35.
I settled onto the stool and squeezed one eye shut, leaning into the rifle’s scope. The lens showed me distant visions, like a witch’s crystal ball; it honed in on the sodium lights of the parking garage’s upper deck, a span of concrete, and a few forlorn cars, scattered between the yellow lines.
“That’s called a scope,” Juliette said, hovering over my left shoulder. “It lets you murder people who are far away.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m aware. Thank you.”
On my right, Justine showed me her range finder. “We’ve already dialed you in. Do you know what that means, Danny?”
“I have fired a gun before.”
Both of the twins clasped their hands to their mouths in horror.
“He did not,” Juliette said.
“He did.” Justine gaped at me. “This is not a gun, Danny. This is a Barrett MRAD bolt-action sniper rifle. It is chambered for .300 Winchester Magnum rounds, it features a single-button length-of-pull adjustment and a polymer bolt guide that keeps dust from getting into the action. The magazine release is ambidextrous, the safety is reversible, and it has a twenty-four-inch barrel! It is a model of modern warfare, it’s been adapted by the armed forces of Israel, Norway, and New Zealand, and it is available in multiple colors, all of which are shades of black!”
“You apologize,” Juliette hissed in my ear. “You apologize to our rifle right now.”
I gave the stock a gentle, if awkward pat.
“I…apologize for besmirching your good name.”
“That’s better,” Justine said with a relieved sigh. “See? Now the four of us are friends again.”
“We don’t know why you want to take the shot yourself, though,” her sister said. “We’re so much better at shooting than you are. I mean, we’re better at everything than you are.”
“But mostly shooting,” Justine said.
I wasn’t sure how I could explain it to them. I wasn’t sure if I understood it myself, beyond some fumbling gut instinct. I had tried to reason with Harry Grimes. I had failed. And now, at his insistence, I was out of options: one of us was going to die tonight.
Letting the twins handle this was the smart play. I’d seen them in action; up close or at range, the only person I knew deadlier than Juliette and Justine was Caitlin herself. I’d even picked the site of Harry’s execution with them in mind. Back in the bad old days, Nicky had put a hit on one of his own men. I was standing next to the poor sap, on that very garage rooftop, when Juliette blew his head off from twelve hundred meters away. This perch was a lot closer. She wouldn’t miss.
All the same, I needed to do this.
I understood Harry Grimes. He’d been a scared, hurting kid in a bad place, and inside the walls of the Wellness House he made the same discovery I did: that monsters didn’t feel pain. Our lives had branched in different directions, but how much of that was simple luck? If Bentley and Corman hadn’t pulled me off the streets and taught me a better way—if they hadn’t taught me that the world had value, that I had value—I would have ended up just like him.
I didn’t create Harry Grimes, but I had a hand in what he’d become. And that made killing him my responsibility.
“I need you downstairs with the getaway car,” I told them. “Just in case the shot gets called in by some solid citizen and I have to leave in a hurry.”
It was a flimsy excuse, but they let it slide. Justine pointed to the rifle.
“This part is the trigger. You pull that when you want the rifle to go bang.”
“I’ll make a note,” I said.
“You can make it go bang five times,” her sister added. “After that point, until you load more bang-making devices, it will no longer go bang.”
“I should only need it to go bang once.”
Damn it, now I was doing it. They left arm in arm, finally, thankfully.
“So explain this again,” I heard Juliette ask in the hall. “Are we not having a threesome now? I’m so confused.”
“No, he just wants to use our rifle.”
“But…okay, no, still confused. He wants to use the rifle then the threesome? Hasn’t he heard of multitasking? Why does he have to make everything so difficult?”
Their voices faded as they reached the stairwell. Then there was nothing but me, the cold night wind streaming in through the circle of cut glass, and the sounds of the streets below. Distant horns, engine hums, the background noise of ordinary people living their ordinary lives.
Right now, while I prepared to commit a murder in cold blood, my brother was home with his wife and kid. I imagined them sitting around the dining table and sharing a meal, talking about their ordinary day. Washing dishes together, settling in on the couch with a bowl of popcorn to watch television.
Me, my brother, Harry. Some people like to think they’re the masters of their fate, but the bends of our lives are so much luck and chaos. One missed call, one change of heart, go left instead of right, and your future is transformed. A twist of fate, and Teddy could have been up here instead of me, watching the rooftops through a high-powered scope and waiting for a victim. I could have been in Harry’s shoes, a killer with no friends, no family, no future, confusing brutality and cruelty with strength.
I couldn’t control the tides of fate. I could only make the occasional tiny adjustment. That’s what the rifle was for.
Nothing to do now but watch, and wait, and shiver as I leaned into the scope and the cold. Harry still hadn’t shown, and we were twenty minutes past the two-hour mark. I wondered if he was on some other rooftop, with some other rifle, looking for me the same way. No. He was an up-close-and-personal kind of killer. He was addicted to the last words before the trigger pull, savoring the fear in his victims’ eyes. He’d need me to face him, to get some kind of acknowledgment that he’d bested me.
I heard the stairwell door clang and stifled a groan. Asking the twins to sit patiently for more than ten minutes at a stretch was like begging for a miracle. They’d probably driven around the block five times already, then gotten bored.
“Seriously,” I said, keeping my eye on the scope. “This won’t take long. Just watch the car, okay?”
“Damn right it won’t take long,” Harry said.
I spun as he charged at me, coming on like a mad bull and lunging through the open apartment doorway. For a big guy he was faster than he looked. No time for the scope, and he’d just be a blur at this range. I hip-fired, the Barrett bucking wildly in my grip. The round went wide and blasted open a chunk of freshly painted wall. His fist buried itself in my gut, doubling me over as the breath burst from my lungs. I staggered back. My shoulders bumped against the glass and I swung the rifle like a bat. The steel cracked against his shoulder but it didn’t slow him down.
He swatted the rifle out of my grip and sent it tumbling across the new shag carpet, then grabbed me by the lapels and swung me around. A second later I was tumbling too, flying free and hitting the floor hard on my back. He flexed his tattooed arm. The ink flared to life, blazing sapphire blue as the Nordic patterns flowed like serpents under his skin. Then his cupped palm erupted with blue fire.
I rolled left as a gout of wildfire splashed across the carpeting. It like a meteor, leaving a charred trail and spreading flames in its wake. I scrambled to my feet, going for my pistol. One beefy hand locked around my wrist and the other, glowing azure and hot as an oven, clamped down on my throat.
Harry swung me around again and slammed me against one of the floor-to-ceiling windows, hard enough for the glass to rattle in its frame. Then again. The room crackled as the fires spread, going hazy with swirling smoke.
“What do you think will break first?” he asked me with a brutish smirk. “You or the window? Let’s find out.”
The back of my skull slapped against the glass. I gasped, sucking down smoke, then coughed it up while Harry shook me by the throat like a rag doll. My vision blurred, eyes tearing up. I knew I’d be out like a light in less than twenty seconds. And then I’d be dead, either left for the flames or thrown to the street below.
Not today. I had one free hand and one shot left. I fumbled in my pocket, tugging open Bentley’s velvet pouch, and felt crusty clay under my fingertips. I scooped up two of the alchemist’s clay marbles, curling them against my palm, and used the last of my strength to charge them with a jolt of raw magic.
“C’mon, say something,” Harry demanded. “Say something!”
I’d read him right. He could have finished me by now, but he needed the fear response. He needed the power high. He killed for money, but this was the part he lived for.
I answered with my fist. Not to throw a punch, but to hurl the marbles of clay to the floor at our feet. They exploded, violent and raw, spewing columns of choking green gas with a cobra’s hiss. I knew to hold my breath when they went off. Harry didn’t. As the green mist blotted out the world in a heartbeat, I heard him cough and his grip went slack.
I twisted my other wrist, pulling free, and slipped loose from the clinch. Then I sprinted, blind, heading for what I hoped was the apartment door. I broke from the mist and the spreading fire smoke, green and black weaving together above the flames like a nightmare hellscape, and stood in the doorway just long enough to pull my nine-millimeter.
I spent all seven rounds into the smoke, firing fast and free. I couldn’t see Harry, didn’t know if I’d hit him or anything at all, but I had to try. I holstered the empty gun as I ran for the stairwell door. Then it was one long sprint to the bottom, leaving me breathless and my shirt caked in sweat. My lungs strained for air, throat raw from the smoke and the panic.
A cherry-red Jaguar screeched up to the curb. Justine and Juliette stared at me from the front seats.
“I don’t know if you know this, but you set the building on fire,” Juliette said, pointing upward. Flames roiled behind broken glass, spreading to the neighboring apartments. “Did you mean to do that?”
“Where’s our rifle?” Justine asked.
I jumped in back and slapped the seat. “Go. Drive!”
“Okay,” Juliette said, stepping on the gas. The Jag lurched into the street and picked up speed. “So…I’m guessing you didn’t mean to do that.”
I looked out the back window as we veered away from the burning building, watching the street for any sign of Harry Grimes. I wanted to think I’d hit him from the doorway, but I knew better than to hope; I’d heard breaking glass but not a single grunt of pain. I had to assume he’d gotten away in one piece.
That wasn’t the part that bothered me. Neither did his occult tattoos and burning hand, even as I poked at my raw, aching neck. He was a cambion, after all, and a hit man who worked in the occult underground would have to pick up a magic trick or two along the way. I’d seen weirder forms of attack.
But nothing explained how, with an entire city to battle across, he’d not only picked up on the double cross but found my sniper perch. I could only figure it one way: that he’d told one more lie, back at the party. He wasn’t a one-man army and he sure as hell wasn’t a lone wolf. Someone—if not Naavarasi, whoever was pulling Harry’s strings—was backing him up from the shadows, keeping track of my movements, and pointing him at me like a loaded gun.