Chapter 18 #3
I realize she still has no idea how much danger she was really in, and I think I plan to keep it that way.
“How fucked up is he?” She gets back up and looks over at the doctor.
“Bad enough that he should be in hospital.”
“Why aren’t you there, then?”
“Because you were in danger,” I say, tugging her back down.
“You came while you were dying?” She creeps back up over the seat back, to the point I smack her ass again out of simple frustration. “Why?”
“Because I didn’t want you to die,” Leo says. “In spite of your rudeness, I prefer you alive.”
“That’s so damn sweet, but I was fine.”
“That man has a guillotine in his dining room,” Luke says.
“Really? I didn’t notice that. Then again, we didn’t dine. We had cream teas in his parlor, and then he took me up to see the attic and left me there.”
Ella
“I guess I have a different idea of what danger is.”
“You have no concept of what danger is,” Leo says.
I sit back down and for some reason I can’t begin to explain to myself, tears start coming to my eyes. They run down my cheeks and I try to wipe them away without anyone noticing.
Aiden is the sort of man who always notices everything though.
“What’s wrong?” He asks the question in a low murmur, giving me a little in the way of privacy.
“Nothing,” I say. “I don’t know. I think I’m happy.”
“You’re crying because you’re happy?”
“She’s crying? Why is she crying?” Leo pipes up from the back.
He hates being wounded. I bet it’s killing him not to be able to bound up and see what is going on. Luke is not held back in the same way. Two seconds later, he’s practically in my lap.
“I’m okay. Get off me! I’m happy. It’s nice. Shut up. Don’t talk to me. I don’t want to discuss any of it. I’m fine.”
“I’d believe you if you said one of those things, but saying them all in rapid succession makes me pretty sure none of them are true,” Luke replies, nudging my knee. “What’s going on with you?”
“You all came to get me from the most evil man you know, and you killed the most evil man I knew already. I know you were getting revenge for Teddy, and he deserved it. He’s the worst. Or was.
But you came for me, even after I ran. You could have just let me go.
It would have been so much easier, and then I would have been with Eric Mandeville, and he would have found some use for me, and… ”
“We love you,” Luke says. “We’re always going to come for you. Even Leo.”
“You shouldn’t speak for him,” I say.
“Even Leo,” Leo confirms from behind.
We land at the private airfield the Levin family maintains, and disembark the plane.
I am looking forward to being swept back home.
Happily ever after is so within reach I can practically taste it—right up until two black vehicles come charging up menacingly.
It’s not often you see cars driven in such openly hostile ways, with tires screaming.
“Get down!” Aiden shouts.
It happens so quickly. In the real world it probably all takes place in under sixty seconds. In the moment it seems to last forever.
Gunfire bursts across us, the fuselage of the plane peppered with bullet holes.
I have a strange feeling of being almost entirely calm.
I know I should be panicking, and I know that the feeling of out-of-control anxiety will come later.
Maybe much later. Maybe years from now it will hit me like one of these bullets, but for now I am calm because my body knows how to keep me safe.
I see the same fixed expressions on everyone else’s faces too. Thank god Leo is still in the back and still strapped in with the doctor beside him.
“Take off!”
Aiden and Luke haul the plane door shut again, and the pilot treats the private jet like it is a fucking fighter plane.
I had no idea how fast one of these things could taxi, or how steeply it could take off.
We have to grab for the seats as they turn almost horizontal with the angle of the incline.
The plane levels out and for the moment, the danger is over. It doesn’t feel like it though. It feels like the world is ending and it will never be the same, and if only I had made different choices, everything would have been okay.
The pilot, a man who has up until this point not really existed at all as far as I was aware, suddenly becomes extremely relevant. The door to his cockpit is open, and he talks back over his shoulder.
“Secondary landing spot? We’re going to need one soon. I think the fuel tank was hit, and if we don’t explode in a ball of flame, we’re going to need somewhere to put this thing down.”
Aiden goes up to the pilot and starts talking to him. I sit down and put my seatbelt on, which feels stupid, but there’s nothing else we can do.
Aiden’s back out in a moment or two, and goes to check on Leo.
“Doctor’s been shot,” he says.
One of the bullets has gone straight through the plane and hit the doctor, who is doing an admirable job of patching himself up.
“We’ll double your fee. I’m sorry. We didn’t anticipate that kind of hostility on home ground.”
The doctor shrugs and keeps working.
“Everybody is being shot,” Leo says.
“It’s very in right now,” Luke chimes in.
The doctor seems to have just been grazed, but that doesn’t mean he likes it.
This is madness. I wonder what it must be like to live in some normal version of the world where the worst thing that happens is a parking ticket.
Then I wonder if that normal version of the world really ever existed at all, or if it was just made up to make everyone feel like the strangeness they’ve been experiencing day in, day out, for their entire lives was an anomaly.
Nobody I know, or have ever met, really has a normal life.
Everyone is constantly beset by oddness.
But this is beyond weird, even for me, even for these men.
“Looks like we’re not going home yet,” Aiden says grimly.
“We know who did this,” Leo says.
“Mr. Red. We denied him what he wanted, so he deployed a kill team,” Luke says. “What an absolute bastard. He’s obsessed with you, Aiden. I swear to god, he loves you.”
“He doesn’t love me. He’s not capable of love. He’s capable of fixations. He wants what he wants, and if he can’t have it, then it can’t exist at all. Standard abusive behaviors.”
“So are you going to kill him?” Luke questions.
“It’s not as simple as killing him,” he says. “Eric is better connected than most people. He might be better connected than anyone. He makes BP look like a complete amateur.”
“What, then?”
“We’re going to have to negotiate,” Aiden sighs.
Aiden
The bastard. The absolute, utter bastard. He thinks he smells blood in the water. This is what I was worried about when Teddy died, after the wash of grief had passed over and through me. I knew others would start taking their shots as well. I had hoped it wouldn’t be this literal.
My phone rings.
“We’re all alive, and you’re lucky for it,” I say.
“I knew you wouldn’t be harmed by anything as simple as bullets,” Eric says. “You’d take a more complex trap than that, I’m sure.”
“Eric, we are not going to be integrated into your little empire, so it’s about time you gave up on the idea.”
“It’s all about leverage,” Eric says. “And I feel like I have found some against you. And she’s pregnant?
That is going to be a really difficult situation for you.
Hard to sweep a baby into the air at a moment’s notice.
Much easier to just give into the man who can make a dozen armed men appear out of anywhere at a moment’s notice. ”
“A mercenary magician,” I say. “Don’t forget, Eric. We have resources too.”
“You’re threatening me?”
“Of course I am threatening you. You just attempted to wipe out my bloodline, you pathetic wet teabag…” I wasn’t meant to talk this way, but my anger is getting the better of me as adrenaline starts to surge again, as I remember the hail of bullets, and how easily we could all have perished to them.
“If you have any loved ones, say goodbye to them,” I growl down the line. “Because this, you fucking soggy sandwich fuck, is the fucking end of you.”
That’s when Luke slides the phone diplomatically away from me and ends the call.
“Great negotiation, buddy,” he says. “For our next attempt at diplomacy, let’s throw a brick through his window, and insult his mom.”
“Sorry,” I say. “I lost my temper.”
“I get it,” Luke says. “But I might hold onto this for a while anyway.”
The phone rings.
He answers it.
“Oh, Eric. Hiiiiii,” he says in the way only the youngest brother of a family can. He is slipping back into that role now. Teddy had it for years, but before Teddy was born, Luke honed that role, really made it his.
“Hi, yeah, no, he can’t come to the phone right now.” Luke says. “Why? Well, I think it’s a case of Uranassholeitis. Yeah. Look it up. Okay, bye.”
“That was immature,” Leo says from the rear.
“Do we care? Is there a prescribed response for talking to the guy who just tried to kill you?”
“We’re giving him too much information by talking to him, and the plane will have been tracked.
It has a transponder. And now we’re calling and talking to him, from the plane.
So either we ditch these phones and move now, or we’re going to have another set of visitors very, very soon would be my guess,” Leo points out.
“Here’s what we do,” Leo continues. “We lay up for a month. We take up residence in a fucking bunker. We heal. In another thirty days, I’m going to be fit again. Then when all three of us are ready, we start wiping this son of a bitch off the face of the planet, one thing at a time.”
He’s right. We have to move.
All phones and personal effects are left on the plane. We take the car, along with the pilot and the doctor. Nobody can be left behind.
We start driving through the night, aiming as quickly as possible for an interstate.
We need to blend in with the rest of humanity, and we need to do it fast. We also need to swap the cars, which is doable.
Eric will have access to satellites, and it won’t be easy to ditch him, but I suspect he won’t take that direct hit approach again.
He was trying to scare us. The gun men stayed at a distance, fired in a pattern that wasn’t particularly effective.
If he’d wanted us dead, they would have laid in wait, and that airport would have lit up on both sides as soon as we came to a halt.
A rocket launcher to the fuel reserves would have done it.
This is a game. A sick game played by a sick man who thinks that everybody he’s ever interacted with is a toy that can bleed for him.
I used to think that we could escape evil by just getting powerful enough.
Now I know the more powerful you become, the more evil there is.
It collects in places of influence, extending tendrils throughout every interaction until everything is corrupted.
We need a fucking exorcism.