Robert Crane - Untouched

He took a breath, and I jumped in. “Before, you said Gavrikov had energy projection capability…”

“Yeah, he flies and can throw fire. I heard from M-Squad he can even explode.”

“Reed mentioned that Gavrikov was responsible for the Tunguska explosion in 1908.”

I watched as Zack’s jaw dropped open. “You told him about us capturing Gavrikov?”

I shook my head. “He already knew.”

Zack’s mouth became a hard line, his eyes looked down at the table, and I could tell he was suppressing a kind of deep internal fury. It was the wrong moment for it, but I actually thought it was damned cute. Outwardly, I gave no sign. I hope. “How did he know?” he asked, restraining whatever anger he was feeling.

“I didn’t ask.”

“If ever you get a chance again,” Zack said, measuring his words, “do ask. This is something that only a dozen people in the world knew as of this morning.”

“Sure. Though I think you’re naïve if you believe he’d tell me. So did he explode for you guys? Wipe out a few square miles of real estate in the Andes?”

Zack was distracted, but he went on. “Not quite, but I guess Clary had him pinned in a building at one point and he blew up, left nothing but a crater. It took Clary a while to climb out of that one. Anyway, Gavrikov has a shield of fire around his skin, so tranq darts can’t make it through—”

“So how did they get him?” I was getting impatient. I blame Wolfe. He didn’t have much to do with this one, actually, but I blame him anyway.

“It was pretty ingenious, I thought,” Zack said with a smile. “He wasn’t willing to leave the facility. He’d just fly to a different building whenever they came for him, throw some fire if they got close, do anything to keep them at bay while he jetted off—”

“He doesn’t sound so dangerous,” I said. “Except for the fifty people he killed, I suppose.” I felt sheepish. He sounds like fun , Wolfe thought. You should let him out. I ignored him.

“Anyway,” Zack went on, “they managed to set a trap for him when I got there. They used me as bait.”

“What?!”

“Well, I went in and tried to reason with him, pinning him in place while the hammer fell. See, I was a new face—he’d seen them for weeks on end while they went back and forth. They tried to talk to him at first, too, I guess. Didn’t work out. Anyway, once he figured out I was human, he shot at me like a missile— I mean, he was gonna kill me, but Clary was positioned perfectly, took the hit for me, got a hold of Gavrikov and managed to knock him unconscious.”

I was going over what he had told me, but it didn’t quite make sense. “How did Clary put a hand on Gavrikov if he had his fire shield up?”

Zack’s smile was smug. “Clary can change his skin. In this case, he shifted into some kind of metal. It was actually dumb luck; Clary moves a lot slower than Gavrikov, and if he had been even an inch to either side, he wouldn’t have been able to grab him and club him out.” He leaned back in his chair. “After that, we stuffed him in the containment unit and carted him back here.”

“Bravo,” I said in a hushed voice, thinking of the containment unit. It was tiny, a coffin by any other name, a horrible, claustrophobic nightmare. I tried to think of Gavrikov’s victims rather than about the means of his confinement. I forced a weak smile. “I’m sure the world is better off with one less monster wandering around.”

“I think so,” Zack said, eating another piece of bacon. The smell of my plate had stopped being appealing, so I watched him in silence as he ate, trying to think of something else to talk about. “You know,” he said, “you still have quite a list to work through.”

“List?” I stared at him, blankly.

“You know,” he said. “Of things you haven’t done—go to the movies, a mall, an amusement park…”

“Oh.” I had forgotten that we had talked about that when last we saw each other. Nothing like having a mass murderer rattling around in your head to put some of the irrelevant things in perspective.

“You do still want to do those things, right?” He looked at me, all earnestness, and I couldn’t flinch away from those eyes, those deep brown eyes, rimmed with concern. I got a sudden, uncomfortable feeling, like I was being put on the spot.

“Yeah,” I said, and felt like my answer was burdened with a reluctance that seemed like metal scraping across stone. Slow and painful.

“How about this,” he went on, “why don’t we go out tonight—get dinner and see a movie. You can cross it off your list.”

He smiled, and I felt my stomach twist. Did he just ask me out? Did I just get asked out for the first time? I blinked, almost in disbelief. Was it that he was spying for Ariadne and Old Man Winter that prompted this or had what he told Scott been true? Maybe he felt like he owed his life to me.

I mentally slapped myself. It wasn’t like that, it couldn’t be. After all, even if things went well and the date ended with a kiss, it wouldn’t just be my first date—it’d be his last, and the next time I saw him would be at his funeral.

“Just friends,” he added, as though that would make me feel better. It didn’t. It made me feel a hell of a lot worse.

“Sure,” I said with another weak smile. Wolfe was cackling again, that bastard. “Thanks for offering to…be my guide.”

“It’ll be fun.” His phone rang and he answered, pulling it out of his pocket. “Yeah…I’m with her now, we’re getting some breakfast. Sure, we’ll see you in five.” He finished his call and looked at me. “You’re done, right?”

“What?” I didn’t understand what he was asking until I looked down and saw my half-full plate. I hadn’t taken a bite in several minutes. “Oh, yeah, I’m done.”

“That was Ariadne. She wants us at Headquarters to talk about the warehouse.”

“Okay.” I stood, taking my tray with me to the nearest garbage can and dumping it in. I felt uneven; my head hurt a little, my heart hurt a lot, and I was once again suffering under the realization that my life had been so upended from what I was familiar with that I didn’t know what I wanted.

I mean, even if he wanted me, I couldn’t touch him, right?

Ariadne’s office was right next to Old Man Winter’s in the Headquarters building. His was cold and Spartan, and I expected the same from her based on her wardrobe. When Zack knocked on the door and she called for us to enter, I was surprised.

Her office had the same view of the grounds as Old Man Winter’s, but that was where the similarities ended. Whereas he had a desk that looked like it was made of a massive piece of natural stone stacked on top of two others, hers was a warm cherrywood, with a workstation and hutch against the left wall and a more formal desk between her and the two visitor chairs. There were pictures scattered around the office of Ariadne with other people, ones that looked a little like her—a man and a woman who were older, another that looked like her sister, and a few of her with her sister and some kids.

“Dear God,” she said as I came into the room. “Are you all right?”

“I’m as fine as I’ve been since I’ve gotten here.”

She beckoned for us to have a seat. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“I’ll take a whiskey on the rocks,” I said without blinking.

She froze. “I have soft drinks…”

“Bummer,” I said. “What’d you want to see us about?”

“About the encounters at the warehouse, and uh…” she blinked and shook her head. “Something else.”

“Great,” I said without enthusiasm. “Let’s start with the ‘something else’ that you don’t really want to talk about and work our way back to the warehouse.”