Authors: Elle Hill
He ended the day sweaty, exhausted, and no less frustrated. Nighttime, as it had for the past few weeks, offered his only respite.
The following morning, he sat calmly on the edge of the bed, staring at the bathroom door, hands folded in his lap, when Paul knocked and let himself in.
“You told Berto you wanted to see me?” he asked, hands in his pockets and arms bowed around his belly.
Actually, Reed had pounded on the door and demanded of the first person who unlocked it to bring him Paul. Luckily, Alberto had been in the mood to comply.
Reed turned his head toward Paul, and in spite of his strongest efforts, some of his feelings must have squeezed through. Paul’s smile faded and his eyes darted around the room, probably looking for potential weapons.
Although tiny in terms of deserts, the Mojave spanned more than fifty thousand square miles and three southwestern states, including California. Unlike Katana, Reed had not been born in one of its sprinklings of towns, but like most Angelenos, he’d spent a great deal of time in it. The wind in the desert, particularly in Death Valley, where summer temperatures frequently soared far over one hundred degrees, whispered in soft waves. While caressing, however, they leached one’s face of moisture and scorched air from moist lungs.
Reed’s voice sounded to him like the breath from the desert as he quietly began. “Quina knows she can make me behave while they hold Katrina hostage. Quina seems to think I’ll do just about anything to keep her safe. She’s right.
“If I were to kill you, Quina or Mari would kill her instantly. But the funny thing is, if anything happens to her, you got no more hold on me, and the first thing I’ll do is kill you. Not Leeches in general. You, Paul. If I got to kill anybody else to get to you, I’ll do it, no matter who it is. I tell you this so you might make it your personal goal to keep her alive as long as possible.” He refolded his hands across his lap.
Paul stared at him a moment, his customary smile absent. “I say this purely as a matter of interest and not to participate in some kind of macho competition: I’m not convinced you could kill me. You’re younger and bigger, but I’m well trained. More, I embrace who I am; I know what I was designed to do, and I’ve honed my abilities over the years.”
“It might seem that way,” Reed acknowledged. “But I have complete conviction on my side. There is no corner of my being that doubts my ability to end your psychotic existence.”
“Hmm. Before I quit this room and ponder my mortality, I admit to being fascinated by your sudden antipathy. Might you wish to explain?”
Reed leaned toward him, ever-so-slightly. “I think you can figure it out.”
Paul smiled at him, but Reed could feel, like a small, pink worm crawling across his breastbone, a touch of the older man’s fear. “You do seem to give us more questions than answers. Any desire to share how you ran across this information?”
Reed stared at him till, with a farewell nod, Paul backed out of the room and locked the door behind him.
The following day, Katana took short strolls around her temporary bedroom. She even traveled unaided to the attached bathroom
. Go, Superhero Katana!
Looking at herself in the bathroom mirror, she felt discouraged by her haggard appearance. Mari brought her a change of clothing—white undergarments and boring, long T-shirts that reached her knees —each morning. The only variety came in shirt colors. Today she wore dark blue. Above the rounded neckline, her icy-pale, puffy face perched like a dull moon. The irony of being tired after god-knows-how-many-weeks of sleep did not amuse her. She ordered herself, complete with shaking finger, to stop being tired, but her reflection yawned afterward.
When Quina came in sometime in the early afternoon, Katana’s first question was, “How long was I asleep?”
Quina—she refused to think of her as Professor Daleth or anything else that indicated respect or deference—smoothed the wrinkles from her crisp linen pantsuit and lowered herself into the same chair Paul Daleth had occupied two days earlier. After a brief pause calculated to remind Katana who was in charge of the conversational dynamics around here, Quina said crisply, “Nine weeks.”
“
Nine
?” She wasn’t sure what shocked her more: the immensity of nine weeks of sleep or the translation of what seemed like months, even years of dreaming into a modest span of two months.
“How do you know Reed?” Quina asked in a calm, cool tone Katana had heard a dozen times or more in the classroom.
Sitting propped against the bed’s headboard, still tired and weak, science fiction book folded over a knee, Katana realized she mystified the Daleths far more than the reverse. She knew who they were, what they wanted. In spite of being victimized twice by them, she remained a cipher to them. She smiled slowly.
“The first time I laid eyes on him was three days ago when he walked down the stairs and into that crappy little basement room,” she replied. “And just to clear things up, I had already awoken. He just happened to have a great sense of timing.”
Quina’s eyes narrowed at that. “You’re still in communication with him,” she said, face muscles moving as little as possible. Not the most dynamic conversationalist.
“I hardly see how that’s possible,” Katana said, lowering her eyes modestly. She adjusted the book so it balanced more securely on her knee.
After a long moment, Quina leaned forward and asked, slowly and very clearly, “What would you say if I told you we plan to poison Reed’s food tomorrow?”
Katana looked up quickly, and then smiled again. “Hmm. I would say you’re lying, probably to see if we can do this magical communication thing you’re worried about. I would also say it’s pretty obvious to anyone with firing neurons you plan to keep Reed around till the party thingy on Saturday. You need to parade him around so as not to scare off his Clan buddies, right?”
Like the slow movements of plate tectonics, Quina’s face muscles locked into place underneath her skin.
‘Hohboy
. She should have kept her lips fastened tightly. She’d just wanted so badly to rattle this woman she’d once respected so greatly, to make Quina stop talking past her and to start taking her seriously.
“What do our fundraiser and the Clan have to do with anything?” Quina’s voice hissed from between her thin lips.
Ah, stars
. May as well jump in feet first. “Not anything,” Katana said. “Everything. Ever since you found out about Reed, you’ve been planning how to use him to lure the Clan to you. You manufactured this whole fundraising thing, which I imagine never really even existed, and made sure he knew all about the details so he’d pass it on to his cronies.”
“And why would we do that?”
Katana shrugged, but her heart throbbed in her chest. She couldn’t fool Quina or any other Leech, but she owed it to herself to at least fake nonchalance. “That was a toughie for me, but I remembered how disappointed you were when your little experiment with me only lasted so ‘short’ a time. Clan members are stronger than humans. You want to plug them in and feed off them for a long time, don’t you? This whole pretend fundraiser is just a way to capture some and pen them like cattle for your meals.”
Quina sat back in her chair and, like some arch villain, steepled her fingers under her mouth. Katana almost giggled like an idiot but took a deep, calming breath instead.
“I told Reed, not you, about being disappointed in the brevity of our experiment. There’s no way you could ‘remember’ that.”
“It was written all over your face.” She figured she could slightly relax her usual habit of honesty while her life remained in peril.
“And does Reed share your interpretation of tomorrow’s events?”
Hmmm
. Which response would hurt him least? The truth was, they hadn’t discussed it, but Reed was bright; he’d probably figured out just as much as she had. Sometimes the truth was the easiest answer. “I have no idea.”
“How do you talk? Is Alberto passing messages back and forth? Or is it something less . . . physical?” Quina asked.
“Maybe Paul’s been facilitating our note-fest,” Katana said, her smile lopsided. “Or maybe I’m psychic, Quina. Maybe I’m communicating even now with people who can come rescue me. Maybe you screwed with the wrong woman.”
Quina shook her head. “If only you’d been this passionate about your schoolwork, you wouldn’t have been such an average psychology student.”
It was petty, vindictive, even ridiculous in the current context of life and death. It still stung. In all her life, she’d only ever been really good at one thing, and Quina mocked it.
Warning herself not to be nettled, she snapped, “Remember when you listened to me talk about being the famous ‘Anders girl’ from sixteen years ago? Did you know it was Paul all along, or did you just find out?”
Quina once again smoothed some wrinkles from her lap before responding. “Paul told me a few years ago. I didn’t approve, of course.” (
Oh yeah, you’re the model of ethical behavior
.) “Neither could I understand why he wanted to keep you in our orbit.”
Eyes narrowed, Katana drew her knees toward her. The book slid to the mattress. “What does that mean?”
Quina’s mouth quirked. “Since you’re psychic, I assume you’re asking in order to prolong the pleasure of my company. At Paul’s urging, we’ve been helping you along. That sizable scholarship to LAU you earned from The Family Heritage . . .”
“That’s you,” she said in a low voice. Her schooling, courtesy of Leeches. She’d attended a lunch, met a tall man named Alan or Alex or something, and received a check. The unbelievable gift, her tearful gratitude, and it had all been a leash to keep her close, monitorable.
For the last sixteen years, Leeches had shaped the clay of her life. Maybe more accurate was her earlier analogy of a food animal kept in a pen.
And now here she sat, awake. Finally awake.
She spoke slowly. “Come tomorrow, everything changes. You won’t need Reed anymore, so you won’t need me.” She’d already figured this out, knew her deadline. “What happens with Reed? Do you plan to feed off him, too?”
Quina twitched in surprise and, of all things,
disgust
. “We would never harm a member of our Family, however treacherous and spiteful he’s been.”
She meant it. However cavalierly they treated humans, these Leeches wouldn’t harm their own. However, that didn’t alter her own countdown. She wasn’t one of them, and after tomorrow, they’d have plenty more fodder for keeping Reed in line. After tomorrow, they would no longer need her.
Chapter 17
Reed stood with arms folded when Mari entered the room around six on Saturday. He wore a black suit and tie, and his white shirt practically crackled, it was so crisp. Mari glowed in a lightweight, swirly pink dress. She’d gathered her long hair into a stylized, curly mess atop her head. She was going for fashionably romantic, he thought. God knows she smelled sweet and floral.
“You look very handsome,” she told him, smiling.
You look as psychotic as ever
, he thought, but remained silent.
“Shall we?” She pushed the door wide open and indicated with a sweep of her arm the hallway.
For the first time in several days, Reed left his bedroom. Mari linked her arm through his and drew him toward the front door. There, he paused.
“Is Katana safe?” he asked.
Mari snorted, albeit as cutely as possible. “The human is fine, Reed. And it’s a little late to ask, don’t you think? Someone might suspect you had proof until very recently that she was healthy.”
“I want to see her,” he insisted.
“We’re running a little behind sched—”
“Then you’d better stop arguing and bring me to her.”
With a new tightness in her smile, Mari yanked him to one of the spare bedrooms in the wing she shared with Quina and Paul. Alberto sat in a chair outside the door, textbook balanced on his knees and highlighter in his hand.
“Reed insists on seeing the human,” she said. Alberto fished the keys out of his pocket, knocked, and let them in.
Katana, sitting propped against the headboard, an orange shirt tucked around her folded knees, lowered a tattered paperback to the sheets. Her eyes were wide, her mouth partly open. She looked weaker and slightly thinner than she did in her dreams, but still beautiful.
Reed took a deep breath, wiped his face of expression, and clamped down on his feelings. Not now, with Mari present.
“You look nice,” Katana said, smiling very slightly at him, completely ignoring Maricruz.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Stronger,” she said, and her smile widened.
God, yes, she was. He wanted to say a thousand things to her, but Maricruz’s interested expression shut him up. Before leaving with Mari, all he said was, “I’ll be back for you.”
“I know,” she said before the door clicked closed.
“Oops!” Mari said. “I forgot to tell our human something. ‘B-R-B,’ as they say.” She turned the knob and slipped inside. A few murmured words later, she reappeared, once again linked arms with him, and led him to her car.
They rode in silence to Biscotte, an expensive restaurant tucked into the northwestern edge of the San Gabriel Valley. No neon or garish color would ever cheapen the establishment’s carefully rustic atmosphere. Warm, fluorescent lighting shone on the modest wooden sign marking the entrance to the parking lot. The main building grew from clumps of greenery like some kind of pale green plant.
Inside, candles flickered in frosted containers and warm, low lights painted the scene with a demure brush. Quina stood at the front of the main room, conferring in low tones with a young man dressed in a white dress shirt and black pants. She looked striking in a tight black pantsuit that left one shoulder bare. Little gems sparkled at all her hems and her pale hair lay in gentle waves against her skull. Alexio Greco, Cor’s father and Quina’s co-leader of this ridiculousness, sat, stiff and dignified, at the head of one of the tables. He wore a suit very similar to Reed’s. On his right, Carnelian, the bloodthirsty grandmother, grinned and waved a jeweled hand at Mari and him—or, given current circumstances, probably only at Mari.
“Where’s Paul?” Reed hissed to Maricruz.
She turned to him with a smile. Well over a foot shorter than he, and yet she still radiated undiluted confidence, even menace. “He’s staying home tonight.”
His jaw grew tight. “He’s home alone with Katana?” he asked through his teeth.
Mari shook her head. “A katana is a sword, Reed, not a name. And Berto’s there, too, silly. Keep your human in mind this evening and remember her welfare depends on you doing what you’re told. Now relax and look like my handsome and non-coerced date.” A smile smoothed over her face.
Quina turned around, saw them, and nodded. Mari smiled back at her and led them forward.
“You look lovely,” Quina told Maricruz.
“When are the guests getting here?” Reed asked.
Quina’s cool eyes, painted a light yellow by the candlelight, flickered to him. “You should remember, having done the original planning.”
Reed tried a small smile on his face. “Those invitations never went out, did they? That was all fun and games for me and Cor.”
“It was more helpful than you think. For the actual event two months from now, we decided to hire the string quartet and use the invitation printers you and Cor found. We owe you some thanks for this evening.” Quina smiled back at him.
“Where is Cor?” he asked with as much casualness as he could manage.
“Home where she can’t cause any mischief,” Quina said coolly.
“While we’re being honest, I’d like to ask you to invite Paul here. I don’t trust him with Ka—trina.”
Quina waved her hand. “No need to worry, Reed. He’s no longer the impetuous youngster he was almost twenty years ago. He’s shown remarkable restraint over the years.”
Reed’s hands clenched into fists. “She better be okay when we get back,” he almost-whispered.
“Oh, Reed, you worry too much,” Mari reproached. “You have a lot more to focus on tonight. Just smile at the guests and look as comfortable as you can manage.”
No one had ever before told him to sit back and look pretty. Goddamn them, though, as long as they held Katana hostage, he’d do it.
They planned to kill her soon. Maybe within the next few minutes. Mari’s smug warning about Paul coming “in for a visit in a little bit” still ringing in her ears, Katana looked around the room for something to use as a weapon.
She could smash the lamp against his skull, shove a corner of her book into his eye, strangle him with one of the cords tucked behind furniture, but Leeches were faster and stronger and she was still weak. In a competition of strength, she’d lose. The bathroom contained no convenient straight-edged razors, the nightstand drawers had been cleaned out, no one had conveniently left a can of Raid or other caustic chemicals under the sink. Probably at Paul’s urging, she only received plastic spoons with her meals.
At best, she could papercut him, or perhaps rake the bristles of her toothbrush across his throat.
Speaking of toothbrushes, hadn’t she heard something about prisoners honing them into sharp weapons? Shivs, she thought they were called. Unfortunately, though, she had no convenient knife or concrete floor to help fashion the plastic into a deadly point.
Foot tapping, lips compressed, Katana rose from the bed and padded to the bathroom, wondering if she could somehow mould her comb into something a little more lethal. Garroting via dental floss, anyone? She hunted through the linen closet and gathered several towels and washcloths. Unfortunately, no one had hidden a pair of scissors, a box cutter, or any other sharp-edged object among the linen.
An hour later, tired from her excursion, she switched off the bedside lamp, swung back into bed, and scrunched down under the covers. She tried to rest, to save her strength, but her gaze kept sliding to the locked door.
Mari’s nails dug into his hand. Through her pink-lipsticked smile, she murmured, “Remember your human and behave tonight.”
Across the room from where they stood, a Clan member had entered. Tall, broad-shouldered, capped with a sprinkling of fuzzy black hair, the forty-something White woman strode forward, preceded by the beaming light of her smile. A smaller, thinner man trailed behind her, eyes more wary than his companion’s.
“Orlina Rosenblatt is the CFO of some green engineering firm,” Mari muttered. “Her husband is Sherman something-or-other.”
He knew her as Orli the Hunter, daughter of Rose. The husband he’d never met.
Quina greeted the newcomers with as much warmth as she could manage and led them to the bar. On the way, they stopped by Maricruz and Reed and chatted about work and the social necessity of homeless shelters. If Orli remembered him from eighteen years ago, she made no indication.
They were the first of nine Clan members: seven Hunters and two Psychics. He’d only met three of them before tonight, but Mari’s comments, body language, and percolating excitement pinpointed the remaining six. Most of them came as companions. Reed wondered how they’d convinced their human dates to let them tag along. Only one human came alone. All in all, seventeen non-Leech guests, a little over half of them Clan members. Not subtle.
Damn Clan, thinking they were so sly, arrogant enough, as he had been, to assume they could outplot Leeches. Reed stared at them, wishing he could communicate with them without endangering Katana.
Hoping they had a telepath with them, —although knowing it was unlikely, since telepaths were the rarest kind of Psychic—he mentally shouted out messages. He stared at some of them, trying to drill the knowledge of the trap into their smug brains. As much as he disliked the Clan, no one deserved the kind of hell Katana had lived through.
Throughout everything, Mari watched him, a small smile curving her mouth. He thought about asking her how the five Leeches present planned to subdue nine Clan members, but Hunters, like Leeches, enjoyed extra-sensitive hearing. He thought about writing notes of warning on napkins, a plan hardly feasible with Mari clamped on his arm. Watching Mari watch him, he thought violent thoughts while sipping his white wine through clenched teeth.
Around him, Clan members mingled with humans and Leeches alike, teeth flashing and wine glasses raised, while Leeches laughed inside and played right along. The candles flickered, the lights gleamed, and the bitter fruitiness of the wine mingled with various exotic perfumes and an underlying tang of excited perspiration.
“Dinner will be served very soon,” Mari informed him with a gamine smile.
He suddenly decided he wasn’t even slightly hungry.
“May I have everyone’s attention?” Quina called out. It took a moment for everyone to quiet down. She waited patiently, her tiny smile affixed to her face. “Alexio and I would like to thank you all for coming out to support this very worthy cause. It’s heartening to know that in these difficult economic times, there are still people on whom we can count to help protect the more vulnerable among us.
“But I’m getting ahead of the festivities. Before we talk business, let’s all take our assigned seats and prepare to enjoy this amazing meal prepared and donated by Biscotte’s very own Chef Raoul.”
After a polite smattering of applause, they all glided to their respective tables. Reed and Mari sat with an older, human gentleman and his young Hunter companion.
It had begun.
A key scraped in the lock. Harsh breaths scoured the inside of her breastbone. Her pulse pounded in her throat. She kept her eyes closed.
The door swung open, brushing quietly over the peach runner lying before it. After a moment, the door snicked close. Katana listened but could hear nothing else.
“It’s no use pretending to be asleep.” Paul’s voice sounded gently amused, but it throbbed with a quiet intensity. “I can feel your fear.”
She opened her eyes then and stared at the darkened ceiling. Over the sounds of her shivering heartbeat, she heard him draw closer.
“Do you know what your fear tastes like?” Paul asked, voice dreamy. “It’s like a lemon custard, tart and juicy and creamy all at once. I could taste you all day long.”
Katana lay, hands folded across her chest in a parody of death, staring unblinkingly at the ceiling. She remembered her dream, then, the one with the paralysis and the buyers coming to claim hunks of her flesh.
Seconds later, Paul stood at her bedside, staring down at her.
Hunters, Leeches, and to a lesser degree, Psychics all shared an uncommonly high metabolism, making them run hotter and require more food than the average human. As a result, they burned the sugar in alcohol before it could intoxicate them. Most drugs didn’t work on them, including pain relievers.
Given all this, Reed had initially dismissed the idea of Leeches drugging the drinks or food. However, something in Mari’s vibrating intensity and the expectant air around the prospect of food had him re-evaluating the possibility. Fact: Five Leeches—four, when you considered he wouldn’t help them—could never hope to overpower seven Hunters. As far as he could figure, that left non-physical coercion and chemically-aided compliance. He couldn’t imagine anything they could use to blackmail the Clan and no reason to lure them physically close unless they needed to be present to spring the trap.
He kept coming back to drugs. Most Clan members took their metabolisms for granted, assumed few or no poisons could touch them. No one would suspect the food and drink. They must not know or didn’t consider Quina’s access to biochemists.
Not the wine. Everyone—Leeches, Clan, and humans alike—had drunk from the same few bottles. It must be the food, the reasons behind the assigned seats.
After they were all seated, Alexio Greco rose to his impressive height and delivered an impassioned speech about the homeless and being human angels and other sanctimonious and insincere bullshit. It was all Reed could manage not to throw his wineglass at Alexio’s august head.
“Leave me alone,” Katana said in a low voice, still staring straight ahead.
“I feel as though I’ve been living the last sixteen years for just this moment, don’t you?” Paul asked. He stood to the left of her bed, unmoving for now. “Like our lives have been intertwined since that weekend so long ago.”