MORTAL COILS (13 page)

Fiona
pushed through the kitchen door. She looked on the verge of tears.

Sweat
soaked through the layers of cotton T-shirt, apron, and pink dress. Marinara
sauce spattered her from chin to knees.

“Double
table of Lord of the Flies kids,” she said, and took a deep breath. “I’m ready
for a break.”

“I
was just about to step out back,” Eliot told her. “Get some fresh air.”

She
nodded, and they moved to the back door.

He’d
broach the subject of Mike outside. They’d come up with some plan to get him
off their backs.

Mike
slammed into the kitchen. “Fiona wait,” he called after her.

She
stopped and turned, her hands clasping each other so tight they were white.

Mike
with his wavy, combed-back hair and his strong chin looked clean, fresh, and
honest—everything he actually wasn’t.

“I
wanted to talk to you,” Mike said. He glanced at Johnny and Eliot. “You guys
give us a second?”

Johnny
rubbed his face. Eliot could tell he didn’t want to leave Fiona alone with
Mike. But Mike was the boss, and Johnny had a family to support with this job.
He pulled the basket out of the deep fryer so the potatoes didn’t burn. A few
more drops of grease spattered onto the floor. “I’ll take a smoke out back.”

Eliot
crossed his arms over his chest. There was no way he was leaving Fiona alone.

Mike
glared at Eliot for a full five seconds.

“Okay,”
Mike said with a sigh, “you might as well hear this, too, squirt.”

Fiona
stood as tall as she could and stepped closer to Eliot, but her eyes couldn’t
quite rise off the floor. “What do you want?” she said.

Mike
held up both hands, again in his patented “calm down” gesture. “I wanted to say
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to grab you like that.”

But
Mike’s right hand involuntarily flexed, and Eliot wondered if he was
remembering how he took his sister’s arm. From the glint in his eyes, it looked
as if he had enjoyed it.

Eliot
wanted this creep gone from their lives. Forever.

The
little singsong nursery rhyme pranced through his mind.

“Let
me take a look at your elbow.” Mike came closer. He had on his most charming
smile. “Is it bruised?”

Fiona
curled her arm protectively to her body. “Stay away from me.”

Mike
halted and the warmth dissolved from his features. “If you two are thinking
about telling Ringo anything—I was going to try and talk some reason here, but
I think you don’t want to be reasonable.” His lips pursed. “You know what?
Forget it. Both of you just grab your things and go.”

“You
. . . you’re firing us?!” Fiona gasped. “For what?”

Eliot
knew for what. So they wouldn’t tell Ringo that his manager had assaulted one
of his employees. Mike would fire them, and if they said anything, it would
seem as if they were trying to get even. At least that’s what Mike could say
and get away with.

People
like him always got away with it.

Mike’s
lips curled into a cruel smile. He was enjoying this.

“Why?”
Mike said to Fiona. “Because you’re both geeks. Because no one here wants to
work with you. And because I say you’re fired.”

At
that moment, Eliot had never hated anyone so much in his entire life. He wished
Mike were dead.

Mike
moved closer, maybe to better intimidate them, and stepped into a grease spot
on the concrete floor.

He
slipped and pitched face-first toward the deep fryer. One arm shot out to stop
his fall—

—and
it plunged into the boiling oil.

Mike
screamed.

He
rolled away. Fuming oil coated his arm up to the elbow, and the skin cooked and
blistered.

He
writhed on the floor, pulled his arm to him, then flung it away as the heat
burned his chest.

Eliot
and Fiona watched, horrified and dumbfounded for a heartbeat, then darted to
his side.

The
panic that had locked Eliot’s brain vanished. He knew what to do. They’d both
read and reread Marcellus Masters’s Practical First Aid and Surgical Guide.8

8.
Commissioned by Napoléon Bonaparte for his field surgeons. Bonaparte
subsequently ordered all copies burned, proclaiming if such knowledge fell into
the hands of his enemies, they would “gain miraculous powers to rejuvenate
their front lines.” Masters was made inspector general and was allegedly
responsible for saving thousands of French soldiers. Four copies of the manual
are known to exist and reported to have equivalent, in some cases better,
advice to that in modern first-aid guides. Victor Golden, Golden’s Guide to
Extraordinary Books. (Oxford: 1958).

“Water,”
Fiona said.

“The
sink,” Eliot replied. “Careful. Don’t touch his arm.”

They
lifted Mike by the armpits. He moaned and shivered. They dragged him to the
sink and leaned him over the edge, his burned arm dangling into the basin.

Johnny
ducked inside from the alley, cigarette dangling from his open mouth. When he
saw Mike, he crossed himself.

“Call
911,” Eliot shouted at him. “Now!”

Johnny
sprinted to the phone on the wall.

Eliot
swiveled the faucet over Mike’s shoulder and turned on the cold water.

Mike
screamed anew as water flowed down and over his burns. He tried to pull it out
of the stream.

“No,”
Fiona whispered. “Keep it there or you could lose the arm.”

“It’s
still burning,” Eliot told him. “The grease is in your sleeve. We’ve got to
cool it down.”

Mike
kept crying, whimpering, but he ceased trying to yank his arm away. He hung
limp, sobbing, between them.

Eliot
looked at his sister, and she looked at him. He knew that Fiona was thinking
the same thing he was: that Mike had burned his right hand—the one that had
grabbed her.

9

VACATION
INTERRUPTED

Sealiah
lounged under a palm canopy on her private beach on the island of Bora-Bora,
her home away from home.9 The locals feared this place, claiming it was full of
“bad magic,” for when maritime disasters struck, the currents inevitably washed
the bloated bodies onto this shore. Of course, she did nothing to dissuade
these rumors; privacy was a thing to be treasured and, when lost, mourned.

The
gold sun reflected off talc-white sand. Even filtered by the canopy and
mosquito netting, it toasted her body. Her skin was the color of molten bronze,
and a rope of wet coppery hair twined around her neck and throat in a
serpentine embrace. She was full of form but slender enough to have been a
model, which she might have considered as it would have served her unquenchable
vanity . . . but men and women already fell at her feet.

She
sponged off her brow, which was still wet from this afternoon’s skinny-dip. She
had played with the docile gray reef sharks and whipped them into a feeding
frenzy until the waters were red and clouded with bits of the once-living. She
licked her lips, tasted blood, and this blossomed into a rare smile.

It
had been a delightful afternoon . . .

. .
. about to be interrupted.

9.
Although the proper pronunciation of this entity’s name (title?) has mutated
through all of history, most scholars cite the common ancient use of “say-lay”
as the most accurate. Gods of the First and Twenty-first Century, Volume 13:
Infernal Forces, 8th ed. (Zypheron Press Ltd.).

An
intruder was on her beach.

Her
eyes opened to slits, and in her peripheral vision she saw a shadow on the path
where sand met jungle. Whoever cast this shadow obviously wanted her to see it
as it swayed back and forth.

Sealiah
toyed with the emerald that nestled in her navel and pretended to ignore the
dark visitor. Perhaps it was a curious tourist who would grow bored and leave.

But
it stayed there, wavering . . . waiting.

“Come,”
she said with an expelled sigh.

Why
were these moments—just as she was about to fully and completely relax—always,
without fail, with set-your-atomic-clock-by-it precision, interrupted?

She
sat up and was, save for the emerald in her navel and the knife strapped to her
calf, still nude from her earlier swim.

Her
last lover had bragged to his friends, describing her as “raw with feral
beauty.” She had appreciated his compliment, but not so much appreciated his
lack of discretion, and soon thereafter said lover learned exactly how feral
she could be.

The
shadow skulked from the jungle, resolving into a Samoan man in a black silk
windbreaker, shorts, and baseball cap. He fell at her feet, worshipful, his
face nestled an inch from her toes, which, had she allowed, he would have
kissed.

“Enough.”
She waved her hand. “Up, up. Say what you came to tell me and then depart.”

The
man stood, towering two heads over her. He was Urakabarameel, sometimes Mr. Uri
Crumble, or just Uri when she was in a familial mood, her second-in-command of
special operations.

He
backed away a respectful two paces, and with eyes cast to the ground he reached
into his jacket and withdrew a tiny black book that bulged to the bursting
point with extra pages and a rainbow assortment of sticky notes. He opened it,
seemingly at random, and read.

“M’lady
Sealiah,” he said in a rumbling baritone voice, “the London Exchange dropped
eight percent on opening. Our associates in Oxford are nervous. They demand you
shore up the investment.”

“Really?
Well, ‘demands’ in the middle of my vacation are not granted.” She crinkled her
nose. “Sell my shares. I’ll take profit today.”

“That
will cause a run on the three banks in—”

“I
said sell.”

Uri
bowed. “As you command.”

“Let
Britannia burn and sink into the sea for all I care. Next?”

“A
minor thing: the ambassador from Manila has sent you a gift of three Andalusian
mares. I did not know what you wanted done with the animals. He also wishes to
schedule lunch at your earliest convenience.”

“Oh,
how wonderful,” she cried with joy. “Andalusians are not animals, Uri. They are
treasures to be loved.” She tapped her lip with a curved, red fingernail and
thoughtfully hummed. “Have stables constructed at the Subic Bay villa, and I
will teach these magnificent ladies to gallop in the surf of the South China
Sea. Tell the ambassador, Saturday, New York. At Mitsukoshi’s.”

“Very
good.” Uri bowed again and started to back away.

“Was
there anything else?”

“Nothing.
Only a trivial matter that her ladyship need not bother with.” He closed his
book and tucked it into his jacket.

She
grabbed his wrist, digging in her nails. He flinched.

“Show
me.”

Uri
handed her his black book, and she flipped it open with her left hand. She
continued to hold him with her right.

“It
says, ‘Post children.’ Do we know them?”