Twenty-Eight
Ian
“How does it look?” Kori asked as I put the cap back on the marker.
“Not bad. Unless he carries a magnifying glass, he’ll never know the difference. How did you know that would work?”
She stood and examined her arm in the bathroom mirror. “I used a wig and a black permanent marker to sneak around the east side a couple of times when I first came to the city, before anyone really knew who I was.”
“So, what’s the plan?” Kenley asked from the doorway, twisting her fingers together. She hadn’t stopped fidgeting since Tower hung up on her, and she kept ducking into the living room to check the clock hanging over the door.
I’d been checking the time, too. Eight minutes until her girlfriend would get cut again. No wonder she was melting down.
“Well, even if Jake doesn’t know my marks are dead, I’ll never make it to the basement like this,” Kori said, patting her guns in their holsters.
“What if we go in from the basement?” I said, from my seat on the edge of the tub. “If I could get down there on my own and call up true darkness, you could come through it, right? We could grab Vanessa and go.”
“Can you do that?” Surprise shone through the shock still lingering in Kenley’s eyes. “Can you make darkness deep enough to blind the infrared lights?”
Kori’s brows rose. “Kenni, he can block out the fuckin’ sun.”
“Not the whole sun,” I amended. “Just a little of its light.”
“Daylight?” Kenley gaped at me. “You can kill daylight?” she said, and I nodded. “No wonder Jake wants you.”
“Well, he’s not going to get me. He’s not going to get any of us.”
Kori nodded, obviously thinking. “Okay, we’ll drop Kenley somewhere safe, then you’ll turn yourself in to Jake. Once you’re in the house, find some excuse to go to the basement. Say you won’t sign until you know Van’s okay, and if that doesn’t work, do whatever it takes to get down there, and I’ll come get you both. But take this gun and leave that one here.” She pulled the pistol from my right holster and replaced it with one from her dresser.
“Why this one?”
“Because they’ll confiscate your weapons, but if you don’t try to bring some in, you’ll look weak. And I don’t mind losing that one.”
I gave her a grim nod, trying not to show how much this plan was growing on me. If Van was in the basement, Jonah would be, too. I would get a shot at him, and that would make the whole thing worth it. But…
“But my brother comes first.”
Both Daniels sisters looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “Ian, Van’s being tortured,” Kori said.
“So is Steven. He’s been on the verge of death for two weeks. His organs are failing. He can’t talk. He can’t sleep. He’s so pale you can almost see through his skin. He’s dying, and I’ve made him suffer two days longer than he had to because I didn’t want to hurt either of you. But now that I know Kenley can break his binding, we have to go help him. Now.”
“Wait, he’s in breach?” Kori’s eyes were so big the rest of her features looked smaller in comparison. “You said he was bound, but you never said he was in breach of his binding. How could he survive that for two weeks?”
“Meghan’s a Healer.”
“Who’s Meghan?” Kenley asked, and Kori answered with only a brief glance at her.
“Steven’s girlfriend.” She turned back to me. “Meghan’s been healing him for two weeks?”
I nodded. “Almost two and a half, now. They’re both hanging on by a thread, and I came here to break the binding. And for that I need Kenley.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Kenley said, crossing her arms over her chest so I couldn’t see them shake—a clear sign of the resistance pain she was fighting.
Kori’s hard gaze flicked from me to the clock over the microwave—we were all counting the minutes. “But you said she can only break bindings she actually sealed…”
“Yeah. She’s the one who bound Steven. We don’t know what or who she bound him to, but we know it was her. The Tracker recognized her psychic signature—he evidently sees it a lot in this area.” Because Kenley had bound nearly three quarters of Tower’s current employees, according to Aaron’s sources.
“Whoa.” Kori stepped away from me, eyes narrowed on me in suspicion. “You never said Kenley was the one who bound your brother.”
“I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell you any of this while you were still bound to Tower.” And now Kenley was suffering the resistance pain I’d tried so hard to spare Kori.
“He works for Jake?” Kenley frowned in both confusion and pain. She hadn’t caught on yet to the truth already surfacing through her sister’s ambient anger. “Because I haven’t bound anyone to anything except service to Jake in six and a half years.”
“This would have been sometime before that,” I said, watching Kori even as I answered her sister.
“Why are you here, Ian?” Kori demanded, her voice as soft and dangerous as I’d ever heard it. “Why are you really here?” Her hand hovered at her hip, ready to draw on me like a Wild West outlaw. A tiny, scary, blonde outlaw.
“Kori, wait…”
“At least have the balls to admit it. You didn’t come for her help. You came here to kill her,” Kori said, and Kenley stared at us both, pain and confusion warring for control of her expression. “That description you gave Jake—that wasn’t me, it was Kenley. You requested her so you could get close enough to kill her.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Kenley said, hunched over now from the pain in her stomach. “I didn’t bind your brother. I’ve never even heard of him.”
Kori drew her gun. “Kenni, go to your room.” Tears filled her eyes, but her aim didn’t waver. And I didn’t draw against her. I couldn’t.
“I’m not going to hurt her.” I held my hands up, palms out, demonstrating how harmless I was. “I gave you my word.”
“What good is your word, if you’ve been lying the whole time?” Kori demanded, rage flashing behind her eyes, fueled by something even stronger. Something she didn’t want to admit to.
“I had no choice!” Anger rose through me slowly, winding its way up my spine. “You’d do anything to protect Kenley. So how can you blame me for being willing to do the same for my brother? I didn’t know her.” I spared a glance at Kenley, who still watched us in shock. “I didn’t know you. All I knew was that killing her would save Steven, and he’s my brother. We shared the same fucking womb! But then I met you, and you were horrible, in the most wonderful way.”
“Don’t…” Her aim held steady, but her eyes were watering again.
“You were tactless, and scary, and funny, and easy to provoke, but I knew from the start that you were so strong. You’re a fighter, and I loved that about you from the beginning, and I knew I couldn’t hurt you, even to save my brother. So I found another way, and I had to do it without telling you. To protect you. I did what had to be done, and if you’ll just put the damn gun down and think about this for a second, you’ll realize that you would have done the same thing.”
“No, I wouldn’t.” She lowered the gun. “I would have gone through with it. I wouldn’t have hesitated to kill your brother to save my sister.”
For a moment, we stared at one another, a silent brutal understanding passing between us. Then she blinked, and one more tear rolled down her face. “And I would do the same for you.”
My chest ached like someone had tried to pry my ribs open and pull my heart out through the gap.
“I don’t know what’s going on here.” Kenley sank onto the couch, drawing both her sister’s attention and mine. “I don’t remember binding anyone named Steven Holt, but if this doesn’t stop, I’m going to ask you to reconsider shooting me.” Her face was twisted with pain, her arms clutching her stomach in obvious agony.
“Come with me.” I dropped into a squat in front of Kenley, to catch her gaze. “If you can break Steven’s binding while Meghan has anything left in her, she can help you, at least long enough for us to work on your binding.” I glanced up at Kori, appealing to her mercenary logic. “We can’t stay here anyway. Tower’s probably already sent men after us.”
“What about Van?” Kenley demanded, and I recognized the angry flush in her cheeks—she looked just like her sister in that moment.
“I’m not going to let the princess die in the dungeon. Kori and I will go after her as soon as Steven’s unbound.”
“But…” Her foot began to jiggle—a very bad sign. And every minute she didn’t turn herself in to Jake, it would get a little worse.
“No more arguments. We’re going. Ian, get the lights.” Kori wrapped one arm around her sister and carefully pulled her up from the couch while I crossed the room to flip switches in the kitchen and by the front door, where I had to step over the dead guard’s body. When the room was dark enough to travel through, I took Kori’s free hand and gave her the address. She spared a moment to visualize the general location and search for a pocket of darkness. Then she stepped forward and Kenley and I went with her.
Two steps later, I banged my shin on the toilet in the house Meghan grew up in. They’d kept the house when they moved out a few years earlier, but it was currently unrented, which made it a decent hideout. Though Tower’s Trackers would find us, if we stayed too long.
Kori’s foot hit something and she cursed, while I felt around on the wall for the light switch.
Something clicked behind us just as I found the light, and I was still half-blind when I turned to find Aaron aiming a gun at me from the hall. He exhaled in relief when he recognized me, and his aim shifted to Kori.
“We haven’t met.” Kori half held her sister up with one arm, leaving her left hand free to go for her gun. “I’m Kori Daniels. If you don’t get that gun out of my face, I’m gonna take it, then I’m gonna break your jaw so I can unhinge it and shove your own pistol down your throat. That way the bullet goes through the long way.”
I groaned and gestured for Aaron to holster his gun, but he looked distinctly disinclined. “She believes in making a strong first impression. But she’s here to help. They both are.”
Aaron held his position for another second, then reluctantly lowered his gun and stepped aside, so we could enter. I took Kenley from her sister and carried the Binder in both arms down the hall and into Steven’s room, where he lay on the bed, a skeleton wrapped in skin so thin it looked like it might tear at the slightest pressure.
“Oh, hell,” Kori whispered. “He should be dead.”
“Don’t ever say that again,” Meghan said from her recliner next to the bed. The circles beneath her eyes had darkened and swollen. Her arms were thin and pale, and the veins stood out like dark tree branches, stretching beneath her skin.
Kenley gasped when I set her in a chair on the opposite side of the bed and she got her first look at my brother. “Twins?” she asked, and I nodded, surprised she could see the resemblance in what little was left of him.
“He’s nine minutes my junior.” I knelt next to the bed, searching for something familiar in the living skeleton that used to be my brother. I wanted to take his hand so he’d know I was there, but I was afraid to touch him.
Steven’s eyes rolled beneath his lids, and he groaned in his sleep. Only he wasn’t really sleeping—he was barely clinging to consciousness.
“I don’t know him.” Kenley’s eyes filled with tears and she sounded half-choked by them. “I thought when I saw him I’d remember, but I’ve never seen him before. I didn’t bind him.”
I pulled up a folding chair and sat next to her, while Aaron and Kori hovered near the doorway. “You may not have personally bound him, but your blood and your will sealed the binding.”
Kenley blinked in confusion, but then comprehension surfaced so hard and fast her body actually jerked, like someone had slapped her. She turned to her sister, anger and guilt warring behind her eyes, pain evident in every movement she made. “Nadia? You told him about Nadia?”
Kori shrugged. “I was explaining how we got involved with Jake in the first place.”
“Who’s Nadia?” Aaron asked.
“Her college roommate,” Kori said. “Years ago Kenley gave a sample of her blood to some bitch she had a crush on, who abused the fuckin’ privilege.”
“But Jake fixed all that. None of those bindings are still intact.”
“I don’t care who made the mess and who cleaned it up,” Aaron said from the edge of the room. “His bindings are obviously still intact, and your blood is keeping it that way. So break the fucking seal now, or I’ll end this once and for all.” He drew his gun and pointed it at Kenley’s head, and she gasped.
Kori burst into motion so fast I hardly saw her move. She shoved his gun arm up, startling Aaron, who accidently fired into the ceiling, and the rest of us ducked. Kori threw her knee up and into his groin, and when Aaron fell to his knees, too shocked to make a sound, she took his gun hand in both of hers and twisted viciously. I heard his bone crack from across the room, and I flinched when Aaron howled in pain.
Kori plucked the pistol from his grip, then kicked him in the stomach for good measure.
“You ever point a gun at my sister again, and I’ll strangle you with your own intestines. Got it?”
Aaron moaned from the floor, and Kori must have accepted that as a reply, because she checked the safety on his gun, then kept it, and suddenly I understood where most of her weapons collection had come from.
“Carry on,” she said, waving her empty hand at both Kenley and Steven, but when Meghan stood to help her brother, Kori shook her head and raised the gun again. “Sit. Save your healing juice for my sister. He’ll be fine,” she added, with a contemptuous glance at Aaron, who was still curled up on the floor.
Meghan sank back into her chair reluctantly, and I turned back to Kenley.
“I don’t even know how to start,” she said. “Breaking Kori’s seal was hard, but at least I knew what I was doing. I don’t know what Steven was bound to, so I don’t know what to remove my will from.”
“Okay…” Kori came close, obviously thinking, and I didn’t miss the glance she threw at the alarm clock next to the bed. Vanessa’s time was slipping away, along with Steven’s. “Whatever this binding is, he only breached it a couple of weeks ago, right?” she said, and I deferred to Meghan. I wasn’t even in the country when the whole thing started. I’d been gone for nearly seven years.
“Um, yeah.” Meghan sniffled. “I’ll never forget because it was the night he proposed. We had a wonderful dinner, then there was the question, and the ring…” She held her hand out and studied the diamond on her left ring finger. “Half an hour later, he got a migraine, and we had to leave in the middle of dessert.”
“Oh, hell,” Kori said, turning to see if I’d come to the same conclusion. And I had. Only I knew more than she did. More than any of them could possibly know. “Love Knot,” she said, and I nodded. But the name was a misnomer—you can’t control someone’s emotions, no matter what you bind them to. But that didn’t stop the occasional love-sick adolescent—or desperate college student—from preventing the object of her affection from marrying—or proposing marriage—to anyone else.
Kenley watched us, obviously trying to think through her own pain to follow the conversation. “You’re saying the Love Knot my college roommate used my blood for six years ago was targeting your boyfriend’s twin brother? What are the chances?”
Kori shrugged and shook her head slowly. “I stopped asking that years ago. How did Jake break the seal?”
“He didn’t. He said he couldn’t,” Kenley said, and my temper flared.
“He only said that because he didn’t want you to know you could break your own bindings.”
“So, what, he just lied and said the binding was broken, when it wasn’t?” Kori asked.
Kenley shook her head. “He helped me transfer it.”
I frowned. “You can’t transfer a binding.”
Kenley shrugged. “Evidently you can, under certain circumstances. In this case, he said the target had a dead brother, close in age. And Nadia didn’t have a sample of Steven’s blood, so she used a name binding. Jake’s man showed me how to transfer the binding to the dead brother, where it couldn’t hurt anyone.” She gave another little shrug, brow furrowed from the headache. “Dead people don’t fall in love, you know.” Then she turned to me, frowning. “Except that you’re not dead.”
“He’s not bound, either,” Meghan pointed out. “If you transferred the binding, why is Steven still bound?”
I exhaled heavily and rubbed my own forehead, leaning back in my chair. “Because she transferred the binding to Steven, not from him.”
“I don’t understand,” Kori said.
“Oh, shit. Your names,” Aaron said, and I looked up to see him still sitting on the floor, his fractured arm clutched to his chest. He wouldn’t take care of his own injuries until he knew his sister was safe.
“What about your names?” Kori asked. “The quick version,” she added, with another glance at the clock.
“My mom raised us to be paranoid,” I said. “She told us from the time our Skills manifested that people would want to use them. She said we’d have to hide our Skills, and possibly hide ourselves. Turns out she was right. When we left home for college—we picked schools on opposite sides of the country—we switched names, to help protect our true identities. That way, if someone tried to track me by my name, they’d actually be tracking him, and he was so far away even the best Tracker in the world couldn’t pick up his signal.”
Fortunately, Steven’s skill as a Reader was more common and less powerful than mine, which was why he’d felt safe enough just hiding his name, whereas I’d had to hide my entire existence.
“So, you’re not really Ian?” Kori said.
“No, I’m Ian. But in college, I called myself Steven, and I registered with his records and ID. So when Nadia bound Steven, she was actually binding me—Ian—because he was using my name. He got his degree as Ian—my brother really is a systems analyst—got his first job as Ian, and applied for his mortgage as Ian Holt. He still uses my name to this day,” I said, glancing at Meghan for confirmation, and she nodded. “And I joined the Marines as Steven Holt.”
“You’re the dead serviceman?” Kori’s eyes were narrow, her voice unsure. She was trying to untie a knot of identification my brother and I had worked for years to tangle. To keep each other safe. But that had obviously backfired. “You faked your own death?”
I shrugged. “I just took advantage of the opportunity when the Corps thought I died, along with most of the rest of my unit. Steven chose to hide in plain sight. I chose to hide in Australia. In Steven’s name, which now belonged to a dead U.S. serviceman.”
Kori sat on the end of the bed, eyes closed, thinking out loud. “So, Nadia bound Steven, but she used your name—Ian—so she was actually binding you. Then, when Kenley transferred the binding to you—in Steven’s name—she was actually transferring it back to the intended target. Is that right?”
“Yeah. I think so.” I turned back to Kenley. “Does that give you enough information to break the seal?”
“I sure hope so.”
“Please, do it,” Meghan begged as Kenley closed her eyes. Her hands shook in her lap as she concentrated, and I wondered how much harder this would be, with so much resistance pain already crippling her. Her eyes moved behind her eyelids, and her hands clenched around the arms of her chair
The rest of us waited, hardly breathing. I watched my brother—my twin—trying to find some change in him to indicate her success. Or her failure. His breaths were shallow, his chest hardly moving. He’d grown way too thin, especially in the past week, when food became too hard to keep down, even when Meghan managed to get it in him. He’d stopped letting me help. In fact, he’d kicked me out of his room eight days earlier—that was the last time he’d had the strength to shout—and it took me a while to understand that seeing me was hard for him, because I looked like he remembered himself, even as he wasted away a little more every day.
Finally Kenley gasped and her eyes flew open. “I think I did it.”
Meghan burst into tears and pushed herself out of her recliner to sit on the edge of Steven’s bed. I couldn’t see a change, but she looked happy. Relieved. She laid one hand on his cheek, then touched his arm. Then she turned the sheets back to touch his bare, gaunt stomach. And when she finally looked up, silent tears poured down her cheeks.
“They’re working. They’re all working again.” She turned to Kenley, wiping her face with both hands. “Thank you.”
“I’m so sorry,” Kenley said, clutching her own stomach. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”
“He’s going to be fine soon,” Meg said, and I stood, already turning to Kori.
“Ready?” We had twenty-five minutes to get to Vanessa.
Kori turned to Meghan, who was fussing over Steven, trying to make him more comfortable, obviously eager for him to wake up. “Swear you’ll take care of her.” The gun in her right hand made it kind of hard to hear her request as anything less than an order, complete with implicit threat.
“What’s wrong with her?” Meghan turned to look critically at Kenley for the first time.
“She’s in breach of her oath to Jake Tower just by being here.”
“If she dies, three-quarters of Jake Tower’s private army will go free. His empire will collapse,” Aaron said from the floor near the door, injured arm still cradled at his chest, and I started to reconsider my original assessment of his IQ.
Kori turned to him slowly, pistol aimed at his head. “If she dies, you die, even if I have to chase you across the fuckin’ planet. And you should know that one of the best Trackers in the country owes me a favor.” She lowered her gun, and Aaron looked up at me, anger smoldering in his eyes.
“You’re with her on this? You’re gonna pick some bitch you just met over a friend you’ve known all your life?”
“I’m hoping I won’t have to. Don’t be stupid, Aaron. Kenley just saved your sister’s life.”
“She’s the one who put it in danger!”
“No, I put my own life in danger,” Meghan said, rounding the bed for a closer look at Kenley. “I chose to heal Steven. And now I choose to heal the woman who saved him.” She turned to Kori, as she knelt next to Kenley. “She’ll be fine as long as I am. But I don’t know how long that’ll be. I’ve been doing this too long as it is.”
“It won’t be long,” Kori said, and I could see the solution in her eyes. In the set line of her jaw. She was going after Barker. In killing one of Tower’s Binders, she’d be freeing the other. The king’s castle would come crumbling down on top of him. “Let’s go.”