Night's Deep Hush: Reveler Series 4 (6 page)

He smiled, this time with edge. “I feel so much better. I’d be fucking fantastic if I could get you out of my head.”

“Can’t help you there.”

Vince swore and turned back to the cab. He really did look pretty bad. Lucky for him he had a fortune to fall back on. He could get himself a private nurse. Let
her
occupy his attention.
Connect
with someone, anyone, else.

An uncomfortable familiarity pinched her. Malcolm sometimes talked about a connection—and not necessarily with only her. It had to do with his tracking. Once he marked someone, he could almost always find him or her again.

Vince was bending to seat himself back into the cab.

Connection.
I can feel you
, he’d said.

The familiarity pinched harder.
Shit.
“Wait.”

This was awkward.

Vince rose slightly, holding on to the door and the roof of the cab. After she’d drowned him, he’d been Darkside a really long time. But before that, he’d been with her a lot. In fact, he’d been arguing with her. She’d literally been
his
mark, and she’d been slipping out of his grasp.

A semi-plausible alternative explanation, if she were looking for one, which she wasn’t, was that Vince was a tracker, like Malcolm.

And Vince had accidentally marked her. That’s how he’d found her. That’s why she was in his head.

Which meant she wasn’t caught. Not yet.

She moved closer to him and lowered her voice. “Did you bring Chimera with you?”

“I gave the marshal interested in me and you the slip.”

“And your excellent business associates?” Didier Lambert among them.

“They killed my father.”

There was that. Sad, but handy. “Maybe we can talk.” She felt a tiny bit guilty for leaving him collapsed facedown on the pavement but not guilty enough not to use him if she needed to. “Somewhere safe.”

“I have an apartment uptown.”

“Chimera will have that place under surveillance.”

His face twitched. “A hotel then.”

“Can’t use credit.” Malcolm’s instructions. She could’ve invited him to share the room she planned on getting with her stolen money, but she hesitated. Maybe she didn’t need to spend it.

“I have friends,” he said. “They have a place we can use.”

“What kind of friends?”

“The best kind—absent ones.”

Worked for her. “Do you have a mobile phone?”

He fished one out of his pocket, dropped it, and stomped on it. “Not anymore.”

He understood, then. She was smiling when she warned him again. “Really, I’ll be fine on my own. You’d be better off without me.”

“I’m certain I’ll be better off
with
you.” He cocked his head. “And if my father is any example, I’ll be dead without you.”

“It’s way worse than you think.”

“Goddamn.”

“And I’m in charge.”

“Understood.”

Jordan chewed her bottom lip, considering, then gave up the fight. “Yeah, okay. I want a shower.” She moved around him and got into the cab. “And a sandwich.”

***

“Paula and Marianne split up a few months ago,” Vince said to excuse the semi-packed, randomly cluttered and heaped state of the apartment. A violent shiver ran over him, knocking his teeth together, his vision going a little gray. “Marianne got a new place to go with her new girlfriend, and Paula is getting over the breakup in Spain.”

He watched Jordan as she looked around. She was sharper than he remembered her to be. It wasn’t that long ago that she’d seemed…ordinary to him. Intelligent, sure. Beautiful, in the slender, leggy way. And she had a classic, professional demeanor, even in jeans. He’d known many accomplished women like her. He just hadn’t anticipated the edge under her poise. He knew now how grossly he’d underestimated her, and he hadn’t even heard her story yet. But then, he’d underestimated everything. If just
one person
could be straight with him, maybe he could get his bearings. It felt as if he were still underwater Darkside where sometimes it was impossible to tell up from down.

“I can find what I need,” she said. Seemed like the books and art had been packed, but the essentials for living were still at hand. Pantry food only, however. “You’ve got to rest. We’ll talk in the morning.”

Not many hours left until then. He wavered on his feet, chuckled. “Is it safe to sleep?”

Jordan shrugged. “You don’t have a choice, do you? Keep to your own dreams tonight and you should be fine. It’s what Malcolm taught me.”

Vince gave her a wan smile. “I’ll do that. I’m not interested in visiting the Scrape ever again.” That came out wrong. He didn’t blame her for drowning him. But then again, she didn’t look as if she felt guilty, either.

The guest room was full of plastic storage crates, but the bed was still made. He didn’t peel back the quilt on top—the tremor was back in his hands. Jordan was safe, and that’s all that mattered. He’d found her and had somehow convinced her to accept his company. The rest would have to wait.

He didn’t remember closing his eyes, but when he opened them, the full light of day fell on a transparent crate of holiday decorations. He kept waking in strange places—
Paula’s apartment, maybe?
Then,
Jordan
.

By the time he made it to the threshold of the bedroom door, he was sweating. Jordan sat on the large crescent-shaped sofa. She’d moved a pile of stuff to one end, everything neatly folded. She tilted her head to the side, appraising him. “You wouldn’t happen to have one thousand three hundred sixteen dollars on you, would you?”

He blinked at her, baffled.

She gave him a Cheshire cat smile. “If you don’t, I’ll have to go mug some more people, and I’m not sure there’s quite that much time left before we have to leave. It’s four in the afternoon. You slept for a
long
time.”

Slept, maybe. He didn’t remember dreaming, just the pull of the water dragging him down, down, down.

Wait, mug some people?
He swallowed to wet his throat. “Let me think about it. I’m gonna go take a shower.” Which seemed a safe thing to say, since she wasn’t making any sense. No, that wasn’t right.
She
was probably making perfect sense. It was him who was different now. Hollow. Stripped. Waterlogged.

Jordan Lane had been the last person with whom he’d been himself. Maybe she could remind him what it meant to be normal.

The guest room had an en suite bath. He managed to take off his clothes and then got in the shower and let the water stream over his head. Usually, he woke with energy. Today, he was happy to be up and moving at all.

When he finally reemerged, clean but dressed in his pants from yesterday and an old Giants T-shirt of Paula’s, Jordan was making coffee. The caffeine would either kill him or fuel the day; it would be interesting to discover which.

She handed him a mug, and he remembered. “Did you say
mug
someone?”

A glimmer of that smile. “I need money.”

He guessed she was being funny. “I can get money.”

“No banks.”

“Fine. How much again?” He took a sip. Normal people drank coffee. Look at him being normal.

“One thousand three hundred sixteen dollars.”

Pretty specific number. “Can I ask why?”

“Not yet.” Jordan lifted her own mug, but she walked around to put the counter between them. She seemed cagey, as though she was squaring off, preparing herself. “I haven’t decided what I’m going to tell you yet. But thank you for the place to stay.” She didn’t look as if she’d slept, but her eyes were clear and so piercing that he had the urge to look away.

He sat in a wicker chair next to a tiny reading table, a wall at his back, instead. “You’re welcome here as long as you like. Paula won’t be back for a while. How about you fill me in? Maybe start with basics? I know Chimera is looking for you, which makes me think they are really looking for Malcolm Rook.” The marshal had the kind of colorful history that should’ve precluded a career in law enforcement.

“How about
I
ask the questions.” She sounded as if she had them lined up in her head already. A night of tense thinking does that to a person. “Do you know who you and your father were working for before I drowned you and your father died?”

Vince agreed the
who
was as good a place to start as any. “The only contact I had was with a man named Murray Graeme. My father had borrowed a great deal of money from him in an attempt to save our company, and all I had to do to relieve the debt was produce you, preferably as a willing employee in a new Rêve venture.”

“Willing. Ha. Guess how long that would’ve lasted?”

He opened his mouth to deny it, but no words came out. They’d killed his father. Who knows what they would’ve done to her if she hadn’t cooperated.

“So you flirted with me,” she said.

He’d been a worm. Shrugging, he said, “I generally do well with women.” Not Jordan, though. He knew she’d been flattered at first, but she’d also been reserved. At the time, he’d had no idea she had this…intensity behind her polite face.

She put her cup of coffee down. “The same awful people you and your father did business with are behind the ongoing trouble Malcolm and I have had.”

Vince frowned. When he’d witnessed Malcolm Rook being dragged into a waiting SUV, he had feared as much. He’d apologized already, so he didn’t do it again.

“Except,” she continued, “it turns out they also have people inside Chimera. We’ve been in hiding since, trying to figure out what to do.”

“So find the right Chimera marshal to report the corruption to.” He hadn’t liked that one last night, Marshal Cain, but Marshal Fawkes seemed competent. There had to be others. An internal affairs office.

“Chimera’s not an option,” she said. “It goes too high.”

Graeme had seemed like little more than a thug, not someone who operated an organization that included the control of highly placed Chimera. Her situation was bad, but maybe she was playing into the excitement a bit.

“They’re also involved with the kind of nightmare that attacked you in the Scrape,” she said. “They’ve been…feeding revelers to them.”

“No.” His heartbeat quickened, so he pushed his coffee away. He didn’t want to hear about the nightmares, tried to block the memory.

“It’s how they killed your father,” she said. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

He stood and turned away from her. “Graeme did this?”

The nightmares on the Scrape were icy, grabbing creatures. Vince had killed one to survive. It was that or die, and he’d chosen to survive. He’d become a berserker fighting to the last drop of blood. When he was done, his dream self had been splattered with sticky black tar, the creature’s jaw ripped from its skull. The savagery had made a nightmare out of
him
. That his father had faced such terror…? Vince’s eyes burned.

“No, someone else is responsible,” Jordan said. “Graeme’s probably dead by now. We had him briefly—he actually helped Maisie—but we couldn’t keep him and run, so we let him go.”

Silence fell as he battled the cold inside him. It felt as if he were back in the Scrape, that harsh wind blowing all around him. Last night she’d said the situation was much worse than he knew, and he’d gone along with her because she was finally speaking to him. But if this was true, no wonder she’d left him collapsed in the middle of the city.

“So the money?” she asked.

“I’ll get you your damn money. I want the bastard who—” He couldn’t even say it. “Tell me who killed my father.”

“I don’t know if I can trust you.”

He turned around to argue. “My
father
—”

“—is dead,” she finished. “Your love and loyalty reflects only on the past. You could be trying to save your skin in the present.”

“How do I prove I’m not working for them anymore?” He had no doubt she’d already thought this through. She seemed to have an answer for everything.

She folded her arms. “You have to go Darkside again, so I can figure out if you’re telling the truth. The dreamwaters will give me a sense of your intentions. It works both ways, so you’ll know if what I say is true, too.”

He knew about the dreamwaters.
Fine. Good.
Ending this standoff between them would be a relief, even if he did have to dunk himself in that treacherous stuff again. “I should be able to arrange a Rêve in a matter of hours.” The apparatus was downtown in the SpiderSly building, permits up-to-date. The fees for a rush Rêve in the Agora would be outrageous, but he didn’t care.

She cocked her head at him. Made him feel like he was missing something.
Oh.
“Except the Agora is policed by Chimera.” No credit cards. No banks. No mobile phones. No goddamn Agora Rêve.

“After parting ways with you last night, I arranged a black market Rêve.”

Of course she had. More dangerous. No safeties, and he was already compromised. “Does it cost one thousand three hundred sixteen dollars?”

“If you’re not joining me, I only need three hundred sixteen.”

“Or you’ll
mug
someone for it?” Absolutely ridiculous.