Dee saw one stained yet elegant eyebrow tic up in disbelief. “Ah yes,” the professor replied, with fine contempt. “Morality.”
“Kinda heard you had a thing for that, back in the day,” Dee couldn’t quite keep herself from snapping, though she knew it’d turn him her way—but hell, she was ass-tired of things like this supercilious old fuck always talking around her, just ‘cause her Daddy wasn’t the one with horns. So when Maartensbeck’s blood-charged gaze met hers, she just smiled: not as sharp as him, but sharp enough. Only to be more surprised than she’d expected to be when, a moment later, he did the same.
“Little soldier,” he called her, with what rang like a gross parody of affection (though for all she knew, he actually might’ve meant it). “How you remind me of Ruhel, at your age...” Then threw back over his shoulder without turning, diction still crisp, yet tone gone melting: “...or you, of course, Anapurna—is that the correct pronunciation? What a joy! I still remember what your father’s heartbeat sounded like, in Ruhel’s womb. You also have his smell.”
Dee looked up, and found herself locking eyelines with what must be Chatwin’s recruiter: little, yes—small as Dee herself—and definitely a shade darker than the Maartensbeck norm, curly beech-brown hair drawn back in a tightly-practical French braid, though her Bollywood movie-star eyes were as blue as his once must’ve been, or her grandmother’s still were. Had a modified flare-gun held in a two-hand grip (white phosphorus? That would’ve been Dee’s call) trained between the professor’s shoulderblades, with the famous Kevlar gorget peeping from her silk blouse’s collar. Much like Ruhel, she had her game face down pat, given that was undoubtedly who she’d learned it from. But—
It’s different, when it’s one of your own. Always.
“Great...great-grandfather,” Anapurna Maartensbeck said, finally.
“Oh, that does seem a touch over-formal. Do call me Maks.”
“I’ve—always wanted to meet you.”
“And I you.” Cornish sisters and Chatwin apparently equally forgotten in the face of this long-desired reunion, the professor turned his back on them and took a pace forward, chuckling when he saw Anapurna’s finger tighten on the trigger. “But where is my pretty girl, my dear-beloved granddaughter? Where is my Ruhel?”
“Here, grandfather. On your nine o’clock.”
“Excellent. You never disappoint.”
So here they all were, weapons either out or on the verge of being so, with the walking corpse of Professor Maks playing monkey in the middle. To her right, Dee had Anapurna, gun-barrel still levelled; to her left was Ruhel, having materialized out from behind what used to be the motel’s front desk, toting what looked like either the world’s biggest Taser or a high-tech portable flamethrower scaled down far enough you could hide it under your coat, like a shotgun.
Must be nice to get paid corporate rates, Dee thought.
“I’m sorry to have lied to you, at least by omission,” Ruhel Maartensbeck told them, voice only slightly shaky, “but I needed that book, as well as my grandfather’s location, and I needed whoever brought it to me not to know why. So while I must admit that Miss Chatwin turning out to be able to recognize it took me somewhat by surprise—”
Chatwin shook her head, trucker-hat bobbing. “Tch. Why does everybody assume just ‘cause I never got my GED, I must’a stopped readin’ for pleasure altogether?”
Dee could sympathize, not that she was going to say so. “Well, it’s here now, one way or the other,” she told Ruhel, instead. “It, him, and...about twenty dead bodies I can see plus six more floors of ones I can’t, plus whoever else he might’a happened to kill, on the way over...”
“Plus the team you sent in to get it,” Sami added, “up to and including the only guy he didn’t gut right then and there, the guy A-Cat got your book from. Plus Leah, the waitress, who didn’t even know what was happening to her, ‘til Dee cut her damn head off. Her, those two guys in the kitchen, a couple more people who came in before Maks here was finished, just looking to get a midnight snack...”
The professor threw back his head and hooted, delightedly, while Ruhel’s mouth trembled. “Please,” she said. “I know what we’ve done must seem—excessive, to an outsider—”
Dee rounded on her. “‘Scuse me? We’re hunters, lady, just like you—that’s how you fished us in, in the first place. So no, I don’t give a shit how nice he used to be, or whether or not you can maybe make him that way again: you let your granddad eat people, real people. The kind we’re supposed to save from things like him.”
“Be polite,” Anapurna warned, her voice chill.
“Or what? How old ar
e you, man? You don’t even know him!”
“True enough. But I know her—when my mum and dad died, she’s who took me in. So—”
“—She tells you he’s worth however much collateral damage it takes, then that’s what goes, huh?” Dee didn’t quite spit, but it took effort. “Yeah, well—know what my parents told me? How you people were heroes.”
At this, the professor laughed so hard he had to bend over just a bit, bracing himself, before finally trailing off. “oh,” he said, “that was delightful. Do you know what a hero is, my dear? As much a killer as anything he kills, but with far better public relations.”
“That what the guy who made you this way told you?”
“Amongst other things.” The professor sighed. “Ah, and now you’ve made me sad. I did think, you know—he and I having been nemeses for so long—that if I only caused a long enough trail of damage once I finally got on the other side of those five-foot-thick walls, he might hear about it, and come join me.” A hapless shrug. “But...as you see.”
“Men,” Chatwin commiserated, deadpan.
“All that effort, and all for nothing,” the professor continued, as Sami and Dee shot each other a quick glance behind his back while Anapurna’s eyes slid over to her grandmother, who was starting to look queasy. “I’d discorporated him five times already, throughout my career, which I now suspect he took as a variety of flirtation. But then I was old, and one night I dreamt he appeared in my bedroom, telling me he’d slipped some of his blood into my food. You will change either way, Maks, but if you meet me directly, if you let me do as I please, I can keep you from harming Ruhel, at the very least. I agreed, naturally enough—”
“—Because that was the sort of man you were,” Ruhel broke in here, desperately. “Because you were good.”