“If they get one of you, they could make a case for keeping the program open. We’ve had no word that they’re doing anything major, but I’d be careful, yes. They have freelancers working on it.”
Persephone sat back on the bench. “Bounty hunters?”
She’d dealt with bounty hunters before. The guy from the other day had sure felt like one. Not a very skilled one, she thought with some relief and a little alarm at how close he’d been to her, even if he hadn’t known it.
“They don’t have the means to put together any kind of teams like the one...” The mother trailed off, looking around, but they seemed to be the only ones there.
Persephone nodded. “I got it. You don’t have to say.”
“The reality is, the organization has been privately funded for a long time, but they’re on the way out. They’re swirling the drain. Without a big benefactor or some kind of breakthrough, they’re going to have to close completely. Look, I’m on maternity leave right now, and the only reason I agreed to meet you is that this is really low priority. You know they don’t have eyes and ears all over the place, they’re not monitoring the entire world or anything. Vadim said to tell you that they’ve assessed the danger to you as minimal, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be careful.”
“I know.”
The woman studied Persephone. “He said to remind you that you have a place with us whenever you want it.”
“I’m doing all right. Thanks.” Persephone stood.
“Even so, he told me to remind you.” The woman stood, too, and pressed a small square of paper into Persephone’s hand. “Call him on this number when you’re ready.”
Waking from a nightmare, she realizes all too quickly that this has not been a dream. The ringing in her ears is still so loud all she can do is clap her hands to the side of her head and rock back and forth until it eases. She’s alone. Whoever did this to her has left her for dead, she thinks, and risks running a hand over her body, checking for wounds.
The blood covering her is not hers. The bits of flesh and bone and brain, also not hers. Her fingers clench, remembering the feel of the weapon in her hands, but she can’t remember shooting anyone. Unsteadily, she holds her hands out in front of her, inspecting the nails, grimy with filth.
She has killed with these hands.
The question, with the answer she can’t remember, is has she killed now? Or perhaps not if, because it feels so obvious that she has, but who? She can’t even remember who she was fighting. Staring at the tufts of fur beneath several of her fingers, stroking along the slices in her clothes and the torn flesh beneath, Samantha thinks maybe she needs to ask not who.
What.
Blinking to clear her vision, she makes sure she can stand upright before she tries to go anywhere. She’s in a safe house, not one she remembers, but she recognizes it without too much effort. Bare floors, bare walls, utilitarian furniture. Nothing to show anyone on the outside that there’s anything here but an almost empty house waiting for someone to occupy it. Nothing to stand out to anyone who came to the door.
She hopes nobody does that now. The beige walls are spattered with thick dark fluid that smells of dank earth. The furniture, a brown plaid couch and matching armchair, are overturned, the stuffing torn out. It would be so very clear this house was the scene of something awful.
She doesn’t call out. The ringing has faded enough that she can, if she strains hard enough, hear more than the buzz. Her feet are steady, planted shoulder-width apart. Her fingers ache; she forces them to relax and open. She doesn’t search for her weapon. She already knows it’s gone.
Whatever happened here was recent enough that the blood is sticky, but not dry. Her wounds still seep. She could not have been unconscious for more than twenty or thirty minutes. Listening hard, Samantha waits for some clue to tell her what went on, but she hears nothing but the harsh rasp of her own breathing.
In the next room, she finds him. Eyes wide. Mouth open. He stares at the ceiling, the ribbons of maroon on his throat evidence of what killed him. A familiar face.
Her father.
She kneels next to him without bothering to check for a pulse. You can maybe survive a wound that leaves your trachea hanging out of your throat, your bones poking through the skin, but only with immediate medical attention. It’s very clear that her father went down alone. He won’t get up again.
She tries to cry and can’t. Later, she thinks she ought to have tried harder. He raised her, after all, in the absence of a mother. He did the best he could. But she thinks he wouldn’t have wanted her to weep, not because it was a sign of weakness, but because he’d passed from this life and into the next. The one he’d always taught her was the better one.
The rest of the house is empty. There are signs, left behind by other safe house users. A code—something like the symbols used by transient hobos in the thirties to distinguish friendly homes from those where a man looking for a meal and a hot shave would instead get a serious thrashing. This house, she reads, is no longer safe.
“No shit.” The words leak out of her on a tongue sore from being bitten.
In the kitchen, she finds no signs of struggle. In the fridge, a gallon of milk hasn’t turned, and she gulps it greedily although she doesn’t like milk. Her stomach bucks a protest, but she keeps it down. She spits a few times into the sink. Pink. Again. Clear this time. She puts the jug on the counter and both hands on the rim of the sink, gripping hard as the floor tips and tilts. When she’s once more gathered her balance, she uses the sink to wash her face and rinse her mouth. She watches the water swirl away the blood and bits of fur.
She stands there so long, she realizes the light outside has gone from night to day.
She’s lost time again, but this time remembers coming into the kitchen. Drinking the milk. Going to the sink. She remembers her father is dead, and that someone before her tried to warn them that this house was not safe, but she still can’t recall what brought them here.
She remembers she hadn’t spoken to him in months, though. Before this. How they’d had a final falling-out—he wanted her to keep moving with him, and she wanted to find a place, settle down, keep a job. Have a life. They’d parted on bad terms.
With a gasp, Samantha shakes herself awake again. The faucet is still running, the water ice-cold. She turns it off. Closes her eyes.
Did she kill her father?
No, no, that can’t be. She runs a fingertip over her teeth, careless of the gore still grimed into her skin. She wouldn’t have done that. And it doesn’t explain the fur.
She will never fully remember what brought her to this house, or what happened inside it. She will find the text on her phone from her father asking her to meet him at this address. Nothing more than that. But she does learn what happened to him, and that is because several days after burning that house to the ground in the hopes she can prevent anyone from finding out it had been a haven for the people her father had believed in, a man named Vadim approaches her in a coffee shop two towns away. He sits at the table outside, where Samantha is turning a lukewarm paper cup of shitty coffee around and around in her hands without being able to drink any of it. He says nothing, not even when she recoils as though she might hit him.
“I know what happened to your father,” he says in the calm and steady voice Samantha will come to learn so well. “If you want to know, come with me.”
So she does.
* * *
Jed was dreaming.
He knew it, of course, because in the waking world he would not be dancing slowly