Altar of Bones (57 page)

Ry tried to imagine doing such a thing, and couldn’t. “She must’ve been one hell of woman. Tough and gutsy and smart. Just like her great-granddaughter.”

He saw Zoe’s cheeks flush, and she wouldn’t meet his eyes. He wanted to tell her that he meant it, that he’d never before known a woman like her, and he wanted to know her better, deeper, and keep on knowing her and never stop.

“Anyway, the point I was trying to make wasn’t all that earth-shattering,” she said. “Just that even if we find the amulet, what’s inside of it will have come from the altar, but it won’t
be
the altar. The altar of bones is in a cave hidden behind a waterfall, on a forgotten lake somewhere near Norilsk.”

“Do you want to go to Siberia now, instead?”

“No, St. Petersburg first. Then Siberia.”

Z
OE GREW QUIET
again after that, and this time she did sleep. For about fifteen minutes, maybe, then she awoke with a start, her eyes a little wild. Ry saw that her thigh muscle was trembling again.

“You’re okay,” Ry said. “You’re with me in the Beamer, heading God alone knows where.”

“Oh.” She scrubbed her hands over her face, then looked out the passenger-side window at the view far below them, of the Danube snaking around wooded hills and the red-tile roofs of another little village. “Not back to Budapest?” she said, apparently just now noticing which direction they were headed in.

“I suppose we are going to have to stop and turn around eventually.” He let another half a mile click by, then said, “Not to change the subject, but that was a fine bootlegger’s turn you did back there. Nobody can pull off that kind of fancy driving on instinct. You gotta be taught it, and you need practice.”

She didn’t say anything. In some ways she was the most open person he’d ever met. But he also sensed hidden places in her, like folds in the heart, where she hoarded her thoughts and feelings, and Ry got that. He wasn’t all that good either at opening up the secret parts of himself.

She turned her face toward the window and he was about to just let it go when she said, “My father committed suicide the week before the start of my junior year in high school.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

Her throat worked as she swallowed. “Thank you…. Anyway, my mother had already pretty much taken over the actual running of the family business by then, and I don’t need to elaborate what the family business was since you were working for her.”

“Anna Larina isn’t you.”

“Yeah? Nature or nurture. I guess with some families it hardly matters.” Zoe laughed. Ry heard the bitterness and understood it, because for the last year and a half he’d been wondering the same thing. What parts of his father, the traitor, the assassin, did he carry around inside himself?

Probably more than he was ready to admit to right now. He’d joined the Special Forces right out of college, and they’d trained him to kill, just as his father had been taught to kill. Hell, at the time, his brother, Dom, had even accused him of signing up because he was trying “to out-tough the old man.” Later he’d gone to work for the DEA, where he
often volunteered for the hairiest undercover work because he got off on the excitement of it, the lying and the spying, the cat-and-mouse games, and he was good at them, too.

Just like his old man.

“By the time I was old enough to understand what was going on,” Zoe was saying, “Daddy was just a figurehead, somebody to give the orders because the
vors
and captains and other sundry thugs would’ve balked at the thought of taking them directly from a woman.”

Ry said, “They had to know who was the real brains behind the operation, though. I’ve joined a few gangs of one sort or another while undercover, and one of the first things you figure out fast is who’s really calling the shots.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe as long as Anna Larina allowed him to act the part of the
pakhan
, Daddy could fool himself into thinking he was the
pakhan
. He’d been molded for that life from practically before he could walk. To be the
pakhan
—it was what was expected of him, what he expected of himself.”

Zoe went quiet again, thinking, remembering, and Ry let the silence fill the car until she chose to break it.

“He killed himself less than a week after Anna Larina pulled her infamous stunt with the head in the ice-cream tub. I’ve always thought that was why he did it. He knew only a true
pakhan
would have the toughness to do what she’d done, and he didn’t have that sort of toughness. He knew that and he couldn’t bear it, and so he killed himself.”

She was sitting ramrod stiff in the passenger seat now, eyes straight ahead, chin in the air. She was trying to be so tough herself, Ry thought, and his heart ached for her.

“Anyway,” she said, “Anna Larina crossed a big, bad line killing a top
vors
of the L.A. family, and Daddy was scared they would come after me in revenge. But I’d gotten this little red Miata for my birthday and I wanted to be out with my friends, go to Stinson Beach, to the Stones-town Mall, but Daddy was fixated on the idea they could get to me when I was in the car. He wanted me to take this course called Driving Techniques for Escape and Evasion, but I just rolled my eyes at him. Because I was sure I was God’s gift and knew everything.”

“You were sixteen.”

She shook her head. “That’s no excuse.”

Maybe, Ry thought. And maybe not. When he was that age, he was sure he knew everything and was invincible in the bargain.

“On the day of his funeral,” she said, “I signed up for that defensive driving course, along with shooting and tae kwan do lessons. I thought it was the one thing I could still do for him even though he was now gone. I could keep myself safe for him.”

A moment went by, then it hit them both at the same time, what she’d just said, and they started laughing and then couldn’t stop.

“Oh, God. Keep myself safe,” Zoe said, finally winding down. “I’m kind of sucking at that lately, aren’t I?”

Ry turned his head to look at her. Her cheekbones were flushed from laughing, her eyes bright. Her mouth was open and wet. Half her hair had come out of its clip and curled around the side of her neck. Cupping her neck just the way a man’s hand might do, if he had it in his mind to tilt back her head so he could kiss that wet, red mouth—

A bang, loud as a cannon, rocked the car, and the steering wheel jerked in Ry’s hands. He wrestled with it while he looked around wildly, thinking,
What the hell now?
Then he felt the chassis shimmy and heard the whop-whop of flapping rubber.

He pulled over to the side of the road and got out to take a look. Their left rear tire was in shreds.

“It must’ve taken a round from the Uzi,” he said to Zoe as she got out to join him. “The bullet penetrated just enough to let the air out in a slow leak until it finally blew.”

He laughed, feeling a little high after the big adrenaline rush. “I thought someone had lobbed a bomb at us.”

She was feeling it, too; she was practically thrumming beside him. “You’re telling me.” She blew all the air out of her lungs in a big whoosh and lifted the hair off the back of her neck. “My leg’s doing that twitching thing again, and I—”

He caught the back of her neck with his hand, pulling her face around to his, a little too rough, a little out of control. He kissed her and
felt her gasp of surprise in his mouth, a warm, moist breath, and then she melted into him, opened her mouth to him.

They kissed, locked together, turning slowly, swaying. He ground himself against her belly. He was hot and hard for her and he wanted her to know it.

He was going too fast. He tried to gentle his kiss, but then she tangled her fingers in his hair and sucked on his tongue, pulling it deeper into her mouth, making love with their mouths, sucking, tonguing, and he was lost.

A hot, wet, gasping eternity later, he had her up against the Beamer’s front fender, and they were fighting with the waistband of her jeans.

Zoe, her voice deep and rough, said, “God. I shoulda worn a dress,” and Ry wanted to laugh, but he kept forgetting to breathe. She got a boot and her jeans and panties off one leg and that was enough. He had to be inside her now.

He gripped her waist with both hands, lifting her until her hips were braced on top of the hood of the car. He pushed her legs apart and thrust himself between them.

He felt her shudder, heard her moan, as the back of his hand brushed across her warm belly. He pushed a finger inside her. She was wet, hot, quivering, and he worked her with one hand while he wrenched desperately at his belt with the other, getting it open at last, at last, getting his zipper down, and all the while she was making little panting noises in his ear, “Hurry, hurry, hurry …”

And then her hand found him, gripped him so tightly he nearly came right then.

He went into her, hard, and nearly came again at the hot, tight feel of her. She clutched his shoulders and arched her spine, and her head fell back, and she screamed. He pressed his own open mouth against her wildly beating throat and pushed deep, then pulled almost all the way out of her, then pushed into her again and she met him, rose with him, and they found a rhythm, a beating pulse, their bodies rocking together, and the car rocked with them.

Ry’s last coherent thought was
Oh, dear sweet heavenly Jesus …

T
HEY SPRAWLED
half on, half off the car in a tangle of clothes and she was looking up at him with sated eyes. Her mouth was wet, her lips slightly parted.

“Oh, my ever-loving God,” she said, her voice hoarse, “that was …” Her eyes focused on his face and she grinned, a big, happy grin, and then she gripped his jacket with both hands, pulled him closer. He lowered his head to kiss her, felt her arch up hard against him, and he groaned.

He heard her shouting, “Oh, my God, Ry. Oh, my God,” and then he realized her hands were now balled into fists, and she was heaving, trying to push him off her.

He jerked upright and staggered back. “What? What’s the matter?”

“Oh my God,” she said again, almost falling off the car onto her knees in the dirt as she tried to get back into her panties and jeans.

“Jesus, Zoe. What? Did I hurt you?”

She was tugging on her zipper. “Huh? No, it was great. You were great, and I really want to do it again. But I really, really need to look at the icon right now.”

She gave him a quick, hard kiss on the mouth, then ran to get her satchel out of the car.

Well, at least I was great
.

He turned around to pull himself together and zipper up, feeling both amused and abused. When he turned back around, he saw that she’d taken the icon out of its pouch and laid it on the Beamer’s hood, using the pouch for a pad. She looked over at him, the color now high in her face. “You got to promise not to laugh…. It’s just I’ve never come like that before and—God, this is really embarrassing.”

“Hey.” He slid his hand around the back of her neck and tilted her face so he could kiss her mouth. “It was the same for me, so I’m not going to laugh.”

“Oh.” Her eyes flickered up at him, then away. “I felt like I exploded inside, and I was lying there afterward, looking up at the sky and feeling like there were pieces of me floating around up there, a part of infinity now, and I thought, ‘This is how it must have felt the day the world was created, like a kind of a cosmic organism,’ and you said you wouldn’t laugh.”

“I’m not. Okay, maybe a little. But only because I love the quirky way your mind works.”

“That’s a good thing, I guess, because it’s about to sound quirkier…. So I was thinking about the infinity of creation and my grandmother talking about infinity in her letter, telling me to look to the Lady, the icon. And then I thought about how ever since I first laid eyes on it in the griffin shop, it’s been squirreling around in my brain that the way the jewels are laid out doesn’t make sense. They aren’t in the places where you’d expect them to be, like on her crown, or her slippers, or the hem of her robe, but instead they seem random. Then I suddenly realized they aren’t random, at all. They form a pattern. Watch …”