Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [100]
His response made me go cold all the way down to my toes. “I don’t know.”
“What’s going on?” I asked again, confused and alarmed, and conflicted, too. Obviously I was worried about my stuff. I have lots of stuff—easily millions of dollars’ worth of stuff in that warehouse. And as I’ve implied before, I didn’t really care if Domino vanished off the face of the earth at any given moment. But goddammit, that little girl didn’t have anybody else looking after her and, okay, she wasn’t exactly a ghoul or a pet person or anything like that, except that apparently she was all of those things almost, and very suddenly I felt like I was going to throw up.
It was frankly unexpected.
“Listen,” the boy urged in his softest voice yet. He may as well have been shaping the word with his lips but holding his breath. If I hadn’t been what I am, I would’ve never heard it.
But I heard him shift the phone in his hand, the scrabbling of his fingers almost slipping, almost dropping it, but holding fast and turning it face-out, I imagined—to better catch the sound of whatever he wanted me to hear.
I held out my hand toward Adrian, who’d come back to join me in the “dining area” (if any room in any home of mine can be dubbed such). He wasn’t wearing the face mask anymore, though tiny threads of it showed around his hairline where he’d washed it off too quickly. I don’t know what I was trying to do with the gesture—hold him at bay, keep him from talking, shoo him out of the condo. Any of those things. All of them. I was only trying to concentrate, and concentrate hard. I directed every ounce of my supernatural hearing to the scene back in Seattle, and I even tried to picture it: my warehouse, my things, my floors full of unsecured merchandise and two children who shouldn’t be there, really, but where else could they go? I visualized Domino, doing one brave thing, perhaps—just this once. Because when it came to his sister, I didn’t think he’d lie to me, and that vestigial psychic sense was bouncing up and down behind my tightly shut eyes, telling me that he was telling the truth, and trying to tell me more without making a sound.
At first, I didn’t detect much. The scraping of dry hands on the phone’s plastic shell. A shuffle and the rustle of clothing. An occasional breath that sounded like a ragged gasp, and sounded like Domino.
Then the rest began to come into focus. At least, it did whatever sound does when it phases from white noise to something more specific.
It must’ve looked to Adrian like I was in pain, hunkered over almost double with my eyes closed and my hand still held out, still keeping him away. I backed up slowly until I hit a wall, and then I sat down against it and listened, and listened, and listened.
And now I could catch static—not miscellaneous noise, but actual electronic static, in tiny fuzzes and blips. Footsteps. Carefully uttered words, spoken low and without any of the rambling stutters of ordinary conversation. I couldn’t make them out, no matter how hard I tried.
“Domino,” I whispered, trying to match his closeness to silence, yet trying to make sure he heard me, too.
“Raylene,” he said back. “They’re here.”
“Who?” I asked, knowing he couldn’t say. Even if it weren’t blindingly obvious that the boy was hiding for his life, the odds were great that he wouldn’t have any idea who was invading our turf. My turf.
Bless him, he tried anyway. I caught a scrambling of clothes and sneakers that sounded like a herd of elephants in my ear, but surely made nothing more than tiny scuffs and squeaks in the vast labyrinth of the old factory. Even so, I cringed with every rustle of cloth against the microphone. I tensed myself into an even tighter ball as the boy on the other end of the line adjusted himself, and I tried to remember if there was anything … anything at all … incriminating inside that building.
It was a ridiculous thing to wonder.
Everything inside it was incriminating. But try as I might, I couldn’t think of any paperwork, or electronics, or anything like that. They’d already found my Seattle condo;