When AJ McConaway picked up the phone on a February afternoon, she had no idea what she was in for.
Three
It was just shy of seven in the morning when my Jeep eased into the outskirts of Alexandria and I pulled off into the parking lot of a coffee shop for my fourth venti something of the long drive. The sky was turning pink and purple in the east, hints of sunrise starting to paint the sky. I glanced at my phone again, traced the route from where I was now to the address Tim had given me. My heart gave a strange double-beat. Only a few miles to go.
What the hell am I going to say? How the hell is this going to go? I took a deep breath and suppressed a shiver as I stepped into the coffee shop and ordered my drink, lingering at the far end of the counter and watching cheerful baristas fill the orders of half a dozen men and women who were apparently on their way to work. It was devastatingly normal, making my situation even more surreal. I was on my way to an apartment I’d never been to, hoping to talk to the brother who’d tried to kill me the last time I’d seen him. That hadn’t really been his fault, but it was still what had happened.
Maybe that was why he hadn’t come home.
“Alisa?”
I shot the barista who handed me my drink a smile and slipped back out into the parking lot. Puddles glistened in my headlights and the pale light of dawn as I headed deeper into Alexandria, toward the address he’d given me. He wouldn’t have given me an address if he didn’t want to see me. Maybe he doesn’t remember what happened.
It was a nondescript building on a quiet street. A pair of joggers in US Navy sweatshirts trotted down the sidewalk opposite me as I parked in the street behind a silver Taurus. I watched the joggers for a moment before I glanced up toward the building and checked the address again. There was a light on in the third floor window of the walk-up.
Now or never.
I gulped down a last mouthful of coffee and headed for the front door. There was a fresh name tape next to the buzzer for the third floor apartment with McConaway printed on it. I thumbed the buzzer.
The front door clicked open, but no voice greeted me. A shiver shot down my spine.
Steady, McConaway. Steady.
I shouldered through the door and jogged up the stairs to the third floor landing. A battered wooden door greeted me, light shining through the peephole.
Do I knock, or just go in?
I tried the knob—unlocked. The door creaked softly as I eased it open and poked my head inside.
Tim stood in the center of his tiny living room, staring out the window at the street below, his back to me. Every muscle was taut, his shoulders tight, slightly hunched. I swallowed hard as I closed the door behind me.
“Tim?”
His head drooped slightly before he glanced over his shoulder at me. “Hey sis.”
A dam burst inside of me. I pitched myself at him, throwing my arms around his waist and holding him tight. He shuddered, one of his hands knotting with mine. “You’re real,” I whispered. “You’re really here.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, leaning against me. “I—I should—I’m sorry.”
Tension was slowly draining from him, but not nearly as quickly as I’d have liked. I stepped back slightly, looking up at him as he turned slowly to face me. I reached up to trace a few unfamiliar, faint and fading scars on his face with my thumb. He looked away as if ashamed.
“Don’t,” I said faintly. “It’s okay.”
He met my gaze and stared at me for a few long moments, brows knitting over haunted eyes. “You’ve changed,” he said, voice soft. “It’s in your eyes. What happened?”
Other than my brother and my fiancée getting kidnapped by bad guys from somewhere beyond the boundaries of Earth? You mean besides that? I just shook my head slightly. “I’ve seen a lot since you left.”
“I heard we won in Iraq.”
“Winning is a relative term,” I said. “I had the opportunity to go dig there. Almost turned it down.”
His brows knit. “Why would you have done that?”
“Because someone offered me the opportunity to go looking for my brother beyond the Portals.”
Tim sucked in a sharp breath and looked away. I grasped his arm, fingers digging in.
“Don’t turn away,” I said. “Don’t run. I’m not losing you again.”
“It wasn’t a dream.”
My blood turned to ice. “What did you say?”
“It wasn’t a dream. You and Kate…” His voice trailed away, his breathing suddenly ragged as he looked at me. He wasn’t that much taller than I was, but he was tall enough that he had to tilt his face down to meet my gaze. His voice was hoarse when he found it again. “AJ, I’m sorry.”
I stared up at him, reaching up to rest my palm against his cheek. “It’s okay. We’re all still breathing. That’s all that matters.”
“I’m still sorry.”
He crushed me against his chest in a hug so sudden and so tight it stole my breath. I put my arms around him and squeezed him close as he pressed his face into my shoulder. I could feel him shivering in my embrace, but the tears he needed to cry never seemed to come. I laced my fingers through his hair and just held on for as long as he’d let me. “We missed you.”
“I wasn’t supposed to contact you,” he murmured into my hair. “He said not to contact you.”
I stiffened, stepping back quickly. “Who?”
“Ballard,” Tim muttered, turning away and slumping onto a secondhand couch that had probably come with the apartment. “He ordered me not to initiate contact.”
“I’ve never heard of him.” I sat down with him, watching his gaze grow bleak and distant as he stared out the window at the sunrise. “Who is he?”
Tim glanced at me sidelong. “How much do you know?”
“Other than that there are pathways between worlds and some of us know how to walk them?” I shook my head slightly. “Tim, I know a lot of stuff, but I don’t know what you’re mixed up in and I don’t know how Lieutenant O’Connell managed to find you.”
“We were assigned,” he said, his voice flat. “They told me who she was, what she’d seen before I met her again, before they told her that she was going to be my partner whether she liked it or not.”
“Met her again?” I echoed softly. I reached for his hand. He didn’t react as my fingers wrapped around his and squeezed.
“Mat knew her at the Academy,” he said. “We met at some party when I was in town. It was brief. I guess they were friends.”
That didn’t surprise me. My fiancée was a nice guy, made friends easily—more easily than I ever had. The coincidence was a little startling, though.
Unless it wasn’t a coincidence. I grimaced. Tim didn’t notice. I squeezed his hand again. “How long have you been back?”
“Since November,” he said. “They ordered me not to make contact.”
“You said that.” That was well before our run with Triskele. He’s been here for months and no one said anything. Why? I rested my chin against his shoulder and he shivered. “Who does Ballard work for, Tim?”
He looked at me then, pain in his eyes. “I don’t think I’m allowed to tell you.”
“Cloak and dagger bullshit.”
My brother closed his eyes and rested his head against mine. I slid my arms around his waist and held on tight.
“I know about the Corps, Tim. I know about UNSETIC.”
He shuddered, eyes squeezing shut. “I would ask how you know, but I’m guessing it’s the same way you know about the pathways, how you ended up searching for me.”
“Something like that.” I didn’t like how much tension knotted his lean frame. I squeezed him gently. “Talk to me, Tim.”
“I’m under orders,” he whispered.
“To hell with them. I made contact with you, not the other way around.”
“Technically, that was Brigid.”
“See?” I gave him a gentle shake. “Tell me, Tim. Goddammit, just tell me.”
“UNSETIC,” he said, dredging the word up from some dark and shadowed place in his soul. He lifted his gaze to meet mine, his lips thinning. “They recruited me when I reappeared in St. Petersburg, some weird-looking American babbling nonsense with no ID except a set of dog tags.”
“They had your name, social security number, and your blood type.”
“And they said that I’m Catholic.” He stared at his hands. “Those tags were enough to get me taken to the consulate instead of tossed somewhere worse, though I think the jury’s still out on that.”
I buried my fingers in his short hair and pulled him into a tight hug. “You’re home,” I whispered. “That’s all that matters, Tim. You escaped and you’re home.” My heart ached at the pain in his voice, the broken quality I could sense in him. He may have escaped the Cabal beyond the Portals, but he hadn’t come back whole—not entirely.
“I’m not the same as I used to be.”
“I know that.” My arms tightened a moment before I released him, watching him as he sat there with shoulders hunched and head bowed. “I’m not the same, either. None of us are exactly the same. Some things don’t change, though.”
“Like what?” His voice was dull, almost defeated as he stared at the floor. I swallowed a sigh that tried to win free of my throat.
“You’re my brother,” I told him. “You’ll always be my brother, and I’ll always love you.”
Tim’s gaze flicked up again to meet mine and he gave a little shake of his head. “I don’t deserve it. I’m not worthy of it.”
“That doesn’t matter,” I said. “You’re stuck with it.”
“After everything—”
“You’re still my brother and I’ve forgiven all of it already. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
He shuddered visibly. “Until it does.” He stood and wandered toward the windows, staring out at the street below, at the world that grew slowly lighter as the sun climbed higher in the sky beyond the clouds. “I did a lot of bad things for them, AJ. For the Cabal. I know I did, I just can’t remember all of it. It’s blurry, like I’m…I don’t know. Like I’m blocking it out somehow. Maybe I am. Maybe I just want to forget.”
“It was traumatic.” I stared at his back, wondering about the scars that Kate had told me about in moments of weakness, had cried over when she hadn’t thought I was looking. Were they bad? What had they done to him beyond break his spirit?
There was no doubt in my mind that it was broken, too. There was something missing, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on—as if he’d lost a piece of himself, or hidden it so deeply that even he hadn’t quite found it again since he’d made it home. It was almost enough to open a wound in my own heart.
“No one would blame you if you were.” I stood up from the couch and came up behind him, wrapping my arms around his waist and resting my head against the back of his neck. “Forgetting is a defense mechanism. When you’re ready…if you’re ever ready…it’ll come back. Or maybe it won’t and you’ll be better off.”
“It’s like I can hear their ghosts sometimes,” he said in a low, pained voice. I could see his reflection in the glass, see the pain and tears shining in his eyes. “Sometimes when I lay down and sleep, the ghosts come and I can’t get away from them. The memories rush back but when I wake up, all I have left are fragments of whatever I’ve seen.” His whole body shook for a moment. “What the hell happened to me, AJ? What the hell did they do—or what did I do to myself?”
The last words came as a bare whisper and I shivered a little, holding on tighter.
“We’ll figure it out,” I promised him. “One way or another, we’ll do that.”
“I’m not sure I want to.” He took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly, looking over his shoulder at me. “You came alone.”
“Uncle Chris had board…shit…to do.”
“Uncle Peter couldn’t get someone to cover at the firehouse, either?”
I pressed my cheek against his shoulder and hugged him tighter. Tim stiffened, as if he realized what my silence meant.
He had. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Big fire in the city,” I said. There was no gentle way to break the news, but I wanted to try anyway. “They scrambled companies from all over. Roof came down while Uncle Peter was still inside.”
A single sob tore itself from my brother’s throat and he looked away from me again, back toward the window. His voice was thick when he managed to speak a few minutes later. “Did they bury him with Mom and Dad?”
I nodded against his shoulder. Tim wrapped his hands around mine and squeezed.
“Good,” he whispered.
“They buried him like a hero,” I said, my voice muffled by his shirt. Tim took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly, nodding.
“He deserved it.”
“Yeah. Yeah, he did.”
Silence stretched between us for a few aching moments before he broke it cleanly. “You mentioned Kate.”
“I did.”
“How is she?”
“She misses you.” It was the stark, honest truth. “She hasn’t stopped looking. Of course, now that we know where you are…”
“Were you with her?” he asked in a whisper. “When you got the call?”
“We’d just gotten back from a run,” I told him. “She was getting patched.”
Tim’s head came around as if it was on a swivel. “She was hurt?”
“Bullet to the arm. It’s why she didn’t come with me—she was going to go and have an X-ray done to make sure it didn’t hit anything that important.”
“She’s in Chicago,” he murmured, gaze drifting back toward the window. I watched him, my cheek still pressed against his shoulder.
“Yeah, she lives there. She’s got an apartment above headquarters. Crashes at the house sometimes, too, when it gets really lonely or her brothers are visiting.”
“Fuck all.” Tim stepped away and I let him go, watching him as he started to pace like some kind of caged predator. “I never would have wanted you two to get mixed up in any of this.”
“Too damned late for that,” I said, crossing my arms. “We did it so we could find you.” And Mat. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to ask about Mat yet. Did he know something—anything?
If he knew something, he’d have said it by now. He doesn’t know anything.
It was as if he could read my thoughts—though maybe what I’d left unspoken was written all over my face.
“I don’t know where he is, AJ. They sent him away after…after what happened with you and Kate. I never stopped looking, but I never saw him again after they did that, after they—” His voice broke. “After they fucking sold him.”
Breath suddenly came ragged, painful. I bit down hard on my lip as my gaze locked with Tim’s. For a moment, I could feel his anguish and shared my own, twin souls laid bare to each other.
Then he tore his eyes away and the moment was over. I stumbled to a chair and sat down heavily as he buried his face in his hands, fingers hooked into claws.
“Dammit,” he swore. “Dammit and fuck-all.”
“It’s all right,” I said dully, staring at nothing. They’d sold him? The Cabal had sold my fiancée? To who? Why?
“It’s my fault,” Tim said. “It’s all my goddamned fault. If I had just—but I couldn’t—I…”
I sucked in a breath. “Calm down.”
He looked at me again. Tension had gripped him again, like a spring coiled too tightly.
“How can you forgive me if I can’t forgive myself?”
“That’s easy,” I said. “You’re my brother and I love you. Nothing changes that.”
He went to his knees then, starting to sob—gut and heart-wrenching sobs that sounded so painful they hurt me to hear. It was as if the dam inside him had finally broken, the stopper pulled free of the bottle that he’d kept his emotions in. I went to him and wrapped my arms around his shoulders, hanging on as we knelt there in the middle of his living room. He clutched at my arms like a drowning man.
“Call them,” he whispered into the crook of my arm as I rocked him. “Tell them to come.”
“I will,” I promised. “I will.”
“Are you sure she’s okay?”
I kissed his temple. “We’ll find out, won’t we?”
“Yeah,” he said in a distant whisper, his head resting against my shoulder. “I guess so.”
Then he buried his face in my shoulder and wept.
