Last Line (23 page)

A faint metallic
ping
brought him back. It was quite distinctive. Straightening, Michael dried his face on a tea towel, then went to pull open the back door.

It was strange. Every time he decided he would never smile again, never feel anything but sorrow, Quin’s varying efforts at cunning made him want to break into laughter. He restrained himself. Quin, having very clearly just let down the VW’s bonnet, was now attempting to pocket something unseen. He threw Michael a too-bright smile. “Are you all right? I was just coming in.”

Michael nodded. He leaned on the door frame. “Not bad. What is it, then? The spark plugs?”

Quin’s shoulders sagged. “Shit.”

“It’s okay. Pulling the rotor from under the distributor works better.” Michael held out a hand, and Quin surrendered the oily, still-hot plugs into his palm. “Don’t try it tonight, son, please. Or anything else. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You won’t.”

Quin sounded weary. But his head was high, and he met Michael’s gaze squarely. Michael wondered what it would take to replace the trust in his eyes with betrayal. He steered him gently into the kitchen, pulled out a chair for him at the table. “Still like your PG Tips with sugar? Or have they converted you to ginseng at those fancy schools of yours?”

“Mineral water,” the boy said tiredly. “Tea and coffee are toxins. They might set off my attention deficit disorder. Or my hyperactivity syndrome. I can’t remember which I’m meant to have.”

“Shall we take our chances?”

“I will if you will.”

Michael poured tea for both of them and sat opposite Quin. He rested his elbows on the table and pushed his fingers into his hair. His hands smelled charred, as if he’d been rearranging furniture in hell. “I’m sorry to have brought you here.”

Quin stirred his tea. “It’s okay. That Anzhel bloke could…make you do anything, couldn’t he?” He shot Michael a wry look, the exact equivalent of John’s. “Anyway, I think
I
brought
you
.”

“Yes, you did. Thank you.”

“Do you think it’ll work? Being here, I mean… Do you think it’ll stop you?”

“I don’t know.” Michael lifted the mug to his lips, but it was a gesture only. His throat was tightly sealed. He wouldn’t eat or drink until this was over. “It hurts less here. But I don’t know.”

“Do you want me to put the lights on?”

“No. I need the ghosts.” Michael shook his head. “Sorry. I know I sound like a nutcase. I mean I just want to be able to see out of the windows properly. For when somebody comes.”

A shadow of fear brushed Quin’s face. “Who do you think will come? Apart from John?”

“John?” Michael’s voice quivered on the word. “He won’t come here.”

“He will. He will, Mike. He said to me in the car—he’s on his way.”

“No. You don’t understand. There’s some things you’re young to worry about, but me and your brother… I’ve screwed all that up.”

“With John? Hang on. Which part am I not meant to understand?”

“Well…any of it, I’d hoped.” Michael rubbed his eyes. “Sorry. Don’t mean to treat you like a kid. It’s just when I met you, you were only twelve, and you’re kind of frozen in time for me.”

“Rubbish. You’re the only one who’s noticed I’m
not
twelve anymore. I know John’s gay. And I know he had a boyfriend a week, but whenever he came to see me, he never shut up about you. It was Michael this, Michael that. What you said, what you did, what you thought about things.”

Michael quirked a smile. “I’m sorry he bored you so.”

“No. I wanted to hear. Better than listening to him bang on about whichever brilliant school he’d discovered for me next. And when we all came down here, I just assumed…you’d sorted out your differences. That you were together.”

“We were sleeping in separate rooms, Quin.”

The boy shook his head, as if in appeal not to be teased with technicalities. “I don’t mean like that. Well, maybe I do, but that’s not the important part. I’d see you both outside, working on the walls or arguing over whose turn it was to go and get more pig manure for the garden, and—”

“I know. We’re all about the romance.”

“And I knew he loved you.”

“Quin. Don’t.”

“No matter who he was running around with. Just you.”

Michael had covered his face with his hands. He was trying not to see his world as Quin evoked it. Because there it had been—in the domestic trivia, the ordinary business of life here with John. A look across the table, across a half-dug trench in the garden, that told him he was loved. And he had taken that and broken it.

His ghosts shifted. His grandfather turned and dissolved into the stonework in the place where a door had used to be. All around him, Michael felt the house the old man had built crouch down, like a beast at bay, defensive and waiting. His mother flickered to the window and stood glancing out of it and back to him, her eyes bright as stars. And a moment later, Quin heard it too—the distant purr of an engine. He jumped to his feet. “It’s John! I told you, didn’t I? I knew he’d come.”

“Sit down and be quiet.”

“No. The lights are out. He might not know we’re here. Let me go and let him in!”

Michael pushed wearily upright. His head was throbbing. He couldn’t bear much more, and it was with gentle thoroughness that he took hold of Quin and lifted him away from the door. “If I told you to run, would you do it?”

“Not a chance.”

“If I begged you. Let yourself out through the living room window and run. Don’t stop, don’t look back.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

“Oh God, Quin. If I had a kid, I’d give almost anything for him to be like you. But that’s not John.”

* * *

A cold wind was blowing. It came from unknown spaces to the east and curled itself round the farmhouse, testing the windows. Michael heard it cut through the sultry, airless night, and he took up position in front of the door. He’d never had a proper lock put on it, to John’s disgust. He’d learned very young that there was little point, that trouble would find you regardless. He waited.

The door swung wide. Beyond it there was only empty dark. From the corner of his eye, he saw Quin huddle back into a corner, truly frightened at last. Cold air filled the kitchen, dank and heavy with ozone.

Between one blink and the next, Anzhel was there. He filled the doorway, a darkness on darkness. All his lights were out. His hair was slicked back and thick with soot, and Michael could see that one side of his face was charred. He stepped into the room. “Not bad,” he said. “Not a bad run for it at all, though it’s a shame you didn’t get time to train junior here to notice when he’d picked up a tail. I’m tired now, Mikhaili. It’s all over. Come with me.”

Michael was glad to. Resistance had become a fingertip grasp on the edge of a cliff. Painful, pointless. To let go and fall at last, a deadly relief. He reached into his pocket and took out the detonator. Anzhel examined it briefly, then handed it back. “All right. You have to do it yourself. You understand that? Then you can rest.” He smiled, an uneasy flicker in the shadows. “I’ll take care of you then. You’re mine once this is over. Oriel promised you to me.”

“Oriel burned. You should have burned.”

“You should know by now it takes more than that. Come on.”

Somewhere far off in the house, glass shattered and fell. The sound was tiny. On any other night, any night other than this pin-drop, heartbeat silence, Michael might not have heard it. He tried not to show that he had. It had been liquid somehow, a trickle of water to arid lips in a desert. He and John had reglazed the big west-facing windows themselves, only a few weeks ago. The large sheets of glass had been hard to source. They’d spent an afternoon hunting round reclamation yards in Shepton Mallet and joked with one another about the penalties for getting locked out and breaking in that way. No, each big sash had a grid of little panes above it. Break one of those, they had agreed. Small and easy to replace, and then it was only a matter of reaching in and unlocking the lower frame.

Michael tried to keep Anzhel walking. For a moment he thought it had worked. Anzhel looked diminished, tarnished somehow, as if their encounter in the church had drained him. He and Michael could fall together now, carry out Oriel’s bidding, burn up, and disappear. “Come on,” Michael said in his turn. “I’m ready. I want this to be over too.”

But Quin had struggled to his feet and was staring in the direction of the sound. He was bright as a star, Michael thought, but he had used up all his store of grownup resourcefulness and calm. He was a kid again, shaking with relief at the prospect of rescue. “It’s John,” he whispered, ignoring Michael’s warning glance. “Mike, it is. He’s come.”

“What? Your poor zaichik of a partner?” Anzhel wheeled round, dragging Michael with him. “You’re kidding me. After all the trouble we took to get rid of him? How have you done it, Mikhaili? How have you made these people—John, this boy—love you so much that they won’t let you go?”

“I haven’t. They don’t know what I am.” Michael tore his arm out of Anzhel’s grasp and stood in front of him, blocking his path. “John doesn’t know. You’re not going to hurt him anymore.”

Anzhel nodded. There was a kind of weary pain in his eyes, a loss. He took out the gun from his belt and handed it to Michael with a gesture that was almost a shrug. “No. You’re right. Not me.”

Michael frowned. He couldn’t hear his partner’s approach beyond the door—how silently John would move, threading the familiar dark!—but he knew he was coming as surely as Quin did. Michael didn’t know or care why Anzhel had surrendered. It didn’t matter. To set eyes on John would be enough. He’d never expected to see him again. His heart gave a painful lurch of joy. John would be in the hallway by now. He would take three catlike paces, four. A pause before the next one—listening, assessing—then a graceful step back to press his spine against the wall. He was virtually ambidextrous but preferred to lead into an unknown scene from the left. Michael would come automatically to cover his right.

To cover the blind spot he now moved into, raising Anzhel’s gun. He glanced reassuringly at Quin, whose face was a mask of horror.
Everything’s okay. Stay still
. The door from the hallway swung half an inch open, then another. Then John stepped through, took one look at his brother and Anzhel, and snapped up his weapon. “Quin! You all right? Where’s Mike?”

“I’m here.”

John froze. Michael was so close behind him, he felt it: the sudden stilling of every muscle. He was close enough to inhale the scent of John’s hair, and he did so, eyes stinging with tears of pleasure. John must have been home. He’d showered. Beneath the curling, still-damp strands was the place where a bullet would cause such devastation that not even an instant of pain would be felt, not even a flicker of surprise. Michael ran the snout of his H&K up the delicate vertebrae of John’s neck, counting. There. Right between the occipital bones at his nape, the exquisite hollow that seemed designed to take the shot. He put his arm around John’s shoulders and drew him gently back against him. “Griff, you’d better give Anzhel your weapon.”

“Okay.” John sounded calm. He clicked the safety back into place and extended the Walther to Anzhel in a steady hand. “You…you’ve got your gun to my head. You do know that, right?”

“Yes.”

“All right. Just checking. Because…you’ve been a bit shaky lately.”

“I’m sorry. It won’t be for long.”

“Uncle Mike!”

Oh God, that was Quin. Michael had half forgotten about him, and wholly forgotten how the kid looked when he cried. He’d only seen it once or twice, in the early days before Quin had grown his stiff upper lip and his shields. He was huddled in a corner by the fridge, sobbing unashamedly in fright. “Is it a trick? Are you gonna do something?”

“Yeah, he is. Don’t you worry, kiddo. I tell you what, Mikey… Whatever it is you
are
gonna do, you might be decent and not make my little brother watch.”

“Of course.” Mortification swept through Michael, as if he’d forgotten Quin’s birthday or left him at a station somewhere. “Sorry. Quin, you can go.”

“No! I told you I wouldn’t leave!”

“
Ideet svieya komnetta
!”

Anzhel shrugged as Quin and John unwillingly looked to him for translation. “Er—that’s
go to your room
, more or less. Might be best if you did,
boychik
. I won’t stop you.”

“Fuck you! I don’t have to do anything you tell me, you mind-bending bloody lunatic!”

“Quin!” John snapped, and Michael heard the ripple of laughter in it even now, and loved him and loved the boy so intensely he thought his heart would burst, and eased the gun a little deeper against John’s skull. “
Not
helping. Do as you’re told. It’ll be okay. I promise.”

“That’s right.” Anzhel nodded encouragingly. He didn’t seem to mind being called names, and his expression as he held the door for Quin was almost benevolent. “Don’t try to leave or call anyone. It’s good, you know, Griffin, that he has this spirit. He’ll need it.”

“What’s he to you? All he needs at the moment—all I need—is for you to quit screwing with Michael’s head and let him go.”

“That’s just it.” Anzhel closed the door and came to lean on the kitchen cabinets facing John. “It’s like the ropes now, with your Mikhaili. You don’t have to tie him. The idea’s enough. And I don’t need to sing to him anymore. A glance will do, a suggestion.”

“Oh God. Tell me what you did to him. So if we ever get out of here…so I can help him.”

“Well, that’s academic now for you. But there are things I want
him
to know, just so he understands whose creature he is, how completely he’s owned. Mikhaili!”

Michael stirred. He had begun to feel sleepy, and John felt so good in his arms. They had never simply slept together. He’d never had the chance to hold him from behind, bury his nose in the crook of his shoulder and neck and fall asleep under Glastonbury stars. “Yes, Anzhel?”

“Three years ago—nearly four, now that you’ve had your time on the run with your
lubovnik
here—Lukas Oriel handed me an MI5 agent he’d captured and tried to break. You were a novelty to him, Mikhaili. You were his first failure. He gave me strictest orders to pick up where he’d left off. You were terribly special to him.”