Dark Need

"There was another reason." She caught his hand and stopped him, turning around to face him. "And I can't remember it. Isn't that funny?"



Phillipe said nothing.



"You can't tell me because he ordered you not to." She got to her feet. "That son of a bitch. That scheming, conniving, cold-blooded, manipulative jackass. This time, I will kill him."



"Alexandra, please."



She whipped up a hand. "No. Don't you dare tell me this time that it was because he loves me. I'm his sygkenis, his life partner or whatever the fuck it means. I gave him back his face, Phil. I've reassembled his friends. I stopped being human because of him. I took a goddamn copper bolt in the chest for him."



"It is because of your hard work, love, sacrifice, and devotion," Phillipe said, "that he wishes to protect you."



"Protect me how? By picking my brain apart? By deciding for me what I can or cannot handle? Nothing could be that bad." When the seneschal remained silent, she whirled. "Fine. I'm out of here."



Phillipe set down the scissors. "You cannot leave."



"Who's going to—" She turned around. "You wouldn't."



The seneschal came around the table. "He is my master."



Alex fought him for as long as her physical will remained her own, but then the room filled with the sweet scent of honeysuckle. Her mutation did not protect her from any Kyn talent, and Phillipe's was the ability to take over a human being's body and operate it by remote control.



"How long can you keep this up?" she asked as her body calmly walked back to the chair and sat down. "A few hours? Two days? A week? You have to rest sometime, you jerk."



Phillipe picked up the scissors and finished trimming her hair in silence.



Alex fought with everything she had the compulsion to remain still and acquiescent. Nothing could dent the seneschal's hold over her, though, and she was held as spellbound as the first time Phillipe had used it on her, when he had compelled her to operate on Cyprien's shattered face without any proper anesthesia.



He turned her to face him. "When the master returns, I will release you. I am sorry, Alexandra."



She was sorry, too, because she would never again trust the oversize bastard. Tears of frustration pricked her eyes, but through them she saw the door to the kitchen slowly open, and a man step inside. In his right hand was a tranquilizer gun.



"There's a man with a gun standing right behind you," she told Phillipe.



The seneschal removed the towel from her shoulders and brushed some cut hairs from her shoulders. "Distracting me will not—" He stiffened and tried to turn around. "Rafael."



"Forgive me," the other seneschal said.



Alex was released from Phillipe's compulsion as soon as he fell unconscious to the kitchen floor. She jumped out of the chair, but a blast of golden light radiated out, enveloping everything around her, until she could see nothing but the light. She still tried to run, but collided with a pair of hard hands.



"You will be blind until I release you," the man said, "but I mean you no harm, Doctor."



She struggled, but even her Kyn-augmented strength was no match for his. She couldn't pick up any murderous thoughts from him, either. "Then why are you doing this? Who are you?"



"I have my orders."



Alex felt him pick her up in his arms and carry her out of the kitchen. She screamed for the guards, and then felt something sharp and burning stab into the side of her arm. The familiar feel of her own Kyn tranquilizer flooded through her, ending her struggles, silencing her last cry.



John didn't return to Barbastro Abbey for several days. He left the abbey's station wagon parked in town where it could be easily found, but he used the cash Mercer had given him to rent a room and feed himself while he thought of what he could do. He knew he was committing the sin of stealing, but Mercer had lied to him. In his readjusted view, that made things even.



His first impulse was to move on, leave Florida and find another place for himself. That the Brethren had corrupted another good man was no business of his. The only thing that kept him from leaving was remembering how ruthlessly he had abandoned the homeless kids he had supervised at the Haven runaway shelter in Chicago, just as he had his sister and the priesthood. If he didn't stop running away every time he faced tragedy and adversity, in time he'd never find a place for himself.



He began by doing something ordinary: He called Maurice's brother, Lamar Robinson, and asked him for a job interview.



"I don't have no office, brother," the roofer told him. "But you want to meet for a meal, okay."



John took the bus to the restaurant in North Fort Lauderdale. Heaven's Kitchen had once been a gas station; the concrete pad converted to a parking lot, the food mart section serving as a diner, with kitchen in what had been a drive-through car wash. A pair of black youths stood outside the front door, but both gave him only the briefest glance as he walked in.



The months of working outdoors had darkened John's skin, just as Dougall Hurley, the bigoted shelter manager who had been killed in Chicago, had predicted it would. Apparently now he passed as a black man.



Lamar Robinson rose from the booth where he was sitting as soon as John came in and walked over to shake his hand. A tall, heavily built black man with hair gone mostly gray, he looked more like Maurice's father.



"Robinson," he said, shaking John's hand. "You hungry? Good."



They sat down and a pretty teenage waitress with braces brought John a glass of iced water and took their orders.



"You don't try the barbecue sandwich lunch platter," Robinson warned him, "you're gonna regret it the rest of your life."



John dutifully ordered the meal and a glass of iced tea to go with it.



When the waitress left them, Robinson gave him the onceover. "You got any outstanding warrants on you?"



The question almost made John choke on his water. He started to say no, and then thought of the car he had left in town, and the money he had stolen from the abbey. "Not that I'm aware of."



"Good answer." Robinson called to the waitress to bring him a cup of coffee. "Cops come looking for anybody on my crew, I hand them over. Keep my ass out the county lockup. I work a four-day week, from Jupiter to Biscayne and anywhere in between, so you'll need a car. You can't get one, let me know, I'll fix you up."



"I've been passing as Caucasian since I was a kid," John suddenly said. "I've made people think I am. I've never… I've not lived as what I am."



Robinson peered at him for a moment, and then he chuckled. "Boy, if I could bleach this old black hide of mine, I'd make 'em think I was a white man, too." He put his hand on the table next to John's. "Lawd, look at that. Like night and day. I know some brothers don't trust no mix-color folk like you, but I say a man's more than his skin. Most white folks not like that, though, are they?"



John shook his head.



"So tell me where you been working the last year."



Feeling curiously relieved, John recited the names and places where he had been employed; there weren't that many. When he mentioned the labor-pool job in Kentucky, Robinson nodded as if that had some weight. "I've been staying with a friend of mine, but that didn't work out."



Robinson sat back as the waitress brought their orders and placed them on the table. "You need a place? My cousin runs a pay-a-week place out on U.S. One. He'll take you on until you get your first paycheck."



John looked at the delicious food in front of him, and then at the man on the other side of the table. "You'd hire me. Just like that. No résumé, no job application, no background check?"



Robinson shrugged. "Maurice sent you to me. That makes you all right."



"But you don't know anything about me," John persisted. "I could be lying to you."



"You could." Robinson picked up his sandwich and took a bite. "I'll tell you about my little brother, Maurice. He the baby; came along when I was twelve. My daddy died, and I was married and out the house by the time he got old enough to give our mama trouble. Got into enough of that, too, and like to kill her with worry. Time I bail him out for burglary, he only sixteen. I told him, 'You get busted again, I take you out to the 'glades, leave you for the gators.'"



"That convinced him to straighten out?"



Robinson shook his head. "He did time up until he was seventeen. Then one of them gangsters he ran with got himself shot up, and my little brother saw what his future would be. It was just that one thing, but that was it. Maurice came to me after his friend's funeral and asked me for a job. I threw him out of my house. He came back the next day, and the next, till I stopped slamming the door in his face. So I put him on the crew, and I worked his skinny ass harder than anyone else. Took him a bit, but he turned out to be my best man."



John couldn't resist the tangy odor of the barbecue any longer, and took a bite. The pulled pork was as tender as butter, and the savory, smoky sweetness of the sauce made him take a second bite, and then a third.



"I told you." Robinson watched his expression with smug satisfaction. "Rest of your life."



"How did Maurice end up with the bus company?"



"He always liked to drive, Maurice did. While he was on my crew he took a course on bus driving. Quit roofing when he got a place with the county school system. Went from there to public transit, and then to the big companies. Now he drive all over the country." He took a drink from his glass. "The whole time Maurice been driving, ten years now, he give my business card to just three men. One of them married to my daughter and own a shoe shop in the mall. The other's the chief of my crew. And here you are. But you ain't looking for a job, brother."



John put down what was left of his sandwich. "I'm not."



Robinson shook his head. "You ain't no roofer, not with the way you talk, man. There's something about you, too. I'm thinking you already got yourself something lined up. You just ain't made up your mind how you gonna do it, or where."