Authors: Lynn Viehl
Frostfire (27 page)
Elle turned her back on him and took several deep breaths.
I can do this. I can save him.
I can do this. I can save him.
She thought back to the time she had worked with Dr. Devereaux to treat an open wound on the side of one of the stock horses who had run afoul of some barbed wire.
Infection is the biggest problem,
the vet had told her.
We’ll give him a shot after we’re done, but you can start out right by making sure everything is clean: your hands, what you use on the wound, the wound, everything.
the vet had told her.
We’ll give him a shot after we’re done, but you can start out right by making sure everything is clean: your hands, what you use on the wound, the wound, everything.
She used the tiny sink to wash her hands with the bar of soap in the little dish beside it, and wiped them dry with a paper towel. From the first-aid kit she took a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a small suture pack, and began putting together the same kind of setup the vet had arranged, so that everything she needed would be at hand.
Are you ready to fix up this big guy?
the vet asked in her head.
the vet asked in her head.
“I’m ready.”
Neil Huntley opened his eyes, and touched the bandages wrapped around his chest.
“Don’t try to move, Mr. Huntley.” Elle came over to the bunk with a glass of water. She placed a straw in the glass and brought the end to his lips. “I wish I had something for the pain, but all you have in your kit is some aspirin, and I’m afraid that will make you start bleeding again.”
“Mauled?”
She nodded. “It’s my fault. If I hadn’t lost my temper, if I’d just listened to you . . . ” When he shook his head, she took his limp hand in hers. “I’ve never hurt anyone in my life, Mr. Huntley. I would never have done this to you if I’d known. I’m so sorry.”
He tucked in his chin and looked at the bandage on his chest. She had run out of gauze after the second dressing change, and had started using his white undershirts.
“You remembered what to do,” he said. “You could have run away and left me here to bleed to death. But you stayed, and you lived up to the responsibility of your actions. It was very hard, wasn’t it?”
“I was so scared.” She covered her face and sobbed.
His hand came to rest on the top of her head. “You are a good child, Lillian.”
It took another week for Neil Huntley to heal enough to be able to drive. During those seven days, they discussed everything that had happened, and everything that mattered. Huntley couldn’t tell her a great deal about his life before coming to America, or anything about the men who had sent him there.
“We are born to this life, and take vows, like priests,” he explained when she pressed him for details. “As did my father, and his father, and his father before him. Thirty-two generations of my family have served. It is not the vows I took as much as the trust that I have been given along with my name. All of those who came before me made the same sacrifice. That is why I cannot break my vows, Lillian. Not even for you.”
They picked up supplies from a small town, and from there Huntley drove to Seattle, where he rented a small apartment for them. Elle, who had cut her hair and dyed it brown to match his, posed as his daughter. He stayed with her until he finished recovering from his injuries, at the same time teaching her how to cope with the terrible gift she had been given.
“Are you going to tell them about me?” she asked the night before he left for California.
He fell silent for a long time. “No, Lillian. I believe you can control yourself now.”
“But if I don’t, you’ll come after me,” she guessed.
“I hunt monsters, my dear. You are not a monster. You are the victim of one.” He gave her a troubled look. “But you are also dangerous, and if you are to make a place for yourself in this world, you must never forget that.”
“It won’t happen again,” she assured him. “I’ll be careful.”
“You have to do more than control yourself. You must not let anyone discover who and what you are. No doctors, no hospitals. You cannot confide in anyone.” He frowned, thinking. “You should not remain here in Seattle for too long. No more than a year, I think.”
“But I like it here,” she protested. “I’ve got a good job at the café, and I’m making friends.”
“You can’t stay here,” he told her. “You can’t stay anywhere. If you do, people will discover what you are.” He studied her face. “You’re still thinking of contacting your mother, after everything that’s happened?”
“I’m not a monster.” Ashamed, she ducked her head. “I wasn’t going to tell her where I am. I just want her to know I’m okay.”
“She will want to see you, Lillian, and in your loneliness you won’t be able to refuse her.” He sighed. “How long do you think you can control it? A week? A month? What happens when you lose your temper, or you simply have a bad dream? Does anyone deserve to die like that? Could you live with yourself, knowing you could have stayed away and spared her life?”
Before he left, he paid the rent on the apartment for a year, and gave her the rest of the cash that he had. “I will tell my masters that I was robbed,” he said when she tried to refuse. “They are very wealthy. They will send more.”
She walked him out to his truck, and on impulse hugged him. “Thank you for everything.” She drew back. “I can’t believe you’re leaving. Will I ever see you again?”
“This is my last field assignment. After I finish my work, I am going home to be a teacher.” He took a scrap of paper from his pocket and wrote a long number on it. “If you are in trouble, call this number and leave a message for me. I will try to do what I can for you.”
She folded the paper and put it in her pocket. “I don’t even know your name.”
He smiled sadly and kissed her brow. “Ask for Brother Tomaseo.”
Chapter 17
“ . . . e non c’e’ nessuno, che mi può cambiare, che mi può staccare da lei . . .”
3
3
Through the telephoto lens of her camera, Valori Trovatella murmured another chorus of the old, sad song as she watched Teresina Segreta help a tall, groggy man from the back of the limousine. Tracking the private car from Denver International Airport to a newly constructed facility outside the city had required a simple game; she had walked down the row of cars in the executive pickup area, punched in VINs on her BlackBerry, which illegally accessed the state’s registration database. When she’d found the car registered to GenHance, Inc., she went over to the driver’s window and tapped on it with the end of an unlit cigarette.
“Those mean security people took my matches away at the gate,” she told the driver as she bent down, putting her breasts at his eye level. She allowed a bit more Texas twang to color her voice as she asked, “Any chance you can light me up here, cowboy?”
The poor, muscle-bound dolt had produced a lighter, but the proximity of her chest had distracted him so much it took him three attempts to light her cigarette. That gave her ample time to drop the tracer in his pocket, although she probably could have tucked a small bomb between his legs and he wouldn’t have noticed.
The policeman would have
, Tomaseo chided from inside her head.
, Tomaseo chided from inside her head.
“He was a sheriff,” she corrected her dead mentor, using the Cigarette Slut’s accent. She wrinkled her nose as she realized she still smelled faintly of tobacco. “He would also be suspicious that my brain had shrunk to the size of a walnut while my breasts had doubled in size.”
Breasts that were half padding and now itching unbearably, thanks to the spirit gum she’d used to hold the edges of the flesh-toned plastic falsies in place under her body makeup. She took one hand from the camera to reach into her blouse and pull the augmentations off her body, dropping them into the open tote on the floor.
You should not have dallied with him, Valori.
“It was one night of very good sex,” she pointed out, this time in her Snobby Blue Blood tone, “not a dalliance.”
You know what I mean. He is nothing to you.
“Perhaps.” If she hadn’t enjoyed Ethan Jemmet so much, she would have agreed. “But I was something to him,” she told Tomaseo in Lori’s voice.
Valori had rarely used the sweet, shy girl-next-door persona she had shown that night to the lonely lawman. “Lori” worked only on a narrow range of men with specific issues, such as the grieving father of a lost daughter, or a nervous, virginal postadolescent who feared aggressive women. But she’d instinctively brought out Lori as soon as she’d looked into Ethan Jemmet’s stern, handsome face, sensing an innocent charmer would be the woman to whom he would respond with the most kindness. In the end she had been gratified to know that Lori had been the perfect fit for the sheriff.
Just like our bodies.
Recalling the sex with Ethan, like hunger, exhaustion, and all her other personal needs, would have to wait for now. As soon as Teresina and the tired man disappeared into the back entrance of the building, Valori switched off the camera and checked her watch. Knowing Teresina, she would hand off the man and get straight to business; she had only a few hours before she would have to meet the men she’d hired to steal the bodies from Jonah Genaro.
You must stop her,
alunna
.
alunna
.
She started the engine. Her conversations with Tomaseo’s ghost were strictly products of loneliness and her own imagination, but that didn’t mean he was wrong. “I’m trying,
mentore
.”
mentore
.”
Valori drove from her vantage point to a fenced-in cluster of electrical boxes, small satellite dishes, and other equipment that fed power and communications to the remote facility. While she suspected she would need a small army of operatives to break into GenHance’s new lab, they had yet to secure their perimeter. The only thing separating her from their data systems was a padlock on the fence gate.
Before she got out of the unmarked van she had stolen, Valori rolled her curls tight against the back of her head and used a slide clip to hold them in place. She then changed her silk blouse for a utility-company uniform shirt and clipped on a laminated ID tag with a smiling photo of her own face and the name of a real female district field inspector. A yellow hard hat, a company jacket, and a tool bag completed the illusion.
She checked her face in the visor mirror, pausing to wipe off a lingering trace of Cigarette Slut’s red lip paint. “I’m Inspector Pat Drysen,” she said in a colorless, no-nonsense voice. “Denver Power and Light. I am joyless but excellent at my job. I have an apartment, a cat, and no life. I hate men. No,” she corrected herself. “I envy men their superior salaries, which I don’t think they deserve simply for possessing a penis. I do not like being touched. I carry pepper spray in my purse. I am a Democrat and a Methodist. I eat microwave dinners. I watch television crime dramas obsessively.”
Until she dropped the persona or changed to another, she would be Pat Drysen, uptight and unforgiving career woman working in a man’s field.
It had not always been so. After discovering Valori had a natural affinity with electronics and machines, her many masters of childhood had taught her how to identify and infiltrate any security system. Unlike the other children at the Temple, she had not been born into service, but had been brought in from the streets where her unknown mother had dumped her. If Valori had been sickly, troublesome, or limited, she would have been promptly turned over to the Italian authorities, but she had been a healthy, placid infant who had grown into a quiet, highly intelligent toddler. She’d begun her training as soon as she could walk.
The council had originally designated her to serve as a servant or secretary, the most invisible member of any important household or business. It wasn’t until she matured that her other talent had come to their notice, and abruptly changed the nature of her tutelage.
Tomaseo had been the one to explain it to her, and he’d done so with as much kindness as he could. “You will be the butterfly now,
alunna
. Everyone who sees you will think, ‘Ah, how beautiful.’ They do not think this of the moth in the closet.”
alunna
. Everyone who sees you will think, ‘Ah, how beautiful.’ They do not think this of the moth in the closet.”
She had been dutiful and devoted, still a child in many ways. Part of her dreaded this change in her duties, but for Tomaseo’s sake she hadn’t protested. She also knew her place. Only those born to service were treasured, her masters had taught her early on. A nameless bastard like her could only be of service to those who served. They expected only that she fulfill the traditional obligation, that of giving one year of her life for every year they had cared for her.
That she would spend eighteen years as a butterfly instead of a moth had not seemed so terrible in the beginning, not to a child of sixteen.
Valori was sent to Milan for initiation, and then on to Paris for polishing, and reported back to Napoli some two years later. She’d expected to be assigned as a monitor to one household, but after testing her abilities, the council revealed other, important plans for her. Her secret, fragile hope of finding happiness and belonging had finally died that day.
Tomaseo had kept her from descending completely into despair. To the council he had been her handler, but to Valori he had been her friend and confidant. He’d recognized the hopelessness and sadness beneath her many butterfly masks, and he’d promised to intercede on her behalf with the council when her term of service was concluded. That he had died before he could free her didn’t matter; his intentions had been genuine. But losing the man she considered a brother as well as a mentor had torn something out of her. After that, it had been easy to strike the bargain with the council.
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