Mr. Real (Code of Shadows #1) (26 page)

“Or they disappeared.”

“Has any of the stuff you got magically disappeared? Sir Kendall sure hasn’t. My guess is she sent them back with magic. I mean, magic is supposedly reversible, isn’t it?”

Alix stiffened. She didn’t like where this was going.

He continued, “If your aunt was sending these guys back, maybe there was a good reason. And the answer to how to do that would be in here. This stuff is in English. I bet we could figure it out.”

Send them back?
“Here’s what I know, Paul—we’re wasting valuable time that could be better spent searching for Elvis pictures.”

“It’s not funny. This is not somebody with amazing judgment, yet somehow she sent these guys back. Think about it. I think we should study this book. There has to be a road map in there that will guide us in restoring the natural order of things.”

“Restoring the natural order? Why don’t you say what you really mean? Kill Sir Kendall. A way to kill your hated Sir Kendall without having to actually kill him.”

“This is not about killing him.”

“It’s not? You’re a flesh and blood human. Would you want somebody to transform you into just a picture? To turn you into an image? I do believe that’s known as
death
.” She took the book from his hands and put it back in the box, along with the horn hat and the photos. “You want to kill him.”

“Alix, let’s at least look and see.”

“
Just look and see.
This from the man who thinks Sir Kendall is the anti-Christ. And who majorly went back on his word with me? And you’re supposedly only here to protect me, yet now you want a spell to get rid of Sir Kendall? Excuse me if I’m feeling like
not
letting you
look and see
.” She picked up the box.

“Alix, he could be dangerous.” He spoke calmly, but one lone tendon on his neck had popped out considerably, and his jaw was set hard. No, he wasn’t calm. “You don’t know him like I do.”

“You played him in a commercial.”

“This goes way beyond the commercial.”

“How? How does it go beyond the commercial?”

“I can’t…” He eyed her—helplessly, she thought. “It’s too twisted. Just trust me on this. He’s evil. He’s dark.”

“All this because you hate the commercial?”

He made a little sound—a type of grim laugh, as though the truth of the matter was so vast and disturbing it was incomprehensible, and it was all stuffed inside him, popping out in that tendon, waiting to roar free.

“Alix—”

“You don’t get to read the book. I’ll look through it and decide what’s necessary.”

“
You’ll
decide what’s necessary?” His eyes blazed out of his beat-up face. “You’ll excuse me if that doesn’t fill me with a ton of confidence, considering you’re the one who unleashed something you don’t at all understand into the world. And now you won’t consider somebody else’s opinion.”

“I think one of us is unleashing something, and it’s not me.”

“We just need to know how he can be contained, neutralized.” He put his hands on the box.

She tightened her grip, looked warningly from his hand up to his eyes, in full mother bear mode now. He could rip the thing from her grip so easily. He could take it away from her and use it to destroy Sir Kendall. She half-thought he might.

“It’s stupid to not even want to know,” he said.

“I guess I’m stupid.” She pulled the box away. “I have a responsibility to him and I’m not going to shirk it. You can freak out all you want, but that doesn’t change my responsibility.”

“You don’t know what responsibility is. You don’t think things through—you said it yourself.”

Heat flared into her face. “At least I’m not trying to off someone.” She turned and left, calling Lindy in a low voice that meant business.

She stormed across the lawn. She’d trusted him, felt like she knew him. So stupid! Paul didn’t care about anything except destroying Sir Kendall. She had to find a way to keep them apart.

Sir Kendall was heating up water when she entered the kitchen, making more tea, apparently. The man certainly enjoyed his tea.

“Are you done with your computer stuff?”

“Not yet,” he said. “A few more emails and look-ups. What’s in the box?”

“Nothing.” She held the box tighter. “So, I have an idea. Let’s get dressed up and go to the fanciest place in town.”

“This town has a fancy place?”

“The Malcolmsberg supper club. It’s a little old fashioned—stained glass and deer heads and all that. Actually, I think the decorations and wait staff haven’t changed since the seventies. Or the menu.”

“But I’d imagine they have Denali.”

“You betcha. And really excellent frog’s legs.” She smiled. A rural supper club would broaden his experience. He’d probably only ever been to fancy restaurants. “So are we on?”

“Sounds splendid.”

The teapot whistled. She watched him pour the boiling water into the china teacup, which he balanced on a saucer. Paul would never use a teacup and saucer.

Sir Kendall took it upstairs. Quietly, she carried the box into the living room and hit the knob on the wall barometer. Workmen had found a little cubby in the floor of the front closet that unlatched via the barometer—all very weird and secret, but useful now.

She felt so confused. Maybe it would be better to send him back. She wished Paul had more objectivity so they could talk about it. She just wanted to do the right thing. Why did it have to be so hard?

When the box was safely stowed, she called the restaurant and got put on hold to elevator music. She waited, wondering whom Sir Kendall could possibly be emailing. The only elements he’d come with were the elements of the still from the commercial, like the car pictured behind him, so he certainly couldn’t be emailing people from his fictional world. She supposed he could strike up new acquaintances, but why? Or was he just pretending to be emailing, like kids in the Red Owl, pushing the toy carts, pretending to shop?

The hostess finally answered, and Alix made reservations for two. They’d have a long, leisurely dinner away from Paul. He’d get more acclimated to the world, and she’d figure out what to do.

And there was one more upside: she’d be able to wear her ruby necklace, and a fabulous outfit with all the accessories she’d ordered from the computer. The other day she’d looked at the stuff in her closet, and it was more amazing than she remembered. Even the boots seemed cooler. Like they’d evolved, somehow.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Sir Kendall stared at Paul “Puma” Reinhardt’s bio on MMAWorld.com. Why give the clone such an elaborate history, if he’d been created just to stand in for him? It said Puma had entered the professional ranks six years ago, at the age of twenty-three. There was footage from a few fights. Doctored? But the men Paul fought also had extensive histories. They were real. The MMA blog accounts of Puma Reinhardt seemed genuine. Something about a breakdown just weeks ago.

He went back to the earliest Paul Reinhardt image: a photo of a rural Ohio middle school baseball team taken some dozen years ago, a pretty good likeness of Paul in the third row left.

An impulsive, unsophisticated fighter from the American Midwest; the opposite of Sir Kendall, yet a clone. Was this Hyko’s revenge scheme in motion? Or something far more dangerous?

Because there was
something
about this Paul—a terrible familiarity—and it wasn’t just the identical appearance. Sir Kendall couldn’t identify the something; he knew only that when he looked at Paul, he had this overwhelming sense of pain and threat. It wasn’t so much that Paul was the threat—Paul struck Sir Kendall as an innocent, oddly. No, it was more that he was a vulnerability. As though Sir Kendall could be gotten at through Paul. Yet it made no sense. Could this strange, vulnerable sense of connection be an effect of the cloning process?

It didn’t matter. If the feeling persisted, it would make Paul the most dangerous threat of all: an Achilles heel.

He went back over what he knew about the case at hand. There was no question Hyko’s launch site was near the equator;
where
was the question. Yet Hyko was in town. Alix worked for him, or at least she was in the game somehow. But what possible function did the parents and that party serve? He pictured Alix, kneeling in the lawn, pretending fondness for that rabbit lawn statue in a kind of
tableau vivant
of nonsense.

He could almost see Hyko—perverse, vicious, irreverent, brilliant Hyko—blowing resources to create such a moment…almost. When Hyko made a decision, he went for it with everything he had. This decisiveness was a known liability of Hyko’s.

Yet, it didn’t feel right. The strangeness here was too comprehensive, too contextual, for even Hyko to have engineered.

It was the place.

He had spent some time in the woods alone that afternoon, lying in the dirt, studying a leaf. He’d meant to look for clues, but he couldn’t get over the way it looked when one held it up and allowed the sun to illuminate its profusion of tiny veins, which were like an intricate system of rivers locked inside its little world. It seemed so delicate, yet so mighty, too, as though it thrummed with the energy of the sun. And there were millions of leaves all around him, and each one had its own system of veins, its own delicate might. How had he never noticed leaves?

And then he’d found a flower, and a bug, and these things held their own surprises. How had he neglected to notice so much? What did it mean?

What did this anarchy of details mean? It was as if there was no governing intelligence, no organizing principle here whatsoever, save, perhaps, for a kind of mad exuberance.

No, there was
always
an organizing principle. It was supposed to be the launch. Stopping Hyko’s destructive launch.

He thought about the night he’d spent in Alix’s “sister’s” room, walls plastered with childhood memories. Alix and her sister had laughed about a group of boys pictured on the posters—New Kids, they had called them. The two of them had gone on and on about fan letters, schoolwork, and a board game, as though it were perfectly normal to remember such things in vivid detail.

He’d been a boy. He would have had a room with pictures. Why on earth couldn’t he remember any such thing? He had never found it odd before, not to remember, but now he found it…disturbing.

He finished typing his email to George Frame, though it would probably bounce back like the rest. He could draw no conclusions until he got in touch with one of his contacts. He had the wild idea of asking George Frame a question about his own boyhood, as a point of comparison.

What a strange thing to do, though. He was starting to feel desperate. He never felt desperate.

Alix came to the office yet again and stood at the open doorway. “Knock knock,” she said.

“One moment.” He hit send and tapped the button that dimmed the screen. “Come in.”

She entered, eyeing the computer, and then him, quizzically, as though he had just balanced the thing upon his nose rather than typed on it.

“Our reservations are for seven,” she said. “And it’s almost six. And I’m going to dress up. In honor of…well, we’ll think of something to celebrate.”

“Splendid.” He’d wear the tuxedo from the car. He always felt his best in a tuxedo. “I’ll finish up here.”

“Anything interesting?” she asked.

He smiled. “It’s all interesting.”

She turned and left.

His thoughts went back to Paul. Paul made him vulnerable. One cut out one’s vulnerabilities.

Ding
. A new email. No—a bounce back. Another undeliverable to Henry, his man inside Hyko’s organization. This was the fifth message that had bounced back over the secure network, as if Henry had never existed. Had Henry seen trouble coming and shut down his identity? Just when Sir Kendall needed to warn him about the clone? Luckily, they’d agreed on a backup communications venue, the forum at www.parrotfanciers.com, complete with code names. But he had to access the site from a public place. He snapped up his car keys and headed downstairs. The girl was in the kitchen.

“I need to run a quick errand,” he said.

“Really?”

He smiled and kissed her on the forehead. “Back before you know it.”

Seven minutes later, he arrived at the coffee shop. The boy, Benji, was at his usual post, and regarded him warily. Sir Kendall selected a wrapped cookie and placed it on the counter. “Let me guess: the last time I was here, I behaved like an oaf.”

“Oh, no, you just seemed out of it…”

Sir Kendall explained about his “twin.” He paid for the cookie, dropped a five into the jar, and settled into the computer station to fashion the coded message. After he was finished, he erased his history from the machine, and laid false tracks with a speed that surprised him. Was he getting smarter? He certainly felt stronger these days.

The response to the communiqué would take a while. Henry would have to make it alone to a very public computer. If he still could.

Back home, Sir Kendall bathed, took his time dressing, and then went downstairs to await the girl, quietly perusing the shelves and closets, looking for the small chest she’d carried in from the carriage house. She’d deposited it somewhere on the first floor; of that he was sure. Yet it was nowhere to be seen. So she’d hidden it. He smiled. As if anyone could hide anything from him.

Noise out front. He went to the window just in time to see both trucks, piled with garbage, rumbling away. Soon after, Alix descended the staircase wearing a ridiculous outfit. Oh, the dress itself was passable, what women like to call ‘the little black dress,’ but her white boots were thick with fringe and tassels, and she wore a white belt and, strangest of all, a rather impressive necklace of what looked to be genuine rubies.

He stood, made his way toward her and quickly ascertained that they were, indeed, not only genuine, but also astonishing in their saturation and fluorescence, as only the most prized rubies were—particularly the three large ones in the center. “My dear,” he whispered. “Do you mind if I ravish you right here and now?”