I stared down the barrel of that gun, sweating, panicking. No hope, no plan, no aspects . . .
But she didn’t know that.
“They’re around you,” I whispered.
Zen hesitated.
“Some people theorize,” I said, “that the ones I see are ghosts. If you’ve read about me, then you’ll know. I do things I shouldn’t be able to. Know things I shouldn’t know. Because I have help.”
“You’re just a genius,” she said, but her eye twitched to the side. Yes, she’d read about me. Deeply, if she knew how to drive off without my aspects.
And nobody could dig into my world without coming away a little bit . . . touched.
“They’ve caught up to us,” I said. “They stand on the steps behind you. Can you feel them there, Zen? Watching you? Hands at your neck? What will you do with them if you remove me? Will you live with my spirits stalking you for the rest of your life?”
She set her jaw, and seemed as if she was trying very, very hard not to look over her shoulder. Was this actually working?
Zen took a deep breath. “They won’t be the only spirits that haunt me, Leeds,” she whispered. “If there is a hell, I earned my place in it long ago.”
“So you say,” I replied. “Of course, what you really should be wondering is this: I’m a genius. I know things I shouldn’t. So why have I placed us here, right now? Why is it that I want you right there?”
“I . . .” She held the gun on me. A cool breeze blew in down around her, rustling the lips of old potato sacks.
My cell phone chirped in her pocket.
Zen practically jumped to the ceiling. She cursed, sweating, and rested her hand on the pocket. She thrust the gun at me and fired. Wild. The support beam beside me popped with exploding bits of wood. Dion dove for cover.
Zen—eyes so wide, I could see the whites all around her pupils—held the gun in a trembling hand, focusing on me.
“Check the phone, Zen,” I said.
She didn’t move.
No! It couldn’t go this way. So close! She had to—
Another phone rang. Hers this time, I assumed, buzzing in her other pocket. Zen wavered. I met her stare. In that moment, one of the two of us was mad, insane, on the edge.
And it wasn’t the crazy guy.
Her phone stopped ringing. A text followed. We waited, facing one another in the cold cellar until, at long last, Zen reached down and took out her phone. She stared at it for a few moments. Then she laughed a barking laugh. She backed up, placing a call, and had a whispered conversation.
Letting out what had to be the biggest breath of my life, I walked to Dion and helped him to his feet. He looked up at Zen, who laughed again, this time louder.
“What’s going on?” Dion asked.
“We’re safe,” I said. “Isn’t that right, Zen?”
She giggled wildly. Then she hung up and looked right at me. “Whatever you say, sir.”
“. . . ‘Sir’?” Dion asked.
“Exeltec was on unstable footing,” I said. “I released rumors that it was involved in a federal investigation, and had Yol push all the right buttons economically.”
“To make them desperate?” Dion asked.
“To crash the company,” I said, walking back to Zen, passing a flummoxed Audrey. “So I could afford to buy it. Yol was supposed to do that part, but only got halfway done. I had to have Wilson do the rest, calling the various Exeltec investors and buying them out.” I proffered my hand to Zen. She gave me my phone.
“So . . .” Dion said.
“So I now own a sixty percent stake in the company,” I said, checking the text from Wilson. “And have voted myself president. That makes me Zen’s boss.”
“Sir,” she said. She was doing a good job of regaining her composure, but I could see a wildness in the way her hands still trembled, the way she stood with her expression too stiff.
“Wait,” Dion said. “You just defeated an assassin with a hostile takeover?”
“I use the cards dealt to me. Probably wasn’t particularly hostile, though—I suspect that everyone involved was all too eager to jump ship.”
“You realize, of course,” Zen said smoothly, “that I was never actually going to shoot you. I was just supposed to make you worried so you’d share information.”
“Of course.” That would be the official line, to protect her and Exeltec from attempted murder charges. My buyout agreement would include provisions to prevent me from taking action against them.
I pocketed my phone, took my gun back from Zen, and nodded to Audrey. “Let’s go collect that body.”
21
We found Mrs. Maheras in the garden still. She knelt there, planting, nurturing, tending.
I walked up, and from the way she glanced at me, I suspected she realized that her secret was out. Still, I knelt down beside her, then handed over a carton of half-grown flowers when she motioned toward them.
Sirens sounded in the distance.
“Was that necessary?” she asked, not looking up.
“Sorry,” I said. “But yes.” I’d sent a text to Yol, knowing the feds would get it first. Behind me, Audrey, Tobias, Ivy, and a downcast J.C. stepped up to us. They cast shadows, to my eyes, in the fading light, and blocked my view of Dion standing just behind. We’d found them all walking along the road, miles from Zen’s holding place, trying to reach me.
I was tired. Man, was I tired. Sometimes, in the heat of it all, you can forget. But when the tension ends, it comes crashing down.
“I should have seen it,” Ivy said again, arms folded. “I should have. Most Orthodox branches are pointedly against cremation. They see it as desecration of the body, which is to await resurrection.”
We had been so focused on the information in Panos’s cells that we didn’t stop to think there might be other reasons entirely that someone would want to take the corpse. Reasons so powerful that it would convince an otherwise law-abiding woman and her priest to pull a heist.
In a way, I was very impressed. “You were a cleaning lady when you were younger,” I said. “I should have asked Dion more about your life, your job. He mentioned hard labor, a life spent supporting him and his brother. I didn’t ask what you’d done.”
She continued planting flowers upon her son’s grave, hidden in the garden.
“You imitated the cleaning lady who worked at the morgue,” I said. “You paid her off, I assume, and went in her place—after having the priest place tape on the door. It really was him, not an impostor. Together, you went to extremes to protect your son’s corpse from cremation.”