Ari #2
“Rest,” she tells him sternly. “I mean it.” History is there in her voice, the kind of tone that comes with decades of familiarity, and Sam gets the feeling that Demeter must have known Will as a young child. She turns to Sam. “If Diamond wants details, I can give them to her.”
“I don’t usually see Diamond,” Sam says.
The alchiatrist nods at her. “Oh, this time, you will,” she replies, and Sam shivers.
“Miss Lang,” Will says, and Sam meets his gaze. “Call Hanover. Tell him to arrange a meeting for the instant we arrive back at the gates.”
Now he sounds more like the Will she knows. Relief and disappointment flash through her. Had their previous moment just been an instance of delirium? Maybe Will doesn’t remember it at all.
Sam returns to herself too. “Of course,” she says.
“Demeter.” Will meets the alchiatrist’s eyes directly. “Thank you.”
Demeter just scowls at him. “You’ll probably be thanking me again later this week because you didn’t follow my instructions and pushed yourself too hard.” She squeezes his elbow once. “Some things never change.”
When they arrive at the estate, it’s past 4:00 A.M., and Hanover is already waiting inside the gates at the bottom of the hill.
“Hanover—” Sam starts to say as she steps out of the car, but the man is already at Will’s side and opening the door.
“Don’t worry, miss,” Hanover reassures her. “Are you hurt?”
His steady presence calms Sam somewhat, and she shakes her head. “Just Constantine.”
Will scowls but doesn’t protest when Hanover drapes his arm over his shoulders. “Just follow me, miss,” Hanover says. “We’ve all been expecting you.”
The hive has been kicked tonight. Sam hasn’t seen the estate like this before, where dozens of people are bustling about and there is a low din of frantic chatter in the air.
It’s so easy to forget how many people are here at any given time, working behind the scenes on Grand Central’s various operations.
But tonight, everyone is buzzing angrily, eager for blood.
At first, she thinks this is all due to word spreading about a potential hit on Will.
Then she overhears some of the conversations and realizes that it’s also because Diamond has made the rare move of cancelling a flight to come here, and has just returned unannounced.
“—to make sure Ms. Taylor is—”
“—no, she’ll want to take it in her room—”
“—no other calls for her, tell them—”
“—have to hurry, she’s already—”
Diamond, Diamond, Diamond.
They head toward the matriarch’s house, a building that, until now, Sam has only ever seen in glimpses behind curtains of bougainvillea. The door is already open. Hanover guides Will inside and Sam follows in their wake, stepping into a narrow hall that opens to a vaulted living room.
Diamond is already here, sitting opposite a graying man Sam doesn’t recognize. The woman says nothing as they file in, Will easing onto the couch across from his mother, Sam sitting beside him, while Hanover takes a seat beside Diamond.
Sam looks around. Now that she’s in here, she feels mildly surprised.
The space is dark but unexpectedly inviting, ash wood floors contrasting with Spanish archways and ceiling beams. The fireplace is crackling, and through the windows lining the wall, Sam can see a view of the entire cityscape of Angel City, its lights partially obscured behind a curtain of fog.
Sam’s eyes dart back to Will, still searching for a hint that something between them has changed. That he remembers pulling her close, his lips brushing against hers in that strange, unconsummated kiss. But if he does, he shows no signs of it; his attention is on Diamond now.
Diamond takes a sip of her tea, then places it carefully on the table between them and leans back in her chair.
She has always had an unhealthy cast to her complexion, but tonight she is even paler, her cheekbones prominent and eyes piercing.
She is magnificent in a sickly, regal way, and her face, expressionless to most, is the warning of a storm.
Sam’s heart flutters with dread and anticipation.
“Tell me what happened,” Diamond says to her son. Her voice has grown harsher and hoarser over the years, too.
“It was a calculated hit,” Will answers.
He tells her of the meeting that turned into a fight, the slaying of their two negotiators.
Then of his flight out of the hotel, of Sam coming to find him, of the men responsible.
One is Maclan, a representative from a Lumines factory.
The other, Zhukov, is a polemist and the one responsible for shooting Will.
Then Sam gives her account of the evening, filling in around the edges of Will’s story.
When Diamond asks her what information she gathered from the crowd, she mentions the extra Lumines crewmen who had been stationed throughout the hotel.
Even though the effects of her last sand dose have started wearing off, her brain still feels drenched in light, and when she closes her eyes she can see the imprint of her memories branded against the darkness, red and glowing like a too-sunny day.
The man across from Diamond speaks for the first time. “For them to move against Will like this is very unusual.” The man’s voice is reedy, hollow like a reaper’s. “They’re going to risk making the streets bleed.”
“I suspect they want it,” Diamond says. “They’ve been ramping up operations for months. They think they’re going to win the election this year, install their own mayor. It’s making them bold.”
“Everyone will be watching you after this,” Hanover tells Will. “The news will be widespread by morning. You’ll need at least several weeks to recover from a wound like that.” He looks at Diamond. “Several weeks of not showing his face in public is going to do damage to us.”
“Only if we let it,” Will says. “They’ve struck early and hard because they’re confident that this will throw us into disarray.”
“But they failed,” Sam interjects.
The conversation pauses, and they turn to look at her.
“Your thoughts?” Diamond says.
Sam thinks of Ari, how he took a step back and released her. “They failed to kill you,” she says, nodding at Will, “and to do it discreetly. It was supposed to be a clean hit, and yet it wasn’t.”
“Because of you,” Will says.
His expression doesn’t change, but the blunt praise from him startles her. His gaze is as intense as ever, the gleam in his eyes sharp and searing. She shudders, pulled taut between fear and desire.
His lips on hers, the way he whispered her name.
“Not me,” she says. “You’re alive because of Shakespeare.”
Diamond looks at Sam. “You confronted him?”
She feels dizzy as she replies, “Yes. I knew him when we were young.”
At that, both Diamond and Will lift an eyebrow in unison.
Sam hesitates as images of Ari flood her mind.
The knife he pulled out of the wall and pointed at her, the way they faced each other in the hotel’s hallway.
The feeling of his hand closed around her wrist, shoving her against the brick wall, his face inches from hers.
The abrupt shift in her emotions when he touched her, the shudder that coursed through her body.
“He’s the best bioalchemist I’ve ever seen,” Sam finally continues.
Diamond considers Sam’s words carefully.
Her attention shifts to the graying man, who has been listening to the conversation with an air of what Sam can only describe as delight.
He’s gaunt, his cheekbones so sharp that they leave hollows, but it’s the kind of lined face that might once have been handsome.
His fine hair is combed severely to one side.
Now he licks his lips and sits straighter.
His suit is ill-fitting, as if he used to have a fuller figure.
Diamond notices Sam’s curiosity over him. “This is Sebastian Van Den Berg,” she introduces. “Hades.”
Will leans back against the couch. “Sebastian is a serial killer,” he says casually, as if to clarify the man’s attribution.
Every hair on the back of Sam’s neck stands on end.
“He’s one of our best polemists,” Diamond says with a wave of her hand. “He has been employed with me for decades. Sebastian, this is Sam Lang.”
“Yes, Mozart. A pleasure.” The man smiles, and Sam gives him an uncomfortable smile back.
She has crossed paths with plenty of Grand Central’s polemists before, but most of them treat the job as a duty, are committed to fighting for the syndicate.
This man, though, has an eagerness about him that makes her uneasy.
He doesn’t just kill out of duty. He loves it.
Will nods at her. “On Sebastian’s first job with us, he was sent to wait at Gotham’s Grand Central Terminal for a man named Stephen Pitt, who owed us a large debt.
The next morning, Stephen’s body was found dismembered and embedded into the terminal’s central clock, his face partially transmuted into the metal, his blood staining the interior of the clock’s surface red.
The city removed the clock altogether.” He shrugs.
“The papers called it a grotesque stunt by a psychopath, while the syndicates realized who he worked for, and gave us our name.”
So, Grand Central had been christened because of this man.
Sam recalls the mention of Hades on the night she’d been at the Odyssey Theatre.
And now that Will has said his profession, she can see it—even here, seated at the end of the couch, he seems restless, bored, hunting for entertainment.
His gaze is curiously empty, as if he is lacking a soul.
This is impossible, of course, given how powerful of an alchemist he must be.
But she tries to imagine the kind of soul that might inhabit someone like this, wonders if it had been shredded even before he began sacrificing it.
“They want a war,” Diamond continues, “so they’re going to get one. I want the Lumines crew that attempted the hit dead. Save the one who fired the shot at Will. Find him, Sebastian, and bring him back here.”
Sebastian smiles a lazy smile. “Yes, ma’am,” he replies.
Diamond looks at Hanover. “Tomorrow, I need you to pay a visit to Koreatown. I want two of our suppliers alerted. There’s a chance Lumines may target them.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Hanover says.
Sam nods along with Hanover. She usually accompanies Hanover on these errands, keeping her eyes open during supplier meetings, going over ledgers to check for mismatches against what they’ve been promised. “I’ll go with him,” she says.
“Not you,” Diamond says. “You’ll be going with Sebastian this time.”
Sam stiffens. She looks at Sebastian, who gives her an emotionless nod.
There is no room for argument in her statement.
“Yes, ma’am,” Sam says.
“And the next time you see your old friend Shakespeare, invite him over.”
Sam knows what that really means. Diamond wants Ari captured, alive and unharmed. She can only nod. “Yes, ma’am.”
“A bioalchemist like him should have been recruited by us.” Diamond looks at Will. “Can you walk on your own?”
Sam recalls what the old woman had said to her in the Arts District. “The alchiatrist warned that Will is to move as little as possible for the next week.”
“Amerson errs too much on the side of caution,” Will says.
“Amerson always has a reason for her caution. We can’t afford to lose you right now.” Diamond gives him a warning glance that reminds Sam the woman is a mother. “Go rest.”
Sam is the last to leave the room. As she passes Diamond on her way out, the woman stops her.
Diamond coughs, a soft and rasping sound. Then she nods at Sam. “You saved my son’s life tonight,” she says.
Her voice is quiet, different, and Sam doesn’t know what to do.
She thinks the woman is trying to tell her that she’s grateful, and it’s a strange feeling, being given gratitude by Diamond Taylor.
The emotion tethers them together in an unspoken bond.
Sam isn’t used to it, and she doesn’t know how to respond.
“Yes, ma’am,” she decides to say.
Diamond looks at her, a silent beat. And Sam realizes that being at this meeting means she’s part of the inner circle now, that she has just been privy to a conversation at the heart of Grand Central that no one else has heard.
“You can go,” Diamond says at last.
Finally, Sam feels the tether loosen, her freedom returned to her. The darkness outside is starting to weaken, and she finds a curious little memory surfacing in the back of her mind, a childhood letter from long ago.
When does the night end and the morning begin?
At the far end of the hill, the first hint of morning blue is starting to touch the grass. She turns toward it and follows the path leading away from the house.