AT THIS MOMENT, Max was experiencing a peculiar, singing pain behind his eyes; a tight, gritty texture inside his skull that he could not quite place.
Then it came to him: he had a headache.
He tried to remember the last time this had happened, and could not. Decades, at least.
This disturbed him for a number of reasons. It meant that either the Water was becoming less effective or his present troubles were serious enough to tear through the usual wrapping of perfect health he’d come to expect. He found that the more he thought about either possibility, the worse the headache became.
Jesus Christ, he thought. Imagine living like this all the time.
He sat alone in a cheap coffeehouse, a desperate attempt to cash in on the absence of any Starbucks in a six-block radius, located in a dying strip mall. The bored teenager behind the counter watched the screen of her phone and nothing else. He was the only customer. In fact, his was the only car in the entire parking lot. This was as close to being invisible as Max could come.
Then another man entered. He didn’t look like much. The only unusual thing about him was the tip of his nose. It was bright red, the skin tender and raw, as if it had just come out from under scar tissue. But that wasn’t terribly unusual in Florida, where people had skin cancers and plastic surgery in about equal measure.
The girl behind the counter didn’t look twice.
The man got a huge, frothy, whipped-cream-covered drink and walked directly over to Max, then sat down next to him. The girl went back to her phone.
They sat in silence for a few moments and drank.
Max spoke first. “Took you long enough to get here.”
“The bitch nearly killed me,” Aznar snapped back. “If you wanted me on my feet, you should have sent more Water.”
“Simon’s being stingy these days.”
“When is he not?” Aznar sucked from his straw and gave a huge sigh of pleasure. “I tell you, the Frappuccino might just be mankind’s crowning achievement.”
“Not the smallpox vaccine? Or penicillin? Or the atomic bomb?”
“Overrated. Well, except for the bomb. That, at least, is useful. In fact, it’s the one that’s been used the least, and should be used more.”
Max smiled. Aznar was the only one of them whose sense of humor had improved in the past five hundred years.
Except he wasn’t really joking, of course. Aznar was never really joking. It was important to remember that.
It had been this way between them since Berlin. Unlike Carlos, Max had never thought of it as a matter of honor between the original holders of the covenant. He simply had not seen the logic in removing a useful and effective player from their game.
Aznar had never particularly liked Max, but he was not so nihilistic that he was willing to throw away his long life over a matter of personal distaste. So, over the past sixty-odd years, they had formed a comfortable working relationship.
Max used Aznar to clean up the Council’s messes. He sent Aznar to war zones where his work would be lost in the background noise of atrocities and corpses. He disappeared problems like stubborn labor leaders in Chile, an outspoken priest in El Salvador, a reluctant colonel in Nicaragua, a brilliant militia leader in Chechnya. In return, Max gave Aznar the Water, and he overlooked Aznar’s more vicious hobbies.
Neither of them went into it with any illusions of friendship or affection. Max was Aznar’s boss. He gave orders, and Aznar followed them, or he was truly dead.
Aznar sighed and finished his drink. “Tell me what you want,” he said. He rubbed his eyes. Perhaps he was having headaches, too. His supply of the Water was irregular at best. It had to be, to avoid Simon discovering the siphoning from their very limited personal supplies. Max’s emergency flask was only half-full now. And Antonio had stopped contributing to the flow. Max wondered if this constant back-and-forth, aging and then being made young again, bouncing across the years, had contributed to Aznar’s madness.
Ultimately, however, it didn’t matter. Aznar was a weapon. Max pulled the trigger.
“Robinton,” Max said. “He’s going to be a problem.”
“Can you afford to lose him already?”
“Not immediately, no,” Max admitted. “But soon. He says he’s cracked the secret of the Water. He will have to transcribe all his research. Put together patent applications and create a design that others can follow. Once that is done, Simon will want to extend a place at the table to him. Reveal the whole truth.”
“And you would never want another man coming between you and Simon,” Aznar said.
Max ignored Aznar’s insult. “Even with an unlimited supply of the Water, the world is still too small for too many like us. But for now, he’s safe. We need him to complete his work.”
Aznar grunted agreement. “So, what do you want from me?”
Max opened his suit jacket, extracted a piece of paper from his pocket, and handed it to Aznar.
Aznar unfolded it and saw the headline: ‘MIRACLE’ GIRL SUDDENLY CURED OF CANCER.
Aznar read it and frowned. “And I keep hearing newspapers are dying.”
“Everything is dying. Except us.”
“True enough. How did you hear about this?”
“I have an assistant who searches for things like ‘miracle cures.’ ”
“You have someone who does nothing but read, looking for stories like this?” Aznar seemed shocked, his old piousness emerging at the sheer luxury and waste of resources.
“She does it with a computer. It’s something called a Google search.”
“Computers,” Aznar said suspiciously. “Did they also tell you that Robinton was connected to this? I don’t see his name anywhere.”
“He volunteers at that hospital. He’s quite sentimental about such things. But he’s also quite obsessed with his work. I suspect he had to know if his solution would work before he would take it to Simon. If that’s true, then this girl’s veins contain traces that will lead back to us. It’s not a risk I am willing to take. I want you to deal with it.”
Aznar looked at the printout again. There was a photo of the “miracle girl.” Even in grainy black-and-white on standard office paper, her smile beamed.
“Max,” he said, suddenly cheerful. “For me? And it’s not even my birthday.”
“EXCUSE ME, BUT WHERE can I find Elizabeth Saunders?”
Anjelica Reeves, the nurse at the duty station at All Children’s Pediatric Cancer Center, was immediately suspicious. The man asking the question wore a white coat and a smile that reminded her of clowns and party magicians. She couldn’t see a name badge, either. There had been several reporters—she wouldn’t call them journalists—who had tried to sneak in and interview Elizabeth since the “miracle cure” story broke. She personally wanted to wring the necks of the idiots in the public relations department who told the media. The little girl needed rest and privacy more than the evening news needed a feel-good story.
Of course, no one ever asked her.
Anjelica gave the man in the white coat a fake smile right back. “I’m sorry, sir, I’ll need to see your ID badge before I can give you that information.”
He showed her a badge. She had to admit, it looked legit. Still, she’d never seen the guy before, and he wasn’t about to go tromping around on her floor without a little more than that.
“Can I ask why you want to see the patient, Dr. Cortés?”
The smile didn’t waver. “I’ve been asked to do a consult.”
That, at least, made a little sense. Every department in the hospital wanted a piece of Elizabeth—quite literally. They’d all sent representatives to get tissue and blood samples in an effort to learn how she’d managed to avoid dying. If her spontaneous remission from leukemia could be duplicated, then being anywhere in the same zip code as the answer could be a massive career boost.
“Does it have to be right now? She’s sleeping.”
His smile tightened. “Well. Now is when I’m here.”
She picked up the phone. “At least let me call ahead.”
“Oh, that’s really not necessary.”
Anjelica put an edge in her voice. “It’s no trouble at all.”
His face became as inflexible as a doll’s sculpted features. “I don’t have time for this,” he said. “Tell me which room.”
Anjelica felt a small, guilty pleasure. She’d get to send this guy packing, and she could protect the girl’s sleep for a few hours. She might get chewed out for it, but it would be worth it.
“I don’t have to tell you a thing, Doctor, and furthermore—”
His eyes looked up and to the left. The smile returned. “Oh,” he said. “Never mind.”
She looked to the side and saw that he’d finally noticed the patients’ names and room numbers on the whiteboard. Well, she’d tried.
She reached across the desk for the phone. She wanted, at least, to give the girl some warning.
Something sliced through the air. She felt a deep burn across the top of her throat.
It quickly became painful, then intolerable. She tried to scream but couldn’t breathe.
She looked up and saw the arrogant doctor grinning down at her, the bloody scalpel still in his hand.
Then everything went dark as she watched him turn and walk down the corridor toward Elizabeth’s room.
“—KEEP TELLING YOU, I want to go home.” Aznar heard her voice from around the corner. It was the unmistakable whine of a young girl, a sound that had always put Aznar on edge.
“Honey, the doctors just want to do a few more tests,” an older woman’s voice answered. So the girl’s mother was in the room, too. That didn’t present a problem to Aznar. He played his thumb over the blade of the scalpel with just enough pressure to keep from cutting his own flesh. He could be in and out in seconds, before either of them had a chance to scream.
He only had to get close enough.
He went into the room smiling, the hand with the scalpel concealed in his white coat.
“Good evening, ladies,” he said. “Or should I say morning? It’s well past your bedtime.”
The girl didn’t laugh. “What do you want?” she snapped.
“Elizabeth,” her mother scolded, her voice sharp. “Sorry, Doctor. She’s had a rough few days.”
“No problem,” Aznar said, smile fixed in place. “I understand. All these tests and procedures, they can get pretty boring, I bet.”
Elizabeth wouldn’t look at him, her face in full-on sulk. “Yeah. So why don’t you stop doing them?”
“Well, your suffering is almost at an end,” Aznar said. He took a step toward the bed, within arm’s reach of the mother and girl both. “There’s just one more thing I’ve got to do . . .”
The girl suddenly lost her sulk and stared at him. “Is that blood on your coat?”
Aznar looked down and cursed himself. Of course it was blood. The sow behind the counter had splattered down the front of him.
He kept trying to smile. “Yes,” he said. “A bad experience with a patient. Nothing to worry about.”
The girl shrank away from him. The mother did, too. It didn’t seem like anything conscious. But why, why, why did they always do that?
“What sort of tests are you here to do?” the mother asked sharply.
The hell with this. He brought out the scalpel.
The girl opened her mouth to scream. Her mother sucked in a deep breath.
Aznar felt his face stretch in a wide grin.
Then the lights went out. Aznar froze despite himself as the room went black.
Something—someone—hit him hard at the base of his spine. It felt like a kick from a horse, and it sent him tumbling over the end of the bed. He didn’t stop moving until he hit the wall beneath the room’s window.
The only light came from the screens of the girl’s medical equipment and the hallway. He saw the outlines of the girl and her mother, and another shadow coming at him fast—
Another kick, this time aimed for his skull. He managed to deflect it with his arm, but he lost the scalpel. It hit the tile floor with a ringing noise.
The next kick caught him full in the face, and he heard the snap of his nose—his brand-new nose—breaking even as his head bounced against the wall again.
Enough. Enough of this.
He used both arms to block the next kick he knew was coming and pushed back, hard, using his own legs to launch himself at his attacker.
He felt her give way, almost fall to the ground, even as he regained his feet, and he started smiling again.
He saw her outline clearly against the light from the hall now. He knew her, knew the way she moved. No mistaking that shape.
Shako.
She was right here. It was too good to be true, she was right here in front of him.
He threw a punch at her head, followed with another, and another, keeping her down and dodging. He suddenly changed tactics and turned, putting his left fist into her stomach, a devastating uppercut that lifted her off her feet.
He heard her grunt in pain and spun to grab the scalpel. It shone in the reflected light only a few feet away. He bent over and picked it up.
Only when he turned back did he realize he’d been played. The shadows of the girl and her mother appeared before the door as they ran out of the room. Shako was moving them along, her body shielding them from him.
A fire alarm went off. Flashing emergency lights. Someone must have found the corpse he’d left at the desk now. A voice was yelling over the PA system, but he couldn’t make out what it said.
Damn her, she had robbed him of his prey.
He could feel his options closing by the second. There would be security and then police skittering through the building like ants when their hill was disturbed. He might have to take a hostage, one of the little sick brats on this floor, just to get to the door.
But first, by God, he could kill the Uzita witch. He had a knife. She was unarmed. He could spare the time for that.
He charged, slashing with the knife, missing by wide margins. She was too fast. But she was on the defensive. And she did not seem to want to let him leave the room. Perhaps she thought to protect all the little dying boys and girls nearby.
That would kill her. He could corner her and drive the blade into her, again and again and again . . .
He lunged once more, she dodged again, and suddenly, she had the large, plate-glass window at her back. She had no place to run.
“Long time coming, salvaje,” he said, his breath coming in ragged gulps now, more from excitement than effort.
“Too long,” Shako said back, her teeth gleaming white in the semidarkness. “No more children, Aznar. No more little girls.”
Aznar had just enough time to wonder, Why was she smiling?
Then he realized: He had not maneuvered her. She had maneuvered him. There was nothing behind her but the window.
And they were on the seventh floor.
It was too late to check his lunge. He was off-balance and leaning forward.
She came up underneath him, and picked him off the floor bodily, grunting under the sudden strain.
He slashed at her arms, but he wasn’t in them for long.
There was a brief moment of uninterrupted flight.
The glass shattered at his back and parted like a curtain.
Then he was falling, flailing, trying to swim in midair, his arms and legs pinwheeling around him.
He bounced off the lip of the roof of the parking garage, and again off the edge of a stairwell.
But when he hit the ground, he didn’t move at all.