Liquid Lies (20 page)

And Nora wasn’t exactly the trusting type, especially of Primaries. So why the freedom? What made her believe that Reed wouldn’t double-cross her?

“Where’s everyone else?” Gwen asked.

“Ran out of here like bats out of hell this morning. Nora was supposed to come with us but I guess she got called away.”

She hadn’t expected him to answer. That was a lot of information she wasn’t sure she should have. Gwen looked to the east. Something was wrong in the Plant. Not much could rip Nora away from her chance to sit in on Gwen meeting Genesai, but her people could. Was it a problem with the Tedrans? Or the Ofarians?

“You’re mine today,” Reed said. “Don’t think because she’s not here that it’ll be easier going. I have orders.”

She thought he’d say something like that, but it barely registered. Her mind was on the Plant.

Reed pressed her into the Range Rover’s passenger seat. She settled on the black leather, the interior warm from the sun, and debated all the options that had been thrown at her yesterday at the rest stop.

Translating Genesai’s speech would align her with Nora. Ignoring him would send the government dogs on a Secondary fox hunt. Either way, innocent Ofarians would know a fear they’d only imagined. Secondaries would die. Everything came down to today. Everything depended on her.

She bent forward and buried her face in her arms. Reed slid behind the wheel and pressed buttons on the dashboard. A British woman’s voice began a navigation sequence.

“Sit up,” he said, toneless. “Put your belt on.”

How nice of him to consider road safety. She straightened and pulled the seat belt across her body, clicking it down by her hip. Her eyes refused to face forward, however, and drew a long, slow line over Reed’s body.

Those thick thighs spread over his seat. He wore new jeans, like her, but he still wore those beat-up, ankle-high workman’s boots she’d noticed in the alley a few centuries ago. The black fleece coat stretched across his chest and arms, one of which draped over the top of the steering wheel, the other throwing around the stick shift.

She’d seriously screwed up.

BLN—Before Last Night—she could easily chalk up her desire to the Allure. Now she knew what he tasted like, how his hard muscles felt beneath his skin. What that tease of a tattoo had turned into.

What had he said to her before? That he knew what her breath sounded like when she was turned on? Well, now she knew that about him, and every time he exhaled, she found herself focusing on his mouth, wanting to hear it again.

Appalling, that thought, that she still wanted the guy who had stolen her then claimed to want to keep her safe. The guy who’d shoved her away and treated her like chattel. If she could slap herself, she would.

Now, though, his mouth was set in a tight line and he looked so determinedly forward she imagined him in a neck brace. He gunned the engine, his legs working the clutch and the gas to start the steep climb up the drive and out onto the road.

A heavyset man with a mangled ear and two missing fingers exited the driveway guard hut and circled around to Reed. As he checked out the display on Reed’s watch, Gwen watched Reed assess the guy. She could tell without any verbal interaction: the guard, too, was a Primary.

Nora was a fool, to trust that money could buy loyalty. Her army consisted of Xavier and Adine. Xavier was damaged and volatile, and Adine was…hmmm, Gwen didn’t really know what Adine was. Smart, definitely. Observant and careful. Shy, even. Odd traits for a kidnapper. Gwen had sensed a Secondary signature when Adine came around, but it was strangely weaker, as though masked or incomplete.

So Nora had been forced to hire Primaries to help. Where was all this money coming from? This sort of thing was Reed’s job. Gwen had noted his Cartier Chronograph watch. Clearly the guy wasn’t charging his clients minimum wage. And by the way he’d appraised the mean-looking guard, she guessed the fingerless guy with the gun operated on the same side of the law as Reed. Those types would need a pretty penny to stay reliable.

Nora was walking a fine line. Gwen filed it all away and kept her mouth shut.

For the next hour and a half, the British woman in the navigation system did the talking.

The Primary world lined the four-lane road snaking around the lake. Gwen watched it go by with a hand on the window. At a stop sign she tried the door handle. Locked, of course. No amount of pressing the lock mechanism worked either. Beside her Reed made a little sound like he was insulted she’d even try.

He veered off the main avenue and onto a two-lane road that stretched up into the mountains. Pretty soon the markings on the pavement disappeared. The tree growth turned denser, and the road made severe turns and sharp dips. She clutched her stomach to keep down the car sickness and tried to focus on a distant point to stave off the dizziness, but even the far points shifted too fast. The houses thinned out. Their sizes and general upkeep declined. She saw more pickups than BMWs.

The British woman told Reed to turn in twenty meters. He slowed, but Gwen saw no road or driveway. Then, as they got closer, two faint tire ruts swerved off the road and disappeared into a canopy of evergreens so thick the automatic headlights flicked on. The Range Rover came out the other side and face to face with another little green hut almost identical to those sitting around the lake house.

This time a woman exited and strode to the car. Though both her ears were still intact, she shared the same skeptical grimace as the driveway guard. Reed rolled down his window and held out his watch again. What was on that thing? The female guard looked across Reed at Gwen, and her frown deepened. Then she disappeared into the hut and came out with a bulging envelope. She passed it to Reed and waved him onward.

The bushes in front of the Range Rover parted. The SUV slowly drove through and into the opening of a tall, formidable gate extending through the trees. The tire ruts swooped into the forest and the gate clanged shut behind them. The land sloped steadily downward. Ahead rose a ten-foot-tall iron latticed wall. The tire ruts ended in front of it.

Reed threw the SUV in park and killed the engine. The lock on Gwen’s door released. The sudden freedom was anticlimactic because they literally stood at the edge of the world. As she stepped out of the car, pine needles crunched under her boot, releasing their sweet scent. The forest clutched her so tightly she could barely breathe. There was nothing up here except icy gusts that liked to torment her skin, and the roar of the wind throwing about the tree branches.

“There.” Reed stood to one side of the iron lattice, pointing downward. She went to his side, keeping a careful distance between them.

The iron wall had prevented the car from rolling down a steep decline. A path switchbacked down to a tiny shack. Its minuscule front porch rested on the ground, but the back half of the cabin balanced on stilts, hanging over a cliff that dropped into a hazy, quiet valley. The windows were dark, as if blacked out by paint or heavy drapes.

“I’m supposed to stay up here. Orders.” He waved about the watch, but as she tried to steal a glance at it, its screen was disappointingly blank.

“Here.” He slapped the envelope at her chest.

She took it, blinking in confusion. He just shrugged, as if to say, yet again, “Not my business to know.”

So this was it. She was on her own. Nora trusted Reed would make her go inside that cabin at any cost, and Gwen believed he would, too. All that posturing about how he was here for her now had vanished. Maybe she could have used that before. Maybe, if she’d been smart and had actually thought through her actions before she’d tried to jump him, she could have manipulated his obvious desire to get him onto her side. But that was gone now. His position was all too clear.

He worked for Nora.

Reed leaned against the Range Rover’s bumper, the car sagging a bit under his weight, and stared, absolutely expressionless.

Gwen turned away to face Genesai’s shack.

Nora claimed to have told her the truth about the Ofarians and Tedrans, but really, wasn’t her opinion as skewed as Gwen’s own? Maybe Genesai knew something else entirely. Maybe he was the one who knew The Truth.

And maybe, just maybe, she could use it.

She marched down the mountainside, trying to ignore the nerves twanging all over her body. Nora had called Genesai insane. What did that mean exactly? Was he dangerous?

As she stepped onto the porch, the weathered floorboards were spaced so that she could see the pitch of the cliff under her feet. She gulped and tried to focus. The creak of the shack on its stilts wasn’t helping. Clutching the strange envelope to her chest, she took two deep breaths and knocked.

A great crash erupted from inside. Pounding footsteps. She stumbled backward off the porch. Another crash, more footsteps, then the door flung open. A shirtless young man, eighteen at the most, peered out.

Pale, almost translucent skin stretched over his prominent rib cage. Brown hair shot out of his head at all sorts of lengths and angles, as though he’d taken scissors to it himself in the dark. His head twitched on his neck like a bird examining a stranger holding food. His clear, sunflower blue eyes blinked rapidly. When he looked down and saw that his toes had breached the line of sunlight from the open door, he shrieked and scrambled back into the pitch black of the cabin.

Okay. Strange, yes, but not dangerous. His Secondary signature burned hot and wavy, like the desert sun, and she was relieved to learn that
nelicoda
didn’t affect that part of her. The young man’s signature wasn’t at all like Nora’s and Xavier’s, which carried with them an air of unrepentant revenge and hurt. Beneath Genesai’s odd behavior there lay a line of…peace. Of innocence.

She turned to see if Reed was watching, but he was no longer visible. He wasn’t worried about her escaping apparently; the narrow path was the only way up or down. The shack or the Range Rover, her only two options.

Gwen stepped tentatively forward. “Genesai?”

“Genesai!” With a giant smile displaying rows of browned teeth, he whirled back into the shack, arms and legs flailing. She took that as an invitation to go inside, shutting the door behind her.

Two early-twentieth-century gas lanterns sat in the far corners, emitting an unfamiliar odor and just barely lighting the tiny one room. She’d been right; the windows were slathered with a messy coat of thick black paint. Squinting, she could make out a table, two chairs tipped over on their sides, a narrow bed piled with frayed blankets, and an honest-to-goodness chamber pot.

Genesai jumped straight up onto the table and gargled in the back of his throat. Gwen’s back hit the front door, but he didn’t lunge for her. He leaped through the air, the force of his body moving the table, and landed on the bed. Like a child, he bounced on the weak mattress, his face contorted with what she assumed to be glee. He shouted, but the Translation didn’t kick in so he was just making nonsensical sounds. He fell off the bed, picked himself up, and danced around the room, his knobby arms and legs wobbling like the limbs of a new colt.

Genesai started to babble, a short string of sounds that flew all around the pitch scale. They seeped into her ears and slammed into her brain.
This
was actual speech. She gripped the table edge, preparing for the roughest part of Translation, when all of a sudden it stopped. Not his talking, the Translation. Like a car that had driven about two feet out of park and promptly died. She realized why: he was only saying one phrase over and over and over.

“Down, down, down we come. Into fire, into water. Up, up, up we go. Together again, with blood.”

The sounds and words were too limited and her mind couldn’t complete the Translation. As Genesai bounced past, she grabbed his arms, the envelope dropping at her feet. She repeated the phrase in his language, her mouth and tongue feeling thick and heavy and tingly, like fingers regaining feeling after being numbed with ice.

Genesai’s angular face alighted. He bounced out of her grasp and she trailed behind him, anxious for him to say more. Nora said she’d been trying to communicate with him for over a century, and Gwen was on the verge of a breakthrough. It was a powerful motivator, to gain something Nora wanted and only Gwen could unlock.

But Genesai just repeated the phrase. Gwen kept saying it back to him. He squealed with joy, hyping himself up so much he started to wheeze. She could see the energy starting to drain out of him.

“Wait, Genesai. Sit down and rest.” She said it in English and Tedranish, knowing it was futile. But at least he let her guide him to the bed, where he sank with a great sigh. With each pump of his chest, she could count a new rib.

“I would very much like to talk with you,” she said in English.

For the briefest of moments, she thought he might have understood. His face turned up to her and he smiled his version of a smile. She tried not to cringe in the cloud of his breath.

“Genesai,” he whispered, and collapsed onto the bed.

His eyes rolled back in his head and his body went slack. Resonating snores filled the shack. Gwen shook him hard, called his name using the accent of his language, clapped in front of his face. No response.

Now what? Every second meant Nora crept closer to her goal of wiping out the Secondaries’ secret existence. Every second in silence was a second lost to Gwen. She couldn’t simply do
nothing
. When she did nothing, had nothing to say or offer, she was Nora’s puppet. Those strings needed to be cut. Gwen just had to figure out how.

The envelope the Primary guard had handed her lay where she’d dropped it by the door. Gwen snatched it up and ripped it open. What the…office stationery and crayons?

A thin stream of mountain air leaked under the door. It tickled Gwen’s legs then swirled up her body and throughout the cabin. There was movement in the corner of her eye, pale and fluttering. She turned toward the back corner, where the old lanterns still burned. Genesai’s manic movements had distracted her before, but now she saw it. Or them, rather.