Smoke and Mirrors (5 page)

Despite that, he looked oddly comfortable in his surroundings, wandering over to the CD player and turning the volume down a notch. She didn’t know the music. It sounded vaguely eastern, mixing oddly beautiful melody and harmonised voices with accomplished blasts of heavy rock guitar. Unusual, fascinating, constantly changing, like the man who played it.

“How long have you stayed here?” she blurted.

He shrugged. “A week or so. Why?”

“I don’t know. You seem very—settled. Laird-like.”

His eyebrows twitched. “Sit down. Insult me in comfort.”

“Thank you, I will,” she said cordially. She sat on the sofa closest to the fire and sipped her coffee.

He stood in front of her for a few moments. She wondered in sudden panic if he’d sit beside her. He didn’t. He hooked a pouffe over with one foot and sat astride it, a couple of feet away, looking up at her.

“Go on,” he said. “Ask.”

“Anything at all? You mean, you’re prepared to answer at last?”

“Some,” he admitted.

“All right, why are you in Scotland?”

“It’s a long story.”

She looked ostentatiously at her watch. “I seem to have plenty of time.”

“Time isn’t the problem. Understanding is.”

“I’m not normally regarded as stupid.”

He leaned his elbows on his knees. “All right, why do you think I’m here?”

“To take over the Scottish drugs market.”

“You picked that up from D.S. Lamont.” He sounded disappointed.

“You said you would answer,” she pointed out. “
Is
that why you came?”

He seemed to be regarding her coffee mug with so much interest that in annoyance, she offered it to him. He smiled and took it. His fingers brushed against hers. Secret, electric pleasure shot up her arms and spread. She had to squash down the rising panic, because he, of all men, just shouldn’t be having this effect on her.

“It’s why I was sent,” he said at last and sipped from the mug. He lifted his gaze to her face. “But I won’t do it.”

Surprise, stupid relief, pleasure had her retrieving the mug from him before she recognised the intimacy of this little scene she was participating in, and sense came flooding back. So he was an arsonist, a murderer, a gangster, but at least he didn’t want to be a drug dealer? What the
fuck
was so good about that? Even supposing it was true.

She said steadily, “Why not?”

He shrugged. “Again, many reasons. Let’s just say I’m not that bad a bad man.”

“And yet you burned down a building with people in it.”

His eyelashes closed down like a golden veil. “There shouldn’t have been people in it. I made it plain.”

“I don’t understand.” Stupid words from someone who only moments ago had claimed to be so clever, but this time, he didn’t seem to notice.

“I smuggled in and delivered a boatload—almost literally—of heroin to Gadarin in that warehouse. It was meant to buy us—us as in the people who sent me—into his operation. I told my own people not to be there last night. They didn’t have to understand why. My plans tend to work out, and my people know that. But Gadarin’s don’t. Word got out, and so his people
were
there, perhaps warning him, perhaps to protect the goods.”

“You tried to rescue them,” Nell muttered. Was she
comforting
him? Did he need that? It was hard to tell. He was gazing away from her into the fire. “But you said you were sent to take over the operation—sent by whom?”

There was a faint pause, and she wondered if he’d said as much as he was going to. Then he answered, “By a man known as the Bear. You would call him a crime lord.”

“And what do you call him?”

Rodion’s lips twisted. “‘Sir.’ In his company. Out of his company…” He glanced back at her, his eyes suddenly clear. “Out of his company, I call him ‘that fucking bastard I’m going to kill one day.’”

It wasn’t so much the words that were shocking; it was the sheer, implacable hatred spilling out of his voice. His eyes seemed positively to shine with it, turning the blood in her veins to ice. Because she believed him.

“Why?” she got out.

The frightening hardness began to fade from his eyes. “More reasons than I have teeth. But mostly because he has something that isn’t his. Treasure. I need to find it.”

She curled her lip. “So it’s still all about money,” she sneered.

His eyes widened. “Who said anything about money?”

She opened her mouth to yell at him in frustration, to demand a proper explanation, but before the words could get out, the blazing fire in the grate popped and surged outward, a blurry, flaming ball hurtling straight at her.

She couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, but Rodion leapt up in front of her, and the fire blasted right into him. Her mouth opened in a soundless cry of horror as not just his aura but his whole body blazed gold and red and orange like one giant flame.

She jumped up, already reaching to push him over, to wrap him in the rug he stood on, when his flaming arms lifted and quite suddenly he wasn’t burning anymore. It was as if the fire had been driven back and Rodion himself doused in water. But the fire was still there, hovering above the carpet, no longer a ball but growing and lengthening until some kind of human figure seemed to form within it.

And then it actually spoke, words hissing from it in a hollow, yet very human-sounding voice. “Be warned—you’ve gone too far, and it won’t be tolerated. You’re endangering us all.”

“I know what I’m doing,” Rodion said flatly.

So at least she wasn’t hallucinating. He heard the voice too. He even answered it as if it were quite normal.

Maybe she
was
hallucinating.

“We can’t be discovered. You know that.”

“I know what I have to do, and you won’t stop me. You can’t. Go away until I invite you in.”

The fiery figure seemed to surge again, hissing as if angered by his rudeness, but then it bounced back again, like a ball hitting a brick wall.

“We’re
all
warning you, Rodion,” it growled. “You have to stop.”

He stepped forward. “No.
I’m
warning
you
. I will
not
stop. Until it’s done. Until I’ve done
your
job.”

With a crackle, the fire whizzed back into the grate. Nell blinked, several times. The flames blazed away merrily but unspectacularly. The rugs were undamaged. So, it appeared, was Rodion.

He turned slowly to face her, and she gazed up at him with, surely, every fear, wonder, and doubt leaking from every pore. She just couldn’t seem to get the words out.

Perhaps she’d never got out of bed and she was still dreaming.

Surreptitiously, she pinched her arm, and the coffee slopped down the side of her mug, which still dangled from her numb fingers. He took it from her, licked up the drip, and gulped down the remains of the coffee.

“What the fuck was that?” Apart from the obscenity, her voice sounded amazingly calm and conversational.

He winked. “Talking fire. Astonishing, isn’t it?”

He walked past her, but she went after him in sudden anger. “Oh no, you don’t get away with that!”

He glanced back over his shoulder, and she realised in shock that she’d reached out to grab his arm. She snatched her hand back, saw him follow the gesture, but he only set the empty coffee cup down on a nearby table. “Nell. There are more things in heaven and earth. You know that.”

He straightened. Before she could move back, his hand closed over her fingers, and he sat down on the sofa, drawing her down beside him. His clothes weren’t singed. He didn’t even feel hot, although she was very aware of his warm fingers on hers. She must have spent too much time in his company, though, because although she should withdraw her hand immediately, she didn’t seem to mind his touch. She didn’t mind it at all. But then, she had more to think about right now, like what he was saying and what she’d just seen.

“I don’t know that,” she whispered. “I don’t know anything about that. You’re tricking me.”

“Nell. You dream, don’t you?”

Her stomach twisted. “Everyone dreams,” she retorted.

“But yours come true.”

“Bollocks,” she retorted, trying to squash down an entirely new panic. Because he
had
read her book and was admitting it. “
One
came true. Or could have been interpreted that way. It inspired one
story
, that’s all.”

“But it isn’t all, is it? There’s too much understanding in your book. You have them a lot. You notice them a lot, because they come true a lot.”

“Fantasies. Interpretation.”

“Why do you hide it?”

“Because it’s not normal!” The words burst out before she could stop them, and she had to drag her gaze free of his. Children of immigrants always wanted to fit in, didn’t they? Especially eccentric immigrants married to convicted armed robbers. The motive made her ashamed as well as angry. She tugged her hand free, and he let her.

“In what way,” he asked calmly, “isn’t it normal?”

“What, letting dreams tell you what to do? Believing some imaginary aura can tell you all you need to know about someone’s character? That a drink of sodding tea can cure your cancer? Trust me, that is
so
not fucking normal!”

She jumped to her feet, chewing her tongue to get it to shut up. At least he didn’t follow her as she strode across the room to the window, or ask stupid questions or offer pointless words of sympathy. She was pathetically grateful for that understanding, because right now she couldn’t deal with the upsurge of memory of the stupid, deluded people who’d surrounded her mother and got her to believe their drivel about nature’s cures. Before the cancer killed her.

“Not the point,” she muttered, gazing out the window. The rain had started again, splattering off the ground into puddles on the driveway. It would be dark again soon.

“Then what is?” he asked mildly.

She took in a deep breath. “You.” She turned to face him. “How did that car go on fire? How did you light
this
fire? What the hell just came out of it? It’s all to do with you, isn’t it?”

He met her gaze quite steadily. “Yes,” he admitted. “It’s all to do with me.”

“How?”

He shrugged. “It’s just something I can do. I can make fire. Heat things. By—willing them to, I suppose.”

She frowned. “But it doesn’t hurt you?
That
didn’t hurt you.”

“I can protect myself from it, influence it.”

Emboldened, she walked back toward him. “Then in the warehouse, you
chos
e not to save these people? Once you knew who they were?”

His eyes fell, then came back to Nell. “Not exactly. I couldn’t save them because I’d used all my strength starting so massive a fire in the first place. I could have burned to death with them, I suppose. I chose not to do that.”

She remembered something else. His tiredness in Waverley when he’d fallen into the second stolen car, the tight line of his mouth, the huge shadows under his eyes, the constant tapping of his fingers and foot, his teasing conversation, as if to keep himself awake. He’d had a long and tiring night.

Diddums.

She said, “You used it to steal the cars too, didn’t you?” That’s what made him even tireder.

“I melt the locks. It makes robbery pitifully easy.”

She almost laughed, because it was almost funny. He was just like her bloody dad. “Then that’s what you do? You rob people?”

“I’ve robbed some people,” he admitted. “Some banks, some insurance companies. A couple of art galleries and a few villains. One villain too many, to be honest.”

“The Bear?”

“The Bear.” He stood up and walked to a cabinet in the corner, from which he took two crystal glasses. “I never was, nor wanted to be a gangster, but I was a wild and mildly criminal youth. It was too easy for me, so I had to make it harder. The adrenaline was like a drug, and I graduated to bigger and better, the kind that gets you noticed by all the wrong people. Inevitably, I overestimated my own smartness. The Bear got me put in prison, and then he busted me out again. And now he thinks my ass, my treasure, and my people belong to him. We don’t, and I need to find a way to get them all back.”

Nell watched him pour whisky into the glasses and walk back toward her. She waited until she’d taken one of the glasses from him, making sure their fingers never touched, before she spoke.

“How do I fit into all of this?”

His eyebrows lifted. “You think you do?”

But she’d worked out a few more things by now. “
You
think I do,” she said shrewdly. “You knew about me when you asked the police for a translator, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” he admitted without noticeable shame. He even clinked his glass off hers before sipping and savouring the whisky.

She sat down and drew her legs comfortably under her, cradling her glass. “Why?”

“It was an opportunity. I always meant to track you down while I was in Scotland, but when I ran into the police, I decided to let them do it for me.”

“Why?” she said again, baffled. “What do you want with me?”

“I thought your dreams might help me find my treasure.”

She lowered the glass, which had only made it halfway to her mouth. “All right. Now you’re back in airy-fairy weirdo territory.”

“Like your mother?”

“Fuck off,” she said dangerously.

“Did you never ask yourself why she was so open to that shit?”

She opened her mouth to retort, then shut it again with an angry shrug. The bastard already perceived far more than he should have, as much from what she didn’t say as from what she did.

“Zavrekestan is a strange country to outsiders. Many of us have odd…abilities. Maybe your mother didn’t have any herself—I don’t know—but I’ll bet you anything she grew up with some people who did.”

“Oh, that’s
such
a pile of crap!” Nell exclaimed. “If there really was a country full of supernatural dudes, why does everyone not know about it? It’s not as if people aren’t investigating that kind of stuff all over the planet.”

“Why would they come to Zavrekestan? There’s nothing much there. It was poor before Stalin got hold of it, and he and the Russian war between them sure as hell didn’t improve it any. It’s much more fun to chase ghosts around Britain or America.”