“I thought you’d never ask,” he said. He let go of her as Mr. French finished up, and fished in his pocket for the plastic bag, which he snapped open with a flourish of his wrist and handed to her.
“Really?” she said. “I thought you were walking him.”
“I am doing the manly part of holding the leash,” he said. “But he’s your dog, and I have to draw the line somewhere. This seems like a good place.”
She grinned, kissed him on the lips, and bent to clean up after her dog, who chose that precise moment to shake himself, shedding mud and rain like a sprinkler. Lovely. “I don’t know why I put up with either one of you,” she told Mr. French severely, as she scooped the poop. “It’s way too much trouble.”
“Obviously because we’re adorable,” McCallister said on behalf of Mr. French, who barked sharply to support the statement. Or maybe just to indicate his desire to get out of the rain.
Bryn disposed of the bag in the first bin they passed on the way back to the house, and then stopped to look back. “Pat?”
“Yes?”
“Since when are there garbage cans on the lawn?” If you could call the enormous, sprawling, carefully manicured parkland around the McCallister estate something so prosaic as a lawn.
“They’re for the gardeners,” he said. “Don’t worry. I didn’t have them put in just for you.”
“Liar,” she said.
“Oh, I’m not. We’ve got other dogs, too. If it makes you feel better, garbage day is Thursday. You can roll all the bins to the curb.”
That summed up why she liked him so much, she decided; when he was relaxed and the armor was off him, he was oddly unaffected by all…this. The sumptuous multimillion-dollar estate. Most people of his particular social status probably wouldn’t have known what day the garbage was taken out any more than they could locate the laundry room—but Patrick McCallister was one of the most practical people she’d ever met. It helped that he didn’t actually own this place; his family had left everything in a trust, and his income was relatively modest, given the lush surroundings. He was more like a caretaker than the lord of the manor—or at least, that was how he felt about it. The odd thing was that he was happier that way. Too much money makes people callous, he’d told her once. I don’t want to take that chance. I’ve seen what can happen.
They walked in companionable silence, Mr. French tugging at the lead, and stopped in the mudroom to make themselves and the dog fit for entry into the house. He didn’t like it, but the simple, physical effort of toweling him off was kind of bracing.
So was the kiss McCallister gave her, warm and sweet, before they went into the more formal areas. McCallister headed toward the library, which was his favorite evening spot. Bryn was following when Liam came down the stairs with a telephone in his hand.
Liam insisted he wasn’t a butler, but Bryn couldn’t help but think of him that way. He was silver-haired, dignified, and even though he didn’t wear butlerish clothes, he definitely had the manners. And the grace. She’d felt clumsy and glaringly out of her league when she’d first come here, but he’d never made her feel anything but welcome.
Tonight, he gave her a smile and said, “I have a phone call for you from someone who doesn’t wish to give a name. Do you want me to decline?”
That call could have been from anyone, but Bryn had a sudden, painful conviction—irrational as it was—that it would be her sister, Annalie. The metallic taste of adrenaline filled her mouth. No one had seen or heard from Annie—or her kidnapper, Mercer—for more than a month; there were no reports coming in through Pat McCallister’s contacts, or through Joe Fideli’s.
They’d simply dropped out of sight.
She needed to know that Annie was all right, so without a word, she held out her hand, and Liam put the phone into it, then walked away to give her privacy. She headed off in a different direction, Mr. French at her heels. “Hello?” Her voice shook a little, more from eagerness than fear. Annie, please let it be you. Please. She’d let her sister down in a huge and awful way; she’d allowed Annalie to come into her life knowing things were dangerous. She’d done it because, in the aftermath of her death and Revival, she’d been feeling so alone, so vulnerable. It was Annie who’d paid the price for that.
Annie, too, had joined the ranks of the Revived, against her will. And she now depended on Mercer—the original creator of the drug—and his slimy henchman, Freddy, for daily shots to keep her alive.
Please, Annie, help me find you.
It wasn’t her. In fact, it was a voice Bryn didn’t recognize at all. “Bryn Davis?” A man’s voice, medium register, not much of an accent she could detect.
“Yes.”
“I—I’m sorry for calling out of the blue, but I was given your name by a friend. A Pharmadene employee. Like me. Her name is Chandra.”
She turned her back to the doorway, unconsciously shielding the phone from any accidental eavesdropping by Liam or Patrick. “I’m listening.”
“My friend said you run a kind of…counseling service. Support group.” The man pulled in a deep breath, then let it out again. “For those of us who are, you know…addicts.”
“You mean, you need your hit every day or you get very sick?”
“Yes.”
“Uh-huh.” There was a desk in the corner of the room, largely ornamental, but it held some writing paper and a pen, and Bryn quickly jotted down the number on the caller ID and said, “Do you want to meet somewhere and talk things over?”
“Yes.” He sounded relieved. “Yes, I need to talk. Please.”
“Anyplace you feel comfortable that you can get to tomorrow?”
He named a coffee shop she knew, and she wrote it down. “I’ll be reading a book,” he said. “Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time.”
“What’s your first name?”
“Carl,” he said. “Carl—”
“I don’t need your last name, Carl. That’s fine. How about ten a.m.?”
“Fine. Thanks. I just need—I need to deal with this, and I haven’t been doing a real good job lately. It’s my family. My wife. It just seems…”
“Overwhelming,” she said. “I know. It gets better when you talk to someone else who can really understand.”
Carl was one of those the government had saved, and kept saving, every day that they provided him with a shot. He probably had the same question Bryn did: how long would that last? Not long, Bryn thought. She wouldn’t tell him that, but she knew the ruthless truth: the government didn’t need these people, other than a key few; they were just excess baggage, and sooner or later, they’d get dumped as the stockpiled supplies of Returné dried up.
These were victims, innocent victims—Pharmadene employees who’d been designated as mission-critical. They’d been “converted”—corporate-speak for killed, then Revived. And now the government was stuck with a bunch of people they couldn’t allow to run around loose and unsupervised because of their undead status…but there were too many to simply, conveniently disappear.
Bryn didn’t fool herself into thinking there was any genuine moral or ethical dilemma involved. Just expedience, risk, and reward.
Word was starting to get out, and Carl wasn’t the first Pharmadene employee to cold-call, looking for answers. Bryn didn’t know how many Revived were out there under the government’s control, and Riley Block wasn’t going to tell her…but this, in a small way, was making a difference.
Though absolutely nobody wanted her to do it. Particularly not Pat McCallister. He thought there were risks—and he was right. She just couldn’t not do it.…She felt responsible, somehow, to all these luckless bastards who had (like her) never asked for this sinister gift of pseudolife, who had to live a lie now.
Her lies, at least, were less personal.
She finished the call and hung up, and turned to find—no surprise—that Pat was standing there silently watching her. She shook her head. “Don’t start.”
“I won’t,” he said, but she could tell by the stillness in him that he wanted to. “Come on. Dinner. Liam won’t be happy if you let his beef Wellington get cold.”
It was so odd that she lived in a house where beef Wellington was what was for dinner. And it wasn’t even that exceptional.
“I need to change,” she said, and kissed him quickly on the way out the door. “Be down in a minute.”
Her room still didn’t feel like hers, exactly, although all her stuff was here, or as much as she’d wanted to bring with her.…She hadn’t wanted the old, cheap pressboard dresser, the secondhand couch or bed, but she’d brought the old armchair she’d always preferred, and her pictures, mementos, books, music, and movies were all neatly ordered on shelves. The room had come with a television, a vast flat-screen thing that probably also made coffee, as high tech as it was, and she was a little scared of it. It had its own curtains to conceal it, so as not to upset the soothing autumnal glory of the furniture and fabrics; they wouldn’t have been out of place a hundred years ago, in this very house.
Her clothes were not great, but they were better than they had been, mainly because she had some grasp now of how to dress for her job. She’d come straight out of the military to her first funeral home job, and wearing a uniform hadn’t prepared her for the challenge of buying suits. She’d gotten some advice from Lucy, the funeral home’s formidable administrator, who’d surely trained with some kind of fashion-related Zen master.
Bryn stripped off her doggy-mudded jeans and shirt and put on what was casual evening dress here in the mansion—a dress, which was a little sexy, like for a first date at an upscale restaurant. She added a necklace that she’d been given by her mom years ago, and then picked up the nice watch that Annie had given her as her “first job” present.
