“Marco.” Nic lifted his voice a little higher than usual, gravelly and tired.
“P-polo.” I choked on the word. It wasn’t loud enough. “Polo.”
The boot step swaggered over in my direction. A few minutes later, the foliage over my head rustled, and Nic’s dry, wiry fingers snapped around my forearms. I was too exhausted to protest as he hauled me out, except to snarl and chomp my teeth as I put weight down on my foot and felt an invisible knife wrench from sole to knee.
He clicked his tongue. “Shit, Lexi. They fucked you up.”
“Lev.” I turned my head to the side and spat blood. “Need Lev. I have to… have information… the operation. Vincent.”
Nic paused for a moment, looking at me with narrowed eyes, and then hmmph’d and shrugged, offering his arm. I accepted, and he helped me hobble to the car. I let him load me face-first onto the backseat and lay there watching the world spin in an elegant loop ahead of my nose.
“Lev,” I croaked.
“You’re real beat.” Sympathy never really touched Nic’s voice, but his tone held a certain urgency I’d never heard before. He’d mentored Vassily and me in our teens. Maybe he cared. “Keep talking. What happened?”
I couldn’t talk. Instead, I rolled over, struggled up to my elbows, and finally looked down at my leg. I immediately regretted it. It was stuck out to the side, the kneecap pushed up strangely from underneath my pants. Legs weren’t meant to look like that, so I lay back and stared at the lines of leather on the ceiling overhead. “Had to kill a couple of guys. Lev.”
“We’re on the way to Lev. Don’t sweat it. You’re tough.” Nic revved the engine and backed out of his space too fast for anyone’s comfort, least of all mine. “We got your car fixed.”
You’re tough. He’d given that same piece of encouragement since he started teaching me how to box and shoot and boost cars. “Okay.”
Dizzy, dry-mouthed, I covered my eyes and tried to relax on the backseat, bumped forward and back by Nic’s flippant one-handed steering. We turned a corner, and I had to bury my teeth in my own arm as my leg jerked, bracing the other hand against the seat in front. The longer I lay there, the greater the shock. It flushed like a wave of hot anger but without the accompanying energy. I had been naked. My mouth was still oily and sour from the gun. It wasn’t anger. It was disgust. My body was full of holes, my flesh weak and bloodied, invaded. And yet… past the slow and continual shattering of my remaining dignity, past the stench of blood on my wet clothes, I could feel the crooning, cold presence of Kutkha. He enfolded my consciousness with wings as breathtaking as the clouds passing over a wild steppe. Every touch, every brief synaptic moment, carried a litany that slowly overwhelmed my thoughts.
…LoveYouLoveYouLoveYouLoveYouLoveYouLoveYouLoveYouLoveYouLoveYou…
I could smell night-blooming flowers. Jasmine, maybe, or honeysuckle. Was I dying? Drifting, distant, I was surprised to find my vision fading to green.
With no other recourse, I surrendered. Maybe death wasn’t so black after all.
Chapter 9
One moment, I was watching the orange lights of the highway marching through the back windshield of Nicolai’s car; in the next, I was hanging off his elbow in a white-lit elevator. The unlit buttons were numbered into the thirties. Foggily, I stared at them, unsure where I’d been taken. I could distantly smell Nic beside me, a brown and green and muddy blue scent, and was mulling over the weird mouthfeel of his cologne when I fainted again.
The next sensation was one of lapping water against my cheeks. When I opened my eyes, I found myself floating on the surface of an endless expanse of water, looking up through a passing gallery of luminous white aquatic creatures extending far up into the green sky above like a field of stars. Or… not quite endless. Somewhere very high overhead, the green turned abruptly to black, a blackness so deep it looked less like a form and more like the absence of form. It was vacuuming up the eerie, peaceful fauna that swam innocently back and forth, hoovering them in like a screaming mouth. It hurt to look at for long.
I closed my eyes against the darkness. When I opened them a second time, there was light. My face was running with streams of water. My gaze met one overhead, as placid and calm as the green sea at dawn.
“Ah…” Lev said. He wiped my face with a hand towel. “There we go. Back with the living.”
My knee wasn’t hurting nearly as much as it should have. I lurched up to try to look at it, and it was Lev’s clammy, firm hands that pushed me back down. I was lying on a black leather sofa as big as a single bed.
“Nothing’s wrong.” Lev’s prim voice was firm. “It wasn’t as bad as you thought it was. I reset it… it will be fine. It doesn’t even hurt.”
And for a moment, it was true. Lev’s words washed away the pain and doubt like seafoam, but like seafoam, the wave vanished as my memory swept clear and my own thoughts, my own knowledge, flooded back into place.
“You…” I rasped. “I don’t… believe you.”
Lev’s face froze into neutral lines, but he slapped the mask over his expression of shock just a split second too late.
“My knee.” My chest ached as I drew another ragged breath and struggled up to my elbows. Dizzy, yes, and sore. My lips were parched and I was uncomfortable, exhausted, but I was not in agony. I looked down at my leg. My trousers had been cut up and taken off around mid-thigh, baring my legs. The knee still didn’t look right: it was puffy and swollen, purpled up, but it was mostly straight underneath the swelling and bruising. I tried to flex it and immediately let out a harsh bark of pain as it reminded me that, yes, it was still royally fucked up.
“Stop that.” Lev swatted my hand away. “The bones are still setting. Whatever you did to it, it will take time.”
Whatever I did to it? I lay back, nostrils flaring. Lev stood up, carrying a bowl of water and a green cloth away with him.
“You tried to control my mind.” I glared up at the ceiling. The paint was smooth and new. I had no idea where I was. The room smelled clean and air-conditioned, vaguely oceanic, and mild. What furnishings I could see were expensive and new-looking. Brown leather, cream carpet, mahogany cabinetry. Was I at Lev’s house? “Why? How?”
Lev sighed from across the room. “The how and why is not really your business, I’m afraid. In general terms, though, I tried to suggest that perhaps your pain isn’t as bad as you suppose. Apparently, it was ineffective.”
The blank canvas of the ceiling danced with spots and flecks of light that stung my aching, itching eyes. “You’re a spook,” I said, flatly.
“Not as such.” Lev’s footfall was soft on approach. A straw was touched to my lips. Water. I tongued the straw into my mouth and drew greedily. The cool liquid chased some of the scratchy tightness from my throat. “Do you remember anything?”
“Yes, but I have no idea what happened. By the time I roused, I…” The taste of the gun barrel flooded my palate, my body reliving the humiliation and pain. The muscles of my face tightened. I clamped my jaws together until the enamel squeaked, flexing them until the taste and smell of Carmine and his buddies passed over and through me. “What day is it?”
“The morning of the twelfth.” Lev tugged the straw from my gritted teeth and set the glass aside. “Monday.”
Monday. So, I’d been out at least a good six hours. I knew there was something I was supposed to be doing on Monday, but the faint shadow of memory flitted just out of arm’s reach. Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been that important.