Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [145]
I already knew he didn’t like to play by the rules. Maybe the military hadn’t been such a good fit for him after all.
“You,” he said. One word. All he needed, really. Until he saw Adrian, at which point he said, “You?”
My partner in crime answered. “Us.”
“That was a hell of a trick,” the major conceded.
“It’s kind of you to say so,” I said, “but it wasn’t a trick. We were starting to bore each other with all the pretending. It was time to throw down before you lost interest.”
“Or before I forced your hand,” he said, his eyes narrowing, trying to follow us both.
He didn’t move, which was smart. I wasn’t visibly armed, but Adrian was holding the major’s own .38, aimed steadily at its owner.
The old man’s eyes darted back and forth between us. Me immediately in front of him. Adrian off to the right, holding point by the hallway. “Forced my hand?” I said, sitting down slowly on the edge of his mahogany coffee table. It put me about ten feet away from him. This is to say, I was outside his immediate lunging distance … but he was well within mine. “I don’t know what, precisely, you think you forced. I just got tired of it, that’s all.”
“Bullshit.”
“Think whatever you want. I’m not afraid of you,” I said in all honesty. “Even though I know what you’ve done. What you’re trying to do again.”
“You don’t have any idea what we were about—what we were doing,” he objected.
I shook my head. “I’ll admit we don’t know all the ins and outs, but we’ve read enough of your paper trail to have a pretty damn good idea.”
“If that were true, you wouldn’t be here.”
I sat up straighter. Then I leaned back on my hands—like he’d surprised me, but I was prepared to roll with it. “Wow. It’s all or nothing with you, isn’t it? Meet me in the middle ground for a minute, will you? I have some follow-up questions.”
He snorted. “And you think I might answer them?”
“It depends on how badly you want to survive this little meeting.”
His eyes slipped over to a bookcase off to my left. That’s because he kept a big knife there, a cousin to the carbon steel foot-long that I gave up and let Adrian keep. I let Bruner look, and didn’t call attention to it. Why bother? I’d already swiped it, to replace the aforementioned carbon steel foot-long. It was the only piece of weaponry I was carrying at that particular moment, but it didn’t matter. We all knew I didn’t need it in order to bring him a whole lot of discomfort.
“You don’t have any intention of letting me out of here.”
I told him, “It’s smart of you to suspect that. But it’s all going to come down to how useful we think you are, and how good your information is. If we’d seriously wanted you dead and nothing else, your B-positive would be all over that screen right now. And you can take that to the bank.”
He swallowed. “What do you want to know?”
“That’s the spirit! Let’s begin at the beginning,” I suggested. “Project Bloodshot.”
“What about it?” he asked. Working hard to stay cool as a cucumber. Neither completely succeeding nor utterly failing.
Adrian chimed in, “It closed, but it didn’t die. Just like you retired, but you didn’t go away.”
“Sounds like you already know all about it,” Bruner snapped.
But Adrian said, “No, not all about it. I don’t know what really happened to Isabelle deJesus.”
“Who?”
“My sister. Subject 636-40-150. Her name was Isabelle. She was a vampire. You kidnapped her—”
“No,” he interrupted, but Adrian didn’t let him get any other words in edgewise.
“You experimented on her. You took her hearing, like you took Ian Stott’s vision. Why?”
Bruner snorted. “What do you mean, why? It was just a job, same as any other except that it was so damn interesting. The combat applications of their … of your”—he nodded at me—“abilities. They were epic. They were paradigm-shifting if we could harness them for the military. And anyway, who gives a shit? You’re the monsters, and you’d do worse to us, given half a chance. I’ve known some of your kind. I’ve seen