Broken (4 page)

I took a breath, thankful that once again the idiots in my skull were being quiet. I knew how to force entry to a property, knew how to approach quietly, knew how to get myself within close range of him. My only challenge was going to be the moment of truth, the second where I had to pull the trigger. That was where I had always failed before. Not at the range, where it counted for nothing, but in the moment when I needed to take a life.

And for this one, I needed to cut that hesitation out, because there wasn’t any time for it at all. Parks was a canny bastard, and even with the steps I’d taken to make this work, I wouldn’t have much time to act before he did. His response was impossible to predict, which was why I needed to fill his skull with bullets before he got a chance to employ whatever contingency plan he might have.

I kept low as I made my way to the back door. I felt a flash of hesitation as I reached for the handle; if it was locked, I needed to break it down and breach in seconds. Based on where I’d seen him go after he grabbed the vodka, the moment I was through the door I would have a clear shot at him in the corner of the next room. All I had to do was crash through the door with my left shoulder, aim right, and start pulling the trigger. I didn’t have any flashbangs, but I doubted they would have helped with Parks anyway; he’d been the one that taught me how to acclimate to them and he’d be ready and moving the minute he saw one come through the door.

No, my best bet was to come in firing, aim fast, shoot fast, and pump him so full of lead that he was unresponsive when I came to deliver the coup de grace. He had to be just sitting in an easy chair in the corner of the room; I could almost sense it based on where I’d seen him go. It’s not like he knew I was coming, after all—this was coming as an absolute surprise. I reached for the door handle with my left hand and felt my palms sweat as I grabbed the Walther out of my coat with the right. I held it up, hefted it, the weight in my hand almost insignificant. I took a deep breath and inhaled the scent of the mud, the gun oil, my own sweat. I would have preferred something bigger, with more rounds in the magazine, but I had what Kurt gave me and that was it.

At least I had plenty of bullets. I would probably need them before this was all over.

I heard a slight squeak as I touched the handle. It was unlocked, I realized as I rolled it halfway down. It made an almost imperceptible noise, and I hoped that the TV was blocking it. I hit the door hard with my shoulder and it burst open as I threw myself in, my gun already aiming through the passage from the kitchen to the living room where I’d seen him last. Time seemed to slow down as I burst into the world of the farmhouse, with its old white plaster walls. Ahead of me, at the end of the house was an empty chair, and all around it were small monitors lit with white.

Security monitors covering every angle around the house and exterior, I realized in a breathtaking moment of kicking myself. The chair was empty, the old, ragged red thing abandoned, its master nowhere in sight.

I heard the subtle sound of a safety coming off a weapon just behind my left ear, and then a barrel prodded me in the back of the head—only once, and then he backed out of my reach. “Put it on the ground and slide it away, slow. Just like I taught you—consider it a test.” His voice dragged, only slurring a little—not nearly drunk enough for me to beat him on the draw. “You’ve got til the count of three, and then I’m gonna pepper my wall with your brains. And you know—
you know
—unlike you, I’ll actually do it.”

5.

I ground my teeth as I lay my pistol down exactly as he had said and slid it across the room.

“
Got a backup?” he asked, leaning against the kitchen wall a good ten feet from me. Not close enough for me to get to him before he cut me in half with a shotgun blast. I kept my head turned away from him, still looking at the red easy chair I had sworn he would be in. I should have known better. Should have suspected something. Parks was paranoid. I should have assumed he’d have claymore mines wired on every door and window, video security hidden all around the perimeter, motion sensors and every trick I could imagine (and a few I couldn’t) to keep his personal security inviolate.

I cursed myself; I had let the ragged farmhouse and my desire to get this over with sway some of the operational instincts he had burned into me like a brand on my skin. “No backup,” I said. “I wouldn’t be carrying a Walther as my primary if I’d had something higher caliber.”

“
This is what happens when you lay an operation on too quick and you’ve got too much personal stake in the outcome,” he said, lecturing me, still slurring only a little. “You got hasty, impatient. Should have done more scouting. If you’d been on your game and cased the place in the daylight, you would have seen the places where I hid the video surveillance and the motion sensors.” He sniffed. “I saw you before you even got out of your car, before you started crawling across the muddy ground. I thought I’d given you situational awareness that could beat what you’d find in professional soldiers.” His face fell only a little. “I thought I taught you better than that.”

“
Did you?” I asked, keeping my hands up in the air, not looking at him. “I don’t remember.”

“
Don’t give me that,” he snarled, sounding much like the animal I knew he was. “You know better than to do it like this. You tried to breach my back door.
Mine
. If I hadn’t unhooked the claymore before you got in here, it woulda turned you into stew meat!” I turned my head slightly right to look; sure enough, just above the frame rested a claymore mine, the small straps unplugged from ties where they attached to the door, the ultimate in home security. Anyone coming in through that door would die horribly, a spray of pellets propelled by an explosive charge turning their body to a mush like the ultimate shotgun blast.

“
And I care why exactly?” I turned, slow, rising from my knees to face him.

He couldn’t take a step back as he was already against the wall, but I saw a subtle change in his posture, as though he wanted to recoil but was hiding it. “Because you don’t want to get killed.”

“
I don’t care if I die,” I said, staring him down. His eyes had always been somewhat warm before, at least to me; now they barely met mine and were coldly assessing. His pupils were beginning to dilate; I could see them even at this distance. “All I care about is making sure I settle accounts before I go.”

I saw him start to reply to that, then stop. He kept the shotgun aimed at me, level with my head. A simple pull of the trigger would end it, I knew. The chorus in my head was silent, though I could feel their nervous emotion within. Strangely, I felt none of my own.

“
Go on,” I said. “You’ve got the gun, you’ve got me dead to rights. I’m in your house, I came to kill you—”

“
You can’t kill me—” He shook his head.

“
You don’t think so?” I asked, staring him down. I could feel it: he wanted to turn his gaze sideways, look away from me, but he couldn’t. He wanted to avert his eyes, as though to give the little broken girl in front of him some privacy from the weight of the emotions I knew were oozing off me, but his training wouldn’t let him look away from a potential threat. So he kept staring at me and I kept staring right back at him. I had nothing but accusation in my glare; his, in return, was fading.

“
You shoulda approached faster,” he said, and the slurring was getting worse. “Shoulda burst through the front of the house with a truck—”

“
I didn’t have a truck.”

“
Shoulda stolen one,” he went on, swallowing heavily. “Break through the front of the house, odds are good you’d have taken me out before I could get clear. If not, the element of surprise would have been worth it. Or a sniper rifle from a distance—you always were a hell of a marksman—”

“
I didn’t want to do it like that,” I said.

“
Because you couldn’t be bothered to plan it out like you should,” he said, and I could see him starting to sweat, “you’re sitting here staring down the barrel of a shotgun when you oughta be looking at my corpse from a half-mile away.”

“
It was never gonna be like that,” I said calmly and took a step to my right, leaning against the kitchen counter. He swept the shotgun barrel to keep me covered. I had taken a step in the direction of my gun, and with the waggle of the barrel, I knew if I took another he was going to pull the trigger. I watched his eyes, and it was hard to know if that was an empty threat or if he was serious. I wasn’t going to test it. “You know I have trouble killing people. Always have, ever since Gavrikov—”

“
It’s a weakness I would have trained out of you, sooner or later,” he said, taking a hand off the barrel to wipe the perspiration off his forehead.

“
It’s funny,” I said. “Because I killed Wolfe to save my own life, and I killed Gavrikov to save the city because I owed them for what Wolfe did. Do you know how many people he killed to get to me?” I watched as Parks shook his head, slowly. “Two hundred and fifty-four. Men, women, children. From those first two guys outside the supermarket to the last family he slaughtered before he came to get me in my own basement, he killed two hundred and fifty-four people. I remember the number. It echoes in my head.” I felt something in my mind from Wolfe, a vague sense of glee, and ignored it.

“
You didn’t cause that,” Parks said, and brushed the gray hair out of his eyes where it was starting to mat on his forehead. He blinked his eyes, twice, but the shotgun stayed level.

“
I did, actually.” I put my palms flat on the counter behind me, resting them in plain sight, where he could see them. “By my inaction, I caused those people to die. If I had stepped up sooner, some of them would still be alive. So I’m responsible.” I turned my voice more chipper. “Like you, with Zack’s death. You’re responsible. You, Clary, Eve—I know she wasn’t there, but let’s be honest, she would have been involved in a heartbeat if she had been—Bastian, Winter … and me. You all took Winter’s orders, and you carried them out, and let my power do its work. Zack’s dead, the rest of us are all alive.” My eyes narrowed. “I intend to correct that imbalance.”

He let out a ragged breath. “You’ve already failed. Maybe if you’d planned better—”

“
My plan’s going just fine,” I said coolly and looked to my right. The gun was still there. Out of reach.

He watched me eye the Walther and pulled up his grip on the shotgun, tightening the butt of it against his shoulder. “You’ve got a gun pointed at you after you failed to breach properly. If that was part of your plan, then I’m afraid I’ve misjudged you.” He let out a long breath, and the gun swayed by millimeters as he did so. “You were my favorite student, the best pupil I ever—”

“
Do you kill the lovers of all your best students?” I saw him blanch. “Or am I special?”

He let hang a moment of silence between us. “You’re special all right. Or you were. Now you’re so blinded with rage you can’t even think straight enough to come up with an operational concept and carry it out with a clear head.” He waved his hand at my pistol on the floor and then let it come back to mop the sweat pouring down his brow. “Whoever got that gun for you oughta get their ass kicked; all they did was set you up to commit suicide.” He smacked his dry lips together again; they were dark in the low light of the kitchen, almost blue.

“
I’ll make sure to let Kurt know what you think of his efforts,” I said.

“
You have to analyze your target’s weaknesses—”

“
I know that,” I snapped.

“
Well, you didn’t do it!” He looked like he was ready to yell again, but then a calm settled over him. Beads of sweat hung heavy on his forehead and I saw him open his mouth slightly, move his tongue around inside, then he blinked three times in rapid succession. “Oh. You did.”

I watched him without flinching. “I did.”

The shotgun lowered and he started to slump, falling down the counter until he rested on the floor, his back against the wall. “How?” His eyes were clouded, and then he nodded once in understanding. “The vodka.”

“
The vodka.” I took slow, easy steps over to my pistol, where I stooped to pick it up. “You’ve been going through so much of it, once I sapped the delivery guy’s memory it wasn’t very hard to figure out which box was going to you. I saw you get one of the marked bottles from outside the window. The ones with the yellow label.”

He gasped a little, his breathing unsteady, and he looked up at me. “How did you know I wouldn’t kill you outright?”

I nodded. “It was a little bit of a risk, but this was the first test.” I walked back over to him and put my foot on the barrel of his shotgun, pinning it to the floor, before I slid it out of his unresisting grasp. “The poison wasn’t enough to kill you, by the way, even if you drank the whole bottle. You’d be fine in an hour or so, I’d guess. Metahuman metabolism works fast, you know.”

He looked at me, his eyes half-lidded. “You picked me first?”

“
I picked you first,” I said quietly. “It had to be you first.”

“
Why?” It came out as little more than a gasp, his lips blue from the cyanosis that he was fighting against, the lack of oxygen getting to his brain from the poison I’d laced his vodka with.