go back to doctor school, but I have a present for you, anyway.”
She held her hand up imperiously for such a small thing, a small thing who hadn’t even been made of flesh and blood for a long time. I could see that now. A stray beam of sun had struggled through the bedroom window to find its way to and then through her. She wasn’t transparent. She was luminous and delicate, made of the wings of butterflies.
“Charlie.” She wriggled her fingers impatiently. “Chaaaarlie, I have to go. I’m late. It’s my birthday party. Hurry up.”
Her hand disappeared in a ripple of air and returned holding on to a much larger one. The rest of the body stepped through a larger ripple, and I saw the messy hair and big nose I hadn’t forgotten. They were as homely as ever, and Charlie’s smile was as wide and pleased. “You found me.”
“Everything that’s lost is found sooner or later,” she said solemnly. I saw her hand tighten around his to squeeze reassuringly. “It’s time to go home, Charlie. You’ll love it. It’s everything and everything and everything.”
He nodded. “I can’t wait to see.” He was so close to Hector that their shoulders rested against each other’s, and Charlie bumped his harder, judging by the sudden tilt to Hector’s stance. An older brother’s affection. Pale blue eyes to pale blue eyes, he added warmly, “You did good, little brother.”
“Charlie.” Hector said it with the purest of belief and relief.
“You found the one guy who could help you save me. I owe you big.” Then Charlie turned his gaze to me. “I knew you’d answer my call. Just like you promised at Cane Lake.”
“One helluva long-distance charge,” I managed, my tongue as numb as my face and lips. I wasn’t Hector. I had nothing this trusting or this deserving in me. No faith. This couldn’t be real. As much as I wanted it to be, it was the denial of what I’d believed for almost my entire life. How could I believe it? All of it?
A kiss brushed across my cheek, and I turned with what had to be half-crazed eyes to look into those of my sister, still five years old, still beautiful.
“You won’t forget this, Jackie. You’ll try, because you’re a boy, and boys are stubborn. But I won’t let you. No way you’ll be able to ignore me now.” She smiled again, a little sadder, the kind of sad that broke me with her next words. “It wasn’t your fault you didn’t save me. We all take turns. It wasn’t yours. But it’s my turn to save you now. And I will.”
They were gone, the two of them, as if they hadn’t been there to begin with. Couldn’t have been there, and my thoughts clamped onto that firmly, because that made sense. Impossible shoes, impossible sisters, they don’t happen. Hallucinations from blood loss, that happened. Some damned ether disruption went screwy and messed with your mind, that happened, too. But the long lost? They don’t come back, and they don’t speak to you. They don’t absolve you of things that can’t be absolved.
“You’re already doing it, aren’t you, you stubborn bastard?” No matter what he said, Hector sounded unnerved. Amazed, too, but he’d definitely had his world tilted on its axis. “Going straight into denial of a full-blown miracle.”
“You shot me. That means you don’t get any say into what I do or don’t do. And there are no miracles. It’s not like the Vatican is behind funding your project.” I lifted an arm, swallowed bile that scorched my throat at the pain the movement caused, and demanded, “Help me up. We need to check on Meleah.”
He was already as pale as he could get, but I saw the apprehension etch its way into his face.
“She’s going to be all right.” I thought she was, and right now, that was the best to be hoped for. “She was quicker.” I didn’t want to finish the rest of that sentence, and I didn’t. “I think it looks worse than it is.”
I was on my feet, thanks mainly to Hector hoisting me up with one hand while the other held the shotgun. I hadn’t seen him bend over to pick it back up. I knew I hadn’t, but there it was. I could’ve missed it.
I knew I hadn’t. But I could have. It didn’t have to be Tess who put it in his hand. And why would she? Why would he need it now? He wouldn’t. I held tight to the last thought, because denial needed help now and again. Back where I’d left her, Meleah remained sitting on the floor. She managed a smile at our appearance. “Hector. Jackson.” The cloth around her throat and under her hand was only half scarlet. The bleeding had slowed. I’d been right. She would be all right. Hector, her, me-we were going to walk away from this, unlikely as that would’ve seemed minutes ago.
Which proved once and for all that I was limited to reading objects, places, and people. While bullshit illusions were wide open, the future was closed to me. I’d always been grateful for that.
Until now.
Stepping through the open front doorway, as cheerful and smiling as always in the face of adversity and carefully designed plans gone wrong, Eden glowed with the same inner joy she’d never failed to show. She stopped when she saw the two of us, standing upright.
“This is inconvenient,” she noted, not dressed in nursing scrubs anymore, frowning a little. “All good boys and girls should be dead now. I did expect maybe Thackery would’ve survived, being the obnoxious ass that he is. I was rather looking forward to finishing him off as a loose end.”
Eden. My nurse advocate. On my side against all others who would use me without regard, when really, all along, her own regard had been as predatory as a silent fin slicing through the water. And considerate enough to wear latex gloves always around me, to save me from an unwanted reading. Too bad I hadn’t seen that a reading was more unwanted by her than by me. Eden, who came bearing the gift of an injection of painkiller and sedative in the middle of the night.
“What was in the shot you brought me last night like a good little Florence Nightingale?” I asked, propping myself against the nearest wall, the easier to ride out the waves of pain radiating from the buried shotgun pellets.
She smiled, the dimple flashing beside her mouth like the morning star. “An overdose of Flecainide. A therapeutic dose is just the trick for an arrhythmia. Too much stops the heart altogether. It’s what I gave Dr. Allgood, along with the sedative he normally received in his preexperiment physical. Fifteen minutes later, he’s in the transplanar, and in fifteen more minutes, he’s dead. It’s a good drug for falling through the cracks of a toxicology report.” She flashed the same smile at Hector. “You wondered why you couldn’t find what was wrong with your little toy. That’s because nothing was. Charlie was a dead man before he climbed into it.”
Her gun, the same nine-millimeter Hector carried on base, was trained on him. He was the only one of us armed. And wasn’t that lucky? The shotgun in his hand, the one I hadn’t seen him pick up, the one that if he’d thought about it, he wouldn’t want to pick up again after turning Thackery’s face to hamburger with one barrel and taking me down with the other one.
“But you didn’t want the shot, Jackson, and as you were so certain you were leaving today and no more readings were in the works, I backed down. No one likes a pushy nurse. And I’d had my three other shots at you. It seemed only fair.” In keeping with her bouncy Eden persona, she was wearing whimsical fairy earrings. I didn’t want to die period, but I really didn’t want to die at the hands of someone wearing fairy anything. “It was fine with me if you escaped with your life. I only kill people who are in the way. I get paid for my work. I’m not into extra credit. I don’t even mind all that much about Fujiwara. He was a good partner, but with this job, I have enough to retire, and with his share, I might get two villas instead of one.”
“You killed Charlie.” Hector sorted through it all to home in on what had started it all. The project breakdown, giving Fujiwara enough time to gather all of the data about it. She couldn’t have foreseen what would happen with Charlie, who wasn’t quite as dead as she’d hoped, but what a lucky break for her. Charlie had caused more confusion and crippled the project even further. Until I came along, everything was as sweet as those blackberry pancakes she’d made me. And even then, I hadn’t been a threat to her or Fujiwara, who deserved an Oscar for his acting skills. But Eden was as competent a killer as she was a nurse. No sense in taking chances. It was only after three failed attempts outside the infirmary that she was willing to risk taking a run at me inside it. I imagined that if she’d gone through with it, she’d already be in another country by now with the information Fujiwara had gathered. This plan-my house equipped with the weapons of the past-was nice for cleaning up a few loose ends like Hector and Thackery, who might eventually have figured things out about Fujiwara, but it hadn’t been strictly necessary.
But some killers embraced the better-safe-than-sorry standard.
And so did some scientists.
Hector wasn’t waiting for more talking-if there was going to be more, which I highly doubted. Eden was happily polite in her murdering ways, but she was one for getting things done. The shotgun in Hector’s hand, put
