“¡Ay, Dios!”
Lydia ran to the slat-wood rail and looked wildly up and down the beach. The bocce players were still involved in their game and the sound of their laughter floated to her on the breeze. Somehow the normalcy of that sound and the accompanying ordinary happiness twisted the day into an even worse shape. The oily footprints ended at the patio rail and she leaned out to see deep prints punched into the sand. They started toward the water, then turned sharply and vanished around the far side of the apartment complex. Lydia vaulted the rail, not caring that she was unarmed and wore only a damp bathrobe. What did that matter? She landed running, pivoted in the sand, and tore along the side of the building. Even then, even as panic turned her heart to ice and exploded red poppies before her eyes, she did not lose herself. She didn’t scream Bunny’s name. She knew that it could have the exact opposite effect. Her screams would be filled with fear and all that they would become was a starter pistol for whatever Bunny was going to do.
At the corner of the building she skidded into a turn and then froze.
Bunny was there, kneeling on the sand between two decorative bottle palms. The barrel of the Glock pushed up hard into the soft underside of his chin. He did not look at her. His eyes were glazed, empty, like glass. There wasn’t even an expression of pain on his face. There was absolutely nothing.
Lydia was very still. “Bunny,” she said in as calm a voice as she could force past the stricture in her throat. “Listen to me. I need you to put the gun down.”
She repeated it several times, making it a statement of calm command. Not asking questions, not asking if he could hear her. Bunny was too close to the edge to allow him a choice. She needed him to obey. That was all. It was the only thing tethering either of them to the world.
“Put the gun down, Bunny,” she said as she very carefully edged closer. Her heart wanted to add a plea, to beg, to call on his love for her, but she knew better. This was a tightrope stretched across the abyss and it needed only a single breath to make him fall. His face was as red as flame, his hand glistened with sweat, and his huge muscles were rigid with some kind of awful internal conflict. Each separate muscle stood out in sharp relief as if he had committed himself to a total struggle against some opponent of monstrous strength. His blond hair hung in sodden spikes over his brow; beads of moisture covered his face like rainwater. Bunny’s body shuddered with the strain. And yet there was still no trace of expression on his face.
“Master Sergeant Rabbit,” she said, putting steel in her voice, “you will lower your weapon right now.”
That did it. Somehow, that reached him. The pressure of the barrel eased, the hand holding it seemed to fall as if the weight of intent was too much for even those muscles to bear. The Glock came down, down, down…
And then Lydia moved.
She stepped in, clamped one hand over the gun, wrapping her fingers tight to provide resistance to the slide in case he fired, aware that it probably wouldn’t work. But at the same moment she used her other hand to strike the nerves on the top of his wrist. Lydia was very strong and she knew how and where to hit. She was certain that never in her life, not in all her years of combat, had she moved faster or hit with greater force and precision. She leg-checked his arm, using body weight to jerk his arm straight, to weaken the elbow in a moment of hyperextension; then she pivoted and took the gun from him. She put everything she had into the movement because she knew how strong this man was, and how quick.
With the gun in her hand she pirouetted and danced backward, releasing the magazine, racking the slide to eject the round in the chamber, doing everything right because there was so much to lose if she did anything wrong.
Except that Bunny never moved.
Never resisted.
Did not try to hold on to the weapon.
He knelt there, staring at nothing. Saying nothing.
Being nothing.
And then he fell face-forward onto the sand without even trying to break his fall.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-THREE
I woke to the sound of weeping.
At first I was afraid it was my own sobs I heard, that I was broken. But as I struggled to come fully awake it was clear that the sobs were not inside my head or in my chest. They were close, though. And male.
I forced my eyes open. The lab was gone. The walls were gone. Maybe I was gone. My brain was too battered to tell. The guy kept weeping. After a minute or maybe an hour, I rolled over onto my hands and knees, coughed, spat, blinked my eyes clear. Looked around.
He was there. A dozen feet away, huddled into a quivering ball against a stone wall. Long, jagged cracks ran from ceiling to floor and a few zigzagged out across the ground. The place was ruined, dying. Big chunks of masonry were heaped around, dust drifting like pale ghosts from the impact points. The computers at the far end of the lab were smoking and as I watched, a few small tongues of fire began to lick at the metal housing. The stink of burning plastic and rubber filled the air. Other smells, too. Cloth. And… flesh. That was one of the odors I wish was not stored in my personal inventory, but it was. And I knew it well enough to recognize it now. Someone was burning. People smell different than animals when they burn.
This was a person. Or maybe more than one. I sat back on my heels and tried to make sense of what happened. The lab was wrecked as if it had been struck by something worse than the God Wave. Maybe an earthquake? The lights around the inner rings of the gate were still glowing with hellish light. Steam curled out of the mouth of the tunnel and roiled against the rough stone of the ceiling. Several of the fluorescent lights had torn loose from their bolts and hung precariously by wires.
I turned to the man who lay against the wall. He wasn’t wearing a lab coat and he wasn’t dressed like a Closer. For a crazy moment I thought it was Toys. It looked like him, though that was impossible. Toys was in San Diego. A thousand miles from here.
But… he wore the same clothes Toys had worn when he stayed at my house. Same shirt and pants. Same sandals. Same wristwatch. My brain seemed to slip out of gear. How could Toys be here? How?
I crawled to him. He was facing away from me, arms wrapped around his head. I could see pale scars crisscrossed on his hands and wrists. Toys had those same scars. He’d gotten them when he’d thrown himself across Circe O’Tree at the hospital when Nicodemus and his Kingsmen stormed the hospital to try and kill Church’s pregnant daughter. Toys and Junie had shielded her with their bodies and both would carry those scars forever.
I said, “Toys—?”
The sobs instantly stopped at the sound of my voice. Or, maybe, at the sound of his name.
Then the weeping man rolled over, his body whipcord taut, and past the shelter of his protective wrists he stared at me with familiar eyes.
“L–Ledger…?” he whispered in a voice thick with fear and surprise. “How…?”
“Toys? How the hell are you even here?” I demanded. “How did you get here? What are you doing here?”