Patient Darkness: Brooding City Series Book 2 (4 page)

It was just
after noon when Alex’s taxi arrived outside
Chez Brüding
.

She shoved several bills at the driver and got out, smoothing out any phantom wrinkles in her clothes as she approached the family house. Perched on a grassy knoll, the wide veranda gave an impressive view of Odols and the surrounding countryside. She could just see the peaks of the mountains to the south piercing through the clouds. The house itself was a remnant of the early-century housing bubble, and her father had bought it at just the opportune time.

This house, and also the next closest dozen houses. Once those had been demolished, the Brüdings were left with a rather expansive yard.

She knocked loudly and quickly checked her clothes one more time as she waited. The butler, a servant by the name of Kern, opened the door a moment later. He was an elderly man who rarely spoke, and he was silent even as he ushered her to the dining room. His kind eyes twinkled as she thanked him and took a seat at the table.

It was a long table in an even longer room, and it was set for a gathering of more than a dozen people, despite the fact that her parents had lived here alone for many years. Portraits hung from the walls, including several photos of Alex from her teenage years. Everything was as it had been since her childhood; she’d never even changed her room since college, despite her increasingly more frequent trips back home.

“You’re here,” came a voice, amplified by the room’s natural acoustics. James Brüding, the dark-haired, fair-skinned patriarch of the family, emerged from the warmly lit library that served as his study. He was tall enough to play basketball and moved with a grace that was uncommon for his apparent age, and very uncommon for his true age.

“I’m glad to see you,” he said, embracing his daughter. His voice was warmer now than it had been on the phone, and she let herself fold into his arms. “Sorry for how I was on the phone earlier, it was a rough morning.”

“It’s fine, Dad,” she murmured. “I forgive you.”

A few seconds later, he broke the hug and held her at arm’s length. “Your hair,” he said. “You’ve done something to it.”

Alex grinned. “More like I
haven’t
done something to it. I decided to forgo the dye this time.”

It looks nice,
James thought, smiling down at her. He knew about her power as surely as she knew about his; it made for interesting conversations, her talking and him thinking.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m still considering a change, but we’ll see.”

Shall we eat?

Alex nodded, and she took a seat next to her father at one end of the table. Kern, ever silent, carried out two trays laden with fruit slices and sandwich wedges and set them down before retreating to the kitchen. A moment later, he returned with a silver carafe. Ice clinked as Kern poured a glass of spring water for each of them.

James lifted his glass, and Alex mirrored him. “To family,” he toasted.

“To family.” Their glasses connected with a chime that was swallowed quickly in the silence of the grand room. Alex nibbled on one half of a sandwich and watched herself through her father’s eyes. She looked good; beautiful, even, with the sunlight silhouetting her. There were lines in her face, though, that were unfamiliar and unwanted. Not for the first time, she envied her father’s power. She was grateful that he couldn’t hear
her
thoughts at that moment. James Brüding had not raised his daughter to be weak, and jealousy made all men—and women—weak.

“What’s on your mind?” her father asked aloud.

Alex stopped channeling his thoughts and looked with her own eyes. He was watching her closely. Her father had always had an intense curiosity about him, an acute awareness of and interest in everything around him. He could tell something was bothering her without being psychic.

“It’s this guy I’m seeing,” she said.

“Is he giving you a hard time?”

She shook her head. “No, nothing like that. He’s actually really sweet. We met a few weeks ago, and he has been nothing but a gentleman to me. But in spite of all that…there’s no connection. I don’t feel anything for him.”

“You just met him,” he said. “Give it time to develop.”

Alex frowned. “I’ve
given
it time,” she groaned. “How long does it take for humans to develop feelings for each other?”

James glanced around the room, but it seemed that Kern had made himself scarce. Alex’s father looked at her steadily, and she could sense him carefully arranging and protecting his thoughts. “I can’t promise that it will ever happen,” he said. “When your mother and I first met, we butted heads all the time. There wasn’t a single thing we could agree on. One day, something just clicked, and everything fell into place.”

“Yes, but you two are
normal
!” Alex protested. She sat back in her chair with her arms crossed. She didn’t meet his eyes when she spoke. “What happens if I never know love? What kind of person doesn’t
love
?”

I love you
, her father replied.
I’ve always known exactly the kind of person you are, and I know the woman you’ll grow into. And we love you.

We
, she thought. He’d said “we.” It was as good a subject as any, just so long as the focus wasn’t on herself. “How is she?” Alex asked.

James’s eyes crinkled slightly, but otherwise he showed no reaction to the change in conversation. “Your mother is doing fine. She has good days and bad days,” he said, reaching for a sandwich wedge. He briefly held it in his hands, considering it, before tearing it roughly down the middle. “Today is a bad day.”

“Can I see her?”

Her father hemmed and hawed momentarily. “I don’t think that would be such a good idea. She has been in a lot of pain recently, and the doctor recently increased the dosage of her medication.”

“She’s going to get better, though, right? It comes and goes.”

“We can always hope.” It didn’t sound like her father was holding on to much hope. “Meanwhile, I have a new drug under development that shows promise. Trial testing starts in a month, and if those results are promising, we should be able to go ahead with human test subjects by year’s end.”

Alex sipped quietly at her drink. She and her father both knew that her mother wouldn’t survive to see Christmas at the rate she was going. “Is there any way to accelerate the process?”

“Not legally,” he said simply.

There was no sense in hiding it; everyone in the market was culpable of
some
wrongdoing, and Alex would have known about it regardless. She reconciled it with the fact that he was producing medicine that saved people. If that meant going through backchannels to bypass red tape, she fully supported him.

“When we were still a separate entity,” he continued, “it would have just been a matter of depositing the right amount into the right people’s bank accounts.” His expression soured, and he bit violently into the other half of his sandwich. “Now that we’re merged with SymbioTech, though…No, there’s too much oversight, too much risk involved.”

“So you work for them now?”

“They would never phrase it that way. Significant downsizing from my own company, and all of their executives are now
our
executives.”

“If it’s such a raw deal, why did you agree to sell to them?”

James sighed. “If it were up to me, we wouldn’t have. But the board of trustees decides what’s best for the company, and with the direction the market was moving, SymbioTech seemed the way to go. We couldn’t beat them, so we joined them.”

“At least you live to fight another day,” Alex said, giving a false smile. “And now you get to use
their
resources to get what you want.”

Her father smirked. “That is one over-simplified, naively optimistic way of looking at it.”
Thank you
. She could feel the royal blue feel-good emotions that accompanied the thought, and she felt truly happy for the first time all day.

“Speaking of work,” she prompted.

“I’ve been working out of the home office today,” he said, gesturing to the library.

“Ah, I see.”

“But if you need to go for some reason, by all means, don’t let me keep you.”

Alex frowned as he said that. She thought the monthly visits had been enough, but the emotions carried in her father’s words indicated that he missed her far more than he let on.
Whenever I leave, he’s only left with
her.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” she said. “Something came up recently that I really do need to attend to.”

James nodded. “Of course, I understand. I do hope you get to visit us again soon.” He leaned in to kiss her on both cheeks, and then brought her in for another hug.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” she promised.

I love you.

“Love you too, Dad.” Alex slowly disengaged from her father and started walking toward the front door. As she left, James returned to his study and closed its two doors behind him. The family photos stared down at her as Alex made her way to the foyer. At some point, Kern had appeared just a step ahead of her, and he accompanied her the rest of the way.

“I took the liberty of calling a taxi for you,” Kern informed her.

She looked out the door to where a gray-and-yellow car waited in the roundabout driveway, its engine purring while it idled. “Kern,” she said, suddenly rounding on him. “Do you think you could tell the driver to wait a few more minutes? There’s somebody I forgot to visit.”

Kern’s one good eye twinkled approvingly as he nodded. “Of course, Miss Alexis.”

“Just Alex,” she corrected. Alex left him and proceeded down one of the first-floor hallways. The hardwood floor had been worn down over the years by many passing feet. She took care to avoid the floorboards that creaked, keeping mostly up against the wall. She flinched as one board groaned loudly in protest beneath her foot; she could have sworn it was one of the more solid ones when she was growing up. Her father didn’t suddenly appear, and she tiptoed the rest of the way to the solid oak door of her mother’s bedroom. She knocked softly on the door and, hearing no reply, quietly let herself in.

When her mother was gripped with illness, her father made all the necessary arrangements for her to live on the ground floor of their home. An old parlor room, once home to poker chips and billiard tables, had been retrofitted into her new chambers, complete with an easily accessible personal bathroom. The floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the city to the south and green pastures to the west, and they were tinted at such an angle that the setting sun would not disturb her sleep.

Stephanie Brüding was a shadow of her former self. She lay prostrate in her bed, her head propped up by a multitude of pillows. Her face was blank and expressionless, and her eyes stared vacantly toward the windows. If she heard Alex enter the room, she gave no indication of it.

“Mom?” Alex called. No response. She walked closer to the bed and raised her voice. “Mom, it’s me, Alex.”

A flicker of movement, and then Stephanie’s head turned toward her daughter. Alex felt a pang in her chest. There was no recognition in those eyes, only a mild interest in the new person in the room.

“It’s Alex,” she repeated, moving to sit on the edge of the bed. From the doorway, she could have pretended that her mother was the same as she’d remembered from her childhood. Up close, she could see the effects of the disease on her mother’s body. She had lost a lot of weight, an unhealthy amount, and her cheekbones and jaw stood out prominently. Her eyes were sunken and watery, and her skin had aged prematurely. Gray was now the dominant color of what was left of her hair.

Alex swallowed her misgivings and reached out to one of Stephanie’s gnarled, bony hands. It was clammy, but she smiled into her mother’s eyes. “It’s so nice to see you,” she said, her lie dripping with warmth. She wanted to see her, but never like this. It was the old Stephanie that she wished were here right now.

Stephanie’s face broke out into a smile. “Oh, you too, sweetie,” she said. “Yes, it’s very nice to see you.”

Alex seriously doubted that her mother knew who she was anymore, but she nodded. “It’s a beautiful day outside. Would you like to see it?”

Her mother fussed with her blanket. “Oh, I don’t know. I’m
so
tired today, perhaps another time.”

“Okay,” Alex said, patting her hand. She didn’t know what else to do, so she just rubbed the leathery skin of her mother’s hand as they stared outside. Her taxi was waiting for her, but she knew that these moments were limited; a few months from now, her father would be a widower.

“Now that is love,” said a voice from the doorway. She looked up, startled, only to see Kern standing in the doorway. He had a stupid grin on his face, one that somehow made him seem younger and older at the same time.

Kern, you sly dog,
she thought.
So you
did
hear Father at lunch.
He was wrong, though. Alex wasn’t doing this out of love for her mother, only pity and a sense of obligation. She returned his smile, though, since that was what he was expecting, and then turned back to her mother. “Mom,” she said, leaning in toward that withered face. “Kern is going to keep you company now.”