Mr. Real (Code of Shadows #1) (37 page)

Hyko adjusted his hat, frowning down at Paul. “Well, well, someone’s been a busy secret agent.”

“It’s all online, dude,” Alix said. “In your
comic book
. This is not your world. And Sir Kendall didn’t hack off your thumbs; the girl who wrote the
Derangerous
comic book did that…in the story she made up. And when I brought you and Sir Kendall into this dimension from the same picture, your stories meshed.”

Hyko smirked. “Yes, yes, I’ll take that under advisement.” He took out a syringe and shoved it into Paul’s thigh. His thumbless hand reminded her eerily of a Muppet hand.

“What are you doing?”

“A painful immobilization agent.”

Paul’s gasp was like a shot to her gut. “God! He’s already roped, cuffed, and in a cage.”

“He’s Sir Kendall Nicholas the Third, my dear.” Hyko stood, walked out, and shut the cage door on them both with a loud clang. “Quite the cage. Handy.” He dropped the keys in his pocket.

She kneeled next to Paul and put her free hand on his sweaty chest. He was breathing fast. She rested her hand on his heart. He was so strong and brave. “Paul,” she whispered.

“It’s okay.”

It wasn’t. He was tied up and being threatened by a deranged bully, just like when he was a kid. And now he’d been shot up with some kind of horrible poison that would—what? Immobilize him? While giving him pain?

She looked out at Sir Kendall, still there on the grass, watching them. He looked…calm. “What are you doing with…” she motioned to Sir Kendall.

Hyko strolled up to him. “I could use a Sir Kendall double, and every man has his price. Or every clone.” Hyko patted Sir Kendall down. “I’m hoping we become great friends.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Hyko released the cuff that held Sir Kendall to the cage, yanked him up by the collar, and re-cuffed his hands together.

Sir Kendall allowed it, turning over Alix’s words in his mind. So he and Hyko had landed in an alternate world.

Hyko didn’t buy it, but Sir Kendall did. It was the only thing that made sense; it explained his communications problems, the vivid quality of details, how different he was from the others—stronger and smarter, yet with a disturbing lack of mundane knowledge. And the magic book! It was so outrageous and so obvious, Sir Kendall wanted to laugh. He’d even worried
he
was the clone at one point.

Instead he was a character from a commercial.

Hyko pulled him around the carriage house. Sir Kendall went, walking heavily. The Paul walk.

Nothingness
, Paul had called him. But surely he was more than that. Surely a mere commercial character didn’t feel all the dread and pain he felt around Paul. And the urge to save him now that he was under threat—where did that come from? And he had his own world to save, too. He wasn’t nothingness; he wouldn’t accept it.

One of the perks of wearing Paul’s clothes and shoes was not having the usual array of weapons on him for Hyko to find. It had helped to fool Hyko. Luckily, Hyko hadn’t bothered to examine Sir Kendall’s toenails, or he would’ve discovered one last weapon. Hyko had also made the mistake of cuffing Sir Kendall’s hands in front of him. More comfortable, but less secure. Hyko would’ve never done that if he knew who he really was.

Sir Kendall felt thankful for Hyko’s famously bold and rash decisiveness.

What’s more, Sir Kendall felt positively liberated to know he’d never truly killed anybody or even taken Hyko’s thumbs, at least not in this world, where it seemed to matter more. It was like waking up to find a distressing memory was nothing but a nightmare.

He was tempted to devise a way to stay in this place with its robust food and smells and parents and lawn statues and love. To stay in this place where good people led sunny lives that weren’t connected to dark, snarled plots. To stay in a place where he wasn’t a monster.

Surely the magic book held the key to staying. But what about Hyko? They’d popped in together. If one stayed, wouldn’t the other stay, too?

It was only a matter of time until Hyko realized the truth of this, too, and got the same thought about staying. Good God, Sir Kendall could only imagine the chaos Hyko could create if he found the magic book and figured out a way to stay. Luckily, Sir Kendall had hidden it. They would go back to their world.

Sir Kendall had cherished that world once; he’d cherished it enough that he’d been desperate to keep Hyko from destroying it. He found, when he thought of it, that he still cared a great deal. The launch was still set to go off there. People would die. He couldn’t let that happen. He would complete his mission and save that world.

Hyko opened the door and pushed Sir Kendall into the house.

To save his world, he needed to know the location and timing of the launch. Surely it was more than a day away. Once he coaxed that information from Hyko, he’d find a way to turn the tables before they blinked back, so that he could return with Hyko subdued.

Apparently, he had twenty-six hours in which to accomplish this.

It went against everything in him to pretend to be Paul with the slouchy walk and the hard expression. But this was the game now. As long as Hyko thought he was Paul, he’d underestimate him.

Was it possible Paul understood that? Was this Paul’s way of teaming up with him?

Yet, Paul had stopped fighting him
before
Hyko arrived on the scene. That hadn’t made sense.

“One thing I don’t understand,” Hyko said, pushing Sir Kendall through the kitchen and into the living room. “Actually, two. One, why were you fighting him? And then, two, why say you’re Sir Kendall? Why protect him?”

Sir Kendall thought fast. Paul obviously knew the truth about the magic, but he hadn’t when he first arrived. He’d thought Sir Kendall was a crazy man who’d had his face surgically altered. Sir Kendall decided to play that Paul.

Hyko shoved him onto the broken couch and took the Italian chair. He crossed his long legs, and waited, gun at the ready. “Well?”

“Hell if I’ll take the place of that foppish ascot,” Sir Kendall said, using Paul’s accent.

“Foppish ascot.” Hyko smiled. Big.

Sir Kendall swallowed and looked away. Hyko had always been a looker—handsomeness was one of the ways he ensnared his female agents—but he looked even more glorious now, somehow. He had a big mouth and a big Adam’s apple and long fingers that looked all the longer due to the absence of his thumbs. And the palest of blue eyes. Those eyes would fool you.

“The man’s a nut job,” Sir Kendall added.

Hyko twisted his generous lips, lost in thought.

Sir Kendall pondered what Alix had said about the rubies increasing in brilliance. Had Hyko increased in brilliance, too? Had he?

“Why protect him, then?” Hyko asked. “Why claim to be him when I showed up?”

Sir Kendall shrugged as he’d seen Paul shrug. “No offense, but you seem to be playing the nut job game with him, and you had the gun. I figured, if Sir Kendall wanted to be Sir Kendall…”

Hyko eyed him with those big blue eyes. “Thought there might be something in it for you?”

“Why not?”

“You were wrong. Sir Kendall spoke up out of a sense of honor,” Hyko said. “All very boring.”

Sir Kendall’s heart swelled.

“You’re a surgical double?”

“I’m done talking to you.” Sir Kendall clamped his mouth shut, trying to hold his face as Paul typically did. Fifty percent of a disguise was how you held your face.

“You’ll see life with me is far superior to that of a double.” Hyko strolled around the place, then came back to stand behind Sir Kendall. He touched his hair, tugged on it a bit, as if to test its strength. “It
is
quite a likeness. Not perfect, but...” He walked back around to the front of him and stared into his eyes. “…
compelling
.” He proceeded to grill Sir Kendall on what his instructions were, what he knew of Sir Kendall’s plan.

Sir Kendall, as Paul now, played dumb. “He has my face,” he blurted at one point. “And I don’t like it. How would you like it?”

“Interesting,” Hyko said. Sir Kendall could only guess what his old enemy was thinking. “Can you tell me what Sir Kendall has out in his car?”

Damn.
Sir Kendall shrugged.

Hyko went into the closet and came back with bungee cords and duct tape, which he used to truss him up further. He’d have to hop to move. Sir Kendall could get free…given twenty minutes and the right tools.

“No offense.” Hyko strolled out of the house. A crash. Sir Kendall closed his eyes. That would be the windshield of his Alfa.

Hyko came back in with the crude radio and set it on the coffee table. It was mounted on a slab of wood—wires, antenna, battery pack, crystal tuner.

“This puts a new light on things. Do you know what I’ve been up to, Paul? You mind if I call you Paul?”

Sir Kendall shrugged. Yes, he had wondered what Hyko had gotten up to, beyond that one appearance in town.

“Well then, Paul, I’ll tell you. I was checking on a certain launch program I have. It’s in a faraway place; I had to travel there by plane. I had to, let’s just say, put the screws to a lot of thumbs to get down there, because bank accounts were jammed up. Do you know why? Why I had to go down there?”

Sir Kendall shook his head.

“Because I found myself out of communication with my people. And do you know what I found when I arrived there?”

Where? Where?
If only Hyko would give him a location! Sir Kendall shook his head.

“Nothing. None of my equipment.” Hyko took off his hat and set it aside. A long, golden lock of hair fell over his eye as he toyed with the makeshift controls on the radio. The signal whined. “It was as if my sunspot machine had been stolen. I blamed it on Sir Kendall. I’d imagined he’d stolen it and was trying to make me think I was crazy by creating a communications bubble around me. I could get on the Web easily enough, but none of my people were accessible. I could find a pizza parlor, but my home in Malibu was wiped off Googlemaps. It was all so strange. I was coming back here to confront Sir Kendall.” He worked the crude radio a bit more.

Hyko eyed him. “And lookie here, he decided to make his own damn radio. Something that can’t be compromised. Why? You don’t make your own radio when you trust the radios around you.” Hyko tilted his head and looked into Sir Kendall’s eyes. “Which makes me think he was having the same trouble I was.” Hyko shifted his gaze right. Then left.

Hyko was working it out.

He reached in his breast pocket and pulled out a smartphone. “What was the comic book name? Derangerous, did she say?
Derangerous
.” He drew a long finger over the window, tapping and sliding and tapping some more. “It’s too insane. Yet not…” He narrowed his eyes, slid his finger along slowly. His face fell into a mask of bewildered concentration. He’d found his comic. A smile spread slowly over his face. He looked up at Sir Kendall. “This is incredible.”

“What?”

Hyko’s astonished gaze fell back down the screen.

“What?” Sir Kendall asked again, trying his best to play Paul.

“I think she may have been telling the truth. I knew things weren’t…normal. But this is…unbelievable.” Hyko sat back and studied the phone, sliding the frames, reading. “This comic. It’s brilliant. I’m
Derangerous
. Fuck, yeah.” Sometimes he laughed, sometimes he gazed out the window. After a few excruciating minutes, he put down the phone. “Well isn’t this a peck of pickled peppers.”

“What?” Sir Kendall demanded.

Hyko looked at the clock on the mantel. “A little over a day. Seven-forty-six.”

Sir Kendall furrowed his brow, an unbecoming thing he’d seen Paul do. All the better to mask his extreme distress.

“She’s right,” Hyko said. “It explains so much.”

Sir Kendall kept his eyes lowered. He’d expect nothing less; Hyko had a supple and highly flexible criminal mind.

“And you’re an actor. It’s the only thing that makes sense. You know, too, don’t you? You don’t want me knowing I’m in an alternate reality. I understand. A man like me might get ideas. I mean how convenient, really.” He crossed his legs and relaxed back into the chair, looking like a hillbilly warlord prince. “I get out of my last world just days before I destroy it, and my goodness, here’s a clean and shiny new world for me to destroy. The people here do seem a bit…dense.” He paused, as though lost in thought. “Most, anyway. Avon, the creator of my comic book, isn’t dense. She’s obviously brilliant.”

He returned to his smartphone, worked away at the controls, then put it to his ear. “Yes, Avon, please,” he said, winking at Sir Kendall. “Avon, hello…Just a fan. I want you to know, I love your work…yes…oh, yes. What can you tell me about these people?” He smiled. “Of course I have, I just thought…okay, then, I’ll be sure to look for it. You have a fan for life.” He clicked off, staring at the phone with an ecstatic expression.

“Avon,” Hyko said, “shall be my greatest ally.”

What did Hyko have in mind? They only had a day left. But that was how Hyko operated—he got something in his head and he ran with it.

Hyko did more investigating on his phone while Sir Kendall waited. He still had the element of surprise—Hyko still didn’t know he was Sir Kendall.

Suddenly Hyko roared with laughter. “Hah! Denali man! Well this settles it. I’m so much cooler than Sir Kendall it’s not even funny. Sir Kendall is the Denali man.”

Sir Kendall betrayed no emotion. Maybe he was from a TV ad, but he was on the side of the angels. Right now, at least.

Hyko smiled. “She got a two-fer with you, huh? It’s all coming together—the character and the actor who played the character. Now that’s funny.” He snapped his phone shut. “Tell me, Paul, where would a pretty girl keep her magical computer?”

“I dunno,” he said, and then he sat back and glanced in the direction of the office. Hyko would find it anyway; he may as well keep up the appearance of cluelessness.

“Thank you.” Hyko rose and strolled off. He returned with Alix’s laptop, followed by Lindy, who liked to sleep in the office.

Hyko powered up the computer and typed. “Where did she get it? That’s my question. That trashy tigress out there wouldn’t have invented magical code. She’s not capable of it. I’m not seeing anything that looks like…” He shook his head, hunting, hunting. No, I won’t get my answers here. The answers are in that lab in the basement, don’t you think? Have you been down there?”