22

The air outside still stank of refuse and sewage, but Fiona gulped it down as they burst out of the door and onto the street. Peter marched purposefully but silently next to her; he didn’t need to say anything, given the rage coming off him in waves. PM, meanwhile, wasn’t so reserved.

“Are you fucking kidding me, dude?” He swooped in front of Peter and blocked his path. “What are we doing, Viper? You do realize what just happened in there, right? That we almost died, that, that Udo and Bill Blemish nearly murdered us and buried us in the basement of this fucking house, right? All because the cooze who I’ve been fucking warning you about for fucking weeks on end decided to follow us—”

“Watch your mouth, Perry,” said Peter. “And get out of my way.”

“For this?” laughed Perry, jabbing a finger at Fiona. “Over some small-town chick who you had a precious moment with? Christ, I’ll give you an apple if it’ll make you listen to me over common fucking sense! She followed you! For all we know, she’s a cop!”

“That’s not true!” choked Fiona, shaking with fear. “Peter, I would never—”

“Shut the fuck up, whore!” PM laughed. “Like we’ll believe a thing you—”

His snarky voice cut off in a squawk as Peter seized him by the throat. Fiona felt her anger and annoyance blown away by a cold inner wind as she watched Peter draw the scared man in close and stare him down with blank, dead eyes. Maybe it was only emotional suggestion, but she swore she felt a ripple in the air like those she’d sensed during the tuning, as if Peter had given off a small wave of sound without monitor or book to aid him.

“I told you to watch your language,” he said. PM tried to twist from his grip, but Peter gave him a sharp throttle, and the man put up his hands in surrender. “Don’t call her anything like that again. Understand? You just do your job and be ready on the thirty-first.” Then he let go, and PM went storming off down the street, shaking his head and grumbling as he went.

She and Peter walked back to his place in silence, both obviously reviewing in their minds what had happened and waiting until they were alone to say what they really wanted to say. As the buildings returned from squalor to simple geometry, as he threw open the door to his place with a bang, as they climbed the stairs two at a time and marched down the aisle of lost sounds, they remained silent.

Once in his corner, he walked over to Betty’s case and gave it a hard shove with the heel of his sneaker. It slid across the floor with a leathery hiss.

“Take it and get out,” he said.

“I’m sorry I followed you,” she began, trying to remain calm.

“I bet you are,” he laughed, rolling his head back and looking up at the ceiling. The words stabbed her between the ribs. “I bet you’re just racked with remorse.”

“But it sounds like I had good reason to!” she said, her voice cracking. “You’re arranging passage for me? With that guy, who acted like all this power you’ve got and the potential you see in me is, what, some kind of tool, or weapon?”

“You don’t even know what you’re talking about,” he said. “Udo gave me the Canoris. He funds my experiments and training—this, all this.” He waved his arm across the room. “All the luxuries you’ve enjoyed these past couple of weeks—”

“All I enjoyed was you,” she cried, and now she couldn’t help it. The fear she’d sensed in that shadowy house, the story her dad had laid on her, the loneliness she’d felt all week without him, it broke through the dam. Tears rushed down her cheeks, and she wailed at him. “None of this matters to me at all without you!”

“Then why’d you leave, Fiona?” he snapped. “We tune, we finally sleep together, and then you leave! What was I supposed to think?”

“That I was scared!” she sobbed. “That I needed to figure out the rest of my life! My mom was freaking out when I spent the night here, calling the police!” She swallowed hard and forced herself to bare it all. “You keep telling me I’m better than the people I grew up around, but…but in a lot of ways, I am those people. I am a small-town girl. So this, the book, your power, you, it’s new! It’s scary! So I ran home, yeah, because I was freaking out. If you care about me, you need to care about that. You can’t just expect me to drop everything and everyone I know in an instant.”

He paused as she wept and then said, “What if you could?”

“What?” she asked. When she looked up and wiped her eyes, he was staring at her, thinking, planning.

“What if it could all be different in one night?” he said. “What if you could leave everything behind, and it could just be us?”

“What are you talking about?” she said.

He went to his desk and retrieved a piece of paper that he thrust into her hands.

It was a flyer. At the top was a black shadow, out of which slithered the silhouette of a snake, its forked tongue flickering. The reptile made the I in the second word scrawled in large letters beneath:

PIT VIPER

Halloween

The Old Mill

Get there before 9pm

DON’T TALK ABOUT IT

DON’T EMAIL ABOUT IT

JUST BE THERE

SCHONERPLATZ SCHONERTAG

Her hands shook as she looked between him and the flyer and back again. “This…this is what you were talking about with Udo,” she said.

“It is,” he said.

“What…” Slowly, it came together in her head, the melody and the rhythm of his meaning finally matching up. “You’re going to take them. You’re going to take them like you took the club rats.”

“It’s what I came here for,” said Peter softly. “It’s what I’m owed.”

“And…do what?” she asked, remembering Filip Moss’s story, the way he’d told her that Jaime’s brother was found dead. “Are you going to kill them?”

“No,” he said. “I told you, that’s not what I do. I’m wiping them clean, that’s all. Taking their minds, their wills.”

“And then you’ll just, what, give them to that slimy cretin in there?” she said. “Do they end up like that woman who grabbed me? Violated and addicted and alone?”

He screwed up his face, and she knew right then that she’d hit it on the mark. Still, he fought not to crush her entirely.

“It’s none of my concern what happens to them after that. What matters is what happens to us.”

“You can’t,” she repeated. “Look, I’m so, so sorry for what my father and those men did to you. You know I am. But these kids, your fans, they’re good people. You can’t just brainwash them and sell them off—”

“Good people?” he said, disgust in his voice. “Do you even hear what you’re saying? Those people stiffed me, and beat me, and left me for dead. You’re the only one who cared about me, the only one who has any strength among them, but when the going gets tough you’re the same as them. You retreat to this sheepish sentimentality, to Hamm and your mommy and daddy and weak-minded friends who are all too ready to jump onto the next fad or trend and then pay someone to kill it if it gets out of hand. You’re better than them, you know you’re better than them, but you treat them like they should be your equals. Why? Why humor that weakness?”

“They’re just scared,” she squeaked out, remembering her father’s face. “Like me.”

“Scared,” he said, like the word tasted bad. “Scared enough to call me in to do their dirty work and scared enough to have me assaulted afterward.” For a moment, his veneer of strength faltered, and he was no one but Peter, her Peter. “I was scared that night, Fiona. I walked for miles, wondering if I would ever have the strength to overcome what your dad did to me. And all I had to hold on to was an apple, some water, and the thought that there was someone different out there, who wasn’t scared of me. By the time I got to a phone, I was stronger that I’d ever been, stronger than any tuning could make me. And I told myself I’d come back and show these people what their weakness gets them.”

Fiona heard the scrape in his voice, felt the shiver in his grip. As tough as he was trying to be, he was breaking down.

She could see the human being inside him through the cracks in his demeanor. Suddenly, all she wanted was to not let the world ruin that person the way it had ruined everyone else in her life.

“Let’s leave,” she said, advancing toward him. “Right now. Let’s just go away.”

He blinked, stunned, and then shook his head furiously. “You fled from me twice, Fiona. Last time was too much for me. I can’t trust you now.”

“Please,” she said, taking his hands in hers. “I promise, I’m not scared anymore. Tell Udo it didn’t work out, and we leave. You, me, and a couple of bags. We’ll leave all of this.” She felt herself shaking now, too, and launched herself desperately into the dream, hoping it would work. “California. We’ll go to L.A., and we’ll get a shitty apartment together, and it’ll just be us and our music. No small towns or gross benefactors, just our potential, together. No revenge. Let’s just leave.”

Peter’s shoulders lowered slowly. His lips quivered, his eyes shone. His hands tightened on her, and he began drawing her close to him—

“I knew it!”

Both their heads snapped up, and they leaped out of each other’s embrace.

A few feet away, Edgar Hokes grinned malevolently, a tire iron clutched in his hand.