Dragonsword Page 23

  “I do care,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I know, Sweetheart,” Jason said. He scratched the back of his neck, then ran his hands over his face. She turned on the faucet to warm and left her hand under it until she could feel her fingers again, then switched it over to shower. She pulled the curtain across and stepped back.

  “Take as much time as you need,” she said. “We’ll have food waiting for you when you’re done.”

  She choked on the last few words, forcing them out as her eyes began to sting. Carter had sent her to bed with frostbitten fingers and crackling joints. Jason had chosen life, just as she had. Fighting for it, using power they hadn’t known they had, previously, and earning it. It was a terrible realization, the minutes and hours just after that, that you were full of a power that was going to make that kind of pain possible. That you would choose to survive and go through it. That you would accept it.

  The shock of the trauma all by itself had shut her down for a day. Coping with the significance of it had been weeks. Carter hadn’t taken his foot off the accelerator, and she’d gone through the training regimen as required, but she hadn’t chased it, like she had before. She’d never wanted to be this. She’d just wanted the knowledge, and when Carter had said this was what she had to do next, she’d done it. She’d never been informed of all of the decisions she’d been making, in her compliance. She wondered if maybe it was better that way. Jason knew he could tell her no.

  “You okay?” Sam asked.

  “Just… very lonely, all of a sudden,” she said, blinking at the tears.

  “I’m here,” he said, wrapping his arms around her and holding her tight.

  “I know. But you weren’t then,” she said, appreciating the warmth of him, anyway.

  “I wish I had been.”

  “I wouldn’t have done it, if you had been.”

  “Even so.”

  “Why don’t you hate me?”

  “Why would I?”

  “I would hate me for doing what I’m doing to Jason. I do hate me for it.”

  “Then you’ve got it covered,” he said.

  She sighed and leaned against him.

  “I wish you wouldn’t trust me so much.”

  “I wish you’d make up your mind,” he said, a smile in his voice. “I take the first step to intervene and you slam me into a wall, and then you say I don’t do enough?”

  “You should both be fighting me more.”

  “Did you fight Carter?”

  She turned her face against his chest, not wanting to remember.

  “No.”

  “Maybe that’s just the way it is.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Hey,” Sam said. He waited, then tugged at her face mentally, asking her to look at him. She stepped away, wiping at her eyes, and went looking for the phone book. “Hey,” he said again. She looked at him. “How’s he doing?”

  “They hurt him bad, while they had him. It’s made him tolerant to a lot of things that I couldn’t deal with.” She paused, comparing timelines as sterilely as she could. “He’s moving a lot faster than I did.”

  “Is it really just about pain?”

  “It’s about focus and control,” Samantha said. “We derive most of our power off the static on the barriers. We have to learn how to live up against them.”

  She pulled the phone book out of the night stand between the beds and tossed it onto the bed.

  “What do you want for dinner?”

  <><><>

  Jason sat on the edge of the tub, resting his head on his hands, his pants dripping on the floor. His body was at war. The hot, the cold, the pain, the struggle… knowing Samantha wasn’t going to let anything really bad happen to him, and the counter-struggle to not struggle, to just let it happen… It wasn’t really about the pain. His body reacted to it, but his mind had long grown bored of it. It was how everything came together to make his mind feel like a raw nerve that he couldn’t shield.

  He was faking his own life. He remembered how he was supposed to act, and he remembered what he liked and what he didn’t like - sex with a stranger, like everything else, felt exactly how he remembered - but there was still part of his mind that couldn’t accept it. That was trying to wake up from a dream, albeit a pleasant one. And that Samantha would drown him in a bathtub full of ice while the cold kindled a bone-deep ache in his body that made straightforward thought impossible, that he had consented to it at first, and then fallen so weak that it hadn’t mattered, that she could hold him underwater with one palm - that all of that was a pleasant dream compared to what he kept expecting to wake up to… He tried to keep the reality of it away from himself as much as he could, but he couldn’t protect himself, now. His arms shook from exhaustion and made him feel out of control.

  “You decent?” Samantha asked, knocking on the door.

  “Presently,” he answered. She opened the door and closed it behind her, watching him for a moment before she came to sit on the floor across from him. She glanced at the pile of clothes Sam had left on the toilet and Jason shrugged. He’d seen them.

  He felt the surge of angry power in his gut, stowing away now, not unfamiliar - it had always been there - but like someone had hung a sign on it to call his attention to it for the first time. Like he was finally understanding what it was there for.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  “Rough,” he answered. Her face collapsed with guilt for a minute and she dropped her head.

  “Listen, Sweetheart. I know you don’t enjoy this.”

  “I do,” she whispered. “That’s the worst part. I understand why they do it.”

  Jason looked away, not trusting any of his mix of emotions.

  She turned her face up, not hiding the tears, but her expression harder.

  “You’re making very good progress,” she said. “I’m proud of that. I’m proud of you, for it. We’re competitive, and you make yourself and me look good. But that doesn’t help you any right now. I told you before they took you that you were supposed to do anything you had to to survive.”

  He nodded. He remembered. He’d remembered it hundreds of times, sitting tied to his chair.

  “I said it because that’s what Carter said to me. Exactly like this. It doesn’t matter how you get through it. No one cares. Okay? You don’t have to be nice to me, you don’t have to be strong, you don’t have to be okay.”

  “I am, babe.” He would have stood, but he wasn’t up for it yet. “Not right now, but most of the time, it’s true. I’m okay.”

  He took a deep breath, just to feel his lungs full, then frowned at her.

  “You really managed that in an hour and a half?”

  “I wasn’t sure if you were listening,” she said. “Yeah. You’re stronger than I was, but I had the benefit of a lot more knowledge.”

  He smiled wryly.

  “And you couldn’t tell me that stuff before we do this?”

  “I had a lot of time. You don’t have any.”

  “I guess so.”

  She stood and looked over his back, his arms, his chest, rubbing her hand over the spots where the skin hadn’t fully peeled away yet. He leaned into it.

  “Thanks,” he said after a minute.

  “Hmm?”

  “For whatever you did. You could have just let me roast.”

  “And damage this pretty skin?” she asked. “Never.”

  He looked at his hands and then his arms.

  “My scars…”

  They were still there, but fainter, save one. The bright scar from naming Anadidd’na. It stuck out more than it ever had before.

  “If you’re looking for an apology, you aren’t going to get it,” she said. He laughed, letting his head hang again. She tossed a towel across his shoulders when she was done, going to pull a length of toilet paper off the roll and cleaning out the tub.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, dropping his head to look at her under his elbow.
>
  “You don’t leave this much skin laying around. You just… don’t. I’ll burn it once it dries out.”

  “Creepy,” he said. She stood.

  “Take the time you need, but Sam went and got Indian food. It’s waiting for you.”

  He forced himself to sit up.

  “Indian? Seriously?”

  “No. He got take out from the greasy burger joint down the road,” she said. “It’s like you think we don’t know you at all.”

  Jason grinned and she ran her hand through his hair.

  “You’re doing good,” she said, as he leaned his head against her hip. “Really.”

  “Thanks, Sweetheart.”

  She scratched his head for another minute, then eased him up into supporting his own weight again and left. He changed pants and put on Anadidd’na, then turned out the light in the bathroom and left, looking forward to greasy food and lots and lots of sleep.

  <><><>

  The shopping center looked exactly the way it had when they’d left. The floors were dusty and grimy with the left-behind remains of construction equipment and smaller tools.

  “So what’s the game plan, here?” Jason asked as he parked the car in the shipping docks and got out.

  “Sam’s going to pick up a lead and find us a demon. Either they daisy chain from there, or we take that one out and come back to get another one.”

  “I don’t know how to find them,” Sam said. Samantha nodded, shifting her backpack higher on her back.

  “I think I’ve got that covered.”

  They went deeper into the mall, finding nothing.

  “You ready?” Samantha asked.

  “For what?” Sam answered. She grinned and reached into her bag, pulling out a set of wrap-around sunglasses.

  “Trendy,” Jason commented.

  Sam looked at them for a moment, noticing something wrong with them, but not able to put his finger on it. He put them on.

  “Ha ha,” he said, pulling them back off. “They’re blacked out.”

  He handed them to Jason and looked back at Samantha. She waited. He waited. Jason tried them on and took them off again.

  “I don’t get it,” Jason said. Samantha sighed.

  “They’re obsidian.”

  As if that explained it all.

  She sighed harder.

  “Black glass?”

  Still nothing. Jason handed them back to Sam, who put them on again, waiting for something to happen.

  “For seeing things that aren’t there,” Samantha said. “I’ve used it before.”

  “Not ringing any bells,” Jason said. Sam got it, though. He reached out from himself to see the mall around him in vision.

  “Wow,” he said.

  “What?” Jason asked. Sam felt Samantha’s smug satisfaction as she went digging into her bag again.

  “It’s like…” He ran back and forth through time like it was on rails. It took no effort. He dodged through rooms, watching demons, going back to look for Jason, coming forward and stalking Argo at fast-forward as they scrubbed the place. He could see everything.

  “It’s like what?” Jason asked.

  “It’s like someone gave me an instruction manual for all of this,” Sam answered. “Finally.”

  “When have you used it before?” Jason asked as Sam wondered off again in his mind, watching the interactions between the demons in the hours before Jason, Sam, and Kelly had turned up. There was a certain frenzy to them that he couldn’t be sure if it was because of the rate of speed he was using to watch, because of normal demonic jumpiness, or something else, but it was fascinating.

  “I don’t remember. I gave it to someone to be able to see a ghost once, I think. Or something. I thought I’d told you guys about it before.”

  Sam shook his head.

  “You’ve been holding out on me.”

  “You weren’t ready,” she answered.

  “What are those?” Jason asked. Sam snapped back to the present to find Samantha sliding her wrists down the gaps in a pair of metal bracers.

  “I ordered the glasses from an artisan in New York,” Samantha said. “She was wearing a set, so I ordered some for me, because they’re cool.”

  They were polished black metal and covered the full length of her forearms with a perfect fit. The cool feel of the metal against her skin was potent enough for it to be distracting to Sam. He found himself looking at the backs of black lenses again, and he took them off.

  “They are cool,” Jason said, turning to Sam. “You find what we needed?”

  “Yeah. I think I can probably find just about any of them.”

  “So pick one and let’s hit the road,” Samantha said. Sam put the glasses back on and slid easily back into a wider view of the room. The lenses looked dark, over his eyes, but it wasn’t obvious that they were opaque. Just solid, reflective black.

  “You have anyone you’d like to find first?” he asked, turning his face toward Jason.

  “Yeah,” Jason said. “There was a girl who brought me food every day. I’d like to find her.” He held out a hand toward Samantha. “And I get to take her on my own. Nothing from you.”

  “If that’s what you want,” Samantha said. “I’ll give you one exemption because it’s personal.”

  Sam was already reeling back through time, scanning across the mall to the small room at the center of the gate where he slid across the wall. He felt the increase in the density of the space as he moved, knowing that there was a limit to how far he could go - he couldn’t cross to hellside in the vision - but he could see it. The room was dark.

  “I can’t see,” he said. “It’s too dark. Can you describe her? Maybe I can find her that way.”

  “I never saw her, either,” Jason said.

  “I did,” Samantha said.

  “What?”

  “She brought you food and she washed your back,” Samantha said. Sam pulled himself back to the present, watching Samantha from inside the vision, so he could watch Jason at the same time.

  “Yeah,” Jason said. “How do you know that?”

  “I watched from hellside, the first few days after they took you. You still had the marks I gave you from coming to get Anadidd’na, and she rubbed them off. That was the last time I could watch you.”

  “That’s why…” Jason started. “Son of a bitch.”

  “Yeah,” Samantha said. “Tall, skinny, with shoulders that stuck out. Curly hair that she wore up on the back of her head, tall, spike-heeled sandals. Tight pants, probably black. Big eyes that sloped down toward a long, thin nose.”

  “Let me see what I can find,” Sam said, drifting back with less enthusiasm. He was remembering how bad those days had been. He actually remembered the day Jason had completely disappeared.

  “It was before he was in the gate,” Samantha said. “I could see him back then.”

  Sam nodded and pulled time faster. A face flashed by and he jerked to a stop.

  “Freckles and hoop earrings?” he asked.

  “She might have been a redhead,” Samantha said. “That might have been the right complexion.”

  “I’ve got her,” Sam breathed. She was striking in a petulant way, with eyes like a praying mantis.

  “Reel her in,” Samantha said. He felt the tension across the bond as both of them relived it. He wondered what it must have been like for Jason. He pushed time, letting go of space and just holding on to her. He hadn’t known he could do that, but it came easily.

  The present flashed into existence and he jerked time to a halt, taking stock of where he was in space. She was at an underground club somewhere, one full of blood and loud music. He’d seen a handful of them in New York - enough to recognize them - but Samantha had kept him out of most of them because they weren’t sanctioned for hunting. And it was a good place to start a war. He backed out, finding a street and then a street sign. He read it to Samantha and he felt her searching for it.

  “San Francisco,” she said. “You have
a grip on her?”

  Sam relaxed, feeling around in his brain to see if he could find her again without knowing where she was.

  “Yeah. I’ve got her.”

  “Let’s go,” Samantha said.

  “You two are scary,” Jason said.

  “I intend to make that as public as possible,” Samantha answered as Sam took off the glasses. “We don’t leave survivors.”

  <><><>

  Sam confirmed that the woman was still in the building, top floor, as they went in the front door. She was in a meeting with a pair of deputies, subservient fire demons who nodded a lot and took notes. Sam scrawled the symbol on the door to the stairwell as he went by, out of habit more than a sense of effectiveness. Jason watched, then they followed Samantha up the stairs, running to keep up.

  Samantha was on a mission. She and Sam had woken up that afternoon to the sound of Jason dreaming. He gasped and thrashed and yelled out as they’d tried to wake him, and then he refused to talk about it. Samantha hadn’t pressed him on it, but Sam had.

  “It doesn’t help,” Jason had told him. Samantha had just gotten her gear together and went to sit in the car. She’d had Sam call Ian from outside of the building, out of courtesy she said, and then it was just a race to keep up with her. Sam put on his glasses, keeping a hand on the railing to help keep his balance up stairs - he was solid all the time but at a dead run and on stairs - while he kept an eye on the woman. There were scouts outside of the elevator keeping an eye on things, but they didn’t appear to be powerful enough to glitch in to warn her so long as Samantha was the one to put the mark on the door at the top of the stairs. Sam was effective, but Samantha had an advantage he didn’t understand and she didn’t try to teach. It simply was.

  “You said she’s got two in with her?” Samantha asked.

  “Yeah,” Sam called up to her.

  “Let them go,” she called back.

  “What?”

  “I told you,” she said. “We’re daisy-chaining them. You can follow them.”

  “Done,” Jason said. “I just want to have a conversation with her.”

  Samantha stopped at the next landing and turned to look at Jason. He looked up the stairs, then back at her.

  “What?” he asked.

  Sam could feel the tear between what she wanted and what she thought was necessary, but he couldn’t guess what those two sides were, right now.