Tanderon (5 page)

I must have been too engrossed in grisly guesswork to pay as much attention as I should have to what was happening around me. One minute I was being forced toward the bed and the next I was already there, but not down on it. Val was seating himself on a corner, Ringer was letting go of me, and then I was off my feet and face down across Val’s lap.

I shouted, “No!” and really began to struggle, but it was already too late. Val had forced my wrists behind me, holding them one-handed, while his other hand kept me from kicking my way free. I could feel his leg against my stomach, his hand warm against my bare thigh, and I cursed at the fates for doing this to me again.

“Do you have it?” Val asked Ringer as soon as he was settled on his corner of the bed.

“Right here,” Ringer answered. I turned my head to see what they were talking about, then pulled so hard that Val had to tighten his grip on my wrists to hold onto me. Ringer needed his answers rather badly, so he’d supplied Val with a hard, nasty-looking hairbrush. And that also told me Ringer had considered the matter of how they would look to the security force. Not like two men torturing a woman for information, but two indignant guardians punishing a disobedient little girl.

I’d faced a lot of threats during my time as a Special Agent and most of them had been faced calmly if not insolently. But this time the sweat broke out on my forehead, my mouth turned dry, and my knees would have been weak if I’d been standing on them. Maybe that was because Val was a true believer in not sparing the rod, and had a lot of things to get even for. Maybe it was just that I could remember so clearly the other spankings my partner had found it necessary to give me. Val leaned the cold, hard, back end of the hairbrush against my thigh, and moved his lips close to my ear again.

“Don’t say you didn’t ask for this,” he told me, keeping his voice low so that it didn’t carry to Ringer. “You may have forgotten what I told you about learning to behave, but I don’t think you’ll forget again.”

I snarled and struggled against being held, but it still didn’t get me anywhere. I could have kicked myself for ever having gotten mixed up with him, but kicking myself wasn’t going to be necessary. Val was ready to do a better job on me, and Ringer couldn’t have picked a more willing accomplice.

“Change your mind yet?” Ringer asked pleasantly from the chair he’d pulled over closer to the bed. I turned my head to look at him and licked my lips, but didn’t answer because I couldn’t. Aside from wrecking everything I’d already done, talking now would guarantee that Val would very quickly find out about the detail that involved him so intimately. Then it occurred to me that it might not be so bad if I could make Val back down a little.

“You can’t be serious about this, Val,” I said, my voice shakier than I wanted it to be. “You know how I feel about getting even.”

I’d been trying some oblique threatening of my own, but it went over about as well as the rest of my plans had gone.

“Yes, I do remember that,” Val answered in a strange voice, as though he’d just remembered what he’d gone through the first time because of me, and the next minute it began in earnest. I tried to ignore the whole thing, but that brush was hard and Val wasn’t taking it particularly easy.

Now, I’d been beaten on Xanadu, strung up by the wrists and beaten by James with his cane till my back was a bloody ruin. But though I still choked with terror over the memory of that beating, I could look back on it and know there was no comparable damage being done to my dignity. I could not, however, look back on the spankings Val had given me and think the same thing.

There’s no way to see the kicking and howling produced by his hand swatting my bottom as being in the least dignified no matter how you look at it. This time, with him using the hairbrush, it was a hell of a lot worse. I held out as long as I could then gave in to yelling and struggling, wishing they’d used hot irons after all.

What felt like at least an hour passed before Ringer finally interrupted.

“Hold on a minute, Valdon,” he said, leaning forward to put his arm on his knee.

“What do you say now, Diana? Have you had enough, or should he continue?”

From the flaming ache in my backside I knew I’d had more than enough, but how could I tell him? I lifted my head to look at him, and let my desperation show through.

“Ringer, please – ” I began, but his face was solid granite.

“Might as well get on with it,” he told Val as he leaned back again. “We could be here for hours.”

“No!” I said as fast as possible, positive I could hear Val’s arm lifting into the air.

They’d simply keep it up until I told them, so it made no sense to take any more.

Even if the security force suddenly appeared in the room, the picture would show nothing but two indignant adults teaching the brat in their charge some manners. I’d lost, and I might as well admit it. But that other thing… “It’s pinned to the middle of the drapes in front of the vu-cast window, low down on the left.”

Val started to let me go, but Ringer snapped, “Keep her like that until I check. She isn’t known for her simon-pure honesty.”

Val tightened his grip again while Ringer got out of the chair and went to the drapes to begin the search, leaving me to pray as hard as I could. Maybe he wouldn’t find it.

If he found it, maybe he wouldn’t understand. If he understood, maybe he wouldn’t tell Val. If he told Val, maybe Val would be less bothered than I expected… I let my head drop as I ran out of maybes. I didn’t have the chance of a weed in Eden.

“Found it!” Ringer exclaimed at the drapes. “But wait a minute – what’s this?”

I stared at the carpeting and held my breath while Ringer looked at what he’d found, but shouldn’t have wasted the effort. He left the vu-cast window with heavy steps, and walked close to wave a paper in my face.

“That was a nice touch, Diana,” he said, all granite again. “I’m proud of you! I’ve got to admit it passed me right by.”

“What is it?” Val asked in a puzzled voice while I closed my eyes.

“Our girl is really good,” Ringer growled, almost in a fury. “Even without my credentials I might have managed to talk the security people into letting me call the Council, so she didn’t take any chances. This is the origins section of your papers, and would have been one of the first things they checked. When they found it missing they’d have gotten a copy of it from the computer from when you first registered here, and checked it out thoroughly.

“These papers are good because our people made them up carefully for you, but they’d never stand up to the kind of inspection they’d get from suspicious security people. As soon as the report came back that you were unknown at your supposed place of origin, they’d put that and her story together and decide they had slavers or pirates on their hands. At that point we’d really be in for it. They’d sweat us for days, and use every truth drug ever mixed to find out what we were supposedly up to. I don’t know about you, but only special drugs work on an agent and I used to be an agent. That would really have added the icing.”

“I don’t think your drugs would have worked on me either,” Val said in a very soft voice. “We’re specially prepared for our jobs, too. Are you finished with her yet?”

“I suppose so,” Ringer growled, shoving the bulky set of credentials into an inside pocket of his jacket. “You can let her up.”

“I … don’t … think … so,” Val said slowly, and I knew without doubt that he also looked down at me.

“What – are you going to do?” I asked unsteadily, very much afraid that he intended to tell me how disappointed he was before letting me up. Hearing it would be hard, but being held like that gave me no choice at all.

“I’m going to finish the job I started, and this time do it right,” he said, shifting where he sat to get a better grip on me. “My way of applauding your effort, you might say.”

“No, Val, please!” I blurted, appalled at the way he was reacting. He should have been disillusioned enough to walk away, not interested in punishing me! “I can’t take any more of being treated like this!”

“That’s the whole idea, Diana,” he said in the same soft voice. “It’s supposed to make you so eager to avoid a repetition of the treatment, that the next time you get a bright idea you drop it without a second thought. Let’s see if it works.”

“All right, I promise not to do it again,” I said very quickly, trying to find some way out of that corner. Strangely enough most of the things I tried on Val seemed to backfire, and it was definitely time to make an effort toward cutting my losses. “I’ll even promise to be good and listen to everything you say,” I added, just to sweeten the deal.

At that point I would have been willing to promise to turn inside out, but I quickly learned that he wasn’t equally willing to listen. He started to apply that hairbrush again, only this time with more enthusiasm than he’d been using. I was already sore from the first dose, but it looked like he’d only been warming up.

“Ringer, make him stop!” I screamed, feeling every swat as it reached me. “He’s killing me!”

“Sorry, Diana, but nobody listens to me around here,” he said with a chuckle as he settled himself back in his chair. “If anyone should know that, it’s you. It’s just too bad this idea didn’t come up nine years ago, when you first started to work for me. It would have saved me a lot of trouble.”

I hate to think about how long Val kept it up. When he reached the point of apparent satisfaction and let me up, I couldn’t move. I’d been crying really hard for a while without being able to stop, and it was all real tears. Val lifted me off his lap and put me face down on the bed, then the two of them walked out of the bedroom and closed the door behind them. I’d managed to make a few mistakes in my life, but that one had proved to be one of the best. With a fistful of bedspread in each hand I lay as still as I could, dizzily trying to figure out why everything had gone so wrong.

Three hours later the sharp edge had worn off, but it still wasn’t possible to forget what had been done to me. I had my pillows bunched up under my arms and face, and was lying on my stomach trying to figure the current odds of escaping when Val walked in. He swung the door shut behind him, came over to the bed and sat down, then stretched himself out on his back on the far side. Once he was settled he put his hands behind his head and closed his eyes with a sigh.

“You bastard,” I breathed, staring at his satisfied expression. “You didn’t have to put so much muscle into it.”

He turned his head toward me and opened one eye. “Watch it,” he warned, his voice soft but not as soft as it had been earlier. “I don’t like fresh kids for roommates.”

“I am not a kid, and I’d rather have James for a roommate!” I told him through my teeth, talking about the crazy who had beaten me on Xanadu. “You get out of here, or so help me I’ll – ”

Suddenly Val’s features blurred, and then it was James lying on the bed next to me. I still wasn’t used to Val’s quick-change ability, but that had nothing to do with my reaction. At sight of James’s face and eyes the breath caught in my throat and choked me, and I buried my own face in the pillow to try to stop the convulsive shakes that hit me. The terror in the memory of what James had done to me came rolling down like a boulder in an avalanche, making it all I could do to keep from screaming the way I’d screamed then. Val put his arms around me almost instantly, but the attempt to counter what he’d done didn’t help. I fought for control and eventually made it, but my heart was pounding as though I’d just run miles.

“I’m the biggest damned fool alive,” Val said bitterly, pressing me tightly to him.

“Are you all right, Diana?”

I would have loved coming up with a witty answer, but I was too busy shuddering at the ice-cold edge of the last of the chills to be in top form where wit was concerned.

Val cradled my head against his chest then lay back down still holding me, undoubtedly encouraged by the way I clutched at him. It wasn’t that I particularly wanted to be held by him; it was just that I needed something right now, and Val was the closest something available. The memory of James was one I hadn’t yet been able to bury.

After a few minutes, I was finally able to say, “Do me one favor, Val. The next time you get the urge to show off your impression of someone, do somebody else, huh?

That particular face tends to make me sick to my stomach.”

“That’s one I owe you,” he said quietly, stroking my hair. “I should have stopped to think first, but in a way you asked for it. You’re always so damned smart-alecky, it’s hard for me to remember you have to have feelings hidden somewhere.” He hesitated for a moment then added, “What did James do to you besides use that cane? You never did say.”

“He didn’t do anything,” I told him, trying to get the sour taste out of my mouth. “I don’t even know what he was planning to do, and if it’s all the same to you I’d like to keep it that way.”

He was very still for a minute, then I heard a sound that suggested he’d turned his head and was trying to look at me where I lay against his chest.

“You’re not as tough as you pretend to be, are you?” he asked, his voice filled with slow revelation. “The hard-as-nails Special Agent who isn’t quite as hard as the image. If I hadn’t been so busy protecting myself from you, I would have seen it a lot sooner.”

“So I’m only as tough as I have to be,” I admitted with a shrug, wondering if he really expected me to try to argue the point while I still held to him like that. “The attitude usually takes care of the necessary, so why try to be more? Every once in a while a nightmare may slide in, but that balances out what fun comes my way – which is only fair. How can you argue with a fair trade?”

“The trade would seem a little more fair if you really were as hard as you try to make people believe you are,” he came back, not terribly happy with what I’d said. “As it is you’re getting shorted all the way around, and I don’t like that. I think I’m going to have to teach you how to relax to the inevitable.”

“Don’t waste your time,” I advised him, lifting my head to look at the face already looking at me. “Most things aren’t inevitable, not if you really work at turning them around. The only exception I’ve found to that so far is you.”