Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [141]
“He didn’t need addresses, and he already had enough information on hand to put the names together.” If he knew I’d gone to Atlanta, and he knew one of the program’s subjects came from Atlanta, the math was fairly easy. All Keene had to do was have somebody watch the deJesus household and wait for me to appear. “Ian.” I wanted to change the subject. He couldn’t have known. I couldn’t hold it against him. “I think he was trying to lure you back for more. The program started again as a civilian enterprise; it’s run out of Bruner’s office, in a building owned by a guy named Sykes. I don’t know the whole picture yet, Ian. But I’ve learned a lot, and I’ll tell you everything. All of it. You can help me put the pieces together. And … and … Bruner is still out there. We’ll hunt him down and ask him the rest. There’s a lot I don’t know, but I do know this—it’s not your fault Cal’s dead. It’s Bruner, and that lying bastard Keene. Please.” I was reduced to begging. “Please, stop this. Let’s get out of here. I’ll help you … or …” It might’ve only been my imagination, but I felt like the fog was thinning. I saw two more bodies, for a total tally of six, I thought. “Or I’ll just keep you company. And you and me and Adrian, we’ll put an end to this. We’ll dig it up the rest of the way, and tear it out by the root. Whatever it takes.”
“I can’t ask you to do that.”
“I’m offering—on the house! You’ve lost your ghoul, Ian. Listen, I’m not much of a guide-vampire, but I’ll do my best. I promise you, among the three of us, we’ll put a total, complete, and apocalyptic end to this.” And then I said something I’m pretty sure I’d never said to anyone else before, ever.
I said, “I won’t leave you.”
Whatever was holding the sky in that amazing pattern of swirls and stars … it shattered … and the motion came to an abrupt sloshing halt. As if a carousel had stopped spinning, everything drawled back into focus, and into stillness.
The darkness quivered, and in a blink it was gone.
Ian Stott was right in front of me, seated on an overturned box or crate of some sort. Blood had splashed and dripped down his chin, over his hands. Red meat hung in globs under his fingernails. His beautiful, impeccable clothes were dirty and torn. He was missing a shoe. He leaned forward so that he rested his elbows atop his thighs, and folded his hands loosely between them.
Without looking up he said, “Don’t promise me anything.”
“We’re in this together now, me and you. And I won’t leave you to the mercy of … of …” I eyed the broken, torn bodies that lay around him in a circle as if he’d been a bomb that exploded. “Yourself.”
“It’s my fault,” he said, one more time.
One more time I said, “It isn’t.”
He put his head in his hands, but I wouldn’t have it. I lifted his chin and I looked right into those empty gray eyes of his—their glasses long gone—and I kissed him because I didn’t quite know what else to do.
It took him a minute to kiss back, but he did, and the taste of other people’s blood mingled in our mouths. He put one hand on the back of my neck and drew me closer; I leaned into it, into him. His hand slipped down to the small of my back, then his other hand joined it—clasping me there, holding me in place in case I hadn’t meant it.
We stayed that way until the crackling static of radios buzzed up to our ears, and we knew the moment was passing, as all moments must.
I reached down for his arm and lifted him up, like I’d carry his ass all the way down to the ground if he made me. “Ian, pull yourself together. I think I see your other shoe.”
“I don’t know where it went.”
“I’ve got it. Come on. Sweetheart, come on. Adrian’s waiting for us.”
16
I waited perhaps two hours for David Keene to come home. During that time I made myself comfortable; he didn’t have any security system to speak of—just a cheesy keypad unit that five seconds with a scrambler took down. Inside everything was unguarded and even unhidden. It was the home of a man who believed he had nothing to fear.
Of course, he was wrong.
I’d found him. And soon, he would