Red Knight Falling (12 page)

TWENTY-ONE

Mikki. She had targeted Kevin, intent on burning him alive. When she did it to Abrams, back at the lodge, there were less than five seconds between the glow and the ignition.

I made a desperate call to my magic, turning my body into a magnet, a conduit, sucking every atom of elemental water from the air around us and channeling it like a river through my heart. I flung out my open hand toward Kevin, an aquamarine glow coursing from my fingertips and washing over him, fighting Mikki’s power.

Mikki fought back. I could feel her pushing against me, a mental tug-of-war with Kevin’s life hanging in the balance. And she was winning.

“Jessie,” I gasped, “she has to be somewhere close.”

Jessie stashed her empty gun and plucked mine from my other hand, crouching low as she bolted from cover. Hunting Mikki down across the battlefield while the gunfight raged on.

Kevin curled into a ball, arms wrapped around his bent knees and head tucked down, squeezing his eyes shut as Mikki and I dueled for his fate. I could feel her bearing down on me like a wave of raw pressure, a hundred-ton weight pressing on my skull and threatening to crack it like a walnut. She was all force, no finesse—but right now, force was all she needed. I kept up the flow of energy, dousing Kevin in primal water, like pouring buckets of ice on a fever victim.

“April,” I wheezed, squeezing out the last bit of breath in my lungs, “fire-suppression system. Need it
now
.”

“Almost have it,” her voice crackled. “And . . . there!”

High above our heads, the sprinklers set into the scalloped roof of the mall concourse sputtered to life.

The rain washed down, spattering my hair and soaking my clothes, and I lifted my open palms to welcome it. I raised my face, letting the water wash over me. From the real water, I drew the
idea
of water, separating the spiritual from the physical like parting delicate silken threads and spinning it into raw fuel for my magic.

Now I was a monsoon.

Freezing mist swirled around me as I unleashed a torrent of power, enveloping Kevin, shielding him, then firing back up the line at Mikki. I felt her mind recoil in shock and pain, the connection suddenly ripping away.

Everything had gone silent. Everything but my labored breath, the
clack-clack-clack
of the sprinkler heads above, and the sound of rain on blood-streaked tile. The sprinklers died, the last few drops of water spattering down, and I slumped to the floor with my back to the bullet-pitted pillar.

I wasn’t sure how much time passed before I could move again. My entire body cramped, my lungs burning and vision blurred double in the aftermath of the magical duel. I felt Cody’s strong arm around my shoulder, helping me back to my feet, and I steadied myself with one palm pressed against the pillar to survey the damage.

The mall was a drenched and bloody slaughterhouse, a wasteland of corpses and broken glass. No sign of Roman and Mikki, or of Angus Caine or Bette, for that matter. It looked like most of Angus’s mercenaries had made it out alive: Roman and Bette’s backup took it the hardest, and I counted seven dead bodies from where I stood to the blown-out Macy’s storefront at the end of the concourse.

“Everybody okay?” I managed to say, fighting for breath. “Anybody hurt?”

“We’re all okay,” Cody said. “Nobody got hit.”

“Kevin?” I looked over. He sat on the tile, leaning against the planter he’d used for cover. Staring silently into the distance.

“Kevin?” I said again. “You okay?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. I already knew.

He wasn’t okay.

On the coroner’s slab, the man we’d gone to meet didn’t look much like Dr. Huerta anymore. With the big fake mustache gone, the colored contacts removed, and the fake eyebrows replaced by skin shaved clean, they could barely pass for brothers.

“Foam inserts for his cheeks,” the coroner told us, holding up a tiny wedge of tan foam. “He also had tiny plugs glued in his nostrils to change the shape of his nose. The age wrinkles and the bags under his eyes were artificial; I’d call this a Hollywood-level makeup job.”

We had a fine basis for comparison. The real Dr. Huerta was lying on the slab right next to him. He’d been in his house in Cape Canaveral with a pair of plainclothes officers—a security detail to keep tabs on him until the handoff, arranged by Linder—sitting in an unmarked car just outside. All three of them had taken bullets at point-blank range, the cops shot through an open car window, Huerta in his easy chair.

“Any ID yet?” Jessie asked.

The coroner shook his head. “I’m afraid nothing’s come back. For now, he’s a John Doe. We’re still running prints on the other bodies.”

Nothing. Nothing was exactly what we had. From her bird’s-eye view of the gunfight, April had watched one of the Xerxes men snatch up the fallen tablet. Then the downpour from the sprinklers turned the camera feeds into a wet and blurry mess. When the smoke cleared, the mercenary she’d spotted was numbered among the dead, and the curse tablet was long gone.

Our next stop was the Orlando FBI field office, where the special agent in charge read us the riot act for running a field operation on her turf without notifying her first. That, and the massacre. Meetings like this were getting to be a bad habit. We took our obligatory tongue-lashing, made our hollow apologies, and left. By the time we met back up with Cody, Kevin, and April, it was after dark. We drove through the humid Florida night in silence.

“Here,” Jessie said in a leaden voice, pointing to the glossy plastic sign of a roadside motel up ahead.
C
ROSSROADS
M
OTEL
, it read,
C
ABLE
TV
AND
F
REE
I
CE
.

“We should keep working,” I said. “If we retrace our steps, we might find something we—”

“Harmony. It’s late. We’re all exhausted. And we are stopping for the goddamn night. Please don’t argue with me right now.”

We pulled into the parking lot.

“Under the circumstances,” Jessie said, trudging off toward the front office, “everybody gets their own room tonight. I don’t think any of us is in the mood to share.”

Kevin leaned back against the minivan’s hood, watching the traffic go by.

“Hey,” I said, “you want to talk about it?”

He didn’t look at me. His eyes glistened in the headlight bloom.

“She tried to kill me,” he said. “It’s not bad enough that she used me. It’s not bad enough that I was so fucking . . . so fucking
stupid
that I led us right into a trap. It’s not bad enough that she humiliated me.”

Now he looked my way. Lost, like a man adrift in the ocean.

“She tried to
kill
me, Harmony.”

“Kevin, I—” I paused. Glanced across the parking lot. Jessie, Cody, and April were over by the motel’s front office, out of earshot. Good. I could think of only one thing to say to Kevin, and it wasn’t something I talked about. Ever. Nobody needed to hear it but him.

“I know what you’re feeling right now,” I said. “Kevin, when I was your age—a college freshman, away from home for the first time—I was in my first serious relationship. And he wasn’t . . . he wasn’t who I thought he was. It ended badly.”

He rolled his eyes at me. “Not the same thing. I kinda doubt he tried to set you on fire.”

“No,” I said, “but he put me in the hospital.”

Kevin blinked. “Jesus. I’m—I’m sorry.”

I gave a fluttery wave of my hand, glancing down to the asphalt under our feet.

“It happens to somebody, every single day.” I looked back up at him. “And right now I bet you’re trying to figure out what you did wrong. What you did to make Mikki turn on you. What you could have done differently to stop it from happening. And I know I could stand here and tell you it’s not your fault, that you didn’t do anything wrong—that Mikki being a horrible fucking person is no reflection on who
you
are—just like I know you won’t hear it. Not until you get to a place, inside yourself, where you’re ready to believe me.”

I held his shoulders gently and pulled him close. Looking him in the eye.

“So I’ll just tell you that you
will
get to that place. And I’ll be here—whatever you need, whenever you need it—until you do.”

His head bobbed, a halting nod. “Thanks.”

“Any time. Come on, Jessie’s right. I think we all need some sleep.”

Sleep was a lost hope for me. I paced the cigarette-burned carpet for a while, then I turned on the chunky television set and flipped through twenty channels of static and infomercials.

I ended up down at the far end of the motel, knocking on April’s door and listening to frogs croak from the overgrown weeds. The door swung open faster than I expected.

“You, too, hmm?” she asked, then waved me inside.

I sat down on the edge of her bed, and she waited patiently while I looked for the right words to say.

“I’m not sure what worries me more,” I finally told her. “What’s going to happen if we can’t recover the tablet before that
thing
in outer space figures out the planet is undefended, or . . . that we might not be able to do it. Kevin’s wrecked. Cody’s barely talked to me since the airport. Jessie . . .”

“Jessie,” April said, “lost Roman Steranko in Boston, has just learned Kevin was abused for two years by a predator under her watch, and let an artifact that may seal the world’s fate slip out of her hands. She is having what I would best describe as a crisis of confidence.”

“But that’s not all her fault. We’re a team.”

“And she’s our leader. Which, in her eyes, absolutely makes it her fault. She holds herself entirely responsible, as much as some of us are spending this lovely Florida evening marinating in our own unique failures.”

I thought she meant me, at first, then I caught the look in her eyes. The faintest, bitter glint of pain.

“You were on the team, too,” I said, “when Kevin and Mikki were—”

“My responsibility,” she said, “goes a bit deeper than that. Harmony, when Mikki was captured, Linder approached me—as the team’s psychologist—about his ‘rehabilitation program’ idea. He wanted to see if certain hostiles could be turned into weapons. Trained to operate under Vigilant Lock protocol and then, ideally, deployed on maximum-deniability missions. The kind of wet work and dirty business we like to pretend we don’t participate in. Prime missions for a killer with no empathy and no conscience.”

She fell silent.

“You agreed,” I said.

“The final decision was left squarely in my hands. And yes. I agreed.” She took off her bifocals, rubbing them down with a cloth. The dusty light from the bedside lamp etched her wrinkles in deep shadow. “And everything since, from the scars she left on Kevin to her alliance with Roman Steranko, is entirely my fault. We could have offshored her. We could have terminated her. Instead, I clasped a viper to our collective breast.”

“Why?” I asked. “Why did you do it?”

She put her glasses back on and looked me in the eye.

“Because I wanted to prove that I
could
. Hubris, Harmony, is the killer of gods.”

“That’s . . . that’s
it
?” I stared at her. Torn somewhere between pity and sudden anger. “All of this happened because you wanted to
prove
something?”

The lamplight caught her glasses, glinting. She sucked in her lips, and there was something reptilian about her. An ethereal coldness that made my words slide right off her skin.

“Yes. That’s it. Would you like to shout at me, Harmony? Mask your frustration and your fear as righteous rage and vent it all on me? You can do that if you think it would make you feel better. But if you expect me to wear a hair shirt and flagellate myself for my sins, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. My penance is entirely cerebral, and quite private.”

I felt deflated, looking at her. Disarmed before the argument could even begin.

“Besides,” she said, “if we were to enumerate my ethical lapses over the course of my career . . . well, Mikki doesn’t make the top of the list. We all commit errors, now and again.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. So I just sat, silent beside her, until I found the real question I wanted to ask.

“So,” I said, “our team is broken. How do we fix it?”

Her head dipped, just a bit. Shoulders sagging.

“Your assumption that it can be fixed is . . . admirable. Your optimism is a positive trait.” She looked toward the bed. “It’s late and I find myself fading. If you’ll excuse me, I think I’d like to sleep now.”

I went back to my room, alone.

I slipped under stiff, overstarched sheets and tossed in the dark, chasing sleep. Eventually I got up and did calisthenics to tire myself out, push-ups on the bristly thin carpet. I took a hot shower, staring at the mold-flecked grouting, and went back to bed. Then I did it all over again an hour later. I couldn’t stop walking through my memories, diving down the rabbit hole again and again, coming up empty.

Then, as the cheap bedside clock rolled over to 6:00 a.m., I found the answer. I kicked off the covers and stormed into the bathroom to get cleaned up.