Undertow (The UnderCity Chronicles) (13 page)

She instantly rearranged her face into a mask of blandness the second he looked up, a hint of mischievousness playing across his features. “Turn off the lights. The tree, too.”

She raised an eyebrow, but did as instructed, leaving the room in candlelight.

“Now look at the jacket again,” he instructed softly. Jack held it up near the flames, and Lindsay grinned. It
was
magic. Dee’s handiwork had reappeared in the dark, brilliant and beautiful.

“That’s how it was made,” Jack said, his voice still low. “By candlelight. It’s not meant to be shown on television or in some store window. It’s a work of subtlety.”

She nodded, understanding. Without thinking she sat down beside him on the makeshift bed to better see the jacket. She became instantly aware that their bare thighs were only a handspan apart. To jump up would appear awkward to say the least, so she focused on her purpose for sitting down.

“What do all these markings mean?” she asked, running her hand over the woven symbols.

“They represent places in the underground,” he answered, pointing. “That one is the MTA’s ‘money room’, that’s the gang tunnels under Chinatown, that’s the labyrinth beneath Columbia University. Some are real, like Sumptown. Some, like The Burbs, used to exist once upon a time. And some are legendary, like Beach's City. They all carry a deeper meaning, too. Each place has a certain mood and history and imagery….” He trailed off. “Damn, I’m starting to sound like a professor again.”

“You know, that’s not a bad thing. You
are
a professor, Jack.”

He shook his head, his profile dark and stony in the flickering light. “No. I’m not. Not anymore.”

“Why not? What’s keeping you from going back to work, or writing a book, or—”

“Maybe a talk show appearance?” he continued sarcastically. “Or perhaps an article in
People
?”

Any urge to wrap herself around his body was utterly gone. Unless it was her hands around his neck. “I don’t get you, Jack.”

“I know,” he replied. “And trust me, that’s a good thing.”

She was about to give his attitude a dressing down when her phone rang. Crap, she hadn’t checked her land line. Maybe Seline—. She crawled across the couch bed and picked up the phone on the end table. “Hello?”

Silence.

“Hello? Anyone there?”

She thought she could hear breathing, slow and even, but nothing more. Despite the warmth of the apartment, a chill ran down her spine. She hurriedly hung up.

Jack was suddenly beside her. “Who was that?” His voice was low, sharp. His tension unnerved her. “Nobody. A crank caller, I guess.”

“Check messages.”

One look at his face and she did it. Thirteen messages. The first was silence and static. Same with the second. And the third. “There’s no message. Whoever it is doesn’t—”

Jack reached behind the table and yanked the cord from the jack. “You have other phones?”

“Yes. By the door and in the bedroom—”

“I’ll do the one at the door. You do the bedroom.” He was already walking away.

“Jack, what the hell is going on?”

“Move it! They’re listening.”

Fear and confusion tightening her gut, Lindsay hurried to her bedroom. When she returned she found Jack back at the couch, a brooding look on his face.

“Jack… what’s going on?”

“I don’t know.”

“Bullshit!” she said angrily. “Don’t you dare hold out on me.”

When he spoke, it was in that same low voice he’d used underground, as if they were being spied on. “Every time you pick up the phone you make a connection, Linds, and it’s not necessarily broken when you hang up. Someone’s got your number, and they’ve been trying to eavesdrop on you.”

“You’re saying I’m being watched?”

“It’s called a hook switch bypass,” he explained. “They splice into the phone system and call you up. You answer it, get silence, hang up, and after that they can use your phone like a bug, listening in on you and all the calls you make.”

“It’s them isn’t it? The people that have Seline.”

Jack rolled his shoulders. “Perhaps.”

“What do you mean ‘perhaps’? How do you know about this phone stuff?”

“Calm down, Linds. It’s probably nothing to worry about.”

If he was trying to downplay the situation to not worry her, he was doing a shitty job. “Oh, right, of course. Someone’s bugging my home, then you act like some guy from Homeland Security with all this unplugging, which is highly inconvenient. What happens if Seline calls? And you’re telling me it’s probably nothing to worry about? How about you humor me, pretend it
is
something to worry about, and tell me what the fuck is going on?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

She lost it. Making a strangled noise, she lunged for Jack and knocked him back on the couch, her legs astride him, and pounded on his chest. “Fuck you, Jack. You talk to me. Talk!” she screamed into his startled face.

There was an inhuman snarl, and a second later her back hit the floor, the force of it crushing the air from her lungs. Jack was over her, one hand gripped around her throat, the other raised in a fist. Then, as fast as it had happened, he let go and yanked his body away, a sharp hiss of breath escaping his clenched teeth.

Her hand on her chest, she gasped for breath. He was at the window, his form silhouetted against the city lights, the muscles of his right arm trembling with unspent force—enough to have shattered bone.

He didn’t move from there. “You okay?” His voice was hoarse as he choked out the question.

She could make out the flicker of the candles over the dark wood of the coffee table. Was she okay? What the hell kind of question was that? She drew herself up onto all fours and leaned against the couch bed. Only then did she make eye contact with Jack. He looked away and bowed his head. No matter that her neck was bruised from his grip, she wasn’t the only one in pain.

“Yeah, Jack, I am,” she replied as steadily as she could. “How about you?”

There was a long silence. “I know you have questions, Linds,” he said from the shadows of the window, his voice hollow. “For now, I need you to trust me. I told you I’ll help you find Seline, and I will, but we’ve got a long way to go, and I can’t guarantee how this is going to turn out.”

She sighed. “You didn’t tell me how you were, Jack.”

She heard the dull thud of his head as it hit the window frame. “I just attacked you after you invited me into your home. A woman who’s already scared about someone else and now I’ve given her reason to be scared about her own life in her own home. How the fuck do you think I am? I’m sick. Fucking sick.”

“Jack,” she said, “you don’t scare me.”

He gave a short hitch of laughter. “I should, Linds. You’ve no clue what I’m capable of.”

* * *

Lindsay slept poorly that night, her dreams a nightmarish collage of the tunnels, Sumptown and Seline. She woke again and again, each time swearing she had heard her bedside phone ring, and when her alarm clock finally went off she felt more exhausted then when she’d gone to bed.

She wrapped her housecoat about her, and pulled back the curtains of her bedroom to reveal a dreary, overcast day. “Give me a break,” she muttered and headed into the living room.

Jack was back in his own clothes, obviously having finished the laundry, and was leaning by the window, looking down at the streets below. In the exact same place she’d left him last night. She wasn’t about to join him. She loved the view from her place, not the fact that she had to be ten floors up to get it. She got vertigo on a step stool, and would bribe Seline to wash the windows.

“Morning,” she greeted him.

“You didn’t sleep well,” he responded, not taking his eyes from the scene below.

“No. I didn’t,” she said, surprised not so much by his observation, but that he would make it.

“I could hear you last night. Sounded like you were having bad dreams.”

He was still not looking at her. She leaned her hip against the armchair, her arms crossed over her chest. “That why you have such a nice bed, Jack? You have bad dreams, too?”

“I need to go and see if I can find MacMurphy,” he replied, changing the subject.

“How about some breakfast before you leave?”

He turned to her, and she saw that his amber eyes were as bloodshot as her own. “No, thanks. Not hungry.”

“I think I figured something out last night,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“I think I know now why you don’t have a phone. You were being spied on too, weren’t you?”

He held her gaze for a long moment. They flashed with anger, and not a little anguish. He headed for the door, reaching it in a few strides. “I’ll call as soon as I got news,” he said, pulling on his coat and boots. “You can plug your phones back in. Disconnect them again if you get another one of those calls.”

“Can I come with you?”

“No,” he said, and the door slammed shut behind him.

Lindsay turned back to the living room. It was then that she saw it. Sprawled on his back, his head on the pillows was Leo, as she’d positioned him the previous night. Except now he wore the Santa boxers.

Perhaps the old Jack wasn’t gone, just hidden beneath the surface.

Jack walked the cold streets alone, his mood as dark as the alleys around him. He’d spent the day asking around for MacMurphy, whose habit it was to roam New York transit like some modern day nomad.

He had gotten conflicting information. Rumor had it she’d knifed someone and been sent to Kirby, a hospital for the criminally insane. A call to the institution revealed that wasn’t the case. He’d heard that she was hanging around at Columbus Circle, and South Ferry, and Queens Plaza. He hadn’t found her at any of those places, either. Now it was nine in the evening, and his latest lead was taking him to a small coffee shop in the Bronx, a couple of blocks from the zoo, where MacMurphy was supposedly a regular.

He shoved his hands deeper into his coat pockets. All this day he’d been trudging around New York, but his mind had never left Lindsay.

His Chelsea home from when they were kids had been nothing like her apartment. He remembered the one time he’d brought her there. They’d stopped to pick up money before they’d headed out to the movies. While he’d rooted through the top ten places where his wallet could be, she’d stood inside the entrance and stared about with a pained expression. It opened his eyes to the stack of unwashed dishes, the toppled cans of pop, his jockey shorts on the back of the couch, the dust. He’d hurried her out and never brought her back.

The more things changed, the more they stayed the same. She’d turned up her nose at where he was living now, though it certainly wasn’t because of the mess. It was as empty as he was.

One look at Lindsay’s place and it was clear that he was in the presence of a warm, energetic and self-possessed woman. A woman who wouldn't normally seek his company, who was repulsed by the mean outcast he’d become. Sure, she’d go for coffee with him. That was a hell of a long way from wanting him like he wanted her, had wanted her even when—.

No. He wasn’t going there.

It was a physical pain in his gut to know that he’d never be the man she’d want.

Nearly punching her in the face hadn’t helped.

Of all the people in the world, the last person he thought himself capable of hurting was Lindsay. And yet he’d done it. He’d become his worst fear. A prodigy of the Moles. An animal that acted on instinct, ready to tear apart whatever got in his way. All he wanted to do was run from her, and yet it now had become even more important to restore Seline to her. To redeem himself, if only a little, in her eyes. Those clear blue eyes that had looked up at him as he held her in a stranglehold. Eyes that held no fear, nor even disbelief. Eyes that sought understanding, connection. They had pierced through his feral fury, called upon his higher self and he’d managed to pull away. She’d tried to reach out to him afterwards, only he hadn’t trusted himself.

He didn’t know what might happen if he touched her again.

He didn’t know what might happen if he couldn’t touch her again.

The softness of her hair and her cheek, the weight of her gloved hand in his, her knee tapping his—small incidents she would’ve thought ordinary but that had shaken him, awakened him to what it was to not feel caged and tormented.