Chapter 30
Daniel
Daniel awoke warm and almost criminally comfortable on the white leather couch. Despite the fact that she, Seb and Colt had coated it in multiple body fluids by now it was still soft as a baby lamb. Someone had wrapped a blanket around her too, swaddling her so tightly she felt like a newborn.
Her body wasn’t nearly as welcoming. Every muscle was limp as a used condom and her head…Oh god, her head felt like a rotting cabbage. She groaned, burrowing deeper into the safe haven of the couch.
“Daniel? Are you okay?”
It was John, his voice all deep and smooth and authoritative. She recalled the blowjob she’d given him and wondered if, despite her gummy eyelids and inflamed sinuses, she looked nice. Nah, mate, her mind told her cheerfully. You look like shit.
She pressed her face deeper into the couch.
“Daniel,” John said more urgently. “You need to get up. We’re running late.”
“For what?” she asked racking her brain for appointments. Then she remembered; Middlebend, sexual conspiracy, danger, high possibilities of death.
“Fuck!” She sat up so fast her head spun, and she collapsed back onto the couch. “What time is it?”
“Eleven,” John said. “Are you—”
“Eleven? I’ve been out for three hours?” Daniel looked around wildly, half expecting to see Elkin and Walshaw bearing down on her. “What are you still doing here?”
“Easy.” John knelt beside her. He was wearing different clothes and had a revolver strapped to his hip.
“You need to relax.”
“You need to relax!” Daniel hoisted herself up, this time with more success. “Why are you still here? Where’s Colt and Seb?”
“Packing the car. The cameras are off. Seriously, Schwartz, you need to calm down.”
“Yeah, and maybe pigs need to sprout wings and start delivering glittery Valentine’s Day cards and little petit fours with strawberries on top.”
John raised a coal-black eyebrow. “Are you feeling okay?”
“No.” Daniel said miserably, pressed her hands into her eyes. “I’m so tired.”
“Here.” John handed her a glass of what looked like water. “Drink slowly or you’ll be sick.”
Daniel took a sip, the bubbly sweetness was a pleasant surprise and heaven to her parched throat. She sighed. “Cheers for the lemonade.”
“Lemonade?” John said, confused.
“What do you call this?” Daniel pointed to her glass.
“Sprite.”
“Which is a kind of…?”
John’s forehead furrowed. “Soda?”
Daniel felt like something was getting lost in translation here. “Sprite is lemonade.”
“In New Zealand?”
“Everywhere.”
John gave her a bemused smile. “Then what do you call lemon juice and sugar and water all mixed up?”
“Lemonade.”
“That’s just confusing.”
“They’re a variation on the same lemon-based product!” Daniel’s head throbbed violently “Right, forget about the lemonade. When are you leaving?”
John’s face grew stern once more. “As soon as you’re up and able to walk around. You’re coming with us.”
The fierceness in his voice made her chest ache. “I can’t.”
“Yes you can,” he said stubbornly. “We’ll head to LA and find a way to get you overseas. Wherever you want.”
A selfish part of Daniel resented his mention of sending her overseas. It wanted him to say she was staying with them, that they would go on the run together. But the rest of her was done dragging these beautiful arseholes down with her and she understood that was not what any of them had signed up for.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I think if this is a beleaguered thank you for the BJ, you could just send me some flowers. There’s no need to flush your entire business, nay your life, down the toilet.”
John did not smile. “We’re taking you somewhere safe, and that’s final, now drink your lemonade and get dressed.”
“No.” Daniel found herself sinking back into the couch like the Titanic and struggled to sit up once more. “If you leave now we can make out like it was some epic multi-lovers’ spat and once you’re gone I can escape.”
“How the hell are you gonna do that?”
Daniel thought of the NEMP under her mattress, the perfect priceless piece of weaponry. “I can’t tell you, Heathcliff, but rest assured I have the technology.”
John’s eyes narrowed. “You think now that you’ve swallowed me, you could call me by my fucking name?”
Daniel thought about it. “I will if you and Seb and Colt leave without me?”
“Nice try.” John stood up. “Get ready to go in half an hour.”
“This is ridiculous,” she snapped. “A few hours ago you were all set to ditch me and now you’ve changed your mind because I sucked you off.”
His jaw tightened. “That’s not what happened.”
“It so is. You act all mean but under that bullshit you’re just a guy who can’t handle casual sex. Well I’ll have you know,” She took an angry sip of lemonade and choked, spraying it everywhere. “See what you’re making me do? You’re making me so mad I can’t drink.”
John’s furious expression cracked a just a little. “Sometimes I think you need to wear a lobster bib. Like all the time.”
“Shut up,” she said, dabbing the lemonade with the blanket.
John’s mouth fell open in horror. “That’s cashmere!”
“So?”
“So stop using it to mop up soda!” John grabbed the blanket from her at the same time she tried to prevent him from grabbing it and their hands met in mid-air, like that famous painting on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. The sensation that passed between them was sharp. A USB clicking into a computer. The shocks you sometimes got when you handled wooly jumpers or dragged your feet on the carpet. Daniel saw a suburban street blurry and gray, the pavement lined with dead birds. A woman, she sounded so familiar, screamed and a man called her name.
Daniel tugged her hand away breathing hard. “What the fuck was that?”
John stared at her, his expression like that of Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream. Seeing it scared her more than the possibility of Middlebend showing up and liquidating her. “What’s wrong? What was that?”
“I need to know,” John said, his face ghostly pale.
“Huh?”
“I need to know what Middlebend wants from you. Why they brought you here.”
The bottom fell out of Daniel’s guts. “I can’t tell you that.”
“Is it bad?” he demanded with shaking urgency. “Catastrophically bad?”
“I…How do you…?”
“It doesn’t matter.” John’s face was now pale green, the panic pouring from his skin, palpable. “I think it’s the reason I’ve been fucked up all year. You need to tell me.”
If it had been anyone else, anyone in the world Daniel would have told them to piss off as they were clearly losing it, but this was John, rock-steady, grumpy clearheaded John. She recalled what she’d seen, the street, the dead birds, the man calling her name.
She bit her lower lip, the bone sticking to the cracked skin. “What just happened? Between you and me.”
John twitched, avoiding her gaze. “You’re gonna think I’m crazy.”
The word Doomsayer pinged around Daniel’s brain like a high-speed pinball. “I’m pretty open minded. Did you…Was that…Did you see the street with all the birds?”
John nodded silently, his face pinched, his eyes begging and refusing at once. She got the sense that if she screwed this up, said the wrong thing, poked the wrong place, he would explode and refuse to say anything. She was not, despite her membership in Grassroots, a stupid or supernaturally inclined girl, but all the best thinkers understood there were things science couldn’t explain. Mysteries waiting beyond what the five senses could perceive. That vision was like nothing she’d ever experienced, like donning goggles and seeing into an alternative reality. It had been real. It was not her imagination.
“So,” Daniel said, drawing on every ounce of courage she had, “Was it some kind of future thing?”
John blinked, his mesmeric cult leader eyes sharp with misery. “Yes.”
“Oh,” she said. “Is that new, or…?”
John pressed two fingers to his temples. “I know things. See things. I always have.”
He sounded disgusted with himself.
“You see stuff?” Daniel repeated, trying not to laugh out of nerves. “You mean like dead people?”
John turned and walked toward the door.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” she called after him. “It was a reflex. I’m a bitch, I’m sorry! Come back. I believe you!”
John turned, his face full of fury. “You are the absolute fucking limit, Schwartz.”
“In a good way?”
“No,” John snarled but the corners of his lips kicked up a little. “Look, we shouldn’t be talking about this, there’s no time.”
“I think we can make time to talk about you having the second fucking sight,” Daniel said.
John’s shoulders slumped. “Fine, just hurry up. What do you want to know?”
“I…uh…so you see the future?”
“Not always,” John said, stubbing the toe of his boot against the carpet. “Sometimes I see what’s happening right now, sometimes I see stuff that’s already happened. It’s a family thing, my mom was like this too.”
He stared out of the window at the beach hollow-eyed and miserable. Daniel could understand why. Shamanic gifts suited him about as well as tie-dye. “And when you touched me?”
“I don’t know,” he said, lifting his gaze to hers. “I don’t understand lots of it. Most of it. I think that was the future, your future maybe. That’s why you could see it as well. You’ve been in a lot of my…I see you a lot.”
Daniel was oddly flattered as though he’d confessed to writing her a poem. “Really? That’s so cool.”
John snorted. “Yeah, right, cool. Now can you please fucking tell me what Middlebend wants to know?”
Daniel’s stomach squirmed like a barrel of eels, she’d wanted to know his secret so badly she’d promised something that wasn’t really hers to give. She, Cynthia, and Mikey had sworn a blood oath to carry the secret to their graves. What happened when you broke a blood oath anyway?
You become a vampire, some immature part of her brain spat back.
Gee thanks, brain.
“You said you’ve been fucked up all year,” she said, stalling. “What did you mean?”
John’s mouth thinned. “I had a bad feeling, which usually means I see something but nothing came. It hung around like this weight in my stomach for months. Then when I met you…” He shot her an apologetic look.
“What?”
“It got about ten million times worse. I didn’t understand it, but just now, what I felt…”
Daniel recalled the hazy street, heard the man calling her name. “You know why I’m here?”
“Maybe,” he said. “I think in some ways I’ve known it since I met you.”
Doomsayer, she thought. Pandora.
“If you could just tell me,” John said in what was almost a whisper. He still looked terrible, pale and pinched and nervous.
Daniel stared at him. Should I? She asked herself. Should I? Can I? She wanted to, she knew that much. She’d wanted to tell someone as soon as Cynthia died and left her to bear the burden of the truth alone. But should she? A wave of boneless nausea swept through her and she had her answer.
“They want me because I found something I shouldn’t have,” she blurted out in a big rush. “I was working on this project, Rangitoto, and I figured out that the world is…You know…”
John squinted at her. “What?”
She swallowed, feeling as though all the blood in her body was pumping towards her brain. “Ending.”
John’s eyes expanded, his pupils shrinking down to pinpricks. “When?” he asked.
“Five and a half,” Daniel said, unable to add the word ‘years.’
John’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “And you’re sure?”
Slightly, so slightly it felt like her head was barely moving, Daniel nodded.
They continued to stare at one another, him on his knees, her still half-swaddled on the couch and it felt, at least to Daniel, that an entire cosmos of understanding was passing between them.
“Okay.” John’s jaw clenched and unclenched. “Okay.”
“Are…Are you alright?” Daniel asked nervously.
To her absolute astonishment, John smiled. He smiled so wide the corners of his eyes crinkled. “I’m fine.”
Daniel stared at him, not at all convinced. “Are you trying to be manly to impress me?”
“No. I really do feel better.” He pressed a hand to his stomach and his face broke into another bone-melting grin. “And I don’t have to try to impress you, Schwartz.”
Daniel grinned like a stupid kid. If she didn’t know about his fear of being touched she’d have hugged him
She wasn’t the only one anymore. She wasn’t alone.
His cold hands wrapped around her own. “Dani…”
She stared at him in amazement. “You’re touching me. Again”
“Yeah, I’m also asking you what we should do.”
“Um, why?”
“Because you know what’s going to happen.” His hands tightened over hers. “At least you have a better idea than anyone else. Tell me where we should go.”
Take me with you, some selfish part of her demanded. Please don’t leave me.
“I think you should do the Arizona job,” Daniel said. “That’ll keep Elkin off your back. Then once you’re done you should sell your business, withdraw all the money you can and go to Japan. Spend the rest of your lives surfing and eating really rare steak.”
John closed his eyes. “What about you?”
“I hate steak. Don’t tell Seb.”
“Daniel…”
She didn’t like him calling her Daniel, she realized. She liked him calling her Schwartz, like a war buddy, like a friend. She pressed her forehead against his, taking comfort from his marble-like skin. “I can’t come with you. We’ll be safer apart and you know it.”
“Yeah, although I didn’t really think we’d leave you behind you know. I thought you’d make us take you with us. Trick us somehow.”
Daniel smiled but it fucking hurt. “I’m all out of tricks, Heathcliff.”
The corner of John’s mouth kicked up. “You know, Heathcliff never got the woman he wanted either.”
Daniel stared at him, almost unable to process what he’d just said.
John pulled his hands away and scrubbed them one after another over his neatly shaved scalp. He looked embarrassed, almost as embarrassed as when he’d confessed he had psychic visions of the future.
Which, she realized as the backs of her eyes started to burn, was just fucking typical.
“It didn’t show,” Daniel said blinking hard. “Heathcliff was a really mellow, well-rounded dude. That’s why I gave you that nickname.”
John ducked his head. “Yeah thanks.”
He was close enough that Daniel could reach up and press a fingertip to his cold lower lip, amazed that she could finally touch him, so pissed that she didn’t have time to do more.
“I’m glad you’re leaving,” she lied. “Beneath your cold, grumpy exterior you’re clearly a rainbow-vision- having hippie and I can’t deal with that.”
“Yeah, I’ll miss you too, Schwartz.”
John took a deep breath, like a man preparing to dive out of an airplane then he leaned forward and pressed his lips to hers. Kissing him was like having cold stars burst in her belly. Strange and beautiful and lovely. He was hesitant, his discomfort with touching obvious but he wanted to be with her, she could feel it in every cell in her body. Just as she was working up the courage to put her arms around John’s neck and pull him closer the lounge room door swung open.
“Hello, Ms. Schwartz, Mr. Blackwood,” Elkin called.
They didn’t jump apart like busted teenagers, instead they peeled slowly away from one another like a banana being removed from its skin. Perhaps, Daniel thought as she spotted the immaculate blond standing in the doorway, her heart was too wrung out to produce any more adrenaline. Maybe she couldn’t panic if she tried.
“What are you doing here?” John said, getting clumsily to his feet.
“This is my house, Mr. Blackwood,” Elkin said smoothly. “And while it’s lovely to see you two are getting along at last I fear it’s no longer relevant to our proceedings. Fabian?”
A huge man dressed all in black dragged a body into the room.
Seb!” Daniel screamed. She stood up, but John shoved her behind him. “What the fuck is happening?”
Elkin smiled. “We’ve got important matters to discuss, Mr Blackwood, and if you want Mr. Rhodes to live, you’ll place your gun on the floor and step away from the girl.”