Painkiller (8 page)

I blew over the northbound lane of Lake Shore Drive, heard what sounded like a million horns but was probably closer to five blaring at me obnoxiously for flying over them. I shot over a chain-link fence toward the beach and zoomed over a sloping ramp that looked perfect for pedestrian traffic. I could hear faint, hyperventilating gasps coming from ahead, so I swooped down the ramp and found a woman dressed in way-too-tight yoga capris, holding her phone in her hand like it was her lifeline.

“What happened?” I asked, hovering about a foot off the ground just outside of the tunnel she was staring into. I didn’t want to just race around the corner in case the murderer was lurking there.

The woman swung around to look at me with her jaw already down around her skinny knees. “Mu—muh—muh—” she said, incapable of getting anything else out.

“So you made the 911 call, then,” I muttered and drifted past her. There was definitely a corpse here, and it looked like one of her fellow fitness buffs. The guy’s head had been completely turned around on his shoulders, the neck at a sick angle. He should have been face-down on the concrete but he wasn’t, thanks to the anatomical rearrangement that the murderer had performed. “Where’s the killer?”

I wasn’t expecting a cogent answer and I didn’t get one. She pointed, though, down the tunnel behind me, and I was off, zooming past the corpse.

I came out on a walkway that overlooked a road. There was no one ahead of me, so I shot onward into a park complete with a wire-frame gazebo and racks full of those rental bikes that looked so ergonomically uncomfortable I felt like I’d need to be coerced at gunpoint into getting on one.

Then again, if the FAA kept me grounded much longer, one of those sturdy bastards might just become my preferred means of transport, ET-style.

I flew off the ground about ten feet and caught a glimpse of a guy who’d gone down the path ahead, toward the crosswalk to downtown. He was hoofing it, walking at a speed that betrayed him as not so much human. He was right at the corner of Lake Shore Drive and another road, next to what looked like a closed-off tunnel that headed under the street. There was a ramp leading down to it, all walled off at the bottom with cream-colored painted plywood, but he was above it at street level, looking back at me, clearly trying to plot out his next move.

“Halt!” I shouted at him, and he knew I had him. I know this because he froze for a second, and it gave us a moment to get the measure of each other.

He was a medium height guy, probably 5'10", reasonably tan for being a white guy at the end of winter in the Midwest. He certainly wasn’t as pale as I was, with my bleachy Nordic skin. He had his hands in the pockets of an old, worn black jacket that looked at least a decade out of style. His jeans were the wrong cut for this century, too, and they were worn in a lot of places. Not threadbare or hipster-faded, either, just well used. He had dark, short-cropped hair parted cleanly over in the style of guys that were in their forties or fifties or older. Everything about this guy screamed, “Vintage!” except for his skin, which was a really good sign that he was an older meta.

He looked at me, and I looked back at him, hovering, ready to strike. I couldn’t see his eye color from here, but I could see him making the calculation: Should I run?

He ran.

Actually, he didn’t so much run as he pitched himself sideways over the railing and dropped the ten feet or so down the onto the ramp below. He landed adroitly and then sprinted into the faded wooden planks that blocked off the pedestrian walkway under Lake Shore Drive. He smashed right through them without letting it slow him down and disappeared into the darkness within.

“Why is it always idiots they send me after?” I wondered aloud. That wasn’t really true, though. I’d run across plenty of people who hadn’t been idiots, who had in fact given me a run for my money in the badass department, that had laid well-crafted traps that had occasionally cost me limb and once even life. Still, I had this thing in me where I couldn’t let myself quit, so every time someone ran from me, I would doggedly run their ass down and refuse to let them escape, even if it caused me pain. Which it often did.

I shot after him and blasted through the hole in the wood with a fury. I figured he was panicked, running, maybe he knew my rep for chaos and destruction and would wisely want to get the hell away from me regardless of how dumb running from someone who could fly actually seemed on a logical level.

But that was before I flew headlong into his fist, which was waiting for me on the other side of the wooden barricade, along with the fugitive himself.

It halted my momentum in a flash, that punch, took me from sixty to zero in about 3.2. It was like a clothesline from hell, and I felt it on my chin, my jaw, my cheek, and all along the rest of me as I spun off and hit the concrete wall after busting some more boards with my legs.

I landed in a heap, stunned, with more than a few broken bones. If I’d been able to speak, I might have said, “Well, that was stupid.” Because it was.

Instead I lay there, on the edge of consciousness, not quite able to summon up Wolfe to heal me, when a shadow appeared above me, looming with a grey sky behind him, the light silhouetting him and robbing his features of clarity.

“You’re going to die,” he said, his voice low and quiet, and my eyes fluttered closed.

Harry stared down at Sienna Nealon, who was bleeding out of her nose and her ears, her right leg broken and pointed off at a sickening angle. A cavalcade of emotions thundered through him as he stood there, but stunned horror was probably right at the top of the list.

The fact that she was here, in Chicago, was not unexpected. The fact that she was here, right here, right now, where he was—that was alarming, concerning, worrisome—he was pretty sure he’d need a thesaurus to fully express the level of UH OH he felt pouring over him.

She was out, that much clear by the fact that he was still breathing, but the fact that she was there, that she could—she could heal, she’d be fine from this once she woke up—that was … well, he was down to disquieting.

None of this was any good.

The professor had needed to die last night. Needed to. But this? He stared down at her, scarcely trusting to believe his eyes. This was …

Frightening. Disturbing. Where was that thesaurus?

Harry didn’t even know what to do, but he could feel help coming. He looked back and knew it was seconds away. He jumped over her insensate body and ran, smashing up through the walkway on the other side with perfect timing as her backup came in through the ramp on the other side.

She’d caught him because he’d been moving too fast on foot. Well, he wouldn’t make that mistake again. He surveyed the area for a second as he burst out onto Michigan Avenue and then walked three blocks, casually, before stepping into a store for five minutes. He meandered, he browsed, and then he stepped out to find police cars, ambulances and fire trucks swarming near the park. As expected.

He raised his hand and hailed the first cab he saw, popping in the back. He gave an address in the Loop and then leaned back to think.

When he’d been in the store, he’d been focused on the next move and the next move only. Harry could only concentrate so far into the future, planning it out. Now he knew he was safe for a little bit at least, and he could open his mind to the next move. He looked back and saw the lights flashing behind him, red and blue and white, and he sighed again. A simple bump-off in an alley wasn’t supposed to get this complicated. This was going to require … desperate measures.

A hard hand slapped across my face, snapping me out of a sweet, blissful nap and back into a world of pain and discomfort. I ached all over, and my face was sticky with blood. I could smell it, the pungent scent flooding into my sinuses and threatening to overwhelm me.

“Owwwww,” I said, looking up at Reed’s deeply concerned eyes. He was crouched over me, in silhouette, pretty much like my attacker had been when I’d gone out. I wanted to make a joke about the Mack Truck that had hit me, but for all my much-vaunted superiority, my own stupidity had been the culprit in this particular injury.

Wolfe
, I moaned inside.

Yesssss
, Wolfe said, already working on it.
You shouldn’t go charging into—

“Spare the lecture,” I said for the benefit of my psycho and also my brother. Two for one. My wounds started to knit themselves together and my right leg jerked back into alignment as it healed itself. “Yowwwww.”

“What happened?” Reed asked, voice thick with worry.

“I thought the bad guy was running but it turned out he was lying in wait,” I said as I got up and dusted myself off. It required a lot of dusting.

“You didn’t consider an ambush to be a possibility?”

“I consider a lot of possibilities,” I said, trying to brush some particularly stubborn wood dust off my knee. “The most likely one when I see someone running from me is that they’ll continue to wisely haul ass away, not take the 1.2 seconds I give them to escape as an opportunity to bushwhack me without so much as a weapon at their disposal.” I turned my neck and heard a crack as bone set back into place. “That guy said he was going to kill me.”

“I heard him run off as I caught up,” Reed said. His eyes flared with anger. “You know, if you’d waited for me—”

“If I’d waited for you,” I said, breaking into run toward the opposite end of the tunnel, where light was flooding down from my assailant’s likely exit, “I’d feel like I was running with weights on my legs.”

“I caught up with you, didn’t I?” Reed snapped, hurrying after me.

“Because I had to stop and try and converse with a witness who had been so traumatized by the sight of a corpse that she couldn’t construct a sentence with heavy machinery. Talk about a drag on your speed.”

I burst out of the walkway at the other end of the street and shot into the air, scouring the sidewalk for hints of my foe. The streets weren’t exactly packed, but they were damned busy, and it seemed like every fourth person had dark hair and a black jacket. “Son of a …” I muttered.

Reed drifted up next to me, only fifteen feet up or so, his hands throwing off massive amounts of wind in order to keep him levitating. “See anything?”

I sighed as I looked in all four directions. I saw something, all right. Desperation. My own desperation and about a hundred people of medium height in black coats, only half of whom were actually looking at me at the moment. “This guy’s gone,” I said, letting myself slowly drift back to the ground at the corner of Michigan and Lake Shore. “He got away.”

It was a dismal day outside Veronika’s mother’s window, her little view of the world shaded darkly by cloud and sky. The sun was just barely up, hiding somewhere behind the layers of clouds. It wasn’t that unusual for San Francisco at this time of year, but it could have been better. The clouds threaded across the sky in layers, deep and thick, blocking out the sunshine and making it feel like a cold, damp winter had settled over the whole world.

Veronika Acheron was used to feeling like this when she came to visit her mother, like a wet blanket had been draped over her, even in the summer, and it was why she tried to stay away as much as possible.

“Are you getting enough to eat?” Veronika asked. The smell of something roughly approximating chicken hung in the air in the nursing facility. Veronika’s hands were clutched together under the coat she had hung over her arm. It was long, and velvety, and it felt reassuringly heavy hanging there.

She waited for an answer from the woman in the bed before her. Her mother had always been strong, always been … unbreakable, resolute of will and tireless of body. Now she reclined in the bed, sitting at a forty-five degree angle, propped up by pillows, eyes lazily pointed at the window, looking about thirty seconds from drifting into sleep. This was how she always was nowadays.

“Of course you are,” Veronika whispered. There was no reaction from her mother. There never was. She’d seen her fed; it was a messy ordeal, not terribly unlike watching a toddler eat against their will. How funny, that she tied this period in her mother’s life with the earliest days of her own. Helplessness lay on both sides of life’s spectrum, Veronika supposed. She found no humor in that thought at all, just a cold, burning fear that she’d live long enough to see it visited upon her again.

The ringing of her phone was a welcome interruption from the stink of the food and faint, lingering scent of disinfectant that couldn’t entirely cover the smell of bodily functions. Veronika coolly went for her phone and turned away from her mother and the window on the cloudy world. “Excuse me for a moment,” she said to her mother in a quiet voice before pressing the key to accept the call.

“Go,” Veronika said. She was precise in her professional life. She had to be. She brushed her straight, long red hair back behind her ears. She rarely let it loose, except when she wasn’t working.

She listened carefully to the voice at the other end of the line. With something that might have been pleasure from any other person, but from her came out cool steel, she said, “It’s been a while.”

She listened again, that pleasant voice threading through her mind. “No, I wouldn’t mind working,” she answered, turning her head subtly to look back at her mother. “I wouldn’t mind at all. Do you have a contract for me? Perhaps something a little more in line with my regular … yes …”

A prickle of fear mingled with anticipation ran down the back of her neck, like someone had opened the window to let the day in. “Sienna Nealon? I can …” She paused to let the voice speak again. “Chicago? I can be there on the next … yes, that’ll be fine. I’ll catch that flight. Am I the only …? No, of course not. That’s all right, I don’t mind a little competition.” She paused, listening, and gritted her teeth for a moment before replying. “Oh, they get a head start, do they? All right. I can work with that. You give them first crack, and when they screw it up, I’ll do the job right.”