Soul and Blade (13 page)

13. SLOW IT DOWN

T
he house has morphed into the one in the French countryside, the one I use as a trigger to help me leave the mind runs. It’s telling me it’s time to go. My favorite nun is there, sitting beside me. She covers my hand in hers, just as she did when I was a little girl. “We are not ashamed of you, Jane.” She says it so calmly.

It is one of my greatest fears, the nuns thinking less of me for the path I have chosen. “We know you have done the very best you could with the life you had.” She lifts her weathered face and smiles. “But now you know what you must do.” She turns into flower petals right before my eyes and blows off, out the open window. Yet the warmth where her hand touched mine lingers.

Little Rory sits next to me on the other side, stuffing in far too big a bite of mashed potatoes for such a small boy. “Just like my ma made them.”

A peaceful feeling sweeps over me as I lean his way, whispering, “If I go, will ya be okay?”

He looks confused. “Why in God’s name would ya want to go anywhere but here?”

The answer isn’t there straightaway so I pause, giving it a moment of thought. “I don’t belong here. This is yer place now. I spent my childhood here and now it’s time for me to go.”

“I don’t want ya to go. I like it when yer here.”

I glance about the room at all the other children and sisters. “But yer safest here. The big Rory can’t come here. He doesn’t like the light.”

His nose wrinkles. “He never comes to where I am, and when I try to go to him, he keeps me away. We never see each other. Not since he let the bad things in.”

I kiss his cheek. “Yer safe here.” I get up from the table and walk to the bathroom. It looks the same as it did in our townhouse when Rory and I were dating, if you could call it that, in the last run.

I drop to my knees and fish the grate off the heater vent. I slide the box with the four-leaf clover on it from the hole and stare at it.

There are so many things I don’t remember about my life before and the little glimpses only ever started coming when I did mind runs. No matter what terrible things occurred here in the minds of bad people, I learned more about myself inside the minds of others than I ever could have on my own. I can never begrudge the fact I came.

I lift the lid and whisper, “Tell me about the swans, the way the swans circle the stars and shoot across the sky.”

Everything turns black—not the response I expect. Yet inside Rory’s mind it never is.

Instead of swirling and the confusion that comes with leaving a mind, I sit in a darkness that echoes and yet is silent. The sound I hear in the echo is my own breath and heartbeat.

I close my eyes and submit to defeat. “You are better at this than I am,” I mutter into the darkness.

“I know.” Rory is here. “The best part about ya coming into my head this time is that I was able to turn the tables on ya. I was able to venture into
yer
head.”

I flinch, realizing why it seemed like he wasn’t aware of me inside him. He was, but he just didn’t care what I found out. He was never planning on hiding anything. It was about finding things in my head. “You’re lying.”

“I’m not, Jane. Can we be more original than falling on the old ways of creating doubt and playing mind games back and forth? You’ve seen my darkest secrets—all the nooks and crannies. Ya know what kind of person I am, what makes me tick. So end the bullshit and let’s be real.”

I open my eyes to find we are still in the dark.

“I am going to take ya on a tour.” His voice is confident and cocky. It can only mean one thing. He is about to do something dastardly. “Show ya the lies in your head.”

“Lead away,” I offer, refusing to fight about this. I am ready. The moment he makes himself vulnerable, I am going to gut him like a fish. I don’t care if we die in here together.

A warm hand takes mine, floating me through the void. There’s nothing but his warm hand through what feels like eternity. I squeeze and try pulling him to me, but it doesn’t work that way. He controls everything. He pulls me along until we enter a tunnel—I can tell by the way my breath echoes against the closeness of the walls around us.

The same door I used to get into his mind materializes, surrounded by light. I feel weaker now than I did the first time I saw it. I was ready then. I’m tired now.

He’s suddenly right beside me. “You ready?”

I nod, not understanding what I am ready for or what we are doing. He opens the door, blinding me with the light from the other side.

I wince and shield my face, struggling to see what’s before me.

When my eyes clear and the brightness fades, I smile. I can’t even help myself. It’s my mom. I would recognize her anywhere. She looks exactly the same as she did in my faded and blurry memory, only now her face is perfectly clear. She waves and I run to her, no longer attached to Rory.

She hugs me and the smell is the same. It’s home. Lilacs or some sort of flower. And her perfume.

She laughs and squeezes me as my father wraps himself around me. He is the perfect mix of deodorant and laundry detergent and the smell a man has that is his own. I close my eyes and drink them in.

It is the moment I have waited my entire life for.

Tears stream down my cheeks, and even though I know it is fake and a trap, I don’t care. I know them.

I open my eyes and see her. She is me, only her eyes match and she is a child still. She was frozen as a child in my mind, never aging a minute more.

Andrea, my twin sister, smiles wide, reaching for me. I cling to my parents, not certain if the dream will end with a trap if I take Andrea’s hand. Binx is there; he swirls around her feet, rubbing and purring. I take it as a sign from my mind that this is safe.

I step to her, wrapping my entire hand around hers. She takes my hand and flips it over, showing me that the pattern in the lines on our palms matches perfectly. I don’t know what that means, maybe that she has lived a whole life with me, sharing in my experiences.

“We are the same person, you and I,” she whispers.

I nod, looking down on her and wondering if we might have been the very best of friends if the accident had not happened.

I look back at my mother and father and smile, still crying silently. “Where did we live?”

They shake their heads. “It doesn’t matter, Jane. What matters is that you are whole and happy. Your life is there, on the outside. This isn’t real. It never was. And chasing us in the minds of others will never bring us back.”

My mother’s words burn inside me. They are true and yet they hurt more than anything.

Rory shakes his head. “Ya could stay here, with me. They are here, inside me and you. We can live here.” He snaps his fingers and we are in a home with flowered wallpaper and fancy couches.

The house in France. Rory has been in my mind and seen all the little places I hid and kept to myself.

“Ya have saved me, Jane. I knew ya might. The moment I met ya, I suspected if one girl could save me, it was ya. I knew if I could get ya to love me the way I love ya, we could be happy, really happy in here. No one understands yer pain like I do.”

I grimace, not believing his bullshit for a second.

Done with it all, I turn and hug my sister, whispering in her ear, “I miss you.” She trembles a bit and nods. She doesn’t speak, because I don’t know what I want her to say. They say the things I want them to.

I let go and walk back to my parents. They wrap around me, whispering all the things a little orphan needs to hear. “We are so proud of you and we wish we had been able to stay. We love you, Janey. We always have.”

I blink and the world fuzzes into a mess, everything blurred and oddly shaped. I let them go and walk to the cat, the one who has had my heart wholly since the beginning.

“If ya leave, ya won’t remember them. They’re in here, in my mind. Ya won’t have new memories, just the glimpse I showed ya.”

I nod, fully aware of the rules of the run.

He moves quickly, pulling a knife and sliding it along my sister’s throat. “I will torture them, if you don’t stay.”

I bend and pick up my cat, shrugging. “Like you said, I won’t remember this. This is a glimpse you gave me of a lie you made up based on my memories.” A slow smile crosses my lips. “You cannot hurt the dead, Rory. Just like the dead cannot hurt you.”

I snuggle into Binx, pressing my face into his fur and whispering my secret words, “Tell me about the swans, the way the swans circle the stars and shoot across the sky.”

He screams, my sister screams, I can smell the blood mixing with the air as everything swirls and falls apart. I grip my cat and in a moment he’s gone too.

I blink and the hospital-exam-room lights above me make it hard to see. Angie is there, worried and speaking, but I cannot hear the things she says. My hearing hasn’t come back into the present just yet.

I lift my hands and pull off the headphones and the tabs stuck to my face. Hunger gnaws at me, but there is only one face I want to see—the man who was a monster in my brain for a half a second.

I need to see the real Dash.

I shiver, searching the room for him, but he’s not there. Only Angie and a team plucking sensors. They each speak over me and yet to me, but I don’t comprehend it all.

I take a deep breath and nod. This is the real world. I can taste the difference in the air.

14. BILLY, DON’T BE A HERO

T
he sidewalk traffic moves faster than I remember it. Everyone is in a hurry, and if you just sat and watched, you could feel like you were still in a dream.

“He’s still not taking yer calls?” Angie asks over her giant latte.

“No.” What is there to add to that?

“Has he been by the townhouse?”

I glance down, furrowing my brow. “He must have been by while I was at the lab. His stuff is gone. It was gone when I got home from the mind run.”

She drums her gel nails, a new beauty thing she’s doing since she’s single. They click when she types like little tap shoes on the ends of her fingers. I sort of like the sound of them, but I know I would instantly have to pick them off. I don’t like things that are so permanent. I’ve worn falsies and those long eyelashes for undercover missions, and the moment I got to undo all the hard work the makeup team put in, I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Did you and Dash date?” I finally say it. I’ve been plotting asking it for the two days it’s been since I left Rory.

“No.” She scowls, giving me a look. “Rory was a bad man, Jane. That’s all that ya can take from that. The Russian is on the list of names that was found in the secret room at the brothel. Antoine found him. He was on there as ‘G. Rusky.’ Giant Rusky. His flights to Mexico with his cousins coincide with the dates at the hotel in the heaps of shite they found.”

“They went into the little room? Did Antoine get to go in there?”

She smiles, but looks confused, like I was there for it all. “Of course. The whole team out west was in there. It was a gold mine of terrible things. The names and dates are shocking. Presidents and kings and princes and prime ministers and clergymen. Ya know that. It was awful. The names of some of the girls shocked us as well. Young starlets who then had a sudden surge to fame.”

“Creepy.”

“Truly creepy.”

“Can I ask you the weirdest question ever?”

Her cheeks flushed with color. “I don’t care what he showed ya in there. I don’t care to know, I guess.”

I want to ask her about being screwed in the office supply room while Rory choked her for pleasure. But she’s right. It doesn’t matter.

“Does any of it make ya think less of me, Janey?”

“No.” I sigh and ask her the other thing I wanted to know. “What did he say when you told him I was in again?”

“Who?”

“Dash.”

She shakes her head. “It wasn’t me that told Dash. He showed up, angry and ornery, and that’s how I found out he knew ya had gone back into Rory’s head. He was livid with ya and said that ya had tricked him into believing ya were done. That if ya couldn’t care about yer own well-being, he might as well not care either. But he did stick around long enough to help the engineers with some of the fine-tuning, and then packed his office. The engineers were the bastards who outed us to him. They called him to ask some advice before I came in with the plan. After ya were under, Dash told the president that he was done. He walked out and that was that. He never came back.”

“Then he went to my place and took all his stuff.” I glance down, hating myself. “The sad thing is, I never even really learned anything. Other than that good Rory ended when he started the mind running. He was clean before that.”

She sighs. “I know.” Her gray-blue eyes look riddled with guilt. “I never should have pushed him forward. Dash asked me not to and I didn’t listen. I said he was choosing the girl and I was choosing the guy and that was that. I trained the girls and he chose who to promote from the pile. Well, all that was left at the end of the pile was ya. So his choice was easy. For me Rory was the one because we had been carrying on. I saw him as a troubled young man and a brilliant agent. I never saw insane.”

“Did you have an affair during the testing?”

She nods, more shame filling her eyes. “Aye, we did. We’d had an affair from the very start. Second day in, we were hiding in the office supply room.”

The room little Rory had showed me.

“Did you regret it while dating or only after we discovered he was actually evil?”

“Only when we discovered his hidden agenda. He’d been placed on special duty with the CIA and FBI, outside the operation we were running. His absences were fully explained. He never had an issue with his double life. I think he was the very example of what we were trying to avoid. He’s the sort of man who takes on the personalities of the people he’s inside.” Her eyes are like staring out at the sea on a gray day.

“I’m sorry, Angie. I wish I’d known too. But I agree, I never saw anything that might have made me think he was doing what he was.”

She shrugs. “He’ll be in jail the rest of his life now. And batshit crazy to go along with it.”

I furrow my brow. “What?”

“Oh aye, the president has deemed him no longer a person of use and has decided he will be dealt with in the military courts instead, totally sealed from the press and public. He will be placed in solitary and spend the rest of his days in the brig, I imagine. He never died from the coma, which would have been lucky for him.”

I almost wince and I almost feel bad for not just killing him. But he would have killed me, we both know that. “That’s a terrible fate, sitting in a cell going crazy.”

“Not one he didn’t bring upon himself.” She looks like she might be sick just talking about it. “The girls in those cells earned him this fate.”

“Yup.” I don’t want to talk about it. I get up and drop cash on the table. “Well, I have the rest of my debriefing to endure still, with the ever-lovely El Presidente. He is making me go through even the smallest of details.”

“Disturbing and yet thorough, I like it.” She gets up, leaving her coffee completely full. She hasn’t been the same since Rory was arrested, she might never be, but at least she’s amazing at faking it. “When is your last day?”

“The moment I am freed from the debriefing. They will have me on standby, in case new things come up. But I am being allowed to either return to active duty or retire and come back to the program on contractor status. I will be part of the mind-running training as a teacher. I can come and go as I please, based on contracts I’ll have to renew every two months. In case it’s too much.”

“Wow! They never even offered me that.”

I crack a grin. “You left crying and cussing everyone out.”

She snorts. “Aye, I did. Damned project from hell.”

“How’s the new one going for you?”

“Dull as balls, but I can do the same sort of schedule as a contractor. Come and go, and work when I need to. It’s all research at this level; they don’t have any trials up and running yet. They don’t even believe it’s one hundred percent possible.” That makes her laugh. Me too.

I wrap my arms around her and breathe her in. “Message me when you get back to Scotland.”

“Come and visit me.”

I nod, actually contemplating that as a possibility. I haven’t been in ages and the idea of relaxing for a couple of weeks while pub-crawling with Angie is enticing.

She pulls away and I catch a glimpse of the tears on her cheeks. “Kiss that bugger of a cat.”

“I will.” I wave, but she doesn’t see me. She’s out the door before I can really get my hand up. I almost don’t trust the quickness of her pace—faster than she normally moves. I can’t help but question everything. How do I know that I’m really out of the run?

Dash left. That’s how.

It makes perfect sense. I prove his reasons for leaving every couple of minutes. Here I am standing in a coffeehouse wondering if what I saw my friend do was real or not.

I fear that this will be the entirety of my life.

I stroll out, moving slowly on purpose to see how it feels. People passing me on the street give me a weird look.

I love the real world.

When I get home that night, I am spent. I have gone over every second of my time spent in Rory’s head, including the forced blow job and the way I was excited about seeing the nuns from my childhood.

It’s all surreal and confusing—there’s no way I can catch up.

But the moment I get inside the house, the little pitter-patter of a fat cat’s feet lift the corners of my lips. I drop to my knees and drag him into my arms. I know he wanted to rub against me, but I need to smell him and feel him against my cheek. I hold him tight until he stiffens and I know I’m about to be bitten. I place him down gently and run my hand along his back.

“I missed you too.”

He purrs and arches, rubbing his body against my hand, until there’s a knock at the door. Then he runs off, peeking around the corners.

I get up and open it, surprised to see Mrs. Starling. “How was the trip?” Her grin flickers, but rebounds as if to convince me that she’s cool with the danger of my job.

“Great.”
Fucking horrible
is what I want to say, but she’s old and she never swears around me. And I cuss way too much.

“Dash came by. He gave me the key and asked if I could watch his royal highness, Sir Binxy Bears.”

“Thank you. I meant to stop in the other day and say that, but I got busy.”

She waves a hand. “There’s a fresh lasagna in the freezer, and I popped a chicken Parm in the fridge today. I had a bit of a week of cooking to avoid the sadness over a death in the family, a cousin of mine.”

“I’m so sorry.” To my ears, my sorries always lack the genuine touch an emotional person might have.

“No. He was old. His time came, as will all of ours. I was just sad because it felt like I was facing my own mortality a bit.” She offers a quick wave and nod. “Tell Dash I hope he enjoys London. It’s beautiful this time of year.”

She turns and walks back to her own house. I hate that she is alone and old. I close the door and stare at my cat.

“Fuck.”

I realize then that I am going to have the same fate. I am going to be a quirky old lady with cats and no one to love me. I will be old and alone. It won’t be today or tomorrow, but one day I will be her. But worse. She had love. She had a marriage. She had a man.

I had one for a minute, but I lost him. I lose everyone.

Being a hero is a lonely job.

I wish I could have been a girl in a sundress and a wide-brimmed hat at a polo match, laughing like the rest of them.

I sigh and think about walking to the bathroom to run a bath.

The two days of debriefing have at least created a distraction. Now in my little townhouse, silence occupies most of the space. And then there’s me. Me, and the bed I have made—lonely and uncomfortable and not the bed I might have wanted now that I have it.

I force myself up, force myself to the kitchen, and force myself to heat up food I will force down my throat. I can bathe afterward. It’ll make me feel better.

At every turn I expect him. Every moment I think I hear him. The hot chicken Parm, my favorite food, and the cat rubbing against my ankles used to be enough.

It all used to be enough.

But now I am here and Dash is gone and this is not enough.

I could settle and be fine with it. I could force myself to live with it. I could make my bed every day and sleep every night. I am a survivor. It’s about the worst thing a person can be.

And I don’t want to be that.

Dash is the first thing I want. I don’t remember wanting a single thing the way I want him. Even Binx, who just showed up one day as a tiny, starving baby kitten in need of love. He foolishly showed up here, where love had never lived.

But I loved him in my best possible way. Sometimes it’s more like a serial stalker sort of love, the kind where I obsess over him. Maybe it’s not healthy, but I don’t know any other kind.

Dash is the same.

He showed up and he saw the bed I slept in, the one I made myself. It was built by blocking everything out and pretending I was fine. And he didn’t judge my bed and he didn’t care that I was emotionally stunted.

He accepted.

And when he told me there was one thing I couldn’t do, I shouldn’t do, I did it anyway. Knowing he believed it would ruin our relationship. It would ruin me.

The mind run was a stupid gamble, but it did work out. I am freed.

I get up, grabbing Binx and hauling him to his carrier, the worst torture I can ever inflict upon him. He ate the cloth one Dash had bought him, so I got him a plastic one. I pick up my cell phone and dial the one man I can always count on to help me through everything, Antoine.

“Hello, Miss Jane. How art thou?” Antoine asks in the annoying tone he uses when he’s gaming and I’m interrupting. That happens a lot, since he is usually gaming and waiting for me or one of his other agents to call in with a crazy request that has seconds to be solved.

“I need you to tell me where Dash lives. Where his big house is, the one he wants me to move to.” I had literally forced him to keep it separate from me and refused to go to his fancy houses since I discovered they existed.

“Why do you want his address?” He chuckles into the phone. “Have you fucked that one up already, Spears?”

“You know it.”

“I do. As heartbreaking as this is for me, I actually predicted you would blow this brutally. He is rich and fancy on a good day, and you are—you. How did it end?” he asks, but his mind is still midgame. He is talking and gaming, the very worst sin as far as phone etiquette goes.