Unraveled Read online

  Then we were alone.

  At least, until the window on the opposite side of the living room shattered.

  Liam swung inward on a rope SWAT team style, a black blur launching in Crixus’s general direction.

  The demigod had time to utter a “what the fuck?” before Liam’s boots broke the pendulum of his swing against Crixus’s chest, sending him sprawling backward.

  “Now?” Vasili’s eager face popped into view.

  “No!” Crixus didn’t so much say this as cough it, mostly owing to the impediment offered by the force of Liam’s boot on his neck.

  “Oh,” the vampire said, clearly crestfallen. “Dasvidaniya.” He sank below the window once more.

  “Liam? What are you doing?” I approached slowly, holding my hands out so he could see they were empty.

  His, of course, were not. In one he held a Smith & Wesson 1911 and in the other, a big Glock. Both were pointed straight down at Crixus’s heart. “Something I should have done a long, long time ago.”

  I had to give credit to Crixus—lying, manipulative cretin that he was—for staying to face Liam when he could have zapped himself back to Prague just as easily.

  “Go home, hit man,” Crixus said through purpling lips. “You’re drunk.”

  “That won’t stop me from emptying these clips right into that black hole where your heart should be.”

  I half expected Crixus to come back with something like “Your mom’s a black hole,” but he only smiled, which proved infinitely more frightening.

  “I’m going to count to three and then I’ll tear your fucking leg off and beat you with the wet end.” The demigod’s grip around Liam’s ankle tightened, his knuckles going white.

  “Liam, please let him go. This isn’t going to solve anything.”

  “One…” Crixus began.

  “Solve?” Liam’s booze-bleary eyes struggled to fasten on my face. “Who said anything about solving anything? I just want to see if this fucker can bleed.”

  “Now?” Vasili’s head emerged from behind the couch like an undead Jack-in-the-box. “Who is bleed? Vasili can taste?”

  Crixus’s eyes bugged out in a way I hadn’t seen since the fourth grade when one of my classmates decided squeeze the class hamster like a tube of toothpaste. Poor Mr. Snuffles. “No, you brain-dead, steroid-shooting, goat-sucking fuckstick! Not now!”

  “Those are some impressive last words, Crickets.” The hit man’s trigger finger moved in slow motion, or I saw it that way. Slowly, gently, without the slightest haste.

  “Liam, don’t—”

  Flashes blinding in the room then, the guns bucking in Liam’s hands, deafening percussion of muzzle signatures swallowing up my scream as he emptied both clips straight into Crixus’s chest.

  I found I was slapping his broad back, repeating “we don’t shoot in the house” over and over.

  Crixus coughed once, twice, then fell into what sounded like choking gasps…until I saw his shoulders shaking.

  He was laughing.

  When he sat up, a small pile of misshapen bullets rolled around on the floor where his back had been. I’d seen it happen before, but it never failed to amaze me. While I hadn’t had the benefit of a detailed scientific explanation, I’d come to understand that in the presence of any kind of threat, Crixus’s immortal molecules simply rejected damage on a cellular level. Bullets pin-balled through his body and were ejected through his skin. Knives plunged in and popped right back out.

  A phenomenon that Liam seemed to find especially vexing as he stabbed again and again with a wickedly sharp M-9 bayonet.

  “You know…you can’t…kill me, right?” Crixus timed his words to coincide with the brief pause between blows. All traces of laughter vanished from his face as he surged up and grabbed Liam by both ankles.

  The hit man opened his mouth to reply but never got the chance.

  Because Crixus hurled him through the wall.

  Not at the wall or toward the wall. Through the wall.

  I stared after him, blinking, wordless, my mouth gaping like the man-sized hole now leading from the living room to the kitchen. Squeaking and pointing, I glanced from the hole, to Crixus, to the cloud of plaster dust rising from the rubble of centuries-old walls.

  Shock kept me silent when Crixus lunged for me, wrapping one arm around my middle and the other around my neck, swinging me to face the couch.

  “Now, Vasili!” he bellowed.

  “Crixus, no!” I scanned the room, expecting to see Vasili’s now-familiar face emerge from behind a bookcase or under the ottoman.

  Nothing.

  Defense strategies flapped around my mind with the blind panic of a trapped bird. Head-butt him? No good. Crixus was too tall for me to hit much but his windpipe, and not even Liam’s stepping on it caused any lasting damage. Stomp on his foot? Rookie mistake. I was barefoot and he was still wearing motorcycle boots. Kick him in the shin? I suspected this would do more damage to my bare heel than it would to his shin. A good, ol’ fashioned scrote-pinch? Promising. If, and only if, I could get my hands behind me.

  “Vasili,” Crixus shouted. “Where the fuck are you?”

  The vampire in question crawled out from underneath the coffee table and sat cross-legged on the floor.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Crixus’s arms tightened against my struggling. “Bite her! Bite her now.”

  “Vasili doesn’t feel like bite now.” The vampire’s massive biceps folded across his broad chest. His pillowy lower lip pooched out as he aimed his nose toward the ceiling.

  Pouting. Vasili was pouting.

  Good. Use it.

  “If someone called me a brain-dead, steroid-shooting, goat-sucking fuckstick, I know I’d want an apology.” I squirmed and wriggled, doing anything I could to put Crixus off balance.

  “This is what Vasili thinks too.” His thick brow lowered over his eyes like a scudding storm cloud. “Crixus is hurt feelings with these words.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” The demigod struggled to stay upright as I flailed my legs, and then went limp. “Do you want what we agreed upon or don’t you?”

  “Of course Vasili wants this. He was visit Powerhouse Gym and picked out bor named Brodie.”

  “You mean bro—wait,” I said. “What?”

  “Crixus is promise bro to eat if I turn pretty doctor into vampire.”

  So that’s what Vasili had been doing loitering in the bushes at the edge of the gym parking lot. Selecting his bro from the crowd like a lobster from the tank.

  “Why would you need Crixus to do that? I’ve seen you. You’re strong enough to hunt for yourself.”

  “Crixus is know how to make it look like Dude Bro Strangler so Vasili does not get in trouble with Supernatural Bureau.”

  “Oh my God.” Shock robbed my face of all feeling as spots danced at the edges of my vision. Time took on the dreamy quality of the moments just after disaster razes to the ground all you thought you knew. “You’re the Dude Bro Strangler.” I turned my chin toward my shoulder, as I was unable to look my husband in the eye.

  Crixus snorted. “Why the hell would I go around killing a bunch of dudes who looked just like me? That makes no sense.”

  “You would make this all about you,” I retorted. “Just because the victims were all tall, built, blond and blue-eyedooooohhnooo—”

  There are moments in a woman’s life when all the doors align and she sees how every single experience, the good and the bad, the positive and negative, have colluded in bringing her to the precise spot where she stands.

  Seeing Liam reflected in the crazed mirror over the mantel, baseball bat raised above Crixus’s head, was just such a moment.

  Liam. Liam was the Dude Bro Strangler.

  The epiphany arrived not with a vision, but with a recollection.

>   Pieces of my conversation from earlier that evening.

  Asking Liam if it was true that he’d been following me around.

  ‘Not exactly.’ He’d been following Crixus around and I just happened to be with him more often than not.

  ‘You didn’t like that I was a hit man. So I stopped killing for money.’ And had begun killing for altogether different reasons.

  Killing the demigod over and over in effigy because he couldn’t kill the real thing. No one could.

  Which isn’t to say that Crixus couldn’t feel pain. Judging by the sound the baseball bat made when it connected with his skull, he was in for a lot of it.

  Many things happened at once then.

  Crixus’s grip on me went slack as he fell forward on his hands and knees. Vasili dove for Liam. Liam dove for Crixus.

  They all went down in a tangled heap, swearing, kicking, and—in Vasili’s case—biting.

  “Get the fuck away from me, Vlad!” Liam reached into his pocket and flung a handful of what looked like sand into Vasili’s eyes.

  “Son of the bitch!” The vampire howled in pain, grinding his fists against his face. “Is salt of garlic!”

  Liam must have pocketed it while he was in the kitchen.

  Which reminded me…

  “So that’s why you came to my office,” I said to Crixus. “To get rid of the garlic spray in my end table.”

  “Could we maybe talk about this another time?” Crixus had both hands wrapped around Liam’s wrist to prevent the hit man from driving a dagger into his eye.

  “You always do this,” I accused. “Every time we need to discuss our relationship, you have something more important to attend to.”

  “It is burn!” Vasili felt along the floor where he discovered the cuff of Crixus’s jeans and used it to scrub his eyes. “Is burn so much!”

  “I came for the nooner.” Crixus grunted as the knife drove to one side of his head and stuck in the wood floor. “The garlic spray was just an added bonus.”

  “And what did you do to Julie?” I asked. “I find it highly suspicious that she became violently ill right after Vasili showed up.”

  “Actually, Vasili is do this.” He looked up from the tangle of limbs, eyes red, smiling through the pink tears streaking his cheeks. “Is syrup of vomit. Vasili puts in assistant’s coffee when she is turn away from desk. Vasili is quick, yes?”

  So I’d been right when I read Julie’s reaction as guilt, wrong about the guilt’s source.

  When would I learn to stop leaping to conclusions?

  “Yes,” I agreed. “Very quick. So quick that I never saw you slip the same syrup into Liam’s flask too, right?”

  “Yes! Vasili is pull the sheep skin over pretty doctor’s eyes!” The vampire clapped his hands like an elated toddler and shadowboxed the air before gagging as garlic-salted tears leaked into his mouth. “Ugh! I can tathe!” He clawed at his tongue with both hands as if he could be rid of the flavor that way.

  “A little help?” Crixus groaned. His body and Liam’s twisted together like a pretzel in their simultaneous attempt to inflict damage.

  “Vasili will help!” The vampire’s head bobbed back and forth as he tried to line his fangs up with one of Liam’s limbs until at last, he struck.

  But it was Crixus who screamed.

  “Goddamn you, that’s my leg!”

  “Prosti! Garlic salt makes Vasili not to see! And hit man’s leg is stuck under coffee table.”

  “Then bite the other leg, you imbecile.”

  Vasili did as he was bidden. Literally.

  “Fuck fuck fuck!” Crixus clouted Vasili upside the head with a flat palm. “You fucking bite me again and I’ll kick your fangs down your throat!”

  Vasili rubbed at his reddening ear. “But you tell Vasili to bite other leg.”

  “I meant his other leg!”

  “Ohhhh.” Vasili nodded. “I am understand now.” He went in again but caught a wild elbow in the jaw and rocked back on his heels. The vampire opened his mouth wide and shifted his mandible side to side until it slid back in place with a sickening pop. “This is solid hit,” he told Liam with undisguised admiration. “Pirate man would make decent fighter.”

  “You think so?” Liam made the mistake of glancing away from Crixus and was rewarded with a fist in the face. Blood flew from Liam’s mouth in a graceful arc, hanging on the air for the briefest of seconds.

  Vasili went unnaturally still, his rubied eyes following the droplets as they painted the air on the way to the floor. He leapt. Tongue out like a child trying to catch a snowflake, lips tight against his pointed teeth.

  And this is how they froze when time…stopped.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I say stopped, but stopped isn’t the right word.

  In another universe, I knew Liam still throttled Crixus with both hands. And Crixus, teeth bared in a snarl, successfully jabbed his index finger into Liam’s remaining eye.

  But here, from my relative position in place and time, they moved not a micron. Vasili with his tongue out. Liam with his hands around Crixus’s neck. Crixus with his finger poised mere millimeters from Liam’s eye. The tableau was like some kind of twisted immortal bar fight mannequin challenge.

  “Well? What do you think, Doctor?” The voice came from everywhere and nowhere and no sooner did I try to identify it than I realized I already knew whom it belonged to.

  Godfrey Weyrick.

  Though I couldn’t see him, I could feel him. Taking a leisurely stroll around my mind as if it were a library and he the librarian, throwing open doors to wings I hadn’t even known were there.

  I staggered backward and sat down hard as a tidal wave of memory swept over me, left me drowning in images, scents, sounds, gasping and clawing for breath.

  “Easy. Your mind will adjust. No, don’t fight anything. Just let it come.” Weyrick’s voice bobbed before me like a buoy, and I seized on it with all the strength I had.

  One breath. Two.

  I saw her face. I smelled the downy skin of her neck and felt her silky wisps of dark hair on the underside of my chin.

  Adelaide.

  The name peeled through my mind like the ringing of bells, high and clear and with a reverberation that had its root in my very soul.

  “My daughter. What did you do with my daughter?”

  “She’s there. It’s all there, waiting for you. If you choose it.”

  “What do you mean if I choose it?”

  “Look around you. You have a beautiful home. All the money you could ever want. Freedom from the thankless drudgery of motherhood…”

  “Don’t forget lying demigods, vampires and serial murderers,” I added, taking in my surroundings. This room and everything in it was like a stage set, filled with familiar copies. A flat, two-dimensional verisimilitude of life. “He put you up to this, didn’t he?”

  “Crixus? Yes and no,” Weyrick answered.

  “I knew it.” I examined his frozen form. If a sculptor had accepted a commission to carve allegorical arrogance itself, it couldn’t have been depicted any more perfectly. Such insolent beauty in the confident angles of his face. Such unrelenting certitude in the sea-shaming blue of his eyes. “He couldn’t just let me be happy in the life I chose. What an arrogant, thoughtless, self-serving—”

  “But were you?” Weyrick was closer now. Maybe even sharing the same couch, though no visible depression provided clues as to his proximity. “Happy, I mean. Was it not earlier this morning you stood before my cell with baby vomit on your shirt and resentment in your heart? Were you not thinking of the demigod, wondering what your life might look like if you’d chosen differently?”

  “All sentient beings indulge in that kind of conjecture from time to time.” Not untrue, but perhaps not fully true either.

  “Yes,” Weyr
ick agreed. “But not all sentient beings are beloved of a demigod who has both the desire and ability to show them they made the right choice.”

  When what you expect to hear misaligns so drastically with what is said, there is a moment of disorientation akin to translating a second language in real time. Meaning is not immediately assigned to words, and words themselves are arbitrary without it. The result—my woefully inarticulate response. “Whaaa?”

  “An immortal cannot love the way the demigod loved you without being forever marked by it.”

  “In what way?” I could scarcely hear my own question above the blood rushing in my ears. Flushed with pleasure I was, even as I knew I had no right to lay any lasting claim to it.

  “He knows, Doctor Schmidt. Crixus knows how often you doubt yourself. How you second-guess your ability to be a good wife, a good mother, and a good therapist. How you wonder if the hit man might not have been better off without you, or you, without him. Most of all, Crixus knows himself. Knows what he might have done had things turned out the way he wanted them. The way you see here.”

  I heard in the location and direction of Weyrick’s voice that he looked at the three bodies locked in combat on my living room floor as he spoke.

  I looked too. “So all of this was what? An experiment?”

  “A gift. Most mortals never have the chance to experience the life they missed and take that knowledge back with them to the life they chose. This is what it is to have been loved by an immortal. This is the gift Crixus asked me to give you.”

  If I had been less moved, I might have cried. Hard to think of it as a sacrifice when it meant that for a moment, Crixus and I would again share a life. To know how it would turn out and to walk into it anyway, purely for the purpose of laying to rest my doubts…I had no words for a sacrifice of this magnitude. “So what happens now?”

  “That is entirely up to you. If you wish, I will depart, and you may live out the remainder of your life here.”

  “Or?”

  “Or, you bid this scene farewell and we will return to your life as it was when you came to visit me this morning. Take a moment. Think.”