memories. He knew he had a brother, a father, a mother, but he couldn’t remember them clearly. He might have recovered from the car crash, but it seemed to have had an amnesia-like effect on his brain. Seven couldn’t clearly see into the Other’s mind, he never had been able to, but the bleed over let him see some of what was going through his enemy’s mind. Luckily it hadn’t done the same to him. That brought a small smile to Seven’s face, but it didn’t last long. The world was no longer his own and he hated that.
He lay on the hotel bed and listened, eyes closed. He didn’t want to see yet. He wanted to take in every nuance of Hunter’s voice, to understand everything about the Other. It was best to understand your enemy completely. Best to know him better than he knew himself. In this case, he certainly did. Seven smiled again at the thought. The name Hunter Harrison was a lie. A fabricated identity he’d created when he was learning how to make forgeries. The address was real enough, mostly because he would never be able to forget that damned location, but everything else was a lie and the Other fell for it.
He had believed the Other was dead and gone. He began to build a proper life for himself, to make connections and get himself set up, despite his age. He’d had the reins and full control and it had been amazing- liberating! But now the Other was back, stealing his world from him.
Again. The thought made him want to scream, but he’d learned a lot about self-control over the last few years. A lot.
He willed himself to focus on the tape. After the idiot had completed a long list of whining complaints about how horrible his life was, he finally got to the point. “Who are you? What the hell do you want from me? What did you do to my family? I need to know that they’re safe. And who… who am I?”
The anger disappeared for a moment and he roared with laughter, pounding the bed with his hands and his feet alike. “Who am I?” He repeated the phrase several times. Oh, this was rich. This almost made up for the changes in his plans.
The Other was alive. That meant a change in plans. If his meeting went well, he might even be able to get that help, too.
He’d done all he could without help, all he could without backup. Now he needed to handle the next level of the game. And really, it was a game. It was best if he thought of it that way because games were different from life. Games could be won definitively.
He intended to win. It was what he did.
A moment later he left the room. He was hungry, but that could wait. There was a man waiting to meet with him who had information that could be bought.
Once outside the hotel room, he picked up the pistol he’d stowed under a decorative rock at the edge of the parking lot and fished the bundle of hundred-dollar bills from where he’d taped them to the underside of the closest manhole cover and stuffed them in a duffel bag. Not the best bank in the world, but no one asked questions. If no one asked stupid questions, he didn’t have to kill anyone else. Hiding the bodies was inconvenient on such short notice.
Loaded with cash and weapons, he headed for the meeting place.
Clarkson was late. Seven wasn’t happy about it, but there was nothing he could do. He flipped open his cell phone again to double-check, but there were no messages.
He dialed the number his contact had given him, but Clarkson didn’t answer.
No. Wait. Just before the damned phone kicked over to voice mail, something changed.
He looked around the bowling alley and studied the people around him. The Kingpin Bowl was a dive, the sort that reputable people didn’t go to. The only people around him were losers, slinking around in the bar area looking to score other losers, and a few teens who were playing in the arcade or actually trying to bowl a few games on the miserable alleys that needed more than a layer of polish to make them halfway decent. It was much too late at night for family fun.
He concentrated and listened carefully to the people around him. Ears that could hear a heartbeat from thirty yards away strained and he sorted the busy noises until he could distinguish the background sounds from what he wanted. Regular humans were damned near deaf in comparison to him, a concept that almost always left him amused. He sniffed. The sad lot stank of beer, cigarettes and failed deodorant.
He hit the redial button and listened. The phone made its purring sound in his ear, and on the other side of what the owners called “the Lounge,” where only people old enough to drink alcoholic beverages were supposed to sit, a phone rang at the same time. He looked in that direction and saw a man sitting at a small table. Even from across the room, he could almost smell the fear coming off the guy.
He studied the stranger as the phone rang in his ear. Sure enough, the man watched his phone ring four times and then as soon as the voice started asking him to leave a message, the man set the phone down on the table next to a drained beer mug.
Seven was big, especially for a fifteen-year-old, and while he could pass as an adult from size alone, no one was going to mistake him for being old enough to drink. That didn’t stop him from entering the Lounge. He had business to take care of, and he wasn’t planning on buying a beer anyway.
He took the long way around the collection of tables, deliberately checking out the women around him instead of eyeballing Clarkson. The man was sweating and looking all over the place.
A grizzled man with tattoos covering his beefy arms looked him over as he stared at the woman draped on the man’s arm.
“What are you staring at, kid?” The man’s voice was a challenge, primal and simple. It said, Don’t try to take my woman from me or I’ll beat you down.
Seven grinned and leaned in closer as he let himself slow down. The man looking at him blinked, shocked that his question was being answered with words instead of with fear. “I’m not looking at much. Just trash.” His eyes slid from the man to the woman with him. She was older, easily five to six years out of his normal range, but still attractive. She wore too much makeup and stank of perfume that was sweet enough to kill a diabetic. “And more trash.”
The response was what he expected. The man stood up fast, muscles tensed, and prepared to swing. The woman with him, realizing she’d been insulted, despite the alcohol blurring her reasoning skills, opened her mouth and started to stand up as well. Her man wanted to be chivalrous, and she wasn’t used to that.
Seven grinned, baring his teeth, and readied himself.
The man did as he expected and took a swing. He blocked the blow easily and drove his clenched fist into the man’s stomach hard enough to knock all the air from the fool’s lungs. As his opponent started to double up, he caught the man’s throat in his hand and lifted him back into a standing position.
There was no reason for the conflict except that he could use the distraction to keep Clarkson off guard. He didn’t want the man to know he was being stalked. Not yet. “Stop while you’re ahead, loser. Don’t make me break your stupid face.” Oh, the thrill! He liked the look of understanding on the man’s face. His fingers gripped the man’s trachea. One squeeze, a few extra ounces of pressure, really, and the man wouldn’t be able to breathe again without major surgery. He doubted anyone in the place knew how to save a loser with a ruined airway.
The man started fidgeting. He leaned in closer and whispered in his ear. “Sit down, or I’ll kill you here and now.” In the distance a ball struck pins with a resounding crash and a couple of kids made victory noises. He looked at the woman watching them both and his grin grew another notch wider. “Trust me, she isn’t worth dying over.”
The woman with him looked furious, but the man wised up and backed down. Seven dropped the man, nodded and began to move on.
And then the woman got dumber. She charged him from behind. He could hear her footsteps, the sound of several people taking in a shocked breath and her voice starting into a scream.
Before she could finish the five steps to reach him, he’d turned around and taken in the situation. She was holding a beer bottle in her hand and had it back behind her and ready to bash in his skull. Her arm was already in motion, but it seemed to take forever for her to get her arm around.
He had plenty of time to grab her wrist before the bottle could swing into his skull. She let out a startled squeak as his fingers closed over her arm and he flexed, pushing her backward.
“Sit down.” His eyes looked into hers and he saw it, the fear that grew as she studied his face. It was a lovely thing.
“I. You. What you said…” Her voice faded down as she spoke, no longer certain.
“Was rude of me. Get over it.” He let go of her arm. It paid to know how people’s minds worked. He’d been
