Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two (30 page)

So she launched herself at the boy, putting him out of the way with one good hard punch to the head. He sagged, dead weight in the old man’s arm, while the gun kept the madman’s other hand busy. He dropped the boy as Raena’s elbow came round at his head. He blocked the blow with his gun, just as she had hoped. She hit it hard enough to put it out of commission.

He got one foot between hers. She let him pull her over, grabbing his jacket with both fists and pulling him down as well. She twisted enough that he took some of her weight in the fall. Once they’d landed, she darted her head forward, planting a good solid kiss on his mouth. That distracted him just enough that she brought her knee up hard and incapacitated him.

Then she scrambled backward off of him and pushed him off the ramp with the toe of her boot. He was lucky she didn’t give him the heel.

She spoke into the comm bracelet on her wrist. “I’m in. I had an unforeseen complication, but it’s been handled. There’s a fire in the next docking bay over, so dodge the fire suppression team on your way here. The smoke will serve as a beacon for you. We haven’t much time.”

She hauled the boy up onto her back and carried him onto the ship. As expected, she found a cell the Thallians had kitted out for her. She locked the unconscious teenager into the restraints, then went back outside to check on things.

The old man had crawled over to his gun and was trying to get it aimed at her. Age or pain made his arm shake.

“I don’t know who you really are,” Raena told him, “but you’d better stop playing with me. Every time a Gavin-figure shows up in one of my dreams, I kill him.”

As the words left her lips, though, the dream came apart. She woke up in her cabin on the
Veracity
, the very same shuttle that had been in her dream. She spared a fond thought for Jain, the boy who’d led her to it.

Her thoughts circled around to the Gavin-figure in his dream. What had he said? “I’ve come back from the future for you.”

Her blood iced. Was that the proof she was looking for, the proof that Gavin really was using Messiah against her? Were the nightmares really visions from the moments when the time streams split? Maybe that was why they started as things she remembered, then warped. Maybe, if she’d been able to stay in the dream a little longer, she could have gotten a message to Gavin. Told him to leave her the hell alone.

Or, she thought grimly, maybe the insomnia had driven her insane to the point that such a theory would make even passing momentary sense to her.

Still, this was the first dream in which she had been able to talk back as a somewhat self-aware participant. The way all the other dreams had played out so far, she had always been passive, forced to endure her past and the emotions trapped there. Even when the dreams diverged from her memories of the past, the figure that represented her—both observed and inhabited—reacted to everything as the Raena of that era would have reacted, given the new set of circumstances.

The dream-Raena was trapped by the time in which she existed.

Perhaps the only active figure in any of these dreams was Gavin: choosing the moment, directing the change, god and king of the past.

Served him right to be punished repeatedly for his hubris, stupid fucker. Maybe he’d engineered it all so that she couldn’t even speak up in her own defense or ask him to leave her alone. He could rape her memories, her past, and there was no way she could fend him off or tell him no, short of ending him in every timeline where their paths crossed.

Maybe it was time she stopped feeling guilty about killing him and see it as honest self-defense, a kind of unknowing triumph.

Raena no longer had any desire for suicide to stop her torment. The answer was going to have to be murder. Gavin had it coming.

Anyway, it wouldn’t be the first time she’d killed someone who believed he loved her. As if she needed any proof that life had really changed for her, she honestly hoped that this time would be the last.

Kavanaugh picked the bar. He hadn’t been to Tengri in a couple of years, at least, but he knew Ocho’s would still be there. It would be kind to call the place a dive, but it had a trustworthy clientele, in that you could trust everyone there to mind their own business.

He got there early so he could scope the place out and find a good vantage point to wait to meet the crew of the
Veracity
.

He’d settled over a good amber ale—for old times’ sake—when the human boy and the blue-furred girl came in holding hands. He wore some kind of obnoxiously flashing shirt with an advertisement for the casinos on Kai over hand-me-down engineer’s pants, all pockets and loops. She wore a boxy black jacket with nothing under it and a star field-patterned skirt that swirled past her knees.

They went straight to the bar for a drink. They weren’t military at all. Barely looked armed. They could have been a young couple of school kids out for a night on the town, slumming, because they didn’t look like they belonged in a place like this. They may have been the only people in the place who didn’t look at all like a threat.

Kavanaugh suspected he’d made a mistake assuming that anyone traveling with Raena was in her league. He shouldn’t have dragged the kids here. Now that he saw them, he felt responsible for making sure they got home safely.

He moved out of the shadows so they could see him when they turned around, drinks in hand.

He watched the pair of Chameleon girls cross paths with the couple, but neither the boy nor the girl reacted. Kavanaugh knew what to watch for, though. He flicked a coin at one Chameleon girl’s bare arm. Without flinching, she snatched the coin from the air, dropped the wallet she’d stolen, and kept walking.

The boy scooped his wallet up, tucked it back into his trouser pocket, and sealed the flap over it. “Thanks,” he said when they reached Kavanaugh’s table. “I didn’t even know it was gone. They were that smooth.”

“Glad to help,” Kavanaugh said. “Go ahead and sit down.” Once they were settled and introductions made, he asked, “How is she?”

“No more seizures,” Coni said.

“That’s good.”

“Now she’s blaming someone named Gavin Sloane,” Mykah continued.

“Gavin loves her. The crazy-making kind of love,” Kavanaugh explained. “He got himself addicted to the Dart, practically wrecked his health, and set about bankrupting himself, looking for her the last time. I saw how nuts he was when she left him on Kai. I can believe he has had a hard time turning loose of her. What is she blaming him for?”

“She thinks he’s messing with her dreams,” Mykah clarified.

“It makes more sense when she explains it,” Coni said.

“No, not really, it doesn’t,” Mykah added.

Kavanaugh had a sip of ale to hide his smile. When he was certain of his poker face, he asked, “Messing with her how?”

“You really should talk to her,” Mykah said. “It will sound crazy coming from one of us. In fact, it will sound crazy coming from her,” he hedged, “but at least you’ll know she means it.”

“Duck,” Kavanaugh told them, not a moment too soon.

He was impressed to see them do just that, dodging in opposite directions, staying low. When the creature came crashing across the table they’d just cleared, Kavanaugh caught the table’s edge and flipped it upward, sending the spider thing to the floor.

The rest of the fight came piling their way. Kavanaugh left his gun holstered. “Never bring a gun to a fist fight,” Doc used to tell him. Someone was going to hit you before you could get clear enough to take a shot, and then your gun would be roaming loose around the party. Never a good thing.

Kavanaugh circled around the altercation. He was amused to see the boy going over it, vaulting off one creature’s shoulder, another’s head, bouncing off the ceiling, using the light fixture to change direction. The blue girl was up and following him, a big grin on her muzzle.

They were a joy to watch. The girl knew how to work that skirt. The way the boy moved told Kavanaugh he had been training with Raena. Neither of the kids seemed interested in joining in the fight, though. They weren’t even really running away, just stirring up trouble in pockets of the room where the brawl hadn’t yet reached, all of it done for the sheer love of chaos.

Kavanaugh waded into the fringes of the turmoil and fought his way toward the door. As he expected, the kids got there first and were waiting on him.

“Let’s go see Raena,” he said.

CHAPTER 14

M
ykah unlocked the cabin door and stood back. Kavanaugh had a flashback to opening Raena’s tomb, not knowing what he’d find inside. Then he remembered that experience had only been terrifying in retrospect, after he better understood the danger he had been in. He wished he had a clue what he was in for now.

Raena was sitting up on her crisply made bed, back against the wall. She wore skintight workout clothes in a festive shade of aquamarine, so different from the black military-styled clothing he still thought of her wearing. It was hard to tell if her hair was brushed or if she meant it to look that way: sticking out from her head in odd tufts in all directions.

She looked tired, but he was struck again by how pretty she was, how very young she looked. Although her brown skin leaned toward shipboard pallor, her face was still completely smooth. She could pass for twenty, even though he’d met her for the first time almost twenty-five years ago. It took him a moment to miss the white line of scar between her eyes.

“Thanks for coming, Tarik,” she said quietly. “I know I already owe you a couple of favors, but I wasn’t sure where else I could turn.”

“I’m not sure what I can do about bad dreams, Raena. We all have them. I can’t prescribe anything for you.”

“These are more than dreams.” She scooted forward toward the side of the bed, dangling her feet over the edge. She was barefoot, which struck Kavanaugh as wrong. He couldn’t remember ever seeing Raena without her high-heeled boots. Even when she’d come out of the tomb, she’d been wearing them.

She asked, “Where are my manners? Would you like something to drink?”

“What’d’ya got?”

“Oh, they’ll let me have pretty much anything I ask for. This is the best prison cell I’ve ever had.”

He couldn’t tell if she was kidding, or if there was a darker edge of paranoia beneath her light tone.

“Would you like a glass of xyshin?” she offered. “I’m kind of in the mood.”

“Sure, that sounds okay.”

She didn’t get up to get it or even to reach over to the comm button. Kavanaugh looked at her, eyebrows raised.

“One of the others will be along with it in a moment,” she explained. “I found out by accident that they were monitoring me. I try not to abuse the knowledge, but room service is pretty quick here.”

When the door opened again, a squid-like creature came waltzing in on a multitude of tentacles, supporting a bottle in one tentacle and a pair of glasses in another.

“Vezali, have you met Kavanaugh?” Raena asked politely.

“Not yet,” the tentacled creature answered in a high-pitched girlish voice.

“He rescued me from a bounty hunter’s ship a long time ago,” Raena said. “Remember?”

The dream was very clear in his head: the way the icy crystals of his breath swirled in the stale air, the dead creature with the bashed-in skull glued to the deck by its own frozen blood, Raena caught impossibly tight in the crash web on the wall.

“I remember,” he said. “I dreamed about it not too long ago.”

Raena got up slowly, languorously, clearly trying not to frighten anyone, and took the bottle and the pair of glasses. She poured the drinks generously, handed one to Kavanaugh and the other to Vezali, and settled back on the bunk with the bottle.

“Stay,” she said, “if you want to.”

“Sure,” Kavanaugh encouraged.

“Thanks.” Vezali perched on the end of the bed, since Kavanaugh had the only chair. He wasn’t sure how to read her emotions, but her body language didn’t communicate any agitation to him. He would have said the squid-girl wasn’t frightened of Raena at all.

“I had that dream, too,” Raena said, sipping the sweet liquor. “Where did yours end? With me walking off into the rain?”

“Yeah,” Kavanaugh said. “That’s where my memories of that night end, too: when you left us. I remember how the storm roared outside of Doc’s ship. I was so worried about you. Then I didn’t see you again until we opened your tomb, all those years later.”

Raena jumped in before whatever he’d planned to say next. “The dream kept going for me. I walked off across the marsh toward the forest. A man was waiting there. I thought he was another bounty hunter, so I shot him. When I confirmed the kill, the dead man looked like Gavin. Not Gavin as I saw him last, in my waking life on Kai, but aged. Gavin with less hair and more wrinkles. In the dream, I didn’t know who he was. Once I woke up, I figured it out right away.”

“Isn’t that how dreams always go?” Kavanaugh asked. “They make more sense after you wake up and think them over.”

“Do you remember when you opened my tomb?” Raena asked, conversationally, as if she wasn’t invested in the answer. “You told me that you worked for Gavin. You said he was on a moon base orbiting the planet.”