“Answer it,” says O’Doul.
Chan taps a single key on the keyboard, and the ringing stops. There’s dead silence.
No, not dead, I think, listening. This silence has a weight and a temperature, an actual presence, like it’s alive. It takes a lot to rattle me—I’ve seen men trying to hold their bloody intestines in their mangled stomachs after being savaged by a grenade—but the texture of this silence makes my skin crawl.
Faintly, Tabby says hello.
The awful silence breaks with the sound of a low exhalation, and then a single word, murmured like a prayer.
“Tabitha.”
Tabby’s arms break out in gooseflesh. Her eyes close. She stops breathing.
I watch all that with impotent rage, not understanding what the hell is happening, only that I want it to stop. Now. I squeeze her hand again, but hers has turned limp and clammy in mine.
Perfectly still, Tabby sits. The air crackles with electricity.
“You’ve made me wait,” says S?ren, “a very long time.”
His voice has the quality of a lullaby, soft and stroking, meant to soothe. It carries a faint and indefinable accent. Not British, but something equally refined. Aristocratic. Somehow it reminds me of winter snowfall, when the air is sharp and cold and everything is blanketed in powdery white.
Snow. Beautiful, frozen, and deadly if you stay out in it too long.
“But how do I know it’s really you?” he muses. Soft tapping, like fingers drumming on a hard surface. “What could convince me?”
A change comes over Tabby’s face. A flash of emotion disfigures it momentarily, as if a terrible memory has reared its head.
“I have a little black box inside my head. Inside the box are monsters.”
She says, “I still have the dagger, if you’d like me to take a picture and send it to you. I’ll focus up close on all the dried blood.”
Her tone is flat and hard, edged with fury. Abruptly I understand that I was wrong before. Tabby wasn’t terrified. It wasn’t fear that made her face go white, her body stiffen.
It was hate.
She hates him. She hates him so much, she’s shaking with it, breathless from it, frozen in place from the sheer enormity of the feeling.
And now we’ve got a bloody dagger to add to all the other weirdness. How fucking Shakespearean.
Whatever the meaning of the dagger, the mention of it makes S?ren laugh. It’s a ridiculously self-satisfied sound, low and infinitely pleased, and also pleasing. This dickhead has a voice as pretty as his face.
God, I’m really going to enjoy mangling both.
“Oh pet,” S?ren says warmly, “I’ve missed you.” A shade of melancholy sneaks into his cultured voice. “I’ve missed you so much.”
A shudder runs through Tabby’s body. She opens her eyes and stares at Chan’s computer monitor as if she’d like to tear it to pieces with her teeth. “Really? No other gullible minions to mold in your despicable image?”
S?ren’s gentle sigh sounds perversely intimate, like he might be stroking himself, aroused by the sound of her anger. “Yes, of course, but none of them could ever compare to you. My fierce little krijger. My liefde.”
Whatever those words mean, they really piss her off. Color burns over her pale cheeks. Veins standing out on her neck, she leans forward in her chair and says through clenched teeth, “I was never yours.”
“On the contrary, liefde. You always were…and still are.”
“You’re wrong!”
“Am I? Well, that would be a first. Tell me, do you have a family? A husband? Children? Any connection to another human being that could be considered intimate?” He waits for a only a beat before answering his own question, smug as shit. “Of course you don’t. And you never will. And—please be honest with me, you know I’ll know if you’re lying—why is that?”
Tabby vibrates fury. That and misery. She withdraws her hand from mine, sits back in her chair, and exhales hard, as if expelling a poisonous breath from her lungs.
“Because of you.”
“Because of me,” S?ren slowly repeats. He lets it hang there, damning as a confession of murder.
Tabby says nothing. She doesn’t move, with the exception of her lower lip, which starts to tremble.
I’m going to kill him.
The thought is bright and dangerously sharp in my mind, a knife blade catching the light.
Even if I never find out the details of what happened between them, it’s clear as day that this motherfucker wrecked her in some profound, irreversible way. And so I’m going to kill him, and present his head to Tabby on a metal spike, and then feed his body to a pack of rabid dogs.
The thought makes me feel a lot better.
I rest my hand on her shoulder. Tabby blindly reaches up, grabs my pinky, and holds on tight.
“I saw what you did,” she says, struggling to keep her voice even. “On the news, that movie studio in Los Angeles, the press conference. I knew it was you when they talked about how they’d been hacked. That’s why I’m calling.”