Dying by the Hour (A Jesse Sullivan Novel Book 2) (6 page)

Nikki looks out the window at the rain splattering the glass. One bead connects with another, doubles in size and begins to glide. Those collide with another and another until it becomes one unstoppable droplet funneling down, like a thick silvery trail left by a snail.

When she doesn’t answer, I take the first real drink of my coffee because I don’t know what to say. I’m not sure I want her to talk about it. Every day I ask myself what I would do if Jesse died—if I had, by some cruel fate, been the only one to survive that basement horror scene. Would I still fight? Could I after losing her again?

I take another sip of my coffee and a smooth taste of bitter chocolate warms my lips, tongue and throat. “Do you like bowling?”

She laughs. A genuine cackle that isn’t as adorable as Jesse’s but it is infectious nonetheless.

“Do
you
bowl? I can’t imagine you in those hideous shoes.”

I’m shocked. “You think I’m prissy?”

“You seem a
tad
more girlie than me,” she says. When I fall back against the back of the chair, she asks. “Does that offend you?”

“I don’t think I’m girlie.” I turn the cup in my hand. “I’m feminine, okay—but so girlie you can’t see me bowling? That’s just wrong.”

“Your nose ring is pretty hardcore,” she says. She leans forward as if to inspect it. The look in her upturned eyes makes my stomach quiver. “But you take an obvious nonviolent approach to our work. Jeremiah and I go in with guns and you’re all Band-Aids and water.”

“There’s quite the distance between bowling and violence,” I say. The café is comfortable and I get the sense that there is more to her. I don’t know if it’s attraction, but there is something there. An allure. “But that depends on how you’ll play, I guess.”

“Is that an invitation?” she asks. “To go bowling with you?”

My confidence falters. The train just stops. And she is smart enough to see this for herself.

She puts her ceramic mug down and it clanks against the saucer. “Listen.”

I look at her. Note the furrowed brow. But her mouth is soft, not hard in agitation.

“You still have feelings for her.”

The honesty almost incites me to protest on principle alone. But she doesn’t give me a chance for such a knee jerk reaction.

“That’s fine,” she says with a dismissive wave. “Really it is.”

“Is it?” I ask. I keep positioning my cup in its little saucer.

“But it doesn’t change the fact that I like you,” she says. “You’re gorgeous, smart, and brave.”

The heat rises in my face as if someone is holding a match under my chin and my heart is doing something strange. It’s her voice. I realize for the first time that I really like her voice.

“I’ve known these things about you ever since Chattanooga.”

Chattanooga. Jeremiah received a tip from his network that six people with NRD were being held captive by one of Caldwell’s cells—the smaller tactical groups he relies on to do his dirty work and keep his hands and image clean—like the group that got Jesse, Lane, Brinkley and I last year. This group had the hostages chained up in a suburban house, torturing them for days.

“I watched you talk down a gunman,” she continues. Her admiration is apparent in her beaming face. “You reasoned with that guy like a pro. I bet professional negotiators aren’t half that good. And like I said, all you brought were Band-Aids and bottled water.”

“You’re exaggerating again.” And my face is on fire. “I would never bring a plastic bottle to a gun fight. Plastic is so bad for the environment.”

She reaches across the table and takes my hand. And it isn’t just that we are in a public place, in the South, in a generally homophobic region of the United States. It’s that I feel like I’ve done something wrong. By touching her, or letting her touch me—and for
liking
the feel of it.

Jesse isn’t your girlfriend
. I remind myself.
She chose Lane. Get over it. You have to get over it.

I manage to keep ahold of Nikki’s hand despite the clenching in my abdomen.

“I just want to get to know you,” she says, still beaming. “This beautiful girl who does amazing things.”

“Ok,” I say, but it feels like a mistake. Like a betrayal. “What do you want to know?”

Nikki grins and it’s triumphant. But even as she settles into her seat like a victor ready to relish her first prize, I can already feel myself pulling back, curling around Jesse’s secrets protectively as if they are my own.

“Start from the beginning,” Nikki says. “I want to know everything.”

And that is what I’m afraid of.

Jesse

I
wake up to an empty bed. First I spread my arms wide, seeing how much of the mattress I can take up by myself. But then a sort of panic settles in. I’m so used to sharing my bed with Lane, or Ally, that so much space feels weird.

I hear a
plop
against my window on the opposite side of the room, like something has smacked against the glass, and jolt upright in my bed. A dart, one of those soft ones with a suction cup on one end, is stuck and wiggling there. The sucker looks like one of those bottom feeder fish slurping away at the glass of an aquarium. And the end of the suction cup, something dangles.

I open the window and work the dart back and forth until it releases with a loud
POP
into my hand. The attached note says:

Bring you know what to you know where

Is this the best code he could manage? Brinkley is supposed to be a high class secret agent. Or maybe that says more about his confidence in my decryption skills. I guess I wasn’t the one who managed to evade the law, fake my own death, and do some major ground work to uncover a huge underground operation. I’ll give the man his due.

I yank on jeans and pull a T-shirt over my head. And as I grab a black hoodie from my closet, I spot another note on the night stand.

I love the way you look when you’re sleeping in my arms

I grin. I take a step toward the stairs and my thighs clench, a deep sore ache that only makes me smile bigger. For a moment, I’m lost in the memory of Lane. His hands on my bare back, his lips starting on my neck and ears before working their way down to the soft inner part of my thighs. Lane holding me up, his arms strong around me as I straddle his lap, legs pinned wide.

Winston gets a bowl of kibble for breakfast which he inhales without chewing. Then with the harddrive jutting from the back pocket of my jeans, I grab a banana from the counter and trot out the back door. It’s a sliding door like the Lovetts, but mine connects with a deck, not a patio, and my yard is smaller, unfenced, and less impressive. At least I don’t have any killer trees.

At least none that I know of.

All the houses in my subdivision are two stories high with an attached garage. Lots of trees and flowerbeds and running trails weaving themselves in and out of the woods, forming a two-mile loop around Greenbrook. Each house has an acre or more of grass, and trees are plentiful, which I like. Mine particularly has Japanese maples that Ally planted two years ago. In their dark purple and burgundy hues, they match my house’s white-gray marbled brick exterior and black shutters.

I love my house. It’s nice and comfortable and far enough from the city that I can get some decent sleep every night, without listening to horns blaring, loud music or ambulance sirens. It was Ally who’d picked this house, Ally who put all the furniture inside, and Ally who makes it feel like home. She insists on having her own apartment, but she practically lives here. And for some stupid reason my throat gets all tight at the thought of this—how little I’ve seen her lately. And how long before I lose her completely?

I try not to look suspicious, chomping on my banana as I cut through my backyard to the part of the trail closest to my house. I push past the trees marking the edge of my yard, and it is only a few feet until the dirt trail begins.

“Right here,” a voice says from the trees. And if I wasn’t paying attention, I would have thought the large maple in front of me sprung to life. But then a man-shaped shadow detaches from the tree and moves forward.

At first, I barely recognize Brinkley. It’s only been a month or so since I’ve seen him, when he rolled into town just long enough to insist I do the Lovett replacement. He looked worn then, but now he looks like hell. His last bit of a beer gut is completely gone. His face used to be a full macho man but now it’s more like emaciated supermodel. The right side of his face is a purple color, the hint of an old bruise. And his favorite leather jacket hangs off of him.

“What the hell happened to you?” I said. “Are you sick?”

He makes no reply. In one hand he still has the dart gun, something you’d find in the toy section of the store. He points it at me playfully and shoots me in the cheek with a dart that bounces off and falls into the mud.

“Oh so it’s fine if you know what I’ve been up to, but not the other way around?”

“I have my reasons,” he replies.

“
What
reasons?”

He points the gun again.

“Never mind. Forget I asked.” I reach out and push the plastic barrel down. “Before you take my eye out or something. As far as I know I can’t regrow those.”

Brinkley faked his death so he could investigate his own organization, the FBRD—The Federal Bureau of Regenerative Deaths—and my employer. A couple of other agents double crossed him and tried to kill us. They license me but I’ve been sans handler for almost two weeks since Garrison was reassigned. I’m supposed to be reassigned a new handler, but I haven’t heard anything.

“So I guess I’m not supposed to ask about your face?”

Brinkley shrugs but he doesn’t raise the gun. “You should have seen the other guy.”

“Why do men always say that?”

“Not all of us heal in a heartbeat.” He rubs a calloused thumb over his bruised cheek, scraping a jagged nail over his scruff.

“I don’t heal in a heartbeat. I have to be dead for at least a few hours.” I notice his tan. “Where have you been?”

“Arizona,” he says. “At the old base where Eric Sullivan was last seen.”

My heart begins its vicious climb up the back of my throat, the way a cat crawls up the drapes to get away from a yappy dog.
Eric Sullivan
.

“Not much to connect him to Caldwell,” he continues.

Because that’s the latest theory—Caldwell and Eric Sullivan are the same man.

Eric Sullivan, with his newly discovered NRD was swept up in protective custody. For over 17 years, the protocol was to detain those with NRD and those detainees suffered unknown tortures at the hands of their military captors. Eric was unfortunate enough to discover his NRD nine months before the public forced the military to release their prisoners. And Brinkley thought the reason Eric managed to stay hidden so well after his release was because he’d taken on a new identity, emerging eight years to the day of his death as Caldwell—North American leader of the Unified Church—a social climb I can’t even imagine. If Caldwell and Eric Sullivan are the same person, then what he did in the years after his release remain a mystery.

“I got this,” Brinkley says. He opens his jacket enough to pull out a folded piece of paper.

I trade him the hard drive and my mush of a banana peel for it. “He’s going to know it’s gone.”

Brinkley drops the peel in disgust. “Of course he’ll notice. A computer won’t work without a hard drive.”

“Oh he’ll notice long before that.”

“Jesse—” my name is a growl in the back of Brinkley’s throat.

“It was the best I could do just to get the drive into Ally’s hand and jump in front of that tree.”

Brinkley raises an eyebrow. “Tree attacks child. That must have made headlines.”

“We might still be in the dark,” I say pointing at the hard drive. “Lovett might not have anything on there.”

“Even things people think they’ve deleted can be pulled off their hard drives. Maybe we’ll get lucky,” he says. And I hope so. We’ve been keeping our eyes on all the higher Church officials for over a year. About time something works out in our favor.

I open the sheet of paper Brinkley has given me and swear under my breath. “Is this a medical record?”

“For Eric Sullivan,” Brinkley says. He has a small device in his hands which he is attaching to the hard drive. Oh Brinkley with his gadgets. It is impressive, actually, seeing as he comes across as very old school, pen, paper, and
cell phone, what’s a cell phone?

“Eric Sullivan, 34,” I say. “But he’s got to be at least 50.”

“This is from his file in Arizona, back when he was still in custody.”

“But Caldwell could pass for much younger,” I argue.

“So he’s been dying,” Brinkley says, referring to the fact that I don’t look a day over seventeen despite that my 25
th
birthday was last month. It’s true that death-replacing or dying in general, helps us not age. When we die, we get that metabolic boost as our bodies heal the damage. It just so happens this boost doesn’t discriminate between normal cell deterioration and that caused by trauma. Death-replacing is certainly the only explanation I have for Caldwell’s preservation. But the Church believes we are soulless and they use the fact that we don’t go anywhere when we die as proof. I can’t believe they’d follow a leader who openly revealed his NRD. It must be his dirty little secret.