Soul and Blade (15 page)

The words ring in my head.

It might be true.

In my first run in Rory’s head, I saw his face when I woke from a coma. He was the doctor. I lift my gaze. “Your face was the first one I saw, wasn’t it?” It isn’t completely a question. I know it’s the truth.

“Yes.”

I gulp, contemplating just shooting him and leaving. Footsteps startle me, pulling me from that idea. I turn back behind me to see the wolfhound. He’s so huge for such a small puppy. He barrels toward me, sniffing and jumping. “Sirius!” Dash calls, but the pup doesn’t listen.

I lift a hand, scratching his ears and his head. “Are all my reactions because of you and your lies about who I am?”

“No. We restarted you to be like any amnesiac. You recall how to chew or swallow or walk or what your personal choices are as far as favorites go. Those are instinctual, not memory based. They are who you are. We could not take that away. We took only long-term memories. The scars they created are still there. Sometimes I see them in your eyes.”

I close my eyes and scratch the dog’s ears, hating that I even feel the way I do about Dash. “Did you make me love you?”

“Of course not. When I met you again, you were a fully formed woman with skills that frightened me. You had grown into a soldier in those ten years. I had kept track of you, of course. But I wasn’t stalking you. I had been engaged and broken it off and lived half a life by the time we were reunited.”

“When you let me into your head at the end of training, you told me I wouldn’t remember it. I wouldn’t form memories of it.”

“Do you remember it?”

“No. But I think Rory showed it to me.”

He gets up, walking to me. The dog sits in front of me, snuggled in. I wrap an arm around him, hugging and needing an anchor.

Dash sits on the cold marble across from me. The shadows play with his features, scaring me with what I see and what I imagine. “Rory knew about you, about your past. Angela told him in a moment of intimacy. She called me straightaway to tell me she’d done it. I panicked and asked you to marry me before I’d even explained my family or any of the other things about me, or you. I wanted you to know I loved you more than anything and that was my way of showing it, in case Rory decided to tell you. I never wanted you to find out who and what you were. It changes nothing, and there’s nowhere in your past that will explain who you are better than when we are together.”

It is at least an attempt at trying to explain how he had handled his family so badly and why the engagement had come out of nowhere. It doesn’t explain why he thought getting married would solve anything.

Technically, at this point, everything is likely to be a lie, even if it feels true. I don’t care about anything else. I just want my one answer. “Did you go to the brothel with your brother?”

“No. I told you I didn’t.”

I heave a little, I can’t stop it. He rushes at me, but I pull the gun, my hand shaking as I extend it and point it at him.

My hand never shakes.

“You made me a monster. I don’t remember my life. You took it away and fed me lies and made me love you.”

“I swear—”

“
Shut up
!” I jerk the gun. “Nothing you say will ever be the truth to me! You are a liar and you made me hollow and blank! I am a lie!” I tremble everywhere, lowering the gun and getting up quickly. I hear the dog chasing me as I run for my cat, but I don’t hear Dash. I grab the cat carrier and run out the door and across the grass.

The grass is damp and my feet push in hard.

I almost dive into the helicopter, but I stop. I need one answer. Just one. I turn and look back at the house, clinging to my poor cat in his carrier. Dash walks through the door, holding his dog. I walk back to him a little bit so he can hear me, but not too close. “Did you make up all my triggers?”

“The four-leaf clover is yours. The purple scarf, yours. The cat named Binx, yours. The rhymes about bullets made of blood and bone and the swans circling, they’re yours. I don’t know where they came from. The French house in the country was the one I took you to in my head. It was my grandmother’s cottage for quiet time. You loved it.”

I take a step back. “You took everything.”

His green-gray eyes are filled with emotion. “I tried to take away all the bad and give you good in its place. I just wanted you to be okay.”

My lip trembles.

“But I had no twin sister! No mother and father! No car accident! That was everything that got me through all this bullshit! Through basic and the military and being a fucking assassin! Goddammit, that is who I think I am! Who am I, if not that?”

“I just wanted you to be a whole person. No leftovers from some horrid life.”

“Why did you care?”

“Because I lov—loved you. I-I loved you from the start.” He stutters and walks toward me, but I step back. I turn and run away from him, climbing into the helicopter. I slam the door and stare at him, wondering how I ended up here. This reality is so much worse than the fiction of a mind run.

15. SHE TALKS TO ANGELS

T
he gun in my hand barely moves as I squeeze the trigger, hitting the man in the eye each time. I can shoot. That’s normal. That’s mine.

I chant these things a lot, making myself see the chanting in Rory’s head was mine. I think more than a few things in Rory’s head were mine. It’s been weeks of me processing, and the longer I think about it all, the messier it becomes.

I have spent the last two weeks telling myself that talking to Rory is not the answer, even if I think he has answers. The man is likely to be even crazier than ever from being isolated in his own dirty little world for weeks on end. There will be no answers from him, only more annoyances.

I am done with being fucked with.

I put the gun down and pull off my safety glasses and earmuffs.

“You have a caller, Jane,” the owner, Mr. Christianson, shouts to me from the door in the back of the shooting range. I turn and give him a wave, but I can’t imagine who would be calling me here.

I put my gun in the holster and stalk over to the door. Through the glass I see he means a person calling
on
me, not a phone call. I sigh and open the door, immediately enraged seeing his remorseful green-gray eyes. I lean against the door when it closes. “What?”

“I need to talk to you.” Dash looks upset, but I force myself to not care, just barely. “Please, just a quick walk around the block. Maybe minus the gun.”

“Scared?” I lift my eyes, almost grinning at him, but I’m afraid he’d take it the wrong way. He’s been calling and texting nonstop for the entire two weeks I have been avoiding all life forms beyond my cat and my loving neighbor.

“Actually yes. I am scared of you with a gun.”

Mr. Christianson snorts and mutters under his breath, “Wise man.”

“Fine. But remember that I don’t need the gun,” I warn before smiling at Mr. Christianson. “Thanks.”

“See you next week, Jane.” He eyes Dash as I empty my gun and put it in the lockbox. I carry it to my car, Dash’s car, our car. I put it in the trunk and realize I should give the car back. “I’ll give the car back as soon as I have a chance to get a different one, if it’s all the same to you.”

“I need to explain.”

I turn and give him a look as I close the trunk. “Explain what? I think you did that.”

“Why I left when you went back into Rory.”

That makes me smile bitterly. “I know why you left. You knew he would show me and I would kill you.”

“I hadn’t changed his nanobot the way they wanted me to when you went in the first time. I had it limited so that he was unable to enter your world. That was a risk if we did the changes they wanted to make. The world was entirely his the first time, apart from a few similarities that you brought to the table. But the changes we made the second time you went in allowed him to enter your mind, with the understanding you would have more control. Suck him into your world a little. But that gave a skilled operator the ability to scour your mind and use things inside of your head against you.”

“I get it. You were worried about what he ended up showing me, so you ran.”

“I was worried he would hurt you, and I didn’t run. I gave you space.” He sighs, his attempt at not having an accent diminished. Dash-with-an-accent reminds me of something. “I gave you some room to be angry and hate me. I had planned on coming to see you on the third or fourth day, hoping you had calmed down a bit.”

“Well, you didn’t have to worry about giving me space, just breaking my heart. I’m dense enough that I didn’t put any of it together. I thought you broke up with me due to anger, without actually breaking up with me. Rory was elusive and Antoine slipped up, so I had some idea that you had been lying to me.”

He can’t hide the surprise on his face. “You didn’t know until you came
to see me? Antoine gave me a heads-up when he got off the phone with you. I was ready for you to kill me. He believed you knew everything.”

“No. That’s why I asked you to tell me the story. I knew nothing.”

A grin creeps across his mouth. “So deceptive.”

“You mean for someone with no brain in their head? I guess.”

His humor flees the second the words leave my mouth. “Jane, that is not what I think.”

I shrug. “I never want to see you again, Dash. I just want you to pretend that we worked together once for a couple years and that’s that. I don’t want to see you and I don’t want to hear you. And I don’t want to know you. It’s been lie after lie after lie.”

“I fucked up.” He never cusses.

I don’t say anything else. I don’t need to. I know what I know and I believe none of it. I am a Frankenstein brain-damage victim.

“I fucked up,” he repeats, and for the first time I see just how broken he is. He is devastated. But I am too far gone to care.

“Do you really want the story, Jane?”

I shrug again. “I want the truth maybe. Not a story, Dash. You took away the only good things in my life and left me standing alone on the road.
Fucked up
doesn’t really cover what you’ve done. Thus far I’ve learned that my best friend is a liar. Her ex-boyfriend is a pervert who has tortured and mocked me. The entire family I thought I once had is a figment of some doctor’s imagination. My childhood likely contains more things than I can handle. I was the victim of something so bad, it left me brain damaged and in a coma. You never told me what it was, so I have to guess it was horrific. And the worst part, for me, is that the man I loved more than anything, the man who got me through every nightmare and saved me from every dark corner, was the biggest lie of them all. If you don’t mind, I don’t want to spend the rest of my fucked-up life dwelling on all of that.” I am so close to tears that I can’t bear it. I toss him the keys to the Mercedes. “On second thought, just take it now. Keep the gun.” I walk away, crossing the parking lot of the gun range. “Good-bye.”

“Jane!”

My heart clogs my throat and my stomach is quivering and threatening to come back up. I turn, as the tears I am desperately trying to rein in slip from my eyes. “You know the funny part? I brought my cat to your house because I was admitting defeat. I was wrong to go into Rory’s mind. I was wrong not to respect you telling me it wasn’t safe. And I knew it. I knew I was wrong and I missed you, so I was coming to beg you for forgiveness. That’s why I came to the castle you call a house.” I laugh at the irony and turn and walk away.

It’s about the saddest moment in my life.

Not the death of my pretend sister. Or the painful loss of my fake parents. Not the pretend worlds I thought I lived in. Or the real minds I ran through.

No.

The saddest moment is walking away from that man. And my gun.

I catch a cab, wishing I still had a car or even my helicopter, to the military base no one knows is a base. I flash my credentials at the kiosk and am buzzed through.

A man greets me at the front door. “How can we be of service, Master Sergeant?” he asks with a salute.

I salute him back, and nod. “You have a prisoner here I wish to speak to.”

“Prisoner?” He sounds confused. If the world knew some of the worst military criminals were kept in downtown DC, they would flip out. I nod my head at the wall that I know contains an elevator into the ground where the cells and extreme military guards are.

“Rory Guthrie. I need to see him.”

His eyes widen. “We do not have—”

I sigh and pull out my phone, pressing a number in my recent calls.

“This better be good, I am a busy man for God’s sake. Spears?”

“Sorry, sir. Can you just tell the officer in charge at the DC brig that I am allowed to see Rory?”

“I can, but why the fuck do you want me to do that?” The president’s military years come back to him quickly in a decent amount of sailor talk. “Are you fucking kidding me, Spears? What is going on?”

“I need to ask him some questions for my own peace of mind. I’m sure you understand. You can record it for your records if you like. Something might come of it.”

“Fine,” he barks, and I hand the phone over to the officer in charge. He takes it hesitantly, his eyes widening and his mouth dropping. “Yes—yes, sir. Of course, sir. Yes. Thank—”

I take the phone back from the baffled man. “He hangs up on me all the time too.”

He gives me a look. “Who the hell are you?”

I shrug. “That is the question of the day.”

I turn and walk to the wall where the door is. It takes an eye scan to open it. I lean forward. I have been here before.

The light turns green and the wall slides away, sounding heavy and thick. I step into the elevator, again allowing a scan of my eyes. The man stares at me in disbelief. “Floor seven,” he says as the doors close. I press the seven and we descend into the earth. The elevator dings after a second. I step out where two men with assault rifles stare at me with their guns pointed. I lean forward and scan my eyes again before they lower their weapons. They then salute.

I nod, saluting back. “Rory Guthrie, please.”

They look puzzled, but one turns and walks to a door on the right. He scans his fingerprints and then his eyes. The door slides open, again sounding heavy. I walk to it, instantly shuddering when I see him.

Rory’s behind Plexiglas in a bright-orange jumpsuit. He lifts his face, smiling wide. “I knew you’d be back.” He looks sickly, as anyone would after weeks in a drug-induced coma. His eyes are shifty and his face is slack, as if he is drugged even now. Mind running has made a mess of us both.

I sit in the chair as the two men stand guard, listening to our conversation. The male and female prisoners in the cells are trained to the highest level; there is a reason they are kept under such strict guard. I lean back and sigh. “You set me up.”

“Aye.” He nods, sitting and leaning forward on his bed. He sighs and swallows funny, like his throat has thickened. “I did. I am sorry for that, Jane. I wish I had been there the moment ya realized ya were nothing but an urchin like me.”

“You think I care about being an urchin?” I pause and then just ask the thing I want to know. “Why do you hate me, Rory?”

“Are ya kidding me?” His dark-blue eyes are hazy. I can tell they’ve been drugging him for a while. Honestly, if I were the guards, I would drug him too. “I don’t hate ya, Jane. I love ya. I have always loved ya. I hated what they did to ya. When Angie told me what Dash had done, I was furious.”

“You tormented me.”

“Ya like it rough. I know ya do.” He laughs and taps his temple. “I’ve seen what’s in there, ya do remember that.”

“I want to know what you saw in there.”

He shrugs. “I didn’t see nothing ya don’t remember already.”

I close my eyes and sigh. “What did you see?”

“What’s it worth?”

“Nothing to me. But for you, it’s a moment to redeem yourself for the horrible things you’ve done.”

His eyes dart to the right and left. “I got nothing to feel bad about. I lived the life I was meant to with the cards I was dealt. I didn’t have it all erased like a little bitch. I suffered through. On my own. Persevered.”

His words don’t hurt me. I didn’t run from my past. It was taken from me on purpose. “I feel sorry for you, Rory. Sorry that you won’t ever love anyone and no will ever love you.”

He winks, but I can see the words have hit him. “Ya loved me for a minute, Jane.”

“I didn’t know you.”

He laughs again and I can see he’s crazy. He’s gone. I get up, but he jumps to his feet giving me a desperate look. “They made me think Dash has a nano with your old memories. He had to collect them with something, didn’t he, then? But I think he covered them up, and they still exist. Ya just need triggers to find them again.”

“If he took them, then you really didn’t see anything in my past.”

“No. I might have lied a bit on that one.” He shrugs, but I think he’s having a second of clarity. “Blank slate in yer head. But I did see him in the rehab center, rebuilding ya. Some mushy shite in there. But you bitches always fall for the mushy shite. There’s layers in yer head, Jane. They’re trying to hide something from ya.”

I lift my middle finger and then look down at it like I’m surprised it’s there. He laughs and I walk out. I will do my best to never see him again.