Dreamlands (7 page)

I enjoyed working out with Okita and the rest of the samurai.

They all seemed proud of me when I improved and started holding my own with them in practice bouts. And Samojirou was right, they were all filled with advice on how I should “handle” him. That caused me to blush a lot, so they teased me even more. But it wasn’t mean teasing, they respected him and Tamazusa. It took me a while to understand that, because I didn’t understand their humor.

In fact, in the beginning, I didn’t understand what they were talking about most of the time. A lot of it was because of cultural 41

DREAMLANDS

differences; in the beginning I’d never understood what the TCs were talking about most of the time either. Later…. I didn’t want to know. I just couldn’t understand joking about sex. I thought sex was painful and scary, so why would someone want to joke about it? But I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut, because I didn’t want those people to know how ignorant I was about it.

So after training with the samurai, the rest of my day was usually filled with different lessons, like on manners and the arts. It was fun to learn about flowers and writing and literature, and I felt that all the new things I’d been learning would make my head burst, but it was good after just existing when the Trust had me.

One odd thing for me was the way Tamazusa’s Reavers followed me around like bodyguards. I didn’t know how many were around, but one or two were always near me when I left Samojirou’s quarters. It freaked me out at first, but when the samurai didn’t make a big deal about it, I started to ignore them. Samojirou was amused that they acted like that, so I wasn’t worried about them, even though they were scary.

I vaguely remembered them from that night in Boylston Street―as the

“good” monsters, as weird as that sounds. They killed all the other monsters―the Hákarl―that were eating people. Tamazusa controlled the Reavers in some way, because they had obeyed her, from what little I remember.

When I felt stronger, after I had been here about a week, I started lessons on how to be a girl, or more precisely, a
tayuu
―a prostitute―since I was supposed to be one when I went someplace with Samojirou. I learned how to walk in the high
geta
―sandals―they wore and manage the heavy, colorful kimonos and the large obi that was part of their outfit. I also learned how to flirt, tease, and sound sexy to a man. In short, to be everything I was not but what Sakura would be.

I should have been angry about these lessons. But I couldn’t be.

Samojirou wanted this, and I bowed to his will. I never forgot that the man owned me, no matter how kind he was to me. I knew he could hurt me, and no one would say anything about it. He still scared me sometimes, but all he seemed to want was for me to be a good companion to him. I still didn’t know if I liked men or women for
that,
but Samojirou seemed to be letting me make up my mind about it.

FELICITAS IVEY

42

My tutor for being a
tayuu
was a tiny woman called Yoshinoko, who looked older than my grandmother. The maids were in awe of her, and she commanded the respect from even the roughest of Tamazusa’s samurai. When she came to fetch me for my first lesson, I was in the practice yard. I was sweaty and out of breath, just having finished the morning’s practice. I wondered if I could shrink into the ground as she studied me. Yoshinoko was dressed in a simple but elegant kimono.

The only reason you could tell she wasn’t a married woman was the way her obi was tied in front. She wasn’t even wearing any makeup.

“You?” Yoshinoko asked. She sounded scandalized.

I blushed, and the rest of the men laughed. Yoshinoko slapped Okita on the arm with her fan. He stopped laughing, and so did the others.

I bowed to her. “It’s the will of Samojirou-sama.”

“You seem to have some manners, boy,” she said, frowning a little. “Escort me back to my chambers.” I bowed and followed her out. I felt I was more of a trailing puppy than an escort. I felt like that a lot here. She studied me some more, including watching me wash and change into clean clothing. She continued to frown, and I wondered what I had done wrong when the silence stretched out uncomfortably.

“You will do,” Yoshinoko finally said. She smiled. “In fact, I am going to enjoy this.”

MASON

I GOT stuck listening to the ice bitch Romejinoff whine about the tragedy of that fat pig Heiseg’s death. Anya Romejinoff had been his live-in piece of tail. She was tall and blonde with fine features and pale skin, a woman who walked and acted like she was a supermodel, even 43

DREAMLANDS

though she had dual doctorates in something weird. She could have been a model, if the American public realized that women were supposed to have these things called hips and breasts. Romejinoff wasn’t what you’d call fat. I’d call her―if it didn’t sound so faggy―lush.

My problem with her was that she had been living with Wolf and fucking Heiseg before Wolf caught them at his place, in their bed. It nearly killed him. And now the bitch was crying on Wolf’s shoulder, and he was letting her.

I was still worried about Keno but glad we couldn’t find a sign of him. He hadn’t been among any of the remains that had ended up in anonymous bags. We ID’d those bags by DNA. All the coffins had been closed-casket and sealed, filled with some sort of weight so that it seemed like there was a whole body in there.

Murphy was being an asshole and blaming Keno for whatever happened, because Keno had to be the mad genius who had summoned those things, since he was gone. Never mind that Heiseg had been the expert at weird shit. Never mind that the kid was so scared he wouldn’t say “shit” if he had a mouthful. Wolf and Murphy were still arguing about it, and I was keeping my mouth shut. Murphy knew my opinion about what had happened. He also thought I should be on the back of the bus most of the time. I would have sworn Murphy hated monsters only slightly more than he did non-whites. Fucking asshole.

What stopped everyone’s bitching was McGann walking into the room. The woman looked tired, and while I had had to put up with one prima donna, Romejinoff, McGann had a half dozen fuckin’ stupid assholes demanding she pull a miracle out of her ass and find out what had happened. Those assholes were also known as Trustees, the ones who ran our merry band of monster killers.

The Trust was founded sometime after World War II when America and the rest of the world figured out that Hitler had been making deals with things that weren’t human, monsters that lived in places humans couldn’t, things that hated us and were not entirely of this world, pretty much the shit we now hunted full-time to keep the FELICITAS IVEY

44

rest of humanity safe. America had decided it was going to clean up those monsters along with the rest of the mess from the war.

Our “cover” was that we were a mercenary group, Global International, which actually paid most of the bills. Two-thirds of the guys on the payroll had no clue what we really did. If the public knew what the fuck we were doing, there would be a bigger stink than even I wanted to think about. It would make some of the shit that went down over cloning look like a fuckin’ tea party.

“I have the reports on the ten survivors,” McGann announced wearily.

“And?” Murphy asked.

I shrugged and went to get her a cup of coffee. Not that I usually gave a flying fuck about being nice, but Romejinoff had her claws into Wolf, and he was the gentleman of our partnership.

McGann flashed me a tired smile. She knew the score, since she also was one of the better telepaths the organization had―or at least one of the saner ones―besides being head honcho at Boylston Street and the local shrink for us. She didn’t have much of a life outside this place, but a lot of us didn’t.

She knew I was being nice because Wolf couldn’t be. She was slightly shorter than the ice bitch, a lighter blonde and skinnier.

Someone that most of America thought a woman should look like―a clothes hanger―because her talent took a lot of energy. I thought she was hot, though, because she definitely had a better personality than the ice bitch. I wasn’t just a tit man like most people thought I was.

“While there are the usual psychiatric reports, the Trustees thought that this was serious enough that the telepaths at Waltham should do brain dives,” McGann said.

Waltham, our nuthouse, had their own ’paths who got stuck with these types of shitty jobs. They also were usually only a couple of baby steps from being
in
the nuthouse instead of working at it. While ’paths were rare, they also burned out fast because they couldn’t handle half the shit they picked up―their brains were like radios on loud all the 45

DREAMLANDS

time around other human beings. You were good enough, though, you could turn down the noise and save your sanity. About one in ten thousand human beings, according to the gossip I heard, could be a

’path.

“And?” Romejinoff demanded.

“Yeah, how did the gook do it?” Murphy demanded.

Wolf’s fists tightened at that comment. McGann glared at Murphy. Hell, I didn’t know what she was pissed about. We all knew that Murphy was a racist, but she was one of the white folk, and he’d never say something like that about her. Or he might because she was a

’path. I hadn’t been surprised to find out he didn’t like them either. I wasn’t too fond of them myself, but it wasn’t something they could help, just like skin color.

“It wasn’t Keno,” McGann said softly.

Wolf relaxed, and I felt a weight lifted off me. Not that I had thought he’d done it, but Murphy’s opinion was a popular one; not the gook part, but that Keno was the bad guy because he had finally snapped, killed a shitload of people, and escaped. I wasn’t going to be the one who pointed out such small details like the kid had never shown any backbone before this and that it was fucking hard to escape through two feet of ceramic-metal alloy blast doors. Gossips never liked those tiny details.

Romejinoff was looking at McGann. I noticed the bitch still looked damned good even if she had spent the last hour crying on Wolf’s shoulder; or maybe she had been faking it to get closer to him.

Romejinoff was many things, but stupid wasn’t one of them. Wolf

“comforting” her for her grief would get her closer to him and maybe back into his bed. She was also one of the reasons I had been hoping Wolf would finally realize that Keno had the hots for him and maybe do something about it. Fussing over the kid would have kept her off his radar.

“What happened?” Romejinoff asked, her voice quivering.

“James―”

FELICITAS IVEY

46

“While none of the survivors are too coherent, they have almost the same memories,” McGann said. “Keno is innocent in all of them. In fact,” she paused, “it seems that he was a victim also.”

“What happened?” Wolf demanded.

McGann at least had the brains and the balls to look guilty. That’s one of the things I liked about her: she could admit that she screwed up.

“It seems that Heiseg took advantage of him.” Wolf looked blank, trying to figure out the euphemism while Romejinoff looked pissed. Her English was better than his. Better than mine, in fact. “James would never!”

“It’s not about sex, sister,” I snarled. “It’s about power, and McGann and Murphy let it be known that they didn’t give a shit about Keno from the beginning.”

“Fuck off!” Murphy protested.

“Shut the fuck up,” I growled. “Kid spent most of the time hiding when he realized that. Techs always were pushing him around, and I know a couple of the TCs wanted to hear him squeal like a pig because he was so pretty, but they hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Not like Keno was going anyplace.”

“You don’t have to be so crude,” McGann murmured.

“Crude would be mentioning the fact that
James,
” I said, mimicking Romejinoff’s tone, “did more than Keno that night. He nailed all the techs who still had something for him to stick his cock into. All the women, at least, because the men were dinner for Hákarl, and after he fucked the girls, he let the Hákarl eat them.”

“Kairns!” McGann protested.

“Heiseg had traces of a lot of people on him that night,” I continued. “And enough crap in his system to do them all, plus assorted other drugs. The man was bugfuck insane with all the shit that was floating through his system.”

47

DREAMLANDS

Romejinoff looked like she wanted to go through the floor. Wolf started rubbing her back as she started crying again. Murphy was pissed. “What about the monsters?” Murphy asked. “The Hákarl?” There had been about three dozen of the damned things, torn apart either by each other, arguing about dinner, or by something else. By another kind of monster, from the tracks we found during clean up.

They were probably the ones that had marched in from nowhere, the ones I was certain had Keno. Although he was probably safer with them than he had been here, even if they
were
monsters.

“They seemed to have been summoned by Heiseg,” McGann said.

“Anya, I am so sorry to say this to you, but I don’t think that James was a well man. There are some anomalies on his psych reports that I was not told about. I think that the stress of his studies had gotten to him.”

“He was working longer hours,” Romejinoff said slowly. She looked embarrassed. “I thought that he was having an affair, but I didn’t want to confront him about it. But he would come home occasionally smelling of another woman’s perfume after working most of the night. I thought that….”

I was pretty sure she hadn’t wanted to lose her comfy bunk with the man. The ice bitch was smart, but she was also a whore. Romejinoff had an education and options, so I never understood her putting up with Heiseg, who was an asshole and a snob. Personally, I thought he was scum and that Romejinoff had been fucking Heiseg to get back at Wolf for something.

“Why didn’t you…?” Wolf trailed off.

Romejinoff just looked at him. I wanted to smack him. Even I knew that dishing dirt on your present fuck to your past one isn’t a good idea. Wolf looked confused, and McGann shook her head. He really was
that
nice a guy. I knew Romejinoff was hoping he would take her back. I was hoping she’d be shipped back to Russia.