Disclaimers: I don’t own them. Yet. Much gratitude to my fabulous betas, Caro Dee, Andi, Sheila, and Stacey Holbrook.
Blair shook his head ruefully as he looked over the thick stack of blue booklets threatening to topple off the table. True, essay tests made it very difficult for students to cheat, and tested how well they’d assimilated the information instead of whether they’d just memorized facts the night before the exam, but Rainier students were not exactly Pulitzer Prize candidates. Some of these essays read like third-grade book reports.
“Hey, Chief, how about Mexican for dinner?”
“Jim! I didn’t hear you ... come ... in?” Blair looked around the empty apartment. “What the hell? Could have sworn I just heard ... okay, Sandburg, obviously time to go to bed.”
He didn’t think that much of it until two days later, waiting for a student to show up for office hours, when he heard Naomi say, “Blair, sweetie, I missed you.”
Blair’s head shot up, but he saw only the empty office. He went to look out at the hallway, but all he saw was Brian Hames turning the corner, “Oh hey, Professor Sandburg, sorry I’m late.”
“It’s okay, Brian,” said Blair, shaking his head in befuddlement. “And how many times do I have to tell you, it’s just Blair. I’m not a professor, just a TA. C’mon in.”
Brian sat down in one of the chairs facing Blair’s desk, and Blair sat back down across from him. “It’s about my paper on Papua New Guinea. I couldn’t figure out if you wanted me to use Malinowski’s journals or just his published works--”
“I made your favorite, sweetie. Tongue.” Naomi said.
Blair’s eyes widened. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” Brian asked.
Blair shook his head. “Nothing.” What the hell was that? “Sorry. Look, the information is going to be skewed either way, because the private journals controvert everything he says in his book. So do what will prove your theory, but whether you leave them out or include them, you’re going to have to write a paragraph about how you justify that choice. There’s no right or wrong answer here.”
It happened almost every day after that, sometimes as many as four or six times a day. It didn’t matter if Blair was at home or at school, alone or with someone else; out of the blue he would suddenly hear people talking who weren’t there. He stopped sleeping, and his motor control was consequently shot to hell. That was when he started seeing things as well as hearing them. Things wouldn’t stay still when he looked at them, the colors were all wrong and they kept bending into impossible shapes. And the voices kept coming. Jim kept asking him if he was okay, but what was he supposed to say? I think I’m going crazy?
He kept trying to dismiss it as stress until, in the middle of lecturing his students on Margaret Mead, he heard Brown murmur in his ear, “Come on, Hairboy, you don’t really expect us to believe that, do you?”
Blair froze and stared out at the class. The students stared blankly back, a few of them turning to murmur in confusion to each other when they realized Blair had stopped talking, but clearly none of them had heard Brown. Blair took a step backwards, and then another, and then he turned on his heel and ran down to his car. “I am not going crazy; there has to be a reasonable explanation for all this. Gotta talk to Jim, see if he’s been hearing any of this stuff.”
His hands were shaking so hard he couldn’t fit the key in the ignition. “Come on, Sandburg, get a grip,” he snarled at himself, grabbing the key in both hands to steady it. Finally the key slid in, and Blair clutched the wheel with white knuckles as he drove home.
He vaulted up the stairs two at a time, and heard Jim yell down to him, “Sandburg, get your butt up here!” Grinning with relief, Blair threw open the door to the loft and said, “Oh man, Jim, you are not going ... to ... believe...”
Jim was not there.
Neither was Blair’s stuff.
His masks and tribal fetishes were gone from the walls. The curtains had been taken down from the French doors, and behind the glass panes he could see boxes and old exercise equipment, all the things Jim had moved to the basement when Blair moved in three years ago.
His first impulse was fury. Come on, Jim, I thought we were past this after what happened with Alex! What the hell did I do this time? Then his eye lit on the drying rack next to the sink. Now that was odd. One plate, one orange juice glass, and the frying pan; everything Jim had used to make scrambled eggs and toast for himself that morning. But where were the glass and blender parts from Blair’s algae shake?
On impulse, Blair threw open the cabinets. His shake powder was gone, as was the couscous, the ginger candy, and the wheat germ. The fridge was missing his Tropicana, although Jim’s Minute Maid was still there. His yogurt, his granola, everything that was his was gone. He ran into the bathroom. His shampoo and conditioner were gone, along with his razor and his little box of hair ties. His towel was gone. In a fit of hysteria, he knelt by the shower drain. There was no sign of long curly hair in the drain, or even on the floor. There was no sign here that Blair had ever existed.
Jim dropped the report on Simon’s desk. “Look, if Malory skipped town, it’s up to the Feds now.” Then the loud bang of the door made him grab his ears in pain as Sandburg charged into the office and started punching him in the ribs.
“You think this is funny, you son of a bitch? You think you can j-just erase m-me?” Sandburg yelled.
Dial it down! Jim ordered himself desperately, trying to shut out the pain and the screams of his Guide. He grabbed Sandburg’s fists and the kid just switched to kicking him without pausing.
Simon pulled Blair away and twisted his arm, fighting to keep hold of the shaking, hysterical observer without hurting him. “What the hell is going on here, Sandburg?” he growled.
“Ask him!”
Simon looked sharply up at Jim.
“Don’t look at me, I don’t know what he’s talking about. Chief, what happened?”
“If you don’t want me there, just tell me what I did wrong and let me pack up my own damn stuff,” Blair wept.
“Chief, what...” Jim struggled to think. “Sandburg, come with me. Let’s get this straightened out.” He motioned for Simon to let Blair go. Sandburg was passive now, letting Jim lead him out of Major Crimes and down to the parking garage without even looking at their friends who stared at Jim and Blair, totally perplexed. Jim drove home, flicking glances at Sandburg huddled in the passenger seat. “You want to tell me what happened?”
Blair didn’t even look at him.
Blair was in no condition to take the stairs; Jim led him to the elevator, took him upstairs and unlocked the door. “See, Chief? All your stuff is here. I don’t want you to leave. I don’t know what made you think I did, but ... Chief?”
Blair’s fist was in his mouth, and he was staring at the apartment like he was going to have a nervous breakdown. He was white and shaking, trying to stifle giggles, and Jim was horrified by the sharp smell of blood as Blair bit down on his fist. “Chief, snap out of it! What the hell is wrong with you?”
The story came slowly, and Jim wasn’t sure what the hell to make of it. Blair was shaking, hysterical. Talking about the weird things he had been hearing and seeing didn’t seem to relieve the pressure. Jim put Blair to bed in his room downstairs, and just seeing his room and all his stuff seemed to trigger a fresh fit of hysteria.
Jim sat in the kitchen, grimacing as he heard Blair sobbing into a pillow, and buried his face in his hands. What in God’s name was he supposed to do? Where the hell had all this come from? Was this because of the whole thing with Alex; post-traumatic stress finally surfacing a few months later, when the crisis was over and it was safe to panic?
Rainier's insurance coverage had spat out the name of Dr. Emmett Jacobs, an expert in abnormal psychology, and Jim made the appointment with a mixture of cynicism and desperation. The main office at Cedar Hill was calm and tweedy; cream-colored walls lined with bookshelves, landscape windows with a view of the grounds. And Dr. Jacobs was as proper and tweedy and kindly as his office. “It’s very good to meet you, Jim, Blair.”
“Thanks for letting us come on such short notice,” said Jim, shaking his hand. Blair was too shell-shocked to be very aware of his environment, sitting in a chair when Jim pressed down on his shoulder, but otherwise barely responding to the environment except to mumble ceaselessly under his breath.
Jim and Dr. Jacobs each took a seat, and Dr. Jacobs spread his hands. “I find diagnosis is easier if I can hear the story, the progression of a problem, rather than just the cold facts. Why don’t you start by telling me a little about what Blair is usually like, and when you first started noticing things were different?”
“Sandburg’s got a really great outlook on life--”
“Excuse me for interrupting, I’m sorry. I assumed Mr. Sandburg would prefer to be called by his first name, that it would relax him. But if he prefers more formality--”
“No, no, Sandburg’s a very informal person. It’s just that where I work, we all usually just call each other by our last names.” Jim turned to look at Sandburg, who was mumbling and staring glassy-eyed out the window, and his heart felt like it was breaking. “I’ve known him about three years now, and he’s always doing a million things at once; getting his doctorate, teaching, following me around -- he’s an observer with Cascade PD for his dissertation -- he sets an alarm to remind him when it’s time to go to bed, instead of to wake up. So at first when he started freaking out, I told him it was probably just stress. I got him to take a few days sick leave, get some rest, but it only got worse. He started saying there were ... animals ... in the apartment.”
“Animals?”
“A wolf. There’s ... look, this is going to sound a little crazy, but Blair’s spirit animal is a wolf.”
Dr. Jacobs shook his head. “You told me over the phone that Blair is an anthropologist, that he’s spent a lot of time with different tribes. It’s not crazy to take part in their spiritual traditions, any more than it’s crazy for a Catholic to believe in transubstantiation. But I have to ask, since many tribes employ hallucinogens to trigger vision quests...”
“Sandburg doesn’t do drugs,” said Jim. “He’s only had a vision once before this.”
“When was that?”
“A couple of months ago. He ... he died. He drowned.”
“And that was when he first saw the wolf?”
Jim nodded. “He’s been seeing it a lot lately. But I haven’t ... usually when something weird like this is going on, I have dreams about a panther, and I haven’t been having them.” He started at the doctor, daring him to make some comment about Jim’s own sanity.
But the doctor merely said, “I’ve heard of husbands and wives or siblings sharing dreams before. A lot of the same factors are usually pressuring both people, sometimes one hears the other cry out a word in their sleep that triggers a similar dream in their own unconscious mind. It’s unusual, but not impossible. But you say that’s not happening this time.”
“No.” Jim reached out to rest his arm on Blair’s shoulders, but Blair didn’t seem to be aware of him. He rubbed his other hand over his face. “Anyway, I first became aware there was a problem when Sandburg completely freaked out, saying that all his stuff was gone from our apartment. We went back there, and everything was fine, just the way I left it. Then he told me he was hearing voices and seeing things, usually voices of people he knew.”
“What were they saying?”
“What do you mean?”
“Were they telling him to do the dishes, or telling him he was Napoleon? It changes the diagnosis.”
“Everyday stuff, he said. Sometimes they talked about cooking food for him, or telling him he was tired and he should go rest, other times they were second-guessing him in public, telling him he was wrong or stupid.” Jim stared at his shoes. “There’s something you should probably know. I kicked him out a few months ago. We were fighting ... it doesn’t matter. Anyway, one day I just boxed up all his stuff without telling him and sat there waiting for him to come home. I think that might be why he’s...”
“That sounds pretty upsetting. Do you remember what you were fighting about?”
“It’s complicated...” Jim struggled to find a wording that would get across information the doctor might need to help Sandburg without giving any of his own secrets away. “He’s doing his dissertation on ... my department in the Cascade PD. I felt like he was treating me like a lab rat, like even after three years of friendship I never knew when he saw me as a friend and when he saw me as a research subject. I felt pretty betrayed, and I guess I just wanted to hurt him back, get some distance. But that was the day before he drowned; one of my cases at work spilled over into his life. And with one thing and another, we never really talked about it. We never apologized. I just moved his stuff back into the apartment and we moved on.”
Dr. Jacobs caught Jim’s gaze. “Jim, I want you to listen to me. These sorts of symptoms don’t just come about because someone is upset, or because you have an argument with them, even an argument as bad as you feel this one was. If it was just the persistent fear that his things were gone, that would make sense, but the types of hallucinations and his current withdrawn state mesh better with certain disorders like schizophrenia, if a patient is predisposed to it, which usually emerges in the early to mid-twenties. I’d like to keep Blair a few days for observation, start him on a course of drugs to see whether he responds typically for a schizophrenic, but I want you to understand that this is not your fault. Blair’s symptoms don’t match a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress. Painful as your recent problems may have been, this could just as easily have been brought on by his heavy workload. It’s important that you don’t blame yourself for what’s happening to him, because your heightened emotions could actually impede his recovery.”
“If I didn’t make him sick, how could I stop him from getting better?”
“Because recovery from schizophrenia, if that’s what this turns out to be, is a lengthy process, and if you blame yourself, he may try to hide his symptoms or fool around with his meds to pretend everything is fine and make you feel better. If he only has to worry about his own recovery, instead of supporting you, he’ll do much better.”
That made sense. “Just for a couple of days, right?” Jim asked.
“It’ll take a couple of days to be certain of a diagnosis. He may need to stay longer, depending on how well he responds to treatment. As Blair isn’t aware enough to sign himself in voluntarily, I’m going to need his next of kin to sign the papers. Does he have any family you can contact?”
Jim shook his head. “His mother, but it doesn’t matter. I have power of attorney. I’ll sign for him.”
Blair came back to himself lying in bed and staring at the kind-faced doctor sitting beside him. “Good, you’re awake,” said the doctor. “Do you remember me?”
“No,” said Blair. “Where am I? How did I get here?” The room offered few clues: cream-colored walls, a high window with safety glass, wood floors, and another bed on the far side of the room, over the doctor’s shoulder.
“My name is Dr. Jacobs, and to answer your questions, you’ve been committed to a mental institution under my care by your Sentinel.”
“Jim?” Blair blurted out, and memories came flooding back; weeks of hallucinating and crying hysterically, insomnia, melting into a fuzzy blur when he tried to remember how he got from there to here. That gap disturbed him, because he wasn’t hallucinating now; he was scared out of his mind, but he was lucid. “You said Sentinel.”
Dr. Jacobs smiled. “Why don’t you sit up and let me introduce you to your roommate?”
As he sat up, his muscles felt weak, shaky, like he’d been ill. The cold lump in Blair’s stomach twisted when he saw the occupant of the other bed. “Oh no. Oh nonononono...”
Alex Barnes looked pale and drawn, the movement of her chest the only sign that she was still alive. An IV took care of her needs, and Blair saw the tubes of a catheter disappearing under the soft pink hospital blanket.
“She’ll be the ideal assassin or spy, all the more so because as far as the world knows, Alex Barnes no longer exists. But all of that is moot unless you can bring her out of this state and teach her to control her abilities.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Blair snapped. “I am so not going to help her, and I’m not going to help you get your perfect killer!”
“Oh, but you will, Blair. Because if we have no use for her, we’ll go to plan B. On the one hand, James Ellison will be harder to disappear, because he has friends and family who would need to be convinced of his death, but on the other, his Ranger training and Special Ops programming could make him an even better candidate than Barnes.”
“How do I know you haven’t already got Jim, that you’re not blackmailing him with my safety while you blackmail me with his?”
Dr. Jacobs smiled. “Visiting hours are Wednesdays from noon to seven,” he said. “You’ll be moved to a private room for those days, monitored by video surveillance. Unfortunately, you’re not going to be in any shape to signal your partner, but I promise you, as long as you behave and do what we say, every week you’ll see a fresh video of Jim, alive and whole.” Jacobs’s expression hardened. “If you refuse to cooperate, however, we’ll have no choice but to take Jim and reprogram him.”
Blair hugged his knees to his chest. “I don’t have a choice, do I?”
“There’s always a choice, Blair.” Dr. Jacobs set a file folder down next to Blair’s feet. “These are Barnes’s medical records.” He tilted his head up to indicate the dark bubbles of surveillance cameras on the ceiling. “I’ll leave you two to get acquainted. Call if you need anything.”
And with that, he walked out, leaving Blair alone with the woman who had murdered him only a few months before.
Three years with Jim had taught Blair well. The first thing he did was try the door, then he tried to smash the window both with his fist and then with the IV stand. The floorboards were smooth and the walls had no cracks near the base. He couldn’t hear any noises in the outside corridor or from the adjoining rooms, but he tried to yell for help just in case. No response.
After what could have been hours or mere minutes, Blair sat back down on the bed and eyed Alex. He wasn’t entirely sure what had happened to her in the Temple of the Sentinels, and from what he read in her file, neither were the doctors. At the Temple she’d plunged into a massive sensory spike, deteriorating rapidly even as they took her away. Much as he might think she deserved this, or felt safer knowing she wasn’t going to hurt him lying there, he had to at least try to bring her around if he wanted to keep Jim safe.
“Okay, there are only three things that could be wrong with her,” he muttered to himself. “A, she had some sort of allergic or chemical reaction to the stuff she took back at the temple that’s made her a vegetable. If that’s the case, it’s out of my league. B, she’s still trapped in the spirit world and needs to be brought home to her body. I’m not even sure I could help with that; I meditate, but I’ve never been great with spirit walks. Some shaman I am. Or C, she’s having the mother of all zone outs and needs to be called back. Let’s start with C.”
He made his way over to her bed and sat down beside her. Then he forced himself to reach out and actually touch her, stroking her hand. “Okay, Alex, wherever you are, you have to come back now. Whatever you’re focusing on, I want you to stop and just focus on my voice and my touch, okay? I need you to come back to me now.”
Eventually Blair heard a soft buzzing and a voice said, “Please step away and face the window.”
He was surprised to find it was dark out, and his voice was completely raw from talking. He stood up carefully, wincing at the twinge from his stiff back, and faced the window. The door opened behind him and he heard the gentle clatter of a metal tray, and then the door closed again.
This was definitely a hospital. Dinner consisted of thin slices of overcooked institutional pot roast, a cup of reconstituted mashed potatoes, a scoop of peas and carrots, and a fruit cup. Ugh. And to top it off, he had to gag the stuff down with a spork.
He sat on his own bed to eat, acutely aware of wanting to be out of her territory. Territory. That was it! The last time they had encountered Alex, Jim had been able to sense her, smell her on him. When Jim came for his first visit, he would smell Alex, put two and two together, and break Blair out of here. All Blair had to do was wait until Wednesday, whenever that was, and he’d be free. Satisfied with himself, Blair finished as much dinner as he was able and put the tray by the door before curling up in his bed, ready to sleep. Jim would figure it out.
Blair was a model prisoner for the next few days. He continued to talk to Alex, touching her as much as possible, trying to bring her out of her zone, if that was what was wrong with her. Just being close to her made his skin crawl, but he kept reminding himself that the more he touched her, the more her scent would build up on his skin. There was no way Jim would miss this. After five days, they came for him, held him down, and injected him with something.
When he groggily came to again, he smelled something new and he groaned aloud. It was the smell of his own clean hair. Damn. Of course they would scrub him head to toe before letting him anywhere near Jim’s heightened senses. Dammit!
The door opened and Dr. Jacobs rolled a TV stand into the room. “How’s our patient?” he asked. “Still groggy?”
“Mm,” Blair grunted, sitting up. “Is that what I think it is?”
Dr. Jacobs nodded and turned to look at Alex. Before Blair could get any bright ideas, a big, burly orderly stepped in to stand next to Blair. “No change yet,” said Dr. Jacobs, shining a penlight into her eyes to check her reactions. “Any idea of how you want to proceed?”
Blair closed his eyes. Damn it, why did he have to decide whether or not to cooperate before he saw the video and knew what Jim was thinking? But he knew there was little to no chance Jim could pick up Alex’s scent after Blair had been washed, even if he knew what he was looking for. For now, anyway, Blair was stuck here. “I want to turn her senses down as far as I possibly can, so that I’m the only thing she’s experiencing. You guys had the right idea with the soft blanket, but you’re going to need Egyptian cotton or silk, and you’ll have to change detergents for both of us, and turn the lights down in here. A white noise generator would be good. And much as I hate to admit it, I’m going to have to eat blander food, tofu and oatmeal and stuff, or she’s going to pick up the scent and tune me out.”
Dr. Jacobs nodded to the orderly. “We’ll see to all of that, Blair. You’ve been most cooperative.” He pressed the play button and the screen showed Blair lying on his back in another room. “We’ll come to take this in the morning, but feel free to watch it tonight.”
With that he left, and Blair watched himself on the screen. He was clearly out of it, and by the discoloration on the pillow, it looked like he had been drooling on himself.
The door opened, and Blair jumped in shock to see his first visitor was Naomi. “Oh sweetie!” she cried, using her sleeve to clean his face. Blair clenched his fists. He was not going to cry, he was not going to cry, those bastards! How could they put his mother through this?
“Wherever you are, sweetie, I need you to come back to me,” she whispered. There was no response from the figure on the bed. Naomi kissed his face and neck, but there was still no response. Then she started to talk in a soft, strangled voice. “Blair, sweetie, I miss you so much. You know, I never told you this, but I cried the night you were born, not because of the pain, but because I realized at that moment that for all my ideals of living free, I’d tied myself completely to you and I could never be happy unless you were happy. That was so frightening to me, to be so young and know that for the whole rest of my life, I was going to be worrying about you. But you’ve always been such a delight to me; I’ve always been so grateful for you. Please, baby, I need you here, I need to know you’re all right.”
Blair was weeping openly now. He wanted to fast forward through this, he didn’t know how much he could take, but he needed to see this, he needed to know as much as possible about what was going on, and whether anyone had noticed anything weird about him during their visits.
Finally, mercifully, the door opened and Simon gently touched Naomi’s shoulder. She turned and started bawling, shaking in his arms as he held her. Simon looked so lost, so miserable, as though he’d rather be anywhere else but here. Finally he managed to calm Naomi down and she left the room. Simon sat down in the chair and cleared his throat. “Sandburg, you look like shit,” he said. “I have a load of paperwork back in the bullpen waiting for you; the place is just falling apart without you. Jim’s going to be by later; he went to pick up some things to make you more comfortable. Daryl says hi. I haven’t told him much, just that you’re sick and you’re going to get better. You’d better not make a liar out of me, kid--”
He broke off and buried his face in his hands, shoulders shaking. “Okay, you’re supposed to keep talking to people in comas.” He pulled out the paper and said, “It looks like the Jags have a good chance this year--”
There was a knock on the door and Megan Connor came in with Joel Taggart in tow. “I thought you two were on duty today,” Simon snapped, wiping his face.
“Lunch break,” said Megan. “We just wanted to see how Sandy was doing.”
Lunch break? Blair thought. This place can’t be too far from Cascade, then, if you can drive here and back in less than an hour. Good to know. Megan looked pretty upset to see how out of it Blair was, just whispered, “Oh Sandy,” almost inaudibly.
Joel turned to her and put his hands on her shoulders. “Connor, Captain Banks, could I have a minute with the kid? Alone?”
Simon and Megan both leaned down to say their goodbyes and beg Blair one more time to wake up, and then he was alone with Taggart. Joel sat down in the chair Simon had just vacated and reached out to clasp Blair’s unresponsive hand. “Hey, kid,” he said. “I know you’ve been having a tough time of it since you nearly died and all, but someone gave me some good advice when I was having a tough time and I thought you should hear it. It’s not about you. Whatever you’re going through in there, whatever made you snap like this, you can get through it. You’ve gotten through a hell of a lot in the time I’ve known you, and you always bounce back. You need to bounce back now, kid. I know you can do it. I know you’re still in there. You have to fight this.”
He looked up as Jim came into the room with an armload of stuff. “Hey, Joel.”
Across the room, Alex stiffened and moaned almost inaudibly at the sound of Jim’s voice. Blair’s eyes widened. So you are in there, he thought.
“Hi. What’s all that?” Joel was asking on the tape.
“Thought I’d make this place a little more homey for Sandburg, you know? A little more stimulating.” The first thing he did was plug in a little boom box and turn on some of Blair’s tribal music. Then he took off the hospital blanket and wrapped Blair in his favorite blanket from home; the Peruvian blanket he’d brought to college. Then he took Blair’s limp hands and wrapped them around a black wooden figurine made out of cedar wood, pressing the wood against Blair’s face for a moment to let him smell it.
Blair wiped away his tears, unsure whether to smile or scream at Jim. Trust Jim to know how important sense memory could be to a catatonic. But come on, you freaking idiot, why are you just standing there staring at me when you should be thinking all those paranoid thoughts I know and love so well!? How can you make small talk with Joel when you should be sniffing me and checking me over and figuring out that this is all a lie?
But Jim didn’t realize a thing, and eventually Joel left and Jim left and the screen went dark.
Jim didn’t know. No one was coming for him. Blair curled up and cried himself to sleep.
In the morning, the television was gone and a bowl of oatmeal cooled by the door, alongside a pile of fresh sheets and two sets of clothes. The light was dimmer, and a little white noise machine sat in the corner.
Blair ate his breakfast, brushed his teeth in the little sink in the bathroom alcove, and considered how he wanted to do things today. He moved Alex around to put the sheets on the bed under her, averting his eyes to dress her in clean, silky clothes. Finally, he reluctantly coaxed himself into bed with Alex, sitting with her in his lap, and started gently talking to her as he brushed her tangled hair with his comb. From her reaction last night to Jim’s voice, subtle as it was, he knew she must be at least a little aware of the outside world.
He kept that up for days, talking to her, touching her, trying not to remember dying, not to remember her kissing Jim, trying not to hate her so much that it became impossible to get through the day. And finally, ten days after he’d first woken up, he felt her breath quicken and she swallowed and blinked and looked at him. “Alex?” he asked.
She stared at him for a long time, and then she whispered, “Blair? What the hell is going on here?”
“What’s the last thing you remember?” Blair asked her.
She shook her head. “None of it makes sense. Nothing makes sense. It’s all delirious.” She stared at him. “I killed you, didn’t I? I remember that. What the hell are you doing here?” She pulled away from him.
“Do you remember the Temple of the Sentinels?”
Alex frowned, then winced, cupping her head in her hands. “Hurts.”
“Okay, we’ll work on that later. You’ve been catatonic for months, and now everyone thinks I am too. We’re being held here; I don’t think we’re too far from Cascade. I don’t know who’s holding us, though, some government agency or something.”
“Which one?” asked Alex.
“I don’t know. CIA, NSA, some jumble of alphabet soup. Not sure it matters much.”
“I feel so weak,” she said. “And everything is too bright and loud.”
Blair looked around the dim, silent room. “Okay, close your eyes. I want you to picture a set of dials, like on a stereo...”
They came a few hours later, after he’d given her some small measure of control. They took her away, and when they brought her back she was catatonic again, hanging limply in their grasp. As soon as they left, Blair went over to her bed and started talking to her and stroking her arm, and soon enough she opened her eyes and looked at him. “Blair? What’s going on?”
He stared at her, confused. “Do you remember waking up before?”
“Vaguely, I think.” She paused and frowned. “We’re being held here. Everything hurts...”
“It’s okay. It’s okay, Alex, just dial it down.”
The next day they took him again, and the last thing he remembered was Alex yelling, “Where are you taking him?” He woke up to the gentle, ticklish sensation of Alex’s hair on his face, and opened his eyes to find his head in her lap, looking up at her. “I guess turnabout is fair play, huh?” she asked. “Sort of makes up for yesterday.”
Blair smiled weakly. “Try the last ten days. That’s how long I’ve been trying to wake you up.”
The intercom buzzed and a voice said, “Both of you face the wall and assume the position.”
This time they took Alex away, and then Dr. Jacobs rolled in the television. “You’re doing a very good job with her, Blair. So far she’s exceeding our expectations.”
“Where did you take her?” Blair asked.
“Oh, I have a feeling she’d react badly to watching your videotape of Jim,” said Dr. Jacobs. “And besides, this way we can get another round of programming in before you both go to sleep.”
“Programming?” Blair asked.
“Oh yes,” said Dr. Jacobs. “You see, Alex has no problem with killing, as you well know, and you’re doing a good job of training her to tune her senses, but she’s far too much of a wild card to make an effective agent without serious reprogramming. Once we’ve broken down her will, she’ll be ready to receive combat and tracking training with your supervision, but it will take some time. In the meantime, is there anything else you need for her training?”
Yeah, a gun with two bullets, one for her and one for you, thought Blair. But the television, all set up with the brand new tape of Jim, his mother and his friends, reminded him of just how much he still had to lose. “I’m going to need some training equipment,” he said, “Something that can make different levels of sounds, or even a tape recording of multiple conversations in the same room, some strong tasting or smelling substances and water or milk to dilute them with, printed words on paper, a strobe light,” Blair went on, listing as many things as he could think of. Finally he pled exhaustion and Dr. Jacobs left him with the tape.
This time the scene opened on him lying under the Peruvian blanket, and Jim walked in and sat down immediately, wrapping his hands around Blair’s. “Hey Chief, I missed you. The loft feels really empty with you gone; I’ve been leaving your laptop on just for the background hum. Your Mom is staying with me, but it’s not the same; all your sounds and smells are gone. She’s coming by later to see you, so how about we surprise her by having you wake up to say hi to her, huh? Doesn’t that sound good?”
Jim lowered his voice, but the recording still picked it up. “I’ve been having trouble with my senses, Chief. Ever since I ... left you here, they’re completely down, except for a couple of excruciating spikes that scared your Mom half to death. I think I’m afraid to let the senses out when I know you’re not here to catch me. I need you, Chief, I need you to come back to me.”
The rest of the tape was more of the same, Simon telling him about Daryl’s latest project for school, Megan crying, Joel’s one-sided arguments, his Mom telling him silly and embarrassing stories of when he was a kid, and threatening to tell them to Jim if Blair didn’t wake up and stop her.
Then the tape ended, and they brought Alex back again, catatonic, and Blair just curled up and cried himself to sleep while Alex stared at the ceiling across the room.
Their days settled into routine. Blair would train Alex until they came for her, pace the room nervously until they brought her back, and then spend the rest of the evening coaxing her out of her zone again. She never remembered what they did to her.
Despite himself, Blair found himself grateful every night when they brought her back and he coaxed her back to herself. She was his only daily human contact, the only person he could trust not to manipulate him. Even the weekly recordings of his friends were only a tool to make him pliable, but Alex -- for once! -- had no hidden agenda, only an eagerness to learn all she could so that they could escape. Blair had no illusions that she wouldn’t leave him behind if it meant her freedom, but for now, they were in this together.
Alex was an eager student, more eager than Jim had been in the early days, and now that they had no choice but to trust each other, Blair actually found himself liking her when he managed to forget the past and just live in the now. And the more sessions she attended, the gentler she became towards him. Whatever they were doing to her, she saw Blair as the one person she could rely on for comfort and strength, and eventually there came a time when Blair would wake up in her arms and not remember or care who came to whose bed for comfort, just grateful for the warmth of human contact.
Then the routine changed, and one day the two of them were led together down to the basement. First there were guns, training in use and cleaning, most of which Alex already knew, but she cocked her head and smiled sadly when she heard Blair murmuring under his breath on the far side of the room, “Today we have naming of parts,” reciting Naomi’s favorite anti-war poem from memory. Blair was pretty freaked out by the guns, and reciting the poem was his way of not thinking about the fact that Alex was going to be shooting people, and he was going to be sitting beside her while she did it, coaxing her vision sharper and sharper to improve her aim.
There was also combat training, martial arts, takedowns and kill techniques, and this Alex and Blair were both unfamiliar with, but Blair learned quickly and helped Alex remember some of the longer combinations of moves. And sometimes when he moved too smoothly, or caught the cold gleam in Alex’s eye as she threw the instructor to the floor and sliced his throat with a rubber knife, he found himself muttering under his breath, “the early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers, they call it easing the Spring,” trying not to imagine watching her kill someone else the way she’d once murdered him. And they also trained separately: Alex needed more practice with guns and unarmed combat, and despite his vehement protest that he already knew more than he needed to from volunteering with Amnesty International, Blair was given a modified KUBARK interrogation manual to study. But once he calmed down, he realized his only chance of holding on to Alex despite her programming was to learn to beat these bastards at their own game. He applied himself to the book with a vengeance.
Every Wednesday they took Blair away, and Blair wondered how many Wednesdays they had left, because he was getting better at takedowns and Alex could hit a target hundreds of yards away, and they had mentioned something about learning to track, which surely meant leaving the grounds, and then came the Wednesday when Blair saw something odd in the video and looked closer and realized that the bruise currently marring his jaw was nowhere to be seen in the video. They had spares. They had God knows how many spare videos, and that meant he had been here months longer than he knew. He couldn’t be sure of anything anymore.
Tracking Naomi down had been a hell of a job, and when he finally found her at a meditation retreat in Istanbul, the connection was lousy and Jim kept screaming at her over and over, “Blair’s sick! Blair needs you!” And she kept saying “What? Who is this, I can’t hear you!” And then the line went dead and Jim sat down on the couch and shook from delayed reaction.
Complete psychotic break. Catatonia. Not schizophrenia, not something that could be controlled with medication. Blair had retreated from the world, and barring a miracle or a breakthrough, he wasn’t coming back.
Simon came by that night, cooked him dinner and stayed with him, trying to make polite conversation before succumbing to the grim silence. And apparently Naomi deciphered part of the message, because Jim came down the stairs two days later, gun in hand, to search out the intruder and found her standing in the living room, demanding to know where her little boy was.
Every day he went to visit Sandburg at Cedar Hill, and usually Naomi or one of the gang from Major Crimes came along too. No change. After two months they changed Blair’s status, and Jim was only able to visit once a week, but Sandburg just lay there, unresponsive. Jim tried talking about meaningless stuff, he tried blackmailing Sandburg by telling him about how all his senses had gone on the fritz, he tried begging Sandburg, telling him he was sorry for kicking him out, for not being a better friend, that everything would be different if Sandburg just gave him a chance.
Nothing.
It was a rare day in Major Crimes that went by without some sort of reprimand for ‘conduct unbecoming’, but every time Simon called him into his office, Jim just stared the man down. Go on, I dare you. Take away the job too. Finish it. Finish it. Sometimes Simon dismissed him without a word said on either side.
He still went to Cedar Hill most weeks, but sometimes he just couldn’t take it anymore. Even when the doctors told him Blair was much more responsive after his visits, that it did him the world of good, Jim just couldn’t bear it every week. After six months, Naomi couldn’t take it anymore either. She made Jim promise to tell her if there was any change and she went to see Blair one last time. Jim ostensibly gave her privacy, but he couldn’t help listening in from the corridor. “Blair? Sweetie? It’s Na -- it’s Mommy. I know you’re in there somewhere, I can feel you, but I can feel how far away you are. I need you to come back, sweetie. I’m going to go away if you don’t come back right now. Blair?” He could hear her weeping as she kissed her son’s cheek. “Blair, all the things you wanted to ask me about your father, I swear I’ll tell you right now, but you have to ask me, sweetie, you have to open your eyes and ask me or I’ll never tell you the truth. Blair?”
Eventually her voice gave out, and she slipped out of the room and cried on Jim’s shoulder, and then she let him drive her to the airport and she was gone.
Jim made his way back to the empty loft and sighed heavily. When Naomi had been here, cooking the same strange foods she’d taught Blair to cook, lighting the meditation candles she’d taught him to use, her heart beating in Blair’s bed every night, Jim had been able to fool himself, now and then, into thinking he was going to be okay. But he wasn’t. His senses were dead, and it felt some days like the rest of him was too. The spikes were debilitating, but Megan helped cover for him. She couldn’t talk him out of a zone, but at least she could tell him to dial down a spike, and keep Simon from catching wind of just how wrong everything was. For the zones, she just left him alone. One time she hid him in a broom closet for six hours until he snapped out of it.
And then one day he got the call he’d been dreading. They wanted him to identify the body. The body in question was cold and still, and Jim couldn’t hear a heartbeat, all he could hear was a roaring hum in his ears, and then he threw up in the corridor, apologized to everyone and went home to get good and drunk.
The funeral was an intimate affair, just the gang from Major Crimes. Naomi stayed over downstairs again, and wanted to show him all Blair’s baby pictures, and Jim finally told her to shut up and went upstairs before he could start crying and make a spectacle of himself.
In the morning, Naomi was gone, and Jim had a hangover and the mother of all sensory spikes. The last thing he wanted was Sandburg’s stuff all over the house, reminding him of just how screwed up his life was now. So he went downstairs to strip the futon and crouched down under it to drag out Sandburg’s clothing bin.
He stared at the deep scratches in the floor.
Who the hell had dragged Sandburg’s furniture around and put it back where it was?
“Come on,” he muttered to himself, “This is important. Get those senses back up and running.” No dice, but he could see plenty even with normal sight. There was dirt and debris in the scratches; they were not new. Naomi hadn’t moved Blair’s furniture when she lived here, and the scratches were on top of the fresh varnish he’d applied during the flurry of home improvement Jim had done by way of tacit apology after Blair’s drowning.
And then it came back to him: the day Sandburg had attacked him, hysterical because all his stuff was gone, only it wasn’t.
“Oh shit,” Jim breathed.
Simon looked up at the shadow that filled his doorway. “Thought you were out until Thursday, Jim,” he said with gentle gruffness.
“Sorry, Simon, I just couldn’t stand to be in that empty apartment anymore. You hungry?”
“Yeah, I was just about to take a dinner break. Wonderburger?”
“Actually, there’s a new Indian place on Anchor Boulevard I wanted to try out.”
Simon blinked in surprise at the idea of Jim eating spicy food, but shrugged it off. The man probably wanted something that would remind him of Sandburg.
When they got to the truck, though, Jim went in the opposite direction of Anchor, made a few odd turns and backtracks, and ended up parking in front of Pierogi Heaven on Taylor Avenue.
“Jim? What are we doing here?”
Jim walked inside, got them a table, and ordered lunch for both of them. “Simon, I need you to hear me out on something.”
Oh damn, this was not going to be good. Simon could see it already. Jim wanted so badly for things to be all right again, for Sandburg to be alive; Simon wouldn’t be surprised if he had some wacko theory ready. But painful as this was, if he didn’t hear Jim out, Jim would never listen to reason afterwards. “Okay, Jim, I’m listening,” he said wearily.
“Do you remember the day Sandburg thought all his stuff was gone?”
“Yeah?”
“It was gone. Someone broke into our house, took all his stuff, and put it all back before I took him home.”
“Jim--”
“Just hear me out, Simon, I know this sounds crazy. So then I checked our house, and his old office at Rainier, and the classroom where he used to teach, and guess what I found? Holes in the overhead lights and scratches inside the telephones. They bugged us, Simon, they got people he cared about on tape and then they used directional amps to make him hear things other people wouldn’t hear.”
“Jim, that’s--”
“Simon, I know what I’m talking about.” He paused and stared down at his hands. “I used to do things like this in Ops.” When he had a better grip on himself, he continued. “Once I knew what to look for, I took his algae shakes out of the closet and shook them, and each of the packets had a tiny hole, like from a syringe. So I tasted a watered-down drop, and my senses went completely haywire. Caffeine, lots of time-release caffeine. See, caffeine is the ideal drug for breaking most people: leaves no odd traces, and once you deprive them of sleep, the brain naturally supplies all the hallucinations, tremors, and mood swings you could ask for. He was getting a daily dose that could drop an elephant. And when I went to identify the body, there was this ringing in my ears. It wasn’t shock; it was white noise so I couldn’t hear a heartbeat. Dr. Jacobs is gone, on sabbatical, no one knows where. They took him, Simon. I don’t know where and I don’t know why, but they took him.”
Simon stared at Jim, wanting to believe, so heartbreakingly sure that this was all in Jim’s head. He opened his mouth to say so, but what came out instead was, “Then we have to get him back.”
Blair opened the case and fingered the gun. “And this is the upper sling swivel,” he murmured under his breath despite himself, “whose use you will see, when you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel, which in your case you have not got.” He took a deep breath, reaching for the memory of Naomi’s voice as he did so. “The branches hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures, which in our case we have not got.”
Alex automatically reached over and stroked Blair’s hair, soothing his tension. “I am calm, I am relaxed,” she intoned with a smile. He smiled back. He’d gotten her into meditation; God knew they needed a way to release the tension of their lives.
“Is it...” he hesitated. “Are you going to be okay with this?”
Alex ran Sentinel-sensitive hands over the gun, then closed the case. “I’ll do what I have to.” She looked at him. “Are you going to be okay with this?”
“Hell no,” he said. “But I won’t leave you to deal with this on your own.” He watched her, and memories of other, earlier deaths crept into his thoughts despite himself. “Do you ever think about it? About the fountain?”
Alex looked up at the guard by the door of the Tokyo hotel room, then met Blair’s eyes. “You smelled like him,” she said softly. “You smelled like him and I saw the anger in your eyes when you looked at me. I knew you wouldn’t help me. I wanted to hurt him for that. If I couldn’t have you, I didn’t want him to have you, either.” Her hand was still tangled softly in his hair. “I wouldn’t do that now, Blair, you know that. We need each other.”
“I know,” he said. Then, Sentinel soft, and with his back to the guard, he asked, “What do you think?”
Her fingers tapped Morse code inside the safe cocoon of his hair. :We can’t get a message out stop Not without tipping off the guard stop:
“Bullet?”
:It would warp with the heat when fired stop:
Blair tried to think. Who did he know in Tokyo? “We need to go to the Good Earth Restaurant. Can you spike your senses?”
She reached down to touch his hand for a second. :Don’t let me get lost again: she begged. Then she started screaming and tearing at her clothes, crying out at the itch, the sounds, God, make it stop!
Blair faked coaxing her down, let the senses run her ragged, until the guard got twitchy and worried that everything was going to fall apart on his watch and he was going to get the blame. “She’s exhausted,” Blair said, when Alex finally quieted down. He stroked the trigger point in her earlobe to gently remind her that he was here, she was safe, he wasn’t going to leave her alone in her head again. “She needs food, but we need to be careful about additives, they could cause a really bad sensory spike.”
“Sushi?” the guard asked.
“You’d think so, but all sushi is made with traces of imitation wasabi, it’s basically horseradish and lots and lots of food coloring.” Blair shook his head. “We’re going to have to find a place that specializes in organic foods. You got a phone book over there?”
The guard handed it over. Blair flipped through to the restaurants and found the number, then called up. “English?” he asked, and waited while the phone changed hands on the other end. “I’m at the Hyatt, room 794, and I want to make a delivery order? Great. Do you have tongue? Oh sorry, yeah, that makes sense. Okay, I guess I’ll have bok choy, tofu with water chestnuts and sugar beets, and two orders of dumplings. Great, thanks.”
He turned back to Alex, who was staring at him, perplexed, and smiled.
The note came through interoffice mail, and simply said ‘Cutter’s Ferry, 1:00’. Jim checked his watch. He could just make it if he hurried. By the ferry, he saw a familiar wheelchair waiting. “Kelso,” he greeted the ex-operative.
Jack Kelso turned his wheelchair to look at Jim. He looked ... old. Defeated. “This won’t take long, Jim. I think it’s time to stop looking for Blair.”
“What? No, Jack, Blair’s alive. He’s got to be.”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” said Jack. He pulled a tape recorder out of his jacket pocket. “Occasionally friends of mine send me freelance work, asking if I can confirm an incident as typical of a particular intelligence group, whether I recognize a photo, that sort of thing. They acquired this from Russian intelligence in Pakistan.” He hit play.
Blair's soft Guide tones hit Jim like a sucker punch. “I’m disappointed in you, Michael. I thought you weren’t going to lie to me anymore.”
“Oh God, please make her stop,” groaned a broken voice, “I told you everything I know!”
“Let’s go back to the drop point. Picture it in your mind. I want you to zoom in on the hand that picked up the package. Describe it to me.”
“Rough hand, two rings.”
“Tell me about the rings.” The voice was deceptively soft.
“One was plain with a twisting edge, like rope, on the top and bottom. The other had a tiny oval ruby. I swear, that’s all I remember.”
“It’s all right, Michael. You did a good job. I promise, you won’t suffer any more pain.” Pause. “Finish it.”
There were a series of muffled gurgles and bangs, and then the tape clicked off. Jim was shaking. Jack looked up at him with sad, dead eyes. “I think it’s time to stop looking,” he repeated softly. “The Blair Sandburg we knew is dead.”
Blair woke up and felt the sticky crackle of dried blood flaking off his hands. He groaned and rubbed his face with his shoulder to keep from getting the blood all over himself. “What time is it?”
He could hear the soothing scratch of Alex’s pencil somewhere off to his left. “I’m jetlagged, I can’t tell.” The scratching quickened. “You’re beautiful when you sleep.”
“Yeah? Let me see.” He propped himself up on one elbow and she turned the sketchpad towards him. She’d captured him perfectly, from the blood spattered on his hands and clothes to the permanent scars his glasses had etched by the bridge of his nose. “I look old,” he said.
“You look beautiful,” she repeated.
He blew her a kiss and went to clean himself up, ever aware of the guard shifting subtly to keep an eye on both of them at the same time. Freshly washed, he came back to Alex waiting for him in bed, and they curled up together like a pair of puppies. He closed his eyes and shivered as she gently sniffed his hair, stroking it. She tucked her chin into the crook of his neck to go to sleep, one arm resting across his belly, the other pillowing his head. If the guard wasn’t there, watching their every move, could he kiss her? Touch her? Oh, who was he kidding; if the guard wasn’t there, Blair would be hell-and-gone from here.
Sheltered in his Sentinel’s arms, he shook the thoughts from his head and drifted into sleep.
Jim walked into Rubin’s Reubens and saw Jack Kelso biting into an overstuffed sandwich on rye bread. He sat down and took an appreciative sniff. “Tongue. Blair’s favorite.”
“You remember that after two years? He can’t have had it that often. It’s a specialty item, hard to get these days.”
Jim shrugged. “It was important to him. Stuck with me.”
Jack nodded. “It stuck with Guillaume Delmare, too.”
“Who?”
“Guillaume Delmare. He and his wife run an organic vegan restaurant in Florence, Italy. Naomi called me on my secure line and told me she talked to him a few weeks ago, and he commented that he’d just been thinking of her son, Blair. Someone called their vegan restaurant and tried to order tongue, if you can believe it.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Jim.
“Neither did Naomi. She broke the bank calling every friend and acquaintance of hers who runs a restaurant or a food cooperative and asked them if anyone had ordered tongue in the last couple of years. Got responses from Thailand, Dublin, Melbourne, Tokyo, Berlin, New York, a whole laundry list.” Jack ran his hands over his face. “You realize after what we heard on that tape, there may not be anything left to save.”
“If he’s leaving these messages for us to find, we have to try,” said Jim.
Jack pushed a packet across the table. “Naomi called me again today. Jake’s Luscious Mouthful in Chicago got a call from the Marriott for tongue. Your flight leaves in two hours. Kip Greenstein will meet you at the airport; he owes me a favor.”
The takedown was pretty straightforward, as these things went. Blair would use his knowledge of Polynesian archaeology to strike up a conversation with the primary. Alex would be positioned on the rooftop over the museum, and would take out the three bodyguards. Blair was responsible for the primary target; he’d have to plunge the syringe of sedative between the man’s ribs and then use the cutters on the handcuffs securing the briefcase. Their guard would wait across the street, out of Alex’s line-of-sight, ready to shoot Blair if he tried to escape. No need to worry about Alex leaving without her Guide.
“So what would you like for lunch?” Alex asked as they crossed the street to the museum’s entrance. Her ‘off’ hand automatically found the small of his back, sheltering him from traffic and leaving her dominant hand free to reach her gun if need be, just as Jim had done so long ago. Hard to believe that by this point he’d spent almost as much time with Alex as he’d spent with Jim. But it was hard to picture his life before Alex. Too painful, too surreal. Best not to think about it.
Alex suddenly grabbed him and their guard hit the pavement, dead. Someone was shooting at them with a silencer! Where were they shooting from? God, if they hit Alex next, Blair wasn’t good enough to locate them and shoot back; all three of them would be dead. Protect Alex, and she’ll get you out of this. Alex turned, and Blair shoved back, getting in front of her, and felt the shock of a bullet in his chest. Alex screamed and caught him as he fell, pressing her hands against the wound to stop the flow of blood. “Nononononono, Blair you can’t die, you can’t leave me alone again.”
“Gotta stop them, Alex, gotta get me out of this.” But she was crying, she’d lost it. Blair looked up, squinting at the sun in his eyes, smiling at the desperation in Alex’s voice. “It’s okay,” he told her, “It doesn’t even hurt.” His lungs felt thick and raspy. “You’re not going to drown me again, are you? Feels like it.”
“Somebody help us!” Alex screamed.
And then Blair knew he was dying, because honest-to-God, there was Jim Ellison leaning over him, white-faced and calling him Chief. “S’all right,” Blair told Alex, because it was important that she know he didn’t mind dying this time, not if it meant he was done, that he would be back with Jim. “S’perfectly easy. Perfectly easy.”
Jim paced the hospital corridor, alternately glaring at and ignoring that murdering bitch Alex Barnes, who was huddled in one of the chairs, mumbling to herself. He shot Sandburg. He shot Sandburg. He couldn’t wrap his mind around it.
He’d told Kip Greenstein who Alex Barnes was in no uncertain terms, and after a glance at the crying, unthreatening woman, Kip had gone off to get more information out of Jack Kelso and tell him about Blair’s condition, leaving the two Sentinels to wait alone together. Alex wasn’t handling the situation any better than Jim was.
“Today we have naming of parts,” she mumbled. “Yesterday, we had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning, we shall have what to do after firing. But today, today we have naming of parts.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Jim snapped.
“He says it when it’s too much for him,” she explained. “It helps him calm down.” She hugged herself tighter. “I can’t lose him again.”
“Why the hell did he get in the way?” said Jim.
Alex looked up at him. “You were trying to hurt me.”
“Yeah.” he said.
“I was trying to hurt you,” she said softly. “He keeps getting in the way.”
The doctor came out, covered in blood, and looked from one Sentinel to the other. “Which of you is the next of kin?”
“I am,” they both said at once, glaring at each other before they each realized the uncomfortable truth: both of them were listed as next of kin for identities Blair couldn’t use without catching the attention of his handlers.
“We are going to need a name for him for our records,” said the doctor.
“I’m sorry, this is part of an ongoing investigation and we can’t divulge names,” said Jim, flashing his badge.
The doctor frowned, but continued. “The patient suffered a gunshot wound to the lower lobe of his right lung. We’ve been trying to reinflate it. He’s also lost a lot of blood.”
“Can I see him?” Alex begged.
“I’m sorry; I can’t clear him for visitors yet. We’ve stabilized him, but he’s still at risk.”
“You have no idea,” Jim muttered under his breath. “Excuse us.” He pulled Alex aside. “I need to know who you’ve been working for and whether they’re going to come after Sandburg. I need to know whether we need to get him to a safe house or whether he’s okay here.”
Alex thought about it. “I don’t know.” At Jim’s disgusted look, she said, “I swear! I’d tell you if I knew; I want out as badly as he did. Does. We’ve never had a chance to escape before; we’ve been watched too closely. I don’t know what they’ll do now that we’re on the loose. How the hell did you find us anyway?”
“Tongue.”
“Yeah, what the hell is that? Blair was always ordering it and always seemed to think it was funny when places didn’t have it, like they were supposed to or something. I mean, it’s not really actual tongue, is it?”
“You don’t know?” He felt a little better for not knowing what the hell she was quoting before.
“He and I didn’t get to talk openly a lot. It’s not easy when only one of you has Sentinel hearing.”
“It was a code,” said Jim. “Not that many vegetarians with a hankering for cow flesh; made you guys easy to track, once we tagged onto it.”
“Look,” said Alex, “Let’s be frank. I don’t like you, and you have no reason to trust me. But neither of us can watch out for him around the clock in here. His chances are much better if we take this in shifts, spell each other to stay sharp.”
“Why should I trust you?” Jim asked.
Alex closed her eyes for a long moment, then she reached out. Jim flinched, but all she did was pull him against the wall so they could talk more privately. “I don’t like to talk about it. I don’t even talk about it with Blair. They broke me, Jim. They tortured me, they forced zone outs to put me in a hypnotic state, they broke me in ways even prison couldn’t. But every time they broke me, Blair came and found me in my head, brought me back. I know part of that was their manipulation, to make us bond with each other so we’d be an effective team and so they could blackmail me with his safety. But for the last two years, the only person who cared about me, the only person I could trust, was Blair. We carried each other through hell, and I’d die before I let anyone take him back there.”
Jim watched her eyes through all this, monitored her breathing, listened to the soft thrum of blood in her veins. As far as she was concerned, Blair was her Guide. More than that, he was her brother in arms. He saw in her the same loyalty he’d once given his fellow Rangers. Whether by programming or by choice, Alex was as tied to Blair as Jim was.
Jim jumped when Kip Greenstein touched his arm. “I need both of you to follow me. We have a situation.” He led them both down the hallway to a spare exam room and shut the door behind them, his heart racing slightly. “I just got off the phone with our mutual friend, Detective, and we’ve got a time crunch until someone realizes Blair and Alex slipped their leash.” He turned to Alex. “We’re moving the two of you to a secure facility and confiscating the ER records. Detective Ellison, I’ll meet you back at the airstrip.”
“Now wait a minute,” Jim snapped, “You’re not taking Blair anywhere without--”
There wasn’t enough time to cry, “No, don’t!” before Kip took advantage of Alex’s distraction and grazed her skin with the poisoned sliver in his hand. Alex’s eyes bugged out, and she clutched her mute throat, her lips turning blue as she gasped futilely for air. Jim watched her struggle, feeling like he should tell Kip to stop, ask for the antidote, she might not deserve this anymore, but all he could do was watch as she fell to her knees and collapsed at their feet.
Kip tucked away the poison needle and hauled the corpse up onto a gurney, covering Alex with a sheet. “Detective? Detective Ellison!” Jim’s eyes snapped into focus at Kip’s warning. “I’ll meet you at the airstrip.”
“I’m going with you,” said Jim.
“I don’t have time to argue with you, Detective, I have a corpse and a wounded man to move in less than four minutes. Now get your ass in gear.”
Jim eyed the pocket where Kip had stored the poisoned needle. The muscle in his jaw jumped, and he glared at Greenstein, but the man was right: they had to get Blair the hell away from here and erase any trails that tied Jim to this fiasco, or they would never stop running. He nodded fractionally. Whatever Jack and Kip had in mind, surely they weren’t going to disappear Blair forever. “Do what you have to do. I’ll be waiting.”
In the next two months, Jim couldn’t stop wondering whether he’d made the worst mistake of his life back at the hospital. There had been no further contact from Jack Kelso, no sign of Blair, nothing but nightmares of Blair smiling up at him from a widening pool of blood, telling him over and over every night that it didn’t hurt. Jim’s resulting lack of sleep had made him even more of a son of a bitch than usual, which could in part excuse why he told the newest addition to Major Crimes, Detective Brandon “Call me Bud” McCoy, that he’d rather frolic naked on an African anthill than show Bud the ropes. Only he didn’t say frolic.
Rather than scurry away in terror or mutter curses under his breath, Bud just grinned, raised his eyebrows and said, “An African anthill, huh?”
Jim glared up at him, but the man had been LAPD for six years according to Simon, and his nose had that slightly thickened look that only came from being broken and carefully reset over and over. Bud McCoy clearly wasn’t one to back down from a fight, despite his cheerful manner. So Jim changed tactics. “I’m going to go grab lunch.”
“Great!” said Bud. “Inspector Connor told me about this amazing place on Mason Street. You can bring me up to speed on MC procedure over chicken teriyaki.”
Jim snarled, but there was no help for it; Simon would chew him out if Jim didn’t at least try to get along with the guy. But something about Bud just seemed off, and Jim couldn’t figure out what was tripping his internal alarms. It was so soon after he’d reconnected with Blair; was Bud some sort of secret agent planted in the department to find out what Jim knew about Sandburg’s whereabouts? He watched Bud as they drove to the Jade Turtle, trying to figure out what exactly felt off. Bud seemed like a nice enough guy on the surface, short and stocky, black Irish good looks only accentuated by his broken nose, friendly, a little clumsy at times, but with a quiet confidence that cops only got after a few firefights, and a straight carriage that spoke of some military service. “Where did you serve?” Jim asked.
Bud looked at him funny, but said, “Naval carrier. You?”
“Rangers. I’m surprised, though, I would have pegged you for a jarhead, not a sailor.”
“Really? Why’s that?”
“You just seem like a brawler to me.”
Bud chuckled. “Don’t judge a book by its cover, man. Face like this doesn’t mean I like to start fights. Just means I wasn’t quick enough to get out of the way.”
That was what was wrong, the voice. The tenor had eerie undertones of Blair’s baritone Guide voice. Was Bud trained in hypnosis or something? Was that how they planned to get him?
“Turn here,” he said, and his suspicions were rewarded when Bud shot him a brief glance before obeying. If the man was really new to town from LA, he shouldn’t know they were now going the wrong way. “Make a left.” Tuning in to Bud’s heartbeat, he was rewarded by a slight acceleration as Jim directed him to Prospect. “Stop here, McCoy.”
Oh, the man knew where they were, and he was definitely nervous. “Uh, Detective Ellison, this isn’t Mason Street.”
“You’re right, it’s not,” said Jim. “Just need to get something from upstairs. Come on.”
Bud followed him up in the elevator, and in the cramped space, Jim noticed another discrepancy. Under the scent of aftershave and salon shampoo, Jim could detect a faint trace of Blair. Bud must have broken into his apartment, ransacked Blair’s things for some clue as to his whereabouts.
As soon as the door closed behind them, Jim slammed Bud up against the wall, some dark part of him relishing the man’s wince as Bud’s shoulders took the brunt of the impact. “I won’t help you find him,” he snarled. “I don’t even know where he is. You tell your bosses to back off or I’ll mail you back to them in little, bleeding pieces.”
Bud stared at him, his heartbeat racing, but not with fear. “That won’t help,” he gasped, “Have you ever tried telling Simon to back off?”
Jim slammed him again, relishing Bud’s hiss of pain. “Don’t bullshit me! Do you think I’m that stupid? I won’t help you find him!”
Blue eyes blazed through him like torches, and a soft voice, altered but still unmistakable, issued from Bud’s throat. “You already have, man. More than you know.”
“B--” before he could speak, Bud’s fingers touched his lips, silencing him.
Bud smiled and glanced down at Jim’s whitened knuckles pinning him to the wall. “Deja vu, man.” The voice was wrong, the face was wrong, but the grin was every bit as cocky and delighted as Jim remembered. Blair had finally come home.
Naming of Parts
by Henry Reed
Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But today,
Today we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And today we have naming of parts.
This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.
This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.
And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.
They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
For today we have naming of parts.