Blue managed to avoid Daniel after he left Iris. Pete was to blame for that. The old man led him on a circuitous path through the upper backstage levels, an area inhabited only by plainclothes workmen, the occasional guy in a suit, and a couple of harried-looking women hauling costumes in their arms.
A chime rang once.
“First warning,” Pete explained. “It means that everyone who’s performing in the first half had better be in their proper places.”
“You’re not in the show?”
“Used to be. When we were on the road, for sure. Ringmaster, son. Nothing like it in the world. But here in Vegas? This is more of a young man’s game.”
Pete said it with a smile, a hop in his step, but Blue had an ear for bitterness, and he tasted the edge of it in the old man’s voice.
“It wasn’t your choice,” he guessed, quiet. “Management told you to step down, didn’t they?”
Pete faltered, but only for a moment. He schooled his features into a better mask. “The money is good and the job is stable.”
Pete gave him a long, hard look. “A man has to make sacrifices sometimes. Give up one love for another love. Regrets are for sissies.”
Which was an effective way of telling Blue to shut up.
Another chime rang, this one longer. Pete picked up the pace and pushed open a heavy white door. On the other side, darkness, the scent of piped-in air and smoke and perfume. A low buzz filled the air—chatter, the rattle of paper. Pete tugged on Blue’s sleeve and led him onto a narrow catwalk. Just two steps and the stage appeared, spreading in front of Blue like a great wild expanse of props and people. He stood at eye level with the trapeze. The platform hung a good ten feet away.
Blue glanced down. He saw Daniel speaking to some women who were dressed in a similar fashion to him: elaborate bodysuits, heavy makeup that did an impressive job of making them unrecognizable. No one, not even their father, would recognize Daniel in full costume.
Hiding in plain sight. Soon to be one of the richest men in the world, playing in the circus.
That alone might be enough to kill their father. If, in fact, he was really dying.
“You sit here,” ordered Pete, showing Blue a solitary wooden chair perched on the catwalk. “Observe, enjoy, think about ways you can improve or fix things. Afterward, I’ll ask you questions.”
“Am I going to have to write a paper, too?”
“Don’t be a smart aleck with me, son. Not now.”
“I apologize,” Blue murmured. Pete frowned, glancing down at Daniel.
“You two,” he said quietly. “You know each other. Don’t bother denying it. There’s history when you look at each other. Something deep.”
Blue said nothing. He knew Daniel, yes. But there was no way Daniel should know him. Not on sight, and probably not even by name. In his father’s ideal world, Blue would never have been born. To speak of him, to acknowledge his existence to the only son he considered legitimate …
No. Not possible. Nor did he think his father would have gone to such lengths to ask for his help if there was a chance that Daniel knew who he was. Too much risk of spooking the young man, making him run.
But there was no denying the fact that Daniel seemed to know the truth. And if he did, especially after that ambush in the circus camp Blue could not understand why he hadn’t started running.
Iris. It’s because of Iris.
Maybe. Probably. If he were in Daniel’s shoes, it would take more than his father to tear him away from a woman like her. And he had seen the way his brother looked at Iris—heart in his eyes.
Blue pressed his palms against his thighs. Calm, calm—he was usually the calm one—but not this time. Not about her.
Pete still gazed at the stage. “Were you telling the truth about your military experience?”
The question took him off guard. “Yes.”
“And do you really care about Iris? Really care, with the heart and head, and not just your dick?”
“Yes,” Blue said, taking a wild guess as to where this was leading.
But after a moment of contemplative silence, all Pete said was, “Enjoy the show, son. Take care not to fall.”
He left. And like magic the lights went down.
The darkness was absolute, but Blue stretched out with his mind and found the world alive with electricity, sizzling and jumping through a maze of wires. He followed the trails, traveling them, flying quick as light through the Miracle hotel, coming home full circle to his body just as the music began to play.
It was ambient, classical, perhaps just slightly New Age with a soft-voiced choir that chanted words in a language that might have been Latin—or pure fantasy—and Blue found himself leaning forward as a blue light filled the stage and bodies moved into place, striking poses.
The curtains pulled apart. Blue could not see the audience, but he heard the low murmur of appreciation, and thought that whatever he was seeing up here must be twice as impressive at floor level.
But for the next hour, Blue found himself drawn in, entranced, mesmerized, as every person who entered the stage performed some impossible act of human agility, some dance through the air that required nothing but the focus of an incredibly strong body and spirit. Stories played out, told only in movement and music, a shifting play of light and curtains across the stage, and he found himself thinking that all his gifts, his power, meant nothing in the face of such breathless beauty. He could turn off a lightbulb with his mind, but big deal—the men and women below him could fly.
He thought he recognized Samuel, who emerged off stage left; a clown, yes, but a giant who carried at least six delicate young women on his shoulders and arms, holding them up with nothing but sheer brute strength. He threw them all into the air, light and easy, and they floated away like butterflies trailing wings and ribbons. Attached to wires, yes, but that did not kill the magic.
And then Daniel appeared, and gave Blue the shock of his life.
It was not the fact that he dressed like some demonic peacock—Blue had gotten over that particular marvel in Iris’s dressing room—or that he moved with a grace and speed that implied years of dance, hard training. Nor was it the fact that he seemed born to the stage and spotlight, that he had the charisma to reach beyond both and pull in his audience. That was natural, blood, all from their father.
No, what surprised Blue, what hit him hard in the gut, was the pure, unadulterated passion Daniel exuded, the unabashed freedom that carried him, marked him like a brand of light. It was infectious, it was astonishing, and Blue found himself marveling that this was his brother, his own flesh and blood—the product of a man who had never, in Blue’s limited experience, expressed any kind of joy, no love, nothing that could touch the presence that danced across the stage.
Daniel won’t leave this, Blue realized. Daniel can’t leave this.
The two women he had seen earlier ran on, leaping and pirouetting, trailing ropes and ribbons. In the center of the stage a trapdoor fell away, and Blue felt the groan of hydraulics inside his head as a glass cage rose slowly from beneath the floor, the solid walls broken only by two large hoses running up from beneath the stage. Inside the cage was another structure, narrow and clear. Like a coffin in the shape of a man, replete with spaces for the arms and legs. It hung from the cage’s ceiling by a chain.
Blue heard a creaking sound beside him. He glanced up and saw Samuel walking quickly up the catwalk.
“Ah,” whispered the big man, his face covered in swirls of white and black. “You have my seat.”
Blue began to stand, but the man touched his shoulder and shook his head. Together they watched as Daniel opened up the door of the cage and stepped lightly inside. The women joined him, lifting away the clear cover of the spinning coffin. Daniel placed one foot inside and twisted around like a man on some odd swing until—in a movement too fast to follow—he slammed himself backward, sliding into the spinning coffin with astonishing agility. It was difficult to see from above, but it looked as though the structure had been custom-made for his body; there was barely any room between his skin and the interior, which molded to him like a sleeve, trapping his legs and arms in individual columns. The women slowed his spin and in one smooth motion replaced the clear cover, locking him in.
Daniel’s hands were restrained by the shape of the plastic, his arms held separate from the rest of his body. The front of the panel fit him perfectly; looking down from above, Blue could see that he filled it out, pressed against the interior even. No wiggle room.
“He can’t move,” Blue murmured. “There’s no way.”
“Ja.” came the soft reply. “Daniel is in deep shit.”
“But you’ve seen him do this before.”
“Nein. This is new. First time. The girls said he refused to practice the actual escape because he was afraid someone watching would ruin das Überraschung—the surprise. Pete doesn’t know that part. Daniel has been rehearsing something safer in front of him. More routine.”
Oh, man. Blue leaned over the edge of the catwalk for a better look. The women, with two great heaves, set the coffin spinning on its chain—a motion that seemed to grow faster and faster all on its own, casting Daniel’s body into a blur. The women leaped out of the glass cage. One of them ran offstage and returned moments later with something large and red.
A gasoline canister.
The crowd began to murmur. The woman unscrewed the lid and began splashing the interior of the cage with gas. Blue knew it was the real thing within moments; he could smell the fumes. So could the audience.
Daniel still spun inside his coffin. Spinning himself into unconsciousness, if he wasn’t careful. The human brain could take only so much centrifugal force. Torture, self-imposed. The women replaced the cage wall, locking it from the outside with padlocks that they tugged and yanked.
The woman who had not handled the actual gasoline pulled a matchbook from her sleeve. She held it up to the audience, ripped out a match, and struck it. Fire blossomed. Her partner slid aside a panel in the glass that Blue had not noticed.
Dead silence, breathless.
The girl tossed in the match. Fire exploded. The audience screamed.
“Shit,” Blue muttered, standing. The man beside him grabbed his arm and pulled him back down.
“Wait for what?” Blue snapped, but he looked back at the cage and stared, helpless, as his brother spun inside the fire, still locked within his coffin. The heat had to be intense, too much to bear, and even if he did escape there was still the rest of the cage to contend with. A cage locked from the outside—
He heard gagging sounds in the audience, cries for help, the police, 911. But no one ran on stage. Amazing. Blue was ready to do some running of his own—anything to stop this—when suddenly he noted a change within the cage, a jerk in the tension of the chain.
The lid exploded off the spinning coffin, ricocheting off the interior wall with a deafening bang. Inside, still trapped within the flames, Daniel shot out an arm and grabbed the chain above him. He swung out, legs moving through fire.
The padlocks fell off the exterior of the cage. Simply opened by themselves and dropped away like magic, like fingers plucking and prying, and the moment the locks hit the ground, Daniel kicked off the opposing wall and slammed into the clear door. It flew open with a bang and he let go of the chain, tumbling to the stage in a controlled roll that brought him to his feet in a breath, a heartbeat that felt stolen from Blue’s own life, because, God Almighty, he had never seen anything so horrifying.
Smoke curled from the surface of Daniel’s body, his costume singed and torn, and in the perfect silence—because someone, at some point, had turned off the music—Blue could hear the hard rasp of his brother’s breathing. Behind him, water poured into the cage via the hoses attached to the fiberglass. The fire hissed, went out.
The audience remained silent—dead, broken, frozen in their seats. Kind of like Blue, who wanted to have a nervous breakdown, staring at his brother. He wanted to commit some selective swearing, too, when Daniel straightened, lifting up his chin as he stared at the men and women seated in front of him. Defiant almost, with a real fuck you all that enveloped his body as he threw up his arms and swept down low into a cocky bow.
For one breathless moment it was anyone’s guess what the audience would do, but Blue heard the first clap, and then another and another, and within seconds the auditorium was roaring so fiercely his body shook with the sound. Pleased as punch, Blue thought. Or pissed off and hiding it very, very, well. Daniel bowed again, gathered his helpers close, and ran off the stage. Still smoking.
“Well,” Samuel said mildly. “That was entertaining, ja?”
Blue sat down hard. The crowd cheered, still with so much thunder in their clapping hands that the catwalk trembled, his heart drowning in the rumble. As the glass cage, sloshing and stained black with smoke and ash, sank beneath the stage, acrobats ran out to fling themselves in somersaults, great leaps and twirls. A distraction, perhaps, as curtains descended—great swaths of fabric painted like a jungle—ropes decorated like vines and flowers tumbling from the upper catwalks directly above the stage. As the applause died, Blue heard birdsong, the rush of a waterfall.
But the fire still haunted him. The fire and padlocks.
Samuel stood and stretched. “I am needed for the next act. You want to join me?”
“No,” Blue said, distant, staring at the stage. “But thanks.”
The big man sauntered away. Blue closed his eyes, pushing deep, sinking below the stage to the cage. He found gears, the water valve, the mechanism that had lifted the structure—but everything else was dead inside his head. No sparks, no flickers of electric life.
Which meant that nothing man-made had been involved with the release of those locks. No remote trigger. No one on the outside who had pushed a button to help Daniel escape. He had done it on his own.
Blue buried his head in his hands. This was no case of Houdini. There was only one way a man could simultaneously unlock a handful of padlocks all at once without touching them. Without the use of modern technology. And that was with the mind.
Ridiculous. Just because you’re psychic doesn’t mean he is. He might have found a way to do it—an ingenious, normal, human way. You’re jumping to conclusions.
Maybe, but everything inside of Blue was screaming, Freak. He put his head between his knees and breathed very deep, forcing himself to go calm, to go easy on his aching head. Memory surfaced—standing inside Iris’s dressing room, feeling the air move, the floor vibrate.
And now he knew why. His brother was a telekinetic. A very powerful, very public telekinetic.
“Shit,” he muttered. Now what was he supposed to do? Roland was going to piss dandelions when he heard about this.
The lights dimmed around him; birdsong swelled. The audience fell into a reluctant hush, and for a moment Blue put aside thoughts of his brother as he glimpsed movement through the willowy darkness of the stage. Somewhere, very near, a lion roared.
The sound was loud, thrilling, and, unlike the birdsong, undeniably real. Gasps came from the audience, followed by nervous titters. Blue suspected everyone was still on edge from Daniel’s performance, himself included. But when he saw movement in the black shadows masking the stage—human bodies furtive, darting—and heard the cry of another wild cat, the sounds and sights curled through him, preparing, warning him—only, not enough, not nearly enough—and he felt a cut like a lightning strike when a spotlight suddenly flicked on. It was blinding, one narrow beam of golden light shining down like a glow from heaven, and in the center of it, face upturned, stood Iris.
Her red hair hung loose; her perfect body was clad in only the lightest of simple dresses. Silk, maybe, the color of shell. Her feet were bare. She wore no jewelry. She looked breathtakingly sweet—and desperately alone.
There was movement outside the circle of light, stripes and spots and glimpses of golden fur treading lightly around the solitary woman, skirting the edge of sight. If it had not been for the fact that Blue had already seen Iris around her cats, he might have been scared for her—nervous, at the very least—but he had seen, and he knew that the fragility she presented was nothing but an act.
Roars and rumbles and low moans filled the air with another kind of thunder, restless and wild and deeply sensual. Iris swayed within the spotlight until—quite suddenly—she disappeared into darkness. Pulled away. A tiger slipped into the light, taking her place, and against the tiger a jaguar pushed close, butting her head under his great striped chin. Lions passed in front and behind, curling close, rubbing and stroking until it was difficult to tell where one cat began and another ended, so tightly were they bound together.
Beneath the birdsong came the hint of a drumbeat, a slow rhythm gathering strength like some ominous song, and Blue was so busy looking for Iris outside the spotlight that he almost missed the pale hand that emerged from within the writhing bodies curled on the ground. A hand, a flash of red, half of a face that looked at the audience with a hunger that Blue felt hot in his gut.
Good-bye, sweet little innocent.
He heard a creak on the catwalk behind him. Samuel probably, or Pete, coming back to check on him. Blue did not care. He could not tear his gaze from Iris, who emerged from within the pile of cats, rolling over their bodies to slink low to the ground, boneless and supple, as if her body were made of lava, one touch a burn. He expected to see scorch marks on the stage.
The catwalk creaked again; Blue smelled heavy perfume. His nostrils itched from the scent, but still he did not turn. The stage around Iris had begun to move; large objects shaped like boulders and cliffs rolled forward. Offstage, close, Blue heard the recorded sounds of shouts, gunfire.
Iris froze, as did the cats. All of them turned as one to look in the direction of those sounds. Iris’s movements were so attuned, so perfect, that for a moment it was impossible not to imagine that she was one of the cats, that her human skin was nothing but illusion and that beneath, skimming blood and bone, was a creature of fur and claw.
The shouts offstage grew louder, drowning out the drums, the floating lilt of bamboo flutes. The audience stirred uneasily. Boots slammed; Blue heard the pump action of rifles and flinched.
Iris did not cringe. She ran, and the cats ran with her. They were an explosive blur of fur and skin moving as one tight group across the stage at impossible, desperate speeds through lights that cast the world in shades of red—until Iris suddenly left the path and leaped upon the fake boulders, scrabbling, swinging. The audience gasped, lost within her terrible desperation. The tiger followed immediately, and then the lions and jaguar, all of them climbing higher and higher off the stage, finding trails on an uneven surface that made Blue ache with worry.
But Iris led them back down—safe, quick—and again they ran circles and circles around the stage.
A net fell. Unfurling from above, hanging like a wall in front of Iris and her cats. Behind them another net tumbled, and then another and another, until they were completely trapped. Blue leaned forward, peering up. He saw another catwalk, and on it stood Mr. Cleaver and several other men, holding on to the ropes upon which the nets hung.
All pretend, utterly fake, but Iris … Iris stood surrounded by the milling cats with a look on her face that broke Blue’s heart, that made him want to stand up and rage, to fight for her—and if the shouts from the audience were any indication, he was not the only one who felt that way. It was like watching the slow desecration of freedom, the terrible decay of the most perfect essence of wild, unflinching joy. Like watching the death of dreams and wonder.
This is what terrifies her, Blue realized. Being caught, trapped. Hunted.
And he understood. Completely.
The scent of perfume still lingered. Blue heard the rustle of cloth, felt the hint of warm breath against his neck. Annoyed, he began to look—and felt something cold and hard press against the back of his head. A gun. He sat very still. Below him, Iris raged.
A hand touched his shoulder. Against his ear a soft voice whispered, “My, my, my. This is quite a surprise.”
The voice was too familiar; impossible, even. The entire right side of Blue’s body ached in sympathetic echo as he turned his head and glimpsed a sharp chin, the rim of sunglasses. Blond hair peeked out from beneath a baseball cap.
The woman from the Jakarta market. The woman who had given him a bomb. The woman who worked for Santoso Rahardjo.
“No,” Blue murmured. “No, you can’t be here.”
Her mouth curved. She backed away, just one step, enough to reveal a tight white tank top and loose tan slacks. A messenger bag hung against her hip.
“A beard,” said the woman. “A mask. Not good enough to hide from me. And, unfortunately, not sufficient disguise against the interests of anyone else who might know you.”
Below, Iris had escaped; the audience sat, rapt, as she tried to rescue her cats. Blue wondered how much noise he could make without ruining her performance; how far he would make himself go to end this. The final step, the final drop of his shield and will … and nightmares forever after.
“What do you want?” Blue asked the woman. “Why are you here? Did you follow me?”
“Do not flatter yourself,” she replied, the irritation in her voice a surprise. “You are startled to see me? Imagine how I feel. Your presence here is more unfortunate than you know. It would mean my death if you are discovered by my employer’s men.”
“Because you were supposed to kill me.”
“Because they think I did.” She tilted her head, studying him. “You must have angels on your shoulders to heal so quickly. I thought I did a very good job of crippling you.”
“You did,” he said, feeling the torrent of Iris’s music in his bones, in his furious heart. He rose from his chair, unmindful of the gun, and took a step toward the woman.
“Stay,” she said.
“No,” he replied.
“I won’t warn you again.”
“Then shoot me. Do it right this time. Otherwise I might just owe you for almost killing me—or maybe just for making me lose the trail of a mass murderer when I was so close to finding him. Nice. So very nice.”
The woman sneered. “You were never close. You were not even in the same part of the world. All you had were breadcrumbs, and that is what you would have died for. Nothing. Just pieces of a puzzle that were, and still are, too big for you to comprehend.”
“So you throw a bomb into my lap. What a wonderful solution to life’s little problems.”
The woman said nothing, but her head turned just slightly, and Blue followed her gaze down to the stage. Iris had freed her cats. The nets were gone. The lights had turned up enough for the audience to appreciate her intricate dance as she flew on light feet between and around the cats, all of whom flowed with her, the interaction seamless and perfect. There was no such thing as tricks or artifice; Iris was no cat trainer making her animals roll in circles or jump through hoops. What Blue saw below was pure, wild, straight from her heart.
“You need to go,” said the woman, tearing her gaze from Iris. “Leave this city now.”
“He’s here, isn’t he? Santoso is here.”
“It would be unwise for you to look for him, Mr. Perrineau.”
Her use of his name caught him off guard, but only for a moment. Someone had sent Roland a message telling him of his accident, and Blue had the sudden sinking suspicion that this woman was the person responsible. And if she had known to contact Dirk & Steele, it only made sense that somehow she would know some of the more personal details of his life.
But how much more is the question. Your secrets are less of a concern than the agency’s, after all. If she’s seen past the cover to its true face—the psychics, shapeshifters, magic …
That meant there was yet another weakness in the agency’s security, another sore spot to line up against the one his father had created.
The problem was how; a mole was impossible. Roland had placed telepathic safeguards inside the mind of every agent, and if one word of Dirk & Steele’s secrets passed though protected lips, Roland would know. The safeguard was infallible.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Blue said to the woman. “I have a job to do.”
“As do I. And believe me when I say that any impediments to the completion of that job will not be tolerated.”
“Let me guess. You have another bomb tucked away somewhere.”
The woman smiled. “No explosions this time. Bullets, however? A definite possibility.”
“Then why are you waiting?” Blue moved close, watching her face. “Why are you holding back? Why bother saving my life when you should have killed me?”
“Perhaps I am a good woman.” Her smile changed, becoming softer, more sensual. “Perhaps I think you are a good man.”
Blue narrowed his eyes. “I think you’re a liar.”
“Lies are nothing but stories we tell to survive. But I think you know all about that, Mr. Perrineau. I think you might be an expert.”
She stood directly in front of him. He was not stupid enough to try to take her gun; he trusted her reflexes more than he trusted his. Instead, Blue remained very still, waiting to see what she would do—and it was not until the last moment that he truly understood.
The woman leaned into his body, pressing herself against him with the gun digging into his chest, and Blue held his breath as she rose on her toes, free hand tracing a path along his ribs. She kissed his mouth, slow and easy.
Blue did not kiss her back. She was warm and dangerous and beautiful, but he felt nothing but profound unease when she touched him. All around, music—drums and flutes and now violins—and he glimpsed Iris below, dancing across the stage with incredible power and grace, her feet barely touching the ground. He wanted to be with her. He wanted her to be the one in front of him, touching his body.
The woman broke off the kiss and followed his gaze. She studied Iris for a long moment, then said, “She is beautiful, isn’t she? Everything a woman should be and so rarely is.”
Fear cut through Blue, but only for a moment; he studied the woman, and though he could not see much of her face, he felt nothing of a threat in her body, in the line of her mouth. Just something tired, almost wistful.
“You talk like you know her,” he said carefully.
“I talk like a woman who was once just like her.”
Again, that odd melancholy. Blue looked at her. Really stared, wishing he could see her eyes.
The woman smiled. “Look hard, look deep, Mr. Perrineau. You will never know me. Never.”
“Does anyone know you?” he asked softly.
Her smile turned brittle. She jabbed the gun against his chest.
“Remember what I said. Leave. Or else I will kill you.”
Blue shook his head. “Why are you doing this? Why work for a man like Santoso?”
“Who says I am working only for Santoso?” She sidled backward, deeper into shadow. Blue began to follow, but she shook her head, still pointing her gun.
“Remember,” she said again, and then she left through the heavy door beside the catwalk. Blue went after her, but she was too fast—by the time he reached the hall she was completely gone, without a trace. Behind him, through the wall, he heard thunderous applause.
Blue got out his cell phone and called Roland.