Deep Deception (5 page)

Everyone knew they disagreed. They just didn’t let it get angry.

Right now his mother had her arms wrapped around his father, and she lifted her legs up, locking them behind his back. Something about it made Adin smile—like playing piggyback—but it also felt like something he shouldn’t be watching. Their kisses were turning more…frantic, he could see, and his father gripped his mother’s butt in the palms of his hands where nice people didn’t normally touch one another.

It looked hungry, and it felt desperate to Adin, as though they couldn’t get enough of each other, as though they devoured each other, breathing each other in like the smoke from water pipes he’d seen in the marketplace in Egypt. Men drew the smoke in and kept it in their lungs as long as they could. His father inhaled his mother the same way.

A hand gripped his arm and pulled him away from the window and Yasmina’s voice washed over him as she took him to task for skulking around.

“Don’t spy,” she hissed at him as she pulled him far away from the window. She held his baby sister Deana in one arm and dragged him toward the back of the house to the kitchen. “Adults need private time.”

“My dad had his hands on my mom’s butt,” Adin told her, wide-eyed.

Yasmina shrugged at him, worldly at thirteen where he was only five. “Adults do that. It’s disgusting, but someday, oddball, you’ll understand.”

Adin had private reservations about that but gave Yasmina the benefit of the doubt. “Don’t call me that.”

“Oddball,” Yasmina swatted at him. “Your mother told me it says Oddball on your birth certificate but the doctor told your parents you’d need a nickname so you wouldn’t grow up with a psychological complex. This is why you are called Adin.” He could see the teasing light in her eyes and forgave her but he knew his parents’ joke. It would stick to him forever.

“Deana’s name rhymes with beans because mom says she gave her gas…”

“True, but she’s more than made up for that by being such a sweet and biddable child, and you are a monster!” She never meant it when she called him that. She was too busy smiling.

“Am not!” Adin wrenched his hand from her grasp, waiting to see whether she’d chase him, and then ran from her through the open courtyard and past the kitchen. Yasmina called to him to slow down in Urdu, to be mindful that she couldn’t run with a baby in her arms, and he complied. Eventually Yasmina had to return to cooking, but she left him feeling well looked after and richer by a special ball-shaped pastry filled with pistachios and sugar, called a Laddu.

Eventually Adin’s friends returned and play continued until the afternoon sun found its way to the horizon. After that, when Adin thought it seemed very late at night, Adin ate a meal with his family outside. A billion stars hung overhead while they enjoyed the drop in temperature and the fading of the desert light. They sat in the courtyard on a bench. His father had one arm around him and one around his mother as she held the baby in her arms and sipped her spicy tea. The way his father looked at his mother seemed to make everyone present smile, his mother most of all.

She looked the way she did when she’d figured out the best place to hide Adin’s Christmas gifts.

A clanking noise called Adin from his dream. He opened his eyes to see Bran sitting on the side of the tub. He grabbed for a washcloth and covered what he could of himself, then shot Bran a killing look. “
Bran
. Generally people like to bathe alone.”

“Don’t worry. You’ve got nothing I haven’t seen before.”

Adin rolled his eyes, still feeling odd. At first, his heart had hurt to be wrenched from that dream. It had been a long time since he’d really thought about his family and how much he’d loved—and been loved by—his parents. While he’d dreamed, he’d felt their love like a drug, seeping into his bones with the heat of the water. Now the dream still pulled at him, as if the warmth of it dragged him under.

The wetness on Adin’s cheeks had nothing to do with the sweat beading on his forehead. He didn’t bother to hide the sob that escaped him. Bran sat placidly while Adin wept, one finger stirring Adin’s bathwater, the other hand holding his chains up so they wouldn’t get wet. When he had no more tears left Bran handed him a small, thick towel and he dried his face with it.

“Thanks.” Adin handed it back and began the effort of soaping himself up and rinsing off, determined that if it didn’t seem unusual for the boy to be in the bathroom with him, he wasn’t going to go out of his way to make it weirder than it had to be. Bran remained silent, and when Adin looked up Bran’s eyes shimmered with unshed tears. “What?”

“Beautiful family,” Bran said in perfect Urdu. “Much love.” Adin’s breath caught.

“What are you?”

Bran smiled faintly. “Yes.
Exactly
.”

Chapter Five

Adin fell into bed and slept. If it was uneventful for most of the night, dream-wise, it more than made up for that in the seconds before he woke, when hundreds of images, mostly faces, flickered like paparazzi flashbulbs going off in his head,
pop
,
pop
,
pop
.

It was as if everyone he’d ever known, every person he’d ever seen, was displayed before him in a lightning round, PowerPoint presentation of old love and painful loss, of things that were frightening, and people best forgotten.

“Stop,” Adin ground out when he realized he had no control over what he was seeing. Adin heard a noise near him that might have been a sigh, or might have been a smothered laugh.

He threw the sheet off his body and swung his feet over the side of his bed. Silk sleep pants clung damply to his sweaty legs. Instead of standing, he put his elbows on his knees and rested his head in his hands. The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was Bran, who lay curled on the floor around a pillow like a cat.

Adin watched the boy for a minute and realized he was pretending to be asleep.

“I can see you’re awake.” Adin drew his feet back up into the bed, as if the boy was going to chew off a toe or something. “There’s no point in pretending. And stop rummaging around in my head, Bran.”

“But I haven’t gotten to the best bits yet.” With a heavy metal scraping noise Bran unfurled himself and sat up. “To look at you a bloke would think that you’ve never had a moment of anxiety in your life, that it was all pricey and painless—”

“I don’t appreciate you fooling around with my memories.” Adin leaned back against the well-crafted mahogany headboard. When Bran would have joined him on the bed Adin pushed him back. “Get a chair.”

Bran tugged one of the leather chairs to the spot where he’d been sleeping next to the bed and sat in it. He slid back and lifted his legs to rest his feet next to Adin’s. His eyebrow rose in defiance, daring Adin to complain.

“Is that why Harwiche wants you? Because you can get inside of people’s minds?” Adin asked.

“I don’t know why Harwiche wants me.”

Adin frowned in disbelief.

“
No
. It’s true! I don’t know why he wants me. I don’t know what anyone would want with me.”

“That’s probably true,” Boaz spoke from the doorway. He entered the room holding a tray of coffee, carefully setting it down between Adin and Bran and then climbing onto the bed. “He doesn’t know.”

“Make yourself at home,” Adin grumbled.

“I am home.” Boaz smiled. He handed Adin a cup of coffee then offered one to Bran, who shook his head. “Bran was probably kidnapped for something random. Perhaps someone saw you do something unusual and they put two and two together, yes?”

“For the love of heaven, Boaz. Just tell me what he is.”

“That’s part of the problem. If I’m not mistaken, Bran isn’t any one thing.” To Bran directly, he said, “Am I right?”

Bran stayed silent.

“Look.” Boaz turned back to Adin. “You have to trust me when I say if I knew more, I would tell you.”

“Like you’ve always done in the past,” Adin replied sourly.

“Here’s the thing.” Boaz frowned. “Every culture in the world has a variation on the theme of the changeling.”

“He’s a
changeling
?” Adin chuckled. “A fairy baby switched at birth with a human?”

“Yes, and no. You’re so disrespectful, and it ill becomes a man of intelligence. Put aside Disney for right now. A changeling child is believed—in most cultures—to be a magical being that is switched with a human child at birth. Whether it’s hell tithes, or mischief, or a way to prevent magical inbreeding. The point is, no one really catches on in most cases.”

“Right.” Adin sipped his coffee. “And no one has considered the possibility that the entire genesis of these tales is a way for superstitious or hyper-religious people to explain away children with illnesses or birth defects or autism.”

Boaz’s mouth dropped open. “You
have
studied this.”

“Of course I have. I’m a professor of literature, and I vet old documents and manuscripts all the time. Fairytales are some of the most profound and interesting things people have ever written. So yes. I know about changelings.”

“All right, all right.” Boaz winked at Bran. “I told you there would be puffery involved.”

Adin sputtered, “I beg your—”

“The point is, even Bran can’t tell you what he is, because he doesn’t know.”

Adin digested this. “How the hell can you not know what you are?”

Bran held absolutely still for a single second, then burst into tears and ran from the room. Adin heard the nearly obscene
clank
of his manacles as he slammed the connecting door between their rooms.

“If you can be any more insensitive, this might be a good time, Adin. After all, I don’t completely despise you yet and even though Santos never liked you in the first place he could probably like you less.” Boaz got up and then removed the tray from the bed. He reached out and pulled Adin’s half-finished coffee from his hand.

“
Boaz
.”

“Think about it,” Boaz ordered Adin sternly. “Think about how you know who
you
are and then come down for breakfast.”

Adin recalled the memories Bran had sifted through. He thought of his mother and father and their stories of
their
parents. If he didn’t have those memories…if he didn’t remember his parents, he’d have no idea what he was either.

Adin froze. “
Boaz
.”

“Did the light go on there for you, Professor Thoughtless?” Boaz could be at least as impatient as Donte. “There is folklore suggesting that a changeling child becomes a human child over a period of time. It’s a process. At some point, the child in the process of
becoming
is neither one thing nor another. Santos speculates that if the process is interrupted, someone like Bran might be… Well. Certainly he’d be outside the norm.”

Adin frowned. “How far outside?”

Boaz measured his words more carefully than Adin had ever seen him do, “Entirely new. Entirely other. He’s not
anything
.”

“Boaz. Of course he’s something. He eats. He stirred my bathwater. He cried.”

“He stirred your
bathwater
?”

“It’s a long story. The point is he’s corporeal. He’s very much a human boy.”

“Yes.” Boaz chewed his lip thoughtfully.

“He couldn’t be held in chains if he weren’t.”

“Santos speculates that iron weakens him.”

“It’s all conjecture?” Adin entertained the idea that he’d purchased some sort of magical being with memory divining powers.
Christ.
“Perfect.”

Boaz shrugged. “Breakfast is nearly ready. I’m making eggs.”

“Quelle surprise.”

Once the door slammed behind Boaz, Adin cursed and ran his hands through his hair. He knew he should get up and put on clothes, clean his teeth, and leave. He should take his luggage and go back to the hotel and leave all the magical machinations to Boaz and his gang of merry monsters, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave without saying good-bye to Bran.

Then, if Boaz could get his money back as Santos promised, Adin could turn his back and walk away.

Maybe.

He dressed quickly and entered Bran’s room where he found the entity in question facedown on the bed. Oddly enough, it reminded him of the many times after his parents died—when he and Deana had been forced to deal with the grief of a sudden shocking loss—he’d found Deana exactly like this. It felt so familiar, sitting on the side of the bed and placing a comforting hand on Bran’s shoulder.

“I’m so sorry.” Adin smoothed the fabric of Bran’s T-shirt over his shoulder blade. “I wasn’t really thinking. I’m sorry if what I said—”

“It’s all right,” Bran sniffed.

“Tell me about the things you know about yourself. Maybe I’ll be able to understand.”

“I see your memories. I can see everyone’s memories. They’re all available to me, except mine.”

“You don’t remember anything?”

“I remember my name, what I did yesterday, last week. Where I’ve lived recently and what I spend my time doing, most of the time. I remember some things from my childhood. A few things.”

“But the distant past?”

Bran looked as though he were concentrating. “Nothing.”

“You remember back how far?”

“It’s not like that. It’s not like a line I can’t cross. It’s as if I’ve
been nowhere, done nothing. Like one minute I wasn’t here and then I was.”

“That must be odd.” Adin considered what Bran said. “It must be horrible.”

Bran shrugged with a clink of his chains. “When I figured out that I could share other people’s memories and dreams, it seemed strange to me that I didn’t have my own.”

“Try to think, Bran. What can you do, what have you done recently, that someone might want you to do for them? It has to be something virtually impossible… What is it that sets you apart?”

Bran stayed mutinously silent for several minutes. Adin waited him out. Finally Bran’s stomach growled.

“I’m hungry.”

Adin sighed, giving up for the moment. “Well, if that’s actual hunger and not—you know—the reason people are trying to buy and sell you, go to Boaz and get something to eat, and I’ll be down in a minute, all right?”

Bran nodded and got up, heading for the bedroom door.

Adin watched him as he took off, heard his chains rattle and his feet thunder on the hardwood floors. Whatever Bran was, he should never have been made a pawn by Harwiche, nor should he be used in some game between Santos and Donte. He should be free to go to school, to run around with his friends on the soccer pitch. He should not be chained up in dank basements or urinating in bins or eating off the floor like a dog. Adin burned with fury at himself that he’d allowed it to continue after their so-called rescue, even though he and Boaz had done better by Bran than his previous captors. Making up his mind, he followed Bran toward the smell of food.

Listening to Boaz and Bran chatter at the breakfast table, Adin thought they seemed like any normal, dysfunctional family. Bran helped himself to food liberally, as though he really were the teenaged boy he appeared to be, and Boaz kept it coming—perfectly shirred eggs, the kind of thick ham called bacon in England, along with sausages and the ubiquitous piping-hot bread, with fresh butter and jam. In all it was a very English breakfast—thankfully missing a black pudding—for a French household, and Adin wondered if Boaz made it especially for him. For some reason that warmed his heart a little.

“Boaz, Santos said you have a way to get my money back. I don’t suppose it’s legal, but then neither is selling adolescent boys, so you won’t be hearing a word about it from me.”

“He mentioned that. I’ll see to it.”

“And that only leaves you.” Adin turned to Bran. “I’ve been meaning to ask you, Boaz. If you don’t know what Bran
is,
how can you know he has to be kept chained?”

“Santos told me that it would be unwise to remove his chains until we know why Harwiche wants him. He said specifically—”

Adin waved his explanation off. “I would prefer it if you didn’t treat me like an idiot. Santos wants to embroil me in another game of triangles with Donte.”

Boaz had the grace to look guilty. “You have to admit it has worked in the past.”

Adin finished his coffee and rose to his feet. He pulled all the cash from his wallet and dropped it on the table by Bran’s plate. “Only because I didn’t see it coming.” He pulled the keys to Bran’s chains from his pocket and handed them to the boy. “Quick as you can, unchain yourself and go home, wherever that is. Hide from everyone. Make sure you appear to be nothing more than a boy on a school trip or something. I’m leaving.”

Boaz leaped to his feet so fast his chair fell over. “Adin, you’re making a serious mistake. Donte will
kill
you for this if he realizes that Harwiche has Auselmo’s papers and you let his leverage go free. And if he doesn’t, Santos surely will.”

“It’s done. And Bran is a…boy. Whatever he is, he’s not
leverage
.” Boaz rushed toward Bran but Adin caught him easily and held him fast while Bran worked the chains. “I’m sure you and Santos can figure out a way to turn this to your advantage. I’m done with your games.”

The last of the chains dropped from Bran’s slight body and Adin half expected a tornado or a mushroom cloud. He anticipated being torn limb from bloody limb despite the apparent unconcern he’d put on for Boaz’s benefit. At the very least he expected the kid to get the hell out and not look back. Absurdly, Adin wanted to tell Bran if he was going to do something awful he should get it over quickly. Instead Bran rushed to him and gave him a kiss on the cheek that carried more than a little adoration with it.

“Thank you, Adin.” Bran’s eyes shone as he poised for flight. “I won’t forget this.”

Boaz struggled against what Adin realized was a chokehold he’d been trained to use by Donte’s minions as they’d patiently tried to teach him to defend himself. “
Run
,” Adin insisted. “Hide.”

Bran fled.

When Adin finally let Boaz go, the smaller man fell to the floor panting.

“Donte and Santos will have the first common goal in their long lives when they realize what you’ve done. Both of them will want to see you flogged.”

“Excellent,” Adin exhaled slowly. “Time-honored. Peace at any price.”

On his way out of Santos’s house he pulled his cell phone out and made a call. His heart clenched when Donte answered on the first ring.

“I’m a shit.” Donte spoke before Adin had a chance to say anything. “Tell me you forgive me or I will be forced to brood in the most beautiful city on Earth.”

“I need you,” Adin told him. “I just threw away any chance for us, and pissed off about half the underworld in the bargain.”

“Did you?” Donte sighed. “Again? You make me laugh to think I used to worry about things like plague…”