Critical Point Read online

  I didn’t like to admit that I saw his logic. The police station was on its highest alert, and swelling at the seams with people carrying guns. If they reacted like I did, any attack by our mystery assailant would be met with enough blind crossfire that he’d probably die in the attempt.

  The same way Pilar and I had killed the dog. It might incapacitate the whole station, but he wouldn’t get to Checker. Neither would D.J.

  I still didn’t feel right leaving. I couldn’t do for Checker what Elisa could, pushing for his legal release, but at the very least, I could be his well-armed guardian angel …

  A harsh tap on the window. I jumped and nearly went for my gun before I registered the imposing navy-blue lines and visored cap of an officer, the butt end of a flashlight importantly ordering me to roll down my window.

  Oh, crap. I dropped the phone and groped for the keys to get the window down, trying like hell not to look like I’d just been on the verge of drawing on a member of the force.

  “What’s your business here?” the cop demanded. Not quite hostile, but with an authority that left no room for error.

  “Uh—” I found the phone in my lap and grabbed for it. “I was making a call.”

  The cop’s hand twitched on his holster at my sudden movement. Christ, I was not good at this. His flashlight beacon swept the other side of the car, across the dangling side mirror.

  “Ma’am, have you been drinking?”

  “No,” I answered truthfully, and then blurted, “It’s been like that for a while.”

  Pilar was going to kill me.

  “License and registration.”

  “But I’m not—” I bit my lip and rethought the wisdom of that argument. Cops can do things, Tabitha had said. She wasn’t wrong. I could get out of obeying, but only in ways that defeated the whole purpose of not breaking Checker out of custody.

  Be cool, Cas.

  I fumbled in my pocket for a forged driver’s license and then leaned across to Pilar’s glove compartment. She was law abiding. The thing would be registered.

  I handed the paperwork through to the officer, trying not to look guilty. Where the hell did a normal person put their eyes?

  He stared at the documents for far longer than I was comfortable with. “This isn’t your car, Ms. Dhar?”

  “No, it’s my friend’s. I’m, uh, I’m borrowing it.”

  “We don’t want people loitering out here. Move along.”

  “Right, okay.”

  “And get that mirror fixed.”

  He handed everything back to me. I took it, trying not to let my hands shake. Under the officer’s too-bright flashlight, I started the Yaris and managed to turn sedately out of the alley and down the street without sideswiping it again.

  I glanced in my rearview. The officer was still watching. I carefully turned the corner with exaggerated slowness and a gentle moderate curvature, just tight enough not to veer into any other lane.

  Fuck, I was less and less in shape to help Checker anyway. Rio was right—I needed to figure out what was going on with Simon, and preferably drag him along with me until I was functionally able to fight back. Besides, Rio and Pilar had both reminded me about Oscar, again, and we still didn’t know how he was mixed up in this. Best case scenario was that we figured out exactly where D.J. was and stopped him—I was sick of playing games.

  I hoped Simon wasn’t injured, or dead, or in some other serious trouble I was trying very hard to care about. Reluctantly, I texted Rio with my plans and drove back toward where I’d left Simon.

  And Oscar. Shit. Remember!

  I had to pay more attention to my driving than usual to keep it from going erratic. I kept seeing phantom cars following mine, but every time I slowed, they sped past. The game theory played strangely and woozily through my head, every other car an irrational player. By the time I reached the apartment building where Simon and Oscar had been, my skin was crawling off me. I pathetically hoped I’d find Simon in short order so he could set me right.

  Whatever explosion had occurred in my flat apparently hadn’t been big enough for the street to be blocked off, and any police had left the scene. I parked down the block and got out. The light was edging toward predawn, still too dark to see clearly but graying softly around the edges.

  The man lurched up in front of me so fast, it was as if he’d blinked out of nowhere.

  Even through the too-familiar curtain of black static dropping over my senses, I should have been faster. But I was going on two days without sleep, plus a full night spent sliding against the edge of terror. My legs buckled while I groped for my gun.

  I still got it out inhumanly fast, but the instant’s stumble gave the man his window. He came at me like a freight train, his limbs taking the most brutal distance to efficiency. Even as I tried to push through the grasping fear and dodge away or defend, some ghostly echo doubled our fight, his moves an instruction, a demonstration of an optimum assignment of variables.

  The twist of memory lasted barely a moment. The man’s shin splintered into my knee and his fist snapped my head around against brick. Flashbulbs went off in my vision. My gun clattered away.

  The panic howled up inside me, drowning out any other input. Somewhere in me, I was aware that the man had wrapped his face with a scarf, but it barely dented the horror clogging my senses. My fight-or-flight instinct shorted out my brain until I was frozen. The man hit me again, and I saw the explosion of kinetic energy coming but registered it too slowly, the physical quantities washing over me with such certain accelerations—and then the blow landed, and I tasted blood.

  The wall was the only thing holding me up. I scratched at it like a plea to help me stand. Or run. Or fight.

  The man grabbed my shoulders and slammed me back. My head ricocheted like a rag doll’s. I tried to look anywhere but at him, but the shape of him filled everything, everywhere, a cracked mirror reflecting nightmare in all directions.

  “Help,” he hissed. “Help … me…”

  My head was filled with wasps, buzzing out into my tunneled vision until I thought I would burst apart. With one last scrap of coherence, I levered up one leg and rocketed it into him.

  He staggered back. I slid down the wall, my hands clawing at my head. Blood swamped my eyes and nose, and I couldn’t tell if it was that or the panic that suffocated me.

  The man shrieked, a long, unearthly baying of pain and fury. A knife flashed silver into his hand, and he lunged. His hand slashed across between us.

  Against his own face.

  We were so close that the wet spray smacked my skin. I tore at the wall again as if I could burrow through it in horror. The man slashed himself again, and again, the scarf hanging mangled with shreds of skin. Blood sheeted down, soaking the cloth and dribbling down his chest like it was a painter’s smock.

  He threw back his head and yelled once more, an inarticulate keen.

  I yelled back, my hands throwing themselves up over my head. My body had hit the street at some point. I curled against the wall, every muscle knotted in a rictus of pain and fear.

  “I help you!” the man raved at me. “I help you—I help you!”

  He backed away from me, stumbling into the street.

  A car nosed around the corner.

  Everything happened in seconds. The driver saw the apparition in the middle of the roadway and swerved. A terrific crash echoed over the street as the car went headfirst into the nearest storefront. The driver staggered out, screaming, and tried to run.

  The man screamed back and pounced after him, flinging the driver’s body like it was a wet rag. The skeleton outline of a human being smacked hard into the asphalt, its angles all wrong and bent backward along far too many axes.

  My attacker bawled at the sky again and then ran, bounding into the early morning shadows and out of sight.

  I lay on the pavement and tried to breathe. My lungs pulsed and seized like I needed to cry or scream.

  Get off the road—out of sight—r />
  Anyone who lived on this street had likely cowered under their beds at the sounds outside, but even in a neighborhood like this, someone might have called the authorities … especially with this not being the only report of the night …

  The frenzy the man had sparked still eclipsed my brain. It was all I could do to unclench a hand and scrape it against the sidewalk, dragging myself in something that wasn’t a crawl. I fell on something hard and realized it was my gun.

  I peeled myself up the steps and into the building. Sweat drenched my clothes and made my skin slick. My knee and head throbbed in time to the blood crusting over my nose and left eye.

  I sat in the dingy stairwell for a long time, struggling, every muscle and joint trying to shove opposite every other one.

  Sirens came eventually. I pressed myself into the cobweb-choked space beneath the stairs. The desperate thought floated that I hoped I hadn’t left an obvious blood trail, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to check. Fortunately, the police mostly stayed outside, though a few did tromp up to the crime scene that had been my apartment, then back down. Probably checking for a connection.

  There was one. It was me.

  Eventually, the sirens wailed away. Doubtless taking the dead driver with them. Sprawled and mangled on the street, all because he’d been in the wrong place in the wrong second.

  He’d been a young guy. Maybe early twenties. Maybe not even that.

  In minutes or hours or a thousand years or an eternity, I dragged myself out and up the steps. My body was uncooperative flesh, welded into dead weight beyond reason. Continuing waves of dread wracked me and brought me into shivering cold sweats.

  I found the doorway to my apartment through a fog, drawn by the beacon of crisscrossing crime scene tape. The door was missing.

  I rolled under the tape and inside.

  After seeing the police come and go, I wasn’t even sure what I expected here. But my brain was sparking with little but desperate intuition. I needed to find Simon—he could help—he had been here.

  My eyes rolled in their sockets, desperate to make sense out of what they saw. The mess in the apartment wasn’t large. The explosives had only held a big enough boom to blow apart whatever barricading Rio had put on the door.

  Blow it all apart—from the inside.

  The conclusion came too slow and after far too long. The bits of twisted-up items from my emergency supplies strewn across the stove. The shredded, burned plastic on the floor, suggesting some sort of controlled gas pressure explosion made in a food container. The shock wave and blast pattern sluggishly sketched themselves out for me, every number coming stubborn and difficult, until a wobbly half picture centered itself just inside where the door had been.

  The Australian hadn’t been rescued. He had escaped.

  Someone groaned.

  I twitched toward the bathroom, groping for my gun. Had I left the Colt on the pavement outside? No, here it was—but my hand wouldn’t close on it, my tendons stretching the joints into unreal talons.

  The flimsy bathroom door was shut, but it had been partially shredded by shrapnel from the explosion, a large chunk of the lower half missing.

  “Cas…” a voice croaked.

  It wasn’t relief that grabbed me by the throat—I was too far gone for that. More like a driving need. With a herculean heave of my remaining energy and sanity, I hauled myself at the bathroom door, shoved it open, and fell inside.

  On the floor, pupils dilated and bleeding copiously from a head wound, was Simon.

  twenty-one

  “CAS,” SIMON said. He reached out and gripped my arm.

  Aren’t we a pair, drifted through the haze of my mind.

  Then the haze lifted, sloughed off like a skin I had shed and left behind. I rolled up to sitting, pulling away from Simon. I felt like myself—alert, whip-fast, and capable of instant momentum calculations. Like I had just had a cleansing shower for my brain, with everything settled back the way it should be.

  I blinked at Simon and scrabbled backward, my heels hitting rubble. “Holy shit. What did you do?”

  “I’m sorry…” he murmured. “I didn’t mean, I just wanted you to … feel better…”

  Black suspicion reared in me at the wrongness of it. Simon had just reached in and—fixed me—with no warning, no permission, no effort on my own part—

  But what was wrong with that? I did feel better now, didn’t I? Everything set back in its proper place.

  I had to … do something, tell people, I had learned something …

  A man slashed at his own face. But dimly, like a reflection of a reflection that had been dulled by years.

  And Simon was hurt. I needed to take care of him. Everything else could wait.

  I managed to help him up and over to the apartment’s threadbare sofa, where I set to work cleaning his scalp wound and brought over the medical kit I’d had stored here. The injury didn’t seem deep, but he was worryingly woozy.

  Well. Worrying if he was the sort of person I’d worry about …

  I blinked.

  “Cassandra,” he murmured.

  My fingers became gentler as they carded away the black curls of his hair. No matter what I thought of him, I didn’t like to see him hurt. It made me feel protective of him in a way I never had before.

  His hand shot up and locked around my wrist.

  “What is it? Did that hurt?” I tried to soften my touch.

  “I’m sorry,” he gasped. “Cas—I’m trying to stop—” His eyes went in and out of focus. A tear slid down the side of his nose, leaving a trail in the dust and sweat.

  “Stop what?” I said. “Lie still. You almost certainly have a concussion.”

  “Cas…”

  My senses fuzzed for a moment, like I was seeing two of him, like I was living two identical moments, but in one I was tender and concerned and in the other turning away in frantic urgency.

  The world snapped back into clarity, settling on concerned.

  “What happened?” I asked. “Can you tell me?”

  He shut his eyes. Even though he was lying still, his body was strained, his fist locked in the ratty blanket across the cushions. “I didn’t think anyone could hurt me,” he said.

  He sounded like a lost little boy.

  Well, I’d hurt him before, I recalled with some embarrassment. If you counted punching him when I’d really wanted to kill him.

  I was abashed at the memory. I had been so naïve.

  Hurt people … I had been worried, a few minutes ago. About somebody being hurt. Who? It probably didn’t matter. My stolen phone buzzed, but I ignored it.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Simon, dabbing antiseptic as lightly as possible. It had to sting. “I’ve never said that before, have I? I’ve treated you pretty awfully, and I know you were only trying to help. I’m sorry.”

  He gulped in a breath like he wanted to choke on it. “No, you’re not.”

  “Hey. I am too. Can we get a new start? On the right foot this time.”

  Why did my knee ache? I scratched at my face and was surprised when my nails came away bloody.

  My phone buzzed again. Irritated, I silenced it.

  “Cas.” Simon took another ragged breath, and his shoulders convulsed like he was holding in a sob. “Oh, God, Cas, I—you’re going to kill me. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m trying to stop. I’m sorry—”

  “Don’t be stupid. I’m telling you I’m sorry now.” I re-sanitized the mystery blood off my hands with alcohol wipes and dug through the first aid kit for the right kind of bandages. “Now, can you tell me what happened? Memory loss can be normal with concussions, so just tell me what you do remember.”

  This time his sob sounded halfway like a laugh.

  He really did seem to be having trouble with his memory, but at least part of that was some muddled mindfuck regarding the Australian, whom I had barely remembered until Simon brought him up again. He also kept repeating that he’d never thought anyone could h
urt him.

  “I don’t think anyone did hurt you,” I said. “Not intentionally. The blast damage is centered with its target as the front door, but some of the shrapnel became projectiles. Whizz bam. You were standing in the wrong place.”

  “I thought it was wrong…” he started, but seemed to lose the thread.

  Someone else had been in the wrong place too. A man without a face slammed a boy into the ground, and it flashed through me like something out of a nightmare.

  I shuddered. Bad dreams best forgotten.

  “No, don’t,” Simon said. “Cas, this isn’t, it isn’t right. You have to get away from me.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “And this wasn’t your fault. The Australian must’ve learned a few tricks from D.J. Do you remember anything else?”

  He seemed to struggle for a moment.

  “I remember—police. For a long time. But I didn’t want them to talk to me—or notice me—it would be so complicated. And I knew you would be coming, Cassandra, I knew…” His eyes went out of focus again.

  “I’ll always come,” I said. “I promise.” What the hell had taken me so long this time, anyway?

  No matter. Whatever it was, it wasn’t as important as being here.

  I finished dressing his scalp wound and got up to dig out some canned soup to heat for us. A dull headache had started behind my own eyes. I tried as hard as I could to pinch it out, or, failing that, ignore it, but it spread until it melded with a bruise on the back of my head I didn’t remember getting.

  I didn’t have bowls, but I brought the pot back to Simon, regretful I didn’t have anything better.

  “Cas.” Simon had mustered a bit of energy, but he closed his eyes again, and blocked my hand when I attempted to spoon-feed him. “Cas, I’m not going to let—please go.”

  I barked a laugh. “I said no. No way. You’re injured. You absolutely need someone with you.”

  “Then get Rio.”

  “Why?” My headache shaded itself a little worse, but I was still perfectly capable of taking care of him. And he needed someone to do that right now.