French fries again. With a hamburger, done medium. And a Coke.
The subtle glow from the craned lamp was kind to her face, downplaying the circles under her eyes and the lingering bruise next to her temple. But he noted it all—along with the tension that ran down into her shoulders. Two near misses? In twenty-four hours? He was able to write off the construction guy falling from heaven—but down at that boathouse?
He had this awful suspicion that someone had tried to hurt her. Or worse.
And yet here she was, as pulled together as anyone else.
He thought about what she’d said about her father and was pretty sure that if the guy had been alive, he’d be stalking the streets for whoever had pushed her into that cold water.
Guess that was up to Matthias now—and he was prepared to meet the challenge.
As if she knew he was looking at her, her eyes shifted over and she smiled. “Aren’t you going to eat?”
He wasn’t hungry for food at this moment. Not in the slightest. Something about the almost-tragedy made him want to be with her skin on skin, like that was the only way he could be sure that she had survived for real.
Matter of fact, in his mind, he crossed the distance between them, pulled her up against him, and undressed her as he kissed the ever-loving shit out of her.
Not a bad plan, except the bed was full—and somehow he doubted that nearly drowning was an aphrodisiac to women.
“Matthias?”
He nodded and picked up his fork, putting food into his mouth and chewing like a robot. The silence that followed was all about waiting: Adrian waiting for Jim to feel well enough to get up; Jim waiting to recover; Matthias waiting for a moment alone with Mels, followed by some one-on-one with Jim to find out exactly what had gone down.
“Can I talk to you for a minute,” Adrian said abruptly.
Matthias glanced up. The guy was looming by the bed, a huge, dark figure who was grim as a graveyard.
How had this friend of Jim’s not been recruited into XOps, Matthias wondered. “Ah, yeah. Sure.”
“In private.”
Wiping his mouth with his napkin, he dropped the white square onto the arm of the chair and got to his feet. “Where to.”
Adrian looked around, and then nodded at the bathroom door.
“I’ll be right back,” Matthias told Mels.
The little room was cramped enough with the toilet, the counter, and the cut-in for the shower/tub combo. With Adrian in it, the thing assumed matchbox proportions.
“What’s up?” Matthias asked.
“Take the sunglasses off, wouldja?”
“Afraid you can’t read me?” When there was no answer, he removed the Ray-Bans and stared at the other man with his good eye.
“You’re very important in all this,” Adrian said in a low, even voice. “So we’ve got to do everything to help you.”
“You and Jim?”
“That’s right.”
“Who are you, exactly? Because I don’t remember you from the good ol’ days.” He narrowed his eyes. “And not because of the memory-loss bullshit. I don’t know you at all.”
“No, you don’t. But you’re never going to forget me.”
“What the hell are you talk—”
The man’s hands shot out and clamped on both sides of Matthias’s head, locking on as the eyes boring into his seemed to change—into a color he’d never seen before.
Matthias tried to jerk back, shove away, dodge out of the hold, but there was no going anywhere. He was stuck where he was, sure as if someone had bolted his feet to the floor—
In a warped voice, the other man started speaking in a language Matthias had never heard. The words were deep and rhythmic, almost a song—except no, they were so much more than sound, the syllables becoming solid in the air, forming strands of rainbow-colored light that encircled his body, one upon another upon another upon an infinite number, as threads would be woven to form a binding.
He fought against it all, thrashing, pushing, the memories of being trapped in that dark Hell giving him strength—
He got nowhere…and still the gossamer spooling from that voice, those words, that cadence wound ’round him, covering him from head to foot, forming an interlocking prison that tightened, tightened…and somehow removed him from the bathroom he’d walked into.
Matthias started to yell, but he had the sense that sound wasn’t traveling, that whatever was going on with him was on a different plane—
The suction came next, the great pull making him feel like his internal organs were being drawn through his skin, his body somehow getting turned inside out. The pain was a stunner, a moan of agony rippling up his throat and breaking through his lips as he continued to fight within the cocoon—
Everything started to move.
The vibration began as a barely noticeable hum, but it soon reverberated within its bandwidth, multiplying until he was rattling within the physical sheath of the words, banging from side to side at a million miles an hour… until he was sure he was going to shatter.
And then came the rotating. Slowly at first, and then with gathering momentum, everything turning until the cage of light spun hard and fast around him. As the rotation took on impossible speed, pressure built to a bursting point, his ears popping, his lungs barely able to draw breath, his body taken to the limit of physical endurance.
He was going to get blown apart, every molecule he had straining—
The maelstrom started to lift, the whole construct rising from his feet, lifting…lifting…up his ankles, his calves, his hips…over his shoulders…and then finally off the top of his head, sailing free of him.
In its wake, he fell as if boneless, going down to the hard floor in a clatter of body parts.
But it was not over.
From the vantage point of his cheek on the tile, he stared up at an impossible sight. The spinning, shimmering chaos hovered above the other man; then began a descent, overtaking Adrian, covering first his head, and his pecs, followed by his whole torso…until he was subsumed by the maelstrom.
Behind the filaments, the man struggled as if being invaded, his body jerking and spasming, the grimace of agony suggesting he was where Matthias had just been.
With a sharp sonic note, whatever it was dispersed in the same way it appeared, thread by thread coming loose and dissipating into the air like smoke, the cocoon peeling itself off strand after strand…until Adrian fell to the floor.
Matthias lifted his head and looked down his body. Then measured the other’s.
Ironically, the pair of them had landed in exactly the same position, one hand up, the opposite down, one leg stretched out, the other curled up.
They were precise mirrors of each other.
Matthias reached out to touch the roommate—
He blinked. Blinked again. Jerked off the floor.
Holding his hand in front of his face, he moved it forward and back, the distance changing.
With a shout, he surged for the counter and yanked himself up toward his reflection over the sink.
What he saw was impossible.
His cloudy eye, the one that had been ruined by his actions two years ago, was the same blue as the other.
Jumping to his feet, he leaned all the way into the glass, going nose-to-nose with himself—as if that would tell him the truth or something…and he supposed it did, just not in a way he would ever have thought possible: Proximity simply proved that the scars on his temple had, in fact, faded.
