Out of the Dark (The Brethren Series) (23 page)

She hadn’t realized she sat still with his finger caught in her mouth until that moment, and as he laughed, she drew it out from between her lips.
You’re talking to me,
she said.

I’ve been talking to you all along.

Not like this,
she replied.
Not with your mind.

He shrugged.
I don’t talk to anyone this way.

Why not?
she asked, and it occurred to her how lonely that must be, to be as tremendously gifted a telepath as Aaron was, and yet to have never opened his mind and fully shared his talents, or himself, with anyone else.

He shrugged again.
There’s never been anyone around to listen,
he replied, adding with a soft smile.
Until now.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

On a
nother tequila-and-beer-inspired whim, Naima volunteered for karaoke. She’d stood at the deejay’s table for a long, indecisive moment while Aaron had excused himself to the restroom. She’d flipped through a three-ring binder listing hundreds of songs, mostly pop and country, before finding one she wanted.

“‘Ain’t Misbehavin’?”
The deejay was a tall, skinny black kid with a day-glo T-shirt screenprinted with
SAVE THE TA-TAS
across the front. He glanced up at Naima and whistled. “Damn, girl. Picking the classics!”

Kid, I’ve been singing that song since your grandparents were gleams in their parents’ eyes,
Naima thought with an aloof smile, accepting the microphone from him as he cued the song up on his laptop.

The song’s piano intro began to play, while on a computer monitor facing the stage, the first line of lyrics appeared:
No one to talk with, all by myself… No one to walk with, but I'm happy on the shelf…

She didn’t need them. Or the microphone, either, really, but she lifted it in hand anyway and began to sing. At first, business continued as it had been inside the bar, with the hustle and bustle of waitresses bearing trays of drinks, or people hunched and gathered around tables, or a nearby billiard set. But slowly, as the sound of Naima’s voice filtered through the tavern, sonorous, sensual and achingly sweet, one by one, people began to turn around and look at her, to fall silent and listen. Naima didn’t even notice. She closed her eyes, tipped her head back, and with a rhythmic rocking of her hips, lost herself in the song
.

As she finished,
cooing out the last syllable in a long, lingering note:
“Ain’t misbehavin’, saving all my love for yooooouuuu…”
she opened her eyes. For a split second, she half-expected to find herself in a Harlem dance hall, waiting to take a bow. Instead, a pair of drunk men at a nearby table began to clap their hands loudly and holler out in approving catcalls—as close to an ovation as she could expect to get, she supposed.

“Girl, that was something else!” raved the deejay as she stepped down from the stage and returned the mic to him.

“Thanks,” she murmured, and as she walked back to the table, she found Aaron waiting for
her. He’d been facing the stage, watching her performance, but stood politely as she approached.

“You can sing,” he observed.

She shrugged noncommittally. “I can carry a tune.”

“Fats Waller,” he remarked, naming the song’s composer. “That’s a good tune to carry.”

“You know jazz?” she asked, sliding into the booth again. Fresh drinks had arrived in her absence, and she knocked back a tequila without benefit of lime or salt.

“
A little bit,” he admitted as he settled back into his own seat. “I like to listen to it anyway.”

“I used to
sing with a band in the early thirties,” she said. “We covered a lot of jazz standards, cut a record or two back in the day. I went by Rachel Young then.”

He cocked his head, as if trying to fit the name to her face. “What do you go by now?”

“Nothing,” she replied. “This is one of my down times.”

When he looked puzzled, she tried to explain. Because they lived for so long without aging, Michel had established a sort of identity cycle for himself and his clan. They were allowed to live freely in the human world under an assumed identity for a reasonable amount of time, usually a few decades. Long enough to enjoy
themselves, but not long enough to draw unwarranted attention. After each of these “cycles” of assumed personas, they would then either take on another identity in another part of the country or world, where they stood no chance of being recognized or remembered. Or—as preferred by Michel—they would simply cease to have an identity in the human world. They would live at the clan compound in Lake Tahoe for a decade or two, with no identification such as a Social Security number or name for use among humans. This was the down time. Naima was currently ten years into hers.

“Michel thought it would protect us,” she said. “Especially since so many of us go on to prominent positions in the human world. It doesn’t happen often, but I’ve been told before how much I look like ‘Rachel Young,’ the jazz singer
. Most often, though, I’m told how much I look like a model from the nineties.”

Digging her iPhone out, she opened an internet window, and Googled the name
Grace Aubrey.
When more than 45,000 digital images came up, she passed him the phone. He studied the screen for awhile, then glanced up at her.

“Some guy came up to me on the street in New York,” she said, feeling heat stoke in her cheeks. God, why was she telling him all of this? She blamed the tequila. She
never
talked about herself, and especially not her past—not even the good things like this that she didn’t necessarily mind to recall. “They call it scouting. Anyway, he talked me into coming by this modeling agency where he worked. They offered me a contract. It’s very flattering to be more than two hundred years old and mistaken for a twenty-something human.”

He laughed. “You really need something like that to let you know you’re beautiful?”

Caught off guard, yet pleased by the comment, she blushed all the more.

“That’s a
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue,” Aaron continued, turning the phone around so she could see the image he was looking at. “And that’s you on the cover.”

“It’s really not that big a deal,” she began lamely. “My agent knew this guy at the
S.I.
production office who owed him a…”

“Second African American woman after Tyra Banks to make the cover of the swimsuit issue,” Aaron said, reading from the screen now.

“I’m sure you’ve done your own share of really fascinating things in your lifetime,” Naima said.

He laughed. “Sure.
I learned to punch a Kukri blade through a man’s stomach to pierce his descending aorta and bleed him dry, while I trained with
Los Chavalos,
a mercenary group out of central Mexico.” Handing her the phone, he added, “Probably about the same time you were posing for that bikini shoot. They had me shoot myself in the thigh once, too. A test, they called it. I had to dig the slug out with that same Kukri knife. And then, because the bullet severed my femoral artery, I had to use my belt for a tourniquet and wade across a river—at a shallow spot where the crocodiles like to sun themselves—so I wouldn’t bleed to death before reaching a truck that could take me to a field hospital.”

Dropping her a wink, he tossed back another tequila. “
In the nineteen thirties, while you were out crooning, I was working with a guy by the name of Bugsy Siegel—maybe you’ve heard of him?—and a group called the Brownsville Boys, hit men for the organized crime syndicates my father helped to bankroll during and after Prohibition. ‘Enforcers,’ they called us. We were taught to use ice picks to gut our prey. Made for messier crime scenes, bigger headlines in the papers. Fascinating shit.” He made a show of reaching for the phone. “I could Google it for you…”

“No, thanks.” She
pulled the phone out of his reach. “I hardly think that’s something I’d go bragging about.”

“I wasn’t bragging.”

“What do you call it, then?”

His brows narrowed. “Making conversation. You were talking about your life, the things you’ve done. I was telling you about mine.”

“And that’s all you’ve done? Kill people?”

“No. I told you before—a lot of them I’ve only maimed. Irreparably.”

“You think that’s funny?” she demanded.

“No, what’s funny is that I almost thought this could work.” He stood up, hands fisted. “Thanks for the drinks. And the memories.”

“Where are you going?” she demanded.

“You’re not the only ride in town,” he assured her. “I’m a pretty good telepath. I think I can convince someone to give me a lift to Reno.”

He started to stomp off, then paused and returned to the table. Planting his hands down heavily enough to startle her, he leaned over, nearly in her face. “You know what the bitch of it all is?
You’re getting bent out of shape about the way I’ve spent my life, but because of that, I’m probably the only one who can keep you alive past this time tomorrow.”

As he stalked off again, she scrambled to her feet and hurried after him. Because she had to stop and pay their tab along the way, he was already halfway across the parking lot before she caught up to him.

“What the hell are you talking about?” she demanded, grabbing him telekinetically and spinning him around to face her, making him stumble.

“You know, I’m getting really sick of you doing that,” he told her, brows furrowed.

“I said what are you talking about, ‘keeping me alive?’ Nobody’s trying to kill me. Where in the world would you get an idea like—?”

“Whoever killed Michel cut the brakes on your truck,” he cut in, adding drily, “It’s been my experience that people don’t do that as a friendly sort of gesture.”

He’d started to walk again, and she stormed along beside him, matching him briskly, stride for stride. “You’re crazy! No one cut the brakes.”

“
The front brakes going out by chance? Yeah, it happens,” Aaron said. “The rear brakes going out? Sure. But both sets going out at the same time? Little too coincidental. You’ve got four lines that run from your master cylinder to each of your wheels. They supply hydraulic fluid to your brakes—it’s what makes them work. You get a leak and those lines stop getting fluid to the brakes. Your brakes stop working.”

They crossed the street, then headed across the motel parking lot toward their room.
“It’s pretty unlikely all four brake lines sprung leaks all at the same time,” he continued. “I think someone got up under the truck before you left and cut them. Probably not all the way—you had enough braking capacity to get off the compound and all of the way to Carson City. But I bet you were hemorrhaging brake fluid the whole time. By the time we turned around on that canyon road, you were completely out.”

“Who would want to kill me?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.” Outside the door to their room now, Aaron paused, arms folded, his brow raised. “Maybe another model you pissed off in the nineties because she thinks you stole her swimsuit cover?”

“Ha, ha, very funny. I don’t have any enemies. I don’t have an identity at the moment, remember? Nobody knows me to want me dead.”

“I don’t know,” he said again. “Maybe someone’s been staking out the compound. They’ve seen you with Michel. They know you’re his granddaughter. Hell, for all I know, this guy could be targeting every single one of your family members. He could be out in the woods right now, taking them out one by one. They’re like fish in a goddamn barrel out there.”

“They
can take care of themselves. They have guns.”

He laughed
, fishing the key from his jacket pocket and turning around to unlock the door. “So? They’re also a bunch of hippies, plastic surgeons and accountants. Give me three hours and my sniper rifle, and I’ll clear at least two-thirds of them out of those hills, one shot apiece.”

That
was the wrong thing to say. Despite her natural tolerance to alcohol, Naima seldom drank as a rule, and the tequila and beer had hit her fast and hard. She felt herself teetering on the brink of one of her brown-outs, a fugue state provoked by the decrease in impulsivity the alcohol caused. That Aaron was deliberately provoking her, and as a result, pissing her off, did nothing to help matters.

She’d come to rely on
the deep breathing exercises Michel had taught her to calm and quiet her heart and mind and divert her attention from whatever contributing stressors were at hand. She knew she shouldn’t fall for Aaron’s goading; knew she needed to step back and calm down, collect herself before she slipped altogether, but she couldn’t.

“Stay away from my family,” she snarled.
She hooked him by the elbow, yanking hard enough to spin him around to face her. Then she punched him in the face. She was a strong woman and put some weight behind the blow; it snapped his head toward his shoulder and left him blinking stupidly against pinpoints of twinkling lights.

“I’m not the one you have to worry about
.” He touched his nose, his fingertips coming away spotted with scarlet, and she smelled the distinctive metallic aroma of blood. “I keep telling you that.”