With the taste of burned butterscotch in my mouth, I slept.
DIY electroshock therapy is not an Auphe’s best friend.
It was a while before I could link enough words and images in my head to come to that conclusion.
Before that I drifted. It could’ve been minutes. It could’ve been days. I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. There was darkness around me and dancing lights, few and distant as the stars of a post-apocalyptic sky. That was all right, came the muzzy feeling. The world had to die sometime. It wasn’t anything as complicated as a thought—it was a feeling, warm and reassuring in the futility of it all. Best to go along. Ride the light to a world better than this. Let it all go. . . .
Including Niko.
That was a thought, fully formed and capable of dissipating the fog in my brain with the force of a high noon, summertime Death Valley sun. Nik. Where was Nik? I sat up, pushing against the floor beneath me. It felt like polished wood, smooth and perfect. My muscles didn’t mirror that feeling. Every single one in my body ached as if I’d run for my life for several hours, was hit by a bus, another bus, and then hit by a train before deciding to top it off with the New York City Marathon for kicks. Tiny shivers and spasms twitched . . . Jesus . . . everywhere as I curled into a ball, resting my forehead on my knees until it passed.
I remembered in the fuzziest of ways cold hands, one on each side of my head, and then a lightning storm inside of it. Jack, friend and pal that he was, had given me a free shock treatment. He’d zapped my brain, and the rest of me incidentally, quickly but thoroughly. The seizures that would cause were what had my muscles tied in what felt like unbreakable knots.
After a minute, all I had time to spare, I looked up and around me. My muscles continued to howl, but I told them to talk to my broken rib and get back to me. I was in a basement from the looks of it, a fancy one. The floor was wood, stained and polished to a high gloss that reflected the flickering lights of the four candles Jack had left me.
I thought it was to see the chains. Feeling them around my wrists wasn’t enough. He wanted me to see how helpless I was as well. That was the kind of dick he was. My hands were in front of me, the wrists wrapped in several tight loops of thick chain that in turn was chained around a wooden column that would be theoretically holding up the ceiling. The chain wasn’t padlocked. That would be too easy and not Jack’s style. The ends were melted into one tangled whole. Lightning, good for so much more than scrambling a brain.
The basement.
The imprisonment.
The symmetry of the chains.
I get it, Jack. Funny fucking ha-ha. Just like the good old days twelve years ago.
I hadn’t seen what Junior had done to Niko while I was in the attic and Niko hadn’t told me. He’d only said that he’d killed Junior and we were safe. I was safe. But he didn’t have to tell me he’d been chained and he didn’t have to tell me where. He’d had the smell on him as we sat in our own bathroom and he washed the blood from my chest and from around his wrists. He’d been with the dead . . . in the basement. I didn’t know how Jack knew about that. He hadn’t been there for that particular show or had and found a reason not to interfere. It could’ve been Junior’s routine. Chain his victims in the basement, kill them later in the attic. Jack would definitely know that about his apprentice. He’d obviously known about two neighbor kids next door who’d disappeared after Junior’s death. Had guessed why we’d vanished.
Jack knew more than he should.
I tried flipping that switch in my brain, starting small, a tiny gate to eat away at the chains and set me free. Nothing. There was only the creeping return of the muzzy sensation around the edge of my thoughts. If I couldn’t do something so small, gating myself was impossible. Jack had seen me moving like him, if not as quickly. Jack had taken a leap of faith . . . wasn’t that hilarious . . . that frying my brain would put a stop to that, temporarily. Permanently. Either one suited Jack.
Yeah, Jack knew way more than he should, but Jack didn’t know me.
Gating didn’t make me who I was. It was a part of me, but with or without gates, I’d always be half of something that could take him out if I had to use my last breath to do it. I remember the torn flesh weeping blood that had circled Nik’s wrists from his stay in Junior’s basement. I’d seen him pop a dislocated thumb back into place, with a towel clamped in his mouth to keep from screaming. If my brother had the balls to do that for me when he’d been a kid, there wasn’t anything that would stop me from doing the same for him as an adult.
Junior must have used handcuffs on Nik. Dislocating a thumb wouldn’t help with chains. A willingness to give Jack his pound of flesh would. Or half a pound. Nik had been right. Thinking you’re invulnerable makes you sloppy.
Jack had gotten sloppy.
He’d seen human weapons were nothing compared to him. They couldn’t hurt him, and he hadn’t bothered to take mine. He’d also left me that slack, not too bright of him either. I loved the arrogant ones. I was thinking all that when I maneuvered my hands and pulled the Mossberg Tactical shotgun out of Nik’s coat. I thought on it harder than I had to. If I hadn’t, I’d think about what Jack was doing to my brother right now.
I couldn’t think about that. God, I . . . no. Just no.
This had happened to him when he was fifteen. When he was unarmed and had no experience with the evil in the world, other than the kind that then he had only watched. Trapped in a basement filled with the dead while Junior had been offering me to his master upstairs, he’d thought it was his fault for not believing me. The wonder wasn’t that he’d had a time bomb in him. The wonder was that he hadn’t given up on life then and there. The wonder was Nik himself who did not give up on me, no matter the odds, who saved my ass every last time.
I wasn’t going to be any different. I was getting him out of this. Somehow. And I was going to make him goddamn proud as I did it.
If that meant that I had to take on Jack with no gating ability and no weapon that could touch him, I’d fucking come up with something. Step one: the chains. If I’d known Jack was going to turn this into a psycho high school reunion of sorts I’d have brought bolt cutters. Now, I tucked the shotgun under my arm, pressed the muzzle against the chain and fired. I then switched hands and did the same several inches over.
My hands and face burned as I reloaded and ran up the stairs.
Cuts and embedded metal fragments from the shattering of the chain in two places when I hit it with a couple of steel slugs were responsible for that. There were ugly powder burns on my hands as well to accent the blood that made me look as if I were wearing black and red gloves. I’d had to aim close to where the chain wrapped around my wrist. If the chain didn’t shatter completely, I’d still have to pull my hands free of metal that wasn’t completely intact, looser but still snug, and would be the new equivalent of razor wire.
That was what had happened, and that’s what I’d done. I’d yanked my hands free, losing large patches of skin down to meat. Nothing I couldn’t live without. Nothing I gave a damn about.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
Nik, wait for me, goddamn it. You’d better fucking wait.
I kept running, limping, moving up any way I could. It was hard to breathe and if a piece of bone in your lung felt worse than this, I pitied the bastard that had that. I hit the first floor, didn’t slow down as I ran for the door to the balcony and went up those too. As I staggered out onto the balcony, I was surrounded by color. Subtle but true. Moonlight washed through the stained glass of the giant window I’d seen walking into the church. The soft light wafted in a quiet drift of blue, purple, and the deep green of grass on a night shadowed grave.