she can only pretend to be enamored by Rachel’s Paris photos. The truth is, the story Rachel tells for each picture goes in one of Zoey’s ears and out the other.
She brings her bottle to her mouth. A mistake. Rachel looks up from her phone and goes still. Her hand must have shaken visibly enough for her sister to see.
“Oh, honey, is it the producer? Are you nervous?”
“Kinda, yeah. I feel bad.”
“About what?”
“Quitting on Dr. Keables the way I did.”
“Aw, fuck that, gurl. You got an opportunity. Jump on that shit. I don’t want to see my little sister working in a dentist’s office for the rest of her life. Not when she’s as talented as you.”
On the television above the bar, she glimpses the helicopter footage of Marjorie Payne’s ranch that’s now familiar to just about everyone in the country. Zoey closes her eyes, looks to the high-top table between them.
“Are you following this shit?” Rachel says. “My friend Tom is all about the Reddit thread on this one, and he thinks the woman felt so guilty one day she went out there and tried to dig up all the bodies herself and realized she couldn’t do it, so she invited the guys over who helped her and killed them all. Me, I think they did it together, like as a suicide pact or something.”
They definitely died together, Zoey thinks. And everything inside of her wants to tell her sister how close she came to being one of those bodies they discovered partially encased in concrete, but her new friends would hate that.
And her new friends are scary.
“Sorry,” Rachel says when she sees the expression on her face. “I thought you were all about that true crime stuff.”
“I’m kind of losing my taste for it, to be honest.”
“You’re not going to watch Dateline with me anymore?”
“Rachel, I will watch anything you want.”
“OK, good. Don’t go soft on me just ’cause you’re writing a bunch of romance now. How long are you going to be out there anyway?”
“A couple weeks, at first. But I’ll be back and forth. We’re going to work on putting a pilot script together and then a tre
atment for a whole series. So he wants me to stay out there until the materials are ready to go to studios and networks. Then we’ll probably have a bunch of pitch meetings, maybe meet with showrunners. So it’s going to be a while.”
“And you’re sure this guy’s not creepy? Hollywood seems creepy right now.”
Not the kind of creepy you’re thinking of, sis.
“Listen, Rachel, there’s something I really want to say to you.”
“Sure.”
“Do you remember that day at the mall when we were little and that guy dressed up as a security guard—”
“Oh, Zoey, you really got to stop beating yourself up about that. We were—”
“I know, I know. I mean, I know every time I bring it up I say that . . . But I had a moment of thinking about it recently . . .” Several tears slip free before she’s even aware they’ve filled her eyes. A moment when I thought I’d never see you again.
“Honey, are you OK?”
“I’m fine. I just . . . I’m having a moment, you know. The TV thing, it’s really exciting. And it’s just got me reflecting about a lot of stuff. And I started thinking about what you did at the mall that day, and I just thought it was so important. What you did. The way you spoke up. And it occurred to me that I’d never said what I should really say about it.”
“What’s that?”
“Thank you.”
Rachel’s not a big crier, but for some reason this little moment brings tears to her eyes as well, and Zoey thinks, Good. She’ll just think her sister’s being a big softie. And I am, but she’s got no idea why. The fact that an old photograph of Marjorie Payne has just filled the television hanging over the bar only makes it all the more surreal. That and the Graydon security guard who followed them here. He’s studying Zoey from across the bar with a concerned look. Sure, there’s probably sympathy in it, but she’s willing to bet he’s more concerned she might be spilling secrets about what she really went through while her sister was gallivanting down the Champs-Élysées with her husband.
Shedding a few tears was apparently the tension release she needed. For the rest of Rachel’s Paris stories she manages to act like the sister she was before Rachel left.
And suddenly, just sitting there, listening to Rachel talk fills her with gratitude so total she’s afraid she’ll start crying again. She’d lost her faith in that pit, came to believe that a horrible, violent death was only minutes away. And now, here she is. Every giggle and joke and curse word out of her sister’s mouth is a gift. And why should it end with Rachel? Colors. Smells. Music. All of it is a gift; she came so close to having it all pulled away.
And maybe this realization will help her accept the fact that while she wasn’t exactly thrilled by the prospect of going back to work, her new friends didn’t suggest that she quit her job; they instructed her to. And a producer isn’t flying her to the West Coast, even though he has an amazing website complete with a dummy phone number and contact email addresses, all of which appeared overnight. And she didn’t ask for the security guards that have been following her ever since she left Marjorie Payne’s ranch; they just never left.
Zoey hugs her sister long and hard as they wait for their Ubers outside the bar. But Rachel’s got no idea where Zoey’s really headed once she steps into hers. It’s not Tulsa International like she said. Instead, after she picks up her bags and her cat from her apartment, she’ll head to a private airfield—and then from there to a destination that seems shrouded in mystery even though she’s heard the name a million times before.
46
San Diego, California
Maybe it was the time she spent with her sister, or maybe it was the fact that the inevitable trip was finally underway and there was nothing else to plan or prepare for, but Zoey passed out cold the minute she sank into the Gulfstream’s comfy leather seat. She didn’t wake until the wheels touched down and she heard Boris the Destroyer meowing inside the cat carrier, probably from the change in pressure.
Now they’re taxiing across a small private airfield that looks similar to the one she took off from in Tulsa. Three Chevy Suburbans with heavily tinted windows are waiting for her like she’s the president or something. She doesn’t recognize any of the people standing next to the cars. There are a few security types who look and are dressed similar to the guys on board with her. But these guys are younger. The one standing in front has really thick sandy-blond hair, and he’s dressed in ratty jeans and a T-shirt for some band that looks like it hasn’t put out an album in years. His face seems vaguely familiar, but she can’t quite place him.
The stairs descend, and the guards gesture for her to go first, one of them taking her suitcase. Before she reaches the bottom, the kid in the T-shirt is coming toward her, taking the cat carrier out of her hands.
“Hey, I’m Bailey. Is there a cat in here?”
“Yes.”
“I’m allergic, but I’ll carry him anyway because you’re probably kind of freaked out right now.”
“I’m glad someone said it.”
“Excited about your new job?”
“I wasn’t really looking for a new job, but they gave me some options and this sounded like the best one.”
“Yeah, that seems like their style. By the way, Luke’s my brother. The guy who helped rescue you.”
He must be referring to the guy who was waiting for her and Charley back on the ranch. Now she realizes why the guy before her looks familiar. “I remember him. So this is, like, a family business?”
“Sort of. Maybe. I mean, sure.”
They reach the first Suburban and Bailey places the cat carrier in the cargo bay. The guards follow suit with her bags. Well, at least she’s being treated well. But Bailey’s stopped with his hand on the door handle to the back seat, studying her closely. She’s about to break the silence by asking him if she’d said something wrong when he says, “Have they told you what you’re going to be doing?”
“Basically, yeah.”
“It’s disturbing. Like really disturbing, especially considering what you just went through. I mean, I can go basically anywhere on the internet I want. I have to go to dark places and I collect massive amounts of data, but I can’t go through it all myself, and sometimes we need actual human intelligence to interpret it. That’s what you’d be doing if you go this route.”
“If I can do anything to stop someone else from going through what I went through, I’ll do it.” They’re unrehearsed, these words, and come out of her with a strength that convinces her that maybe she really did pick the best option. Maybe this is the best way to let her new employers ensure she remain silent about every impossible thing she’s witnessed.
Bailey nods, then smiles. “All right, then. Let’s hunt some monsters.”
As she steps into the Suburban, Zoey wonders for the first time if the inevitable result of mortgaging your life to write books about magic is that you’ll eventually cross paths with someone who seems to practice it.
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
ZYPRAXON. An experimental drug invented by Dr. Noah Turlington that produces bursts of incredible physical strength and nearly instantaneous healing in animal test subjects, but only when the drug is triggered by a stimulus that terrifies the subject. All attempts to replicate the results of animal tests in human subjects caused the human subject’s swift and gruesome death. With one notable exception—Charlotte Rowe.
PARADRENALINE. Partially resembling a hormone, paradrenaline is believed responsible for the bursts of incredible strength and rapid healing Zypraxon causes. It is a never-before-seen chemical compound found only in the bodies of those in whom Zypraxon has been triggered. For paradrenaline to remain active and extractable from the subject, the subject must survive well after the trigger event. The medical implications of paradrenaline are vast and extend far beyond its connection to Zypraxon.
TRIGGER EVENT. An event or stimulus of any kind that produces an acute sense of panic and terror on the part of the human subj
ect. Only events of this magnitude are capable of causing Zypraxon to trigger the synthesis of paradrenaline in the subject’s bloodstream. Typically, subjects must feel as if their lives are in immediate and mortal jeopardy or experience intense and almost debilitating physical pain.
TRIGGER WINDOW. Following a trigger event, the subject experiences incredible physical strength and nearly instantaneous healing for a period of three hours. The window is slightly shorter in nonhuman subjects.
THE CONSORTIUM. An alliance of several defense industry contractors and the CEO of Graydon Pharmaceuticals. It has been convened only twice. Once, when Dr. Noah Turlington, then an employee of Graydon Pharmaceuticals, first brought Zypraxon’s implications to the attention of its CEO, Cole Graydon. And second, after a covert and unsanctioned field test determined Charlotte Rowe was the only human test subject in which Zypraxon functioned effectively. The Consortium’s goal is to ensure absolute secrecy around all tests of both Zypraxon and paradrenaline, while also providing the vast funding required for the experiments in a manner that does not raise red flags on the accounting ledgers of their individual companies. In exchange, members are allowed to exploit the benefits of Zypraxon and paradrenaline that prove relevant to their specific industries.
PROJECT BLUEBIRD 1.0. First initiated to discover if Zypraxon could be used in humans, it was hastily terminated by Cole Graydon after all four volunteer test subjects went lycan. The test subjects were all male with backgrounds in military special operations.
GOING LYCAN. The phrase used to describe the gruesome acts of self-mutilation the majority of human test subjects performed when Zypraxon was triggered in their bloodstream. The majority of these acts culminate in the human subject targeting their own head in a fatally destructive manner.
PROJECT BLUEBIRD 2.0. Initiated after it was discovered that Charlotte Rowe was the only human in whom Zypraxon seemed to work properly. In exchange for the opportunity to conduct field tests that generate extractable paradrenaline in Rowe’s bloodstream, The Consortium finances and provides the logistical support for Rowe to hunt serial killers, posing as a potential victim to ensure abduction to their kill sites so that she might use the resulting trigger events to overpower them and leave them exposed to the arrival of law enforcement.
Blood Victory: A Burning Girl Thriller (The Burning Girl) Page 29
