Phantom Instinct (9780698157132) (35 page)

A
iden gripped the ladder. He swung around and began to descend. A strange ringing filled his head, swelling and diminishing over and over, cyclically. The lights continued to flash,
blackwhiteblackwhite
, and an aura spit at the edges of his vision, a fiery electric tracer, a sine wave that danced like dry lightning in a black thunderstorm. The taste in his mouth was metallic.

The shotgun in his right hand was heavy. Three shells left before he had to reload.

He needed to climb down as fast as possible. Zero was below him, and Zero was always armed.

Beyond the ringing came another sound, something animal, something violent. Below him, in the strobing pit.

He didn't know where he was exactly. How he'd gotten here. The walls were moving,
whiteblackwhiteblack.
His hands were in front of him, and the pain in his leg seemed to be from a heated iron bar.

Go.
Zero was there.

Zero, who had screwed his life, killed people, set Xenon ablaze, and turned loose his thugs on Erika.

He continued to climb down, painfully, the shotgun clattering against the rungs.

Somebody else. Here. Should have been.

Piper. He had heard her. Voice, she was screaming. His name. Where was Piper?

He felt as if he were caught in a stream of air and electricity. Buzzing noise. Something had happened to him. He seemed to be made of pain, and so vague that he didn't know where his body ended and the air and walls began. He should be able to see colors, but the lights—
whiteblackwhite
. He was in a tunnel, racing through a focused stream of lights and energy. His hands were half-numb. He kept climbing down the ladder.

Sound beneath him, growing louder. Through the sine wave thrum, barking. He worked his way down the ladder, his hands flashing in the light, moving with jerks, not seeming attached to him.

He half jumped, half fell to the ground. When he turned, he saw Zero.

His breath jammed in his lungs. Ten yards away, Zero crouched on the floor.
Whiteblackwhite
. The piebald room was etched with shadows and pitiless light, on and off,
blackwhite
, and his perspective wasn't 3-D, somehow both flat and stretched, warped and zooming. Zero crouched on the floor close to rusting machinery, one hand jammed in the pocket of his gray hoodie, hiding Aiden didn't know what. The other hand, right hand—on the concrete. Gun in it.

Drop the weapon.

He tried to say it, heard the words with painful clarity in his mind. No sound came out of his mouth.

Drop the weapon.
“Dro . . .”

He stumbled. His feet didn't seem responsive, and the room was throbbing
whiteblack
. Zero had moved. Slipped sideways. Now looking up at him. That gun.

How much time had passed? There was a lapse. He felt a slicing sense of urgency. Time gone, how much?

From a million miles away, a million years, he seemed to know he was back on the floor of the club at Xenon, lights stroking, music droning, shapes shifting in panicked flight.
Whiteblackred
, blood misting the air.
Whitegoldorange
, the swoop and spill of flame before it caught the wall behind the bar and erupted in ravenous rapture.

He saw Zero, facing him this time, right there. Hood pulled over his head, shadowing his face. Not the gas mask now, not the shining flame eyes, but the same slight form, armed and eager, face almost glittering in the shifting light
whitesilver
, a strip of mask around his lower face.

He walked toward him, two steps, the shotgun coming up in his hands, the ringing rising to a wail.

He saw the dog half a second before it lunged at him.

Harper crouched, ready to throw herself one way or the other like a soccer goalkeeper facing a penalty shot, knowing it wouldn't matter as long as she moved. Aiden was going to fire at her, twelve-gauge from fifteen feet, she would either guess right or not. She couldn't wait, couldn't try to judge it. The sickening strobe light made it impossible to see his movements smoothly. By the time she could tell which way he was swinging the barrel, it would be too late.

Then in the flash of white light, the dog was a snapshot of furious movement. Muscle and its torn face, teeth, midair.

It launched at Aiden. In that moment, she thought it was salvation and death, putting an end to this and ruining her only hope, her heart. Darkness, another blast of jerking light.

Aiden swung the butt of the shotgun. It hit the dog in the side of the head. Eagle cried out hideously, and his flight continued to a limp collapse on the floor.

Harper backed up, giving herself a foot of slack in the chain. Another flip of the light and Aiden was facing her again. He braced himself and held the shotgun with the assurance of an experienced soldier and lawman.

And he wasn't going to ask her to surrender herself.

Not like this.
Not this end,
she thought. If she had only a hundred heartbeats left, let them not end in terror.

Not at Aiden's hands.

He didn't see her. He couldn't. He thought she was a killer, the killer of his hopes, of people who deserved a chance at wonder, of people he had loved. He thought he was avenging all the destruction wreaked by a psychopath. He thought Zero was ready to kill him with the gun taped to her hand.

Not death. Not death.
And if she died, she knew that Aiden would be next. Once he regained his senses, if he found her dead on the floor, he would use the next shell in the shotgun on himself.

He turned, unevenly, then braced himself, feet shoulder-width apart. The shotgun came up, came around, centered on her. The end of the barrel, a dark eye, a portal, aimed dead at her.

“Drop . . .” he said. It was all he could seem to get out.

She couldn't run. Couldn't yell. Couldn't even speak up for herself. Aiden couldn't see her, not right then. He could only see the killer who'd plagued his days and nightmares for the last year.

She stilled. She stopped moving altogether.

She held her right hand high overhead, the gun aimed at the ceiling. But that wasn't enough. He took a step toward her. Her left hand, taped inside the sweatshirt, might look as though it held another weapon.

Slowly, inch by inch, she lowered her right hand.

Aiden stepped toward Zero. Every inch of him hurt, muscles tense to the point of aching. His head screamed. He felt as though he'd spent ten minutes in an industrial dryer with ten pounds of rocks. The metallic taste in his mouth was running with blood. He had bitten his tongue.

He had blacked out. He knew that and tried to narrow his eyes so that the flashing lights wouldn't trigger another seizure.

Time lost. He couldn't remember what he'd been doing before this thing began. There was only darkness, only clouds.

Harper
. Aiden seemed to hear her name in his head, flowing through him. Something about Flynn.

Kicking open the door
blackwhitelightninggray.
Harper—she had looked at him. He knew why now. He understood, and it poured over him like the snaking aura that flicked its tongue at the edges of his vision: Harper had been telling the truth all along.

Piper.
She wasn't here. Shit, what had Zero done with her? He remembered her . . . in the heat of a chaotic and dangerous moment, he had heard her screaming.

She and Harper weren't here. Zero was.

He had a shotgun in his hands. Zero was straight ahead, blocking his path. Why? He had Piper, had . . . did he have Harper? Zero was trying to stop Aiden from getting to them. Standing there goading him, holding a gun, a pistol and . . .

Aiden blinked, trying to clear his vision. The ringing in his head sounded suspiciously like sirens. Zero looked small and large at the same time, and his hand was a silver bundle that enveloped the pistol.

“Drop it,” he said, and knew that wasn't going to happen.

But Zero didn't fire. He had a clear shot, but Aiden had the drop on him. Zero couldn't lower the gun and get off a shot before Aiden pulled the trigger on the shotgun.

He took another step.
Blackwhitesilver
. He held the Remington low and pressed the stock against his hip, left hand beneath the barrel, right finger on the trigger. Three left in the chamber.

Zero stood absolutely still while he advanced. Then Zero put the barrel of the pistol to his own head.

C
hained to the floor in the factory assembly room, Harper held the pistol roughly against her temple. She heard the distant wail of sirens in the empty desert night.

Aiden stood fifteen feet from her. The Remington shotgun was snugged low against his right hip. The muzzle was pointed at her chest. His face, flipping between white and black under the strobe lights, grew ever more focused.

He looked like the cop he had been, the soldier he once was, walking into what was going to be a trap. And he looked like a man who'd just lost his partner and believed he was facing Erika Sorenstam's killer. He looked like an executioner.

She pressed the barrel of the pistol against her temple. Even under the strobe lights he had to see that.

Didn't he? He took another step toward her.

The sirens grew clearer. It should have been the sound of rescue. Instead, it was a countdown to destruction. Zero was somewhere nearby, watching. If Aiden didn't fire, Zero would. Half consciously, she wondered if Travis cared about the evidence the cops would find here. But it wouldn't matter, not if Aiden killed her and SWAT killed him—or Zero killed them both and made it look like murder-suicide.

She had only minutes before a tactical squad would make a dynamic entry, blasting open the factory doors and coming after Aiden.

She had to convey that to him. But he had taken the equivalent of a massive blow to the head, from the inside out. So she stood with the barrel of the empty pistol against her temple. She held so still she thought she might become stone.

Aiden gritted his teeth and said, more clearly this time, “Drop it.”

She'd never felt so scared. Not even when she'd been about to double-cross Travis and Zero, driving full speed toward a police roadblock.

She slowly dropped to her knees. It was impossible to make it look like smooth surrender, but she had to try. Her left hand was still bound to her midsection inside the pocket of the sweatshirt. Keeping the gun pressed to her temple, she lowered herself to the concrete and lay facedown. Then she slowly, oh so slowly, moved the gun away from herself, in a broad arc along the concrete, pointing it away from Aiden. He approached. In the flashing lights, he was hot light and shadow, a kaleidoscopic nightmare.

His shadow passed over her. The barrel of the shotgun pressed against the back of her head. She flinched and let out a stifled sob.

Aiden didn't react. She didn't know what happened in his mind at these times, whether a screaming filled his head along with the visual miscues. The sirens were no longer a hint on the night air but a rising wail. And now, mixed with the freakish black-white strobing, were blares of red and blue, pounding in through the windows at the top of the building. The cops were closing in.

She could see nothing but his shadow. The lights had become another version of noise. Aiden had to know it was only a matter of moments: This was his last chance to kill Zero without witnesses.

The barrel of the shotgun pressed heavily against the base of her skull. Aiden dropped to the concrete beside her, pressing one knee on her right forearm, as Zero had done earlier.

He looked at her right hand. “The hell.”

He pulled the hood of the sweatshirt off her head.

For an eternal moment, he did nothing more. He stared at her. Even with the vicious strobe of the lights, he should have been able to see that she wasn't Eddie Azerov, that she was the woman he had held skin to skin. But he didn't move, didn't say a word.

Outside, the sirens swelled to full volume and the blue-red spin of lights filled the windows. The cops were outside. They would deploy snipers around the perimeter. A forced-entry team would prepare to bring out the battering ram and the flash-bang grenades.

Then she heard a flick and felt a warm blade slip under the duct tape that encased her right hand.
Thank God.
Aiden sliced through the tape that bound the pistol to her hand and tugged the gun from her grip. He tossed it deep into the shadows, clattering it across the concrete floor.

Next he brought the knife up to the tape that gagged her. It slipped beneath the tightly wound strands. Aiden flicked it, ripping the edge and nicking her cheek.

He sliced the tape through and yanked it roughly from her mouth.

“Aiden,” she said. “It's me.”

He breathed. His knee remained on her arm. The barrel of the shotgun remained against the base of her skull.

He said, “They'll be here soon. You tell me what I want to know and I'll let SWAT take us both down. They'll kill you clean. You lay there grinning and lying to me, I'll kill you dirty. Your choice.”

Harper lost it then. The room seemed to crack under the force of the strobing lights. She opened her mouth and couldn't even draw breath. The shotgun pressed against her head. Aiden breathed heavily above her.

Then she cranked it all down. “Aiden, listen to me. You know what's happening. It's your nightmare. Meet the new dream, same as the old dream.”

He went still.

“This is the zombie dream. It's not real,” Harper said.

He paused another long moment, then removed his knee from her arm and rolled her over. In the strobing lights, she saw his ferocity and despair.

She had nothing, not a weapon, not even her own face. Nothing but to empty herself in front of him.

“It's me, Aiden. Earlier tonight, at your place, you held on to me and told me I was not alone. I said the same to you. It's me,” she said.

He blinked and stared at her. She wanted more than anything to scramble and run, or grab him and hold on. She lay still.

“It's me.” She knew he still couldn't see it. “Close your eyes.”

He didn't look anywhere close to doing that. Not when it would give Zero the jump on him. He glared at her.

“Please. Close your eyes. Listen to my voice. Feel my face.”

He struggled, seemingly debating, and then, staring her in the eye, shut his own.

“Can you hear me? I love you,” she said. “I loved you the first moment I saw you at Xenon, when you came through the crowd toward me. I knew you were coming to help me. I saw it in everything about you.”

He opened his eyes. He looked at her for an excruciating second. Then he took the gun from her head. He exhaled as though he couldn't get any air.

“Oh, God.” He knelt on one knee, staring at her with horror.

“If we don't get out of here,” she said, “it gives Zero and Travis everything they've wanted since day one. They'll get away with killing us, and with killing Drew, and burning down Xenon. If we die, nobody will know you were right, that there was a third shooter. They won't know the phantom is real.”

“You—it's really you.”

“Really.”

He reached out with an unsteady hand and brushed his fingers across her cheek. He seemed to be fighting with himself. As though he understood that all his sensory inputs were giving him one set of data, and his brain was giving him another.

Tears leaked from Harper's eyes and ran down her face toward the floor. “Trust me. Please.”

His face was torn. She put her hand on his.

“Hear me. Even if it seems crazy to you. It's me. Really me, not him in disguise.”

She put her hand around the back of his neck and pulled him toward her. He resisted, then he didn't. She lifted her head and put her lips to his ear.

“You don't have to hide from me. I see you.”

She kissed his cheek, shaking. Then he turned his head and kissed her on the mouth.

A second later, he set the shotgun down and clutched her in his arms. He scanned her face. He looked like he was fighting himself, like his heart and his sight were scraping against each other. Behind him, at the high windows, the police lights swirled.

“We're out of time,” she said. “Zip tie. Cut my foot loose from the chain.”

He slipped the knife under the plastic and slit the tie. Then he cut through the duct tape that bound her left hand inside the pocket, and she shucked off Zero's sweatshirt.

“Zero's still here someplace,” she said. “Travis took Piper. He said they were going someplace where they could watch. And we gotta get going before the cops come in.”

She scrambled to her feet. Aiden picked up the shotgun. He was slowly recovering his balance and bearings.

A second later, she realized why she didn't need to hear the sound of a battering ram to herald the cops breaching the room. The rolling door to the outside droned into action and started to clatter open. The cops had found the controls.

She hesitated. If they surrendered, could they withstand the SWAT team storming the building? The strobes were insane. Seeing them clearly, discerning their intentions, would be difficult.

“Aiden, put down the gun and raise your hands.”

Aiden bent to set the shotgun on the floor—just as the flash-bang grenade rolled through the door. A second later, from the catwalk above them, Zero began firing at the cops.