She half mumbled, half cried something into my chest and I had to pull back to give her some room to talk. I smoothed the hair behind her ears, imploring her to look at me. She eventually did even though the tears wouldn’t stop running down her face.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her softly. I hated seeing her cry more than anything.
She grimaced and wiped the tears off her cheeks. “You don’t know?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know much, kiddo. Last thing I remember was being in Portland, upstairs, editing. Next thing I know I’m on the Brooklyn Bridge, talking to a hipster. Apparently, I’ve missed some shit between points A and B.”
She frowned, studying my face, and squeezed my hand hard. “That’s really all you remember? You don’t remember your brother?”
Michael. Again, his face flashed through my mind, as clear as day. Why it struck the fear of god in me, I don’t know.
I paused. “I don’t think so?”
“Lord, Dex, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes,” Maximus said as he walked over to us.
“Good, cuz the sight of you makes my eyes sore,” I said right back but I couldn’t help but grin at him. I looked at Ada who had somehow already devoured the hot dog and was staring at me with questioning eyes. “Little Fifteen. Fancy meeting you in the Big Apple. Can one of you jokers please inform me of what the fuck is going on here?”
“He says he doesn’t remember anything,” Perry said to them.
I wrapped my arm protectively around her waist and pulled her closer to me. “I’m assuming some major shit went down or somehow the teleporter was invented without me knowing it.”
I don’t know why I thought they’d find that amusing but all three of them stared at me gravely. My shackles went up. “Okay, seriously. I don’t know what happened. Can one of you please indulge me?”
Surprisingly it was Ada who spoke up. “You were upstairs. I was working out. Do you remember that?”
“Yeah,” I said slowly, the sound of that scary athletic chick’s voice pounding into my head. “A workout video with the hot but crazy one with the big jaw.”
“Yes,” she said with a raise of her brow. I just then noticed how tired Ada looked. She’d always bordered on that because of her fascination with a metric ton of eyeliner but there was something different about her. The exhaustion made her seems eons older than she was, like she’d seen a lot recently.
She continued. “Then there was a knock at the front door. Do you remember that?”
I tugged at my hat while I tried to think, my other arm tightening around the small of Perry’s waist. I thought she’d relax into me but she felt just as tense as I did. “I don’t think so.” Did I remember a knock at the door? It was hard to say if my memory was true or I was just conjuring up what it would have sounded like.
“Do you know who it was?” she asked.
I shook my head even though every part of me wanted to say Michael, it was Michael.
“It was your brother.”
I nodded. Hearing it didn’t make it seem more real but it also didn’t feel like a lie. It just didn’t make any sense – that was the real problem I was having with it. Why would my brother show up now after all these years? How did he know where to find me?
“What did he want?” I asked.
She glared off into the distance and crossed her arms. “You, obviously. He did some weird shit to my head and the next thing I remember, Perry was shaking me awake.”
“And you were gone,” Perry filled in quietly. “You left in the Highlander, with him.”
“Willingly?” I asked.
She shrugged. “We don’t know, we’ve been trying to figure that out. But Ada said you knew something was wrong. That once you saw him, you told her to run, to get out of there, to go and get me. You knew he was bad news.”
I scratched at my chin, unsure how to take any of this. “My brother and I may have had our differences back in the day, but I don’t think his appearance would have made me freak out.”
“Well you did,” Ada said. “And now you’re here.”
It was then that I noticed Maximus had been awfully silent. I glanced at him and was met with a suspicious gaze, green eyes appraising me as if I was spewing bullshit. I was close to delivering another barb to him, just to put him in his fucking place, when Perry said, “You really don’t remember anything? Anything at all?”
I’m sure if I went into a psychotherapist’s office and subjected myself to some hypnosis, I could conjure up some hidden memories, as well as stop my on-and-off again affair with smoking and badly-lit porn. “I don’t remember anything, but the moment I do, I’ll let you know.” I licked my lips and eyed them all. “So, then if I’m here, how did you know where to find me?”
Perry sighed as if she’d been asked this question a million times already. Perhaps she had.
“I ran into your brother, when I was off on my walk,” she said carefully, her eyes flitting to the pavement. “Before all this happened.”
My heart chipped a bit. This didn’t sound like it was going in a good direction. As much as I didn’t like my brother, I also didn’t want to know what she was going to say next.
She went on. “He told me some things, about who he was and where you’d be going. So I knew.” She nervously wiped the back of her hand across her lips. “And Pippa told me too. Back when we were on the coast, at the school. The visions I’d had.”
And that was fucking news to me. But as much as I wanted to be in the loop over any visions or Pippa encounters that Perry had had – and kept from me – what she said about Michael was far more troubling.
I stared down at her until her eyes met mine. “What happened after that? With Michael?”
I could see her inhaling through her nose but to her credit she didn’t break my gaze, even though I saw pity in her eyes, maybe even fear. “He did something to me.”
My heart banged angrily in my ribcage. “What?” I asked, my voice low and hard. Fire licked at my guts.
“I don’t know,” she said helplessly. “He…he made it so I was powerless. At first anyway. I couldn’t move. And then, then I just fell to the ground I guess and passed out.”
“What did he say to you?”
She exhaled sharply then said. “He said, ‘You really are pretty, you know that. And young. Young blood is the best. My brother has excellent taste.’ Then he said…” she paused.
“What?” I asked, my fingers gripping her tight.
She looked away from me. “He doesn’t know I’m here,” she said, her voice lowering to mimic his. “And I wanted to keep it that way. I was rather a jerk to him after our mother died. And yet, now I need him. And I’m sure I’ll need you. Perry.’ Then he added, ‘See you soon’ and I already knew he mentioned New York. Pippa mentioned it too. So we came as soon as we could. It was a hunch in a way, I mean we had nothing to go on. But somehow we found you.”
Maximus snorted. I managed to tear my eyes off of her and glance at him, though I was still seething and grappling with what my brother had said and done to Perry and what the hell it all meant.
“Not somehow, little lady,” Maximus said with an unamused roll of his eyes. He looked to me. “She went into the Veil to find you. I reckon it worked but it was mighty stupid of her.”
It was stupid of her. “Perry,” I said, hating the idea that she would even entertain that thought, hating all of this.
“Figured you wouldn’t like it either,” Maximus said.
“I had no choice,” she said defensively. “Dex would have done the same for me.”
And that was definitely the truth. I would have scoured the ends of this world and many others if I were in her shoes and she in mine.
Suddenly I was hit with a wave of dizziness and that strange, creeping feeling again, almost like something was watching me. I quickly glanced around, half-expecting to see my fabled brother, but only saw the cityscape of New York instead. To say it was all overwhelming was being facetious.
“Are you okay?” Perry asked quickly, running her fingertips along my cheek.
I closed my eyes at her touch and nodded slowly. “It’s a lot to take. I need a beer and a cigarette and some time to wrap my head around things. All the things.”
“I know just the place to cure what ails ya,” Maximus said, forced levity in his voice. I was certain he was going to take me to a dive bar a few blocks from here, one we used to get cheap fish tacos at in University.
I nodded and with my hand gripped firmly around Perry’s, the four of us made our way down the street. The crazy thing was, even with my beloved and my friends at my side, even though all I had wanted to do was find Perry and now I had her in my arms, that didn’t make everything right.
It should have.
But it didn’t.
That horrible feeling, like something tragic was about to go down and all the speed in the world wouldn’t help me? That had only gotten worse since I found them.
And I had no damn clue what that meant.