Fatal Strike (McClouds & Friends #10)(119)

Greaves followed her gaze. “Yes, that’s my son, Geoff,” he said. “He’s been in a coma for seventeen years, but I still hope for a miracle. Would you like to sit down, have some breakfast? Coffee?”

She stared at him, panting, from behind her snarled tangle of hair. Gritting her teeth against the agonizing pulse of pain in her wrist. The image of the thin, desolate little boy in her visions was as clear in her head as the room she saw before her.

Greaves laughed, softly. “Oh, yes, I remember now. You disdain my offers of hospitality on principle. Anabel, unfasten her wrists.”

Anabel stepped forward with a black-bladed knife. Lara braced herself for the pain as the woman sawed the blade through the tape, which had stretched and twisted into a tight, agonizing plastic cable.

It made her faint. Blood pressure going wonky. Her freed hand was thickly swollen, red and hot. She could barely move her fingers.

“Your hand looks terrible,” Greaves said, his voice solicitous. “Anabel, I told you to deliver her unharmed. How did this happen?”

“That was Rockwell, sir, and I didn’t tell him to—”

“You have a bad habit of blaming others for your mistakes,” he chided. He turned back to Lara. “I apologize for their roughness.”

“Don’t bother to scold her,” she said. “You don’t take responsibility for your mistakes, either.”

His smile froze for a moment, and then started to twinkle again.

“Feisty,” he said, in an admiring tone. “Of course, you were before, too, but your romp with Miles Davenport seems to have put even more steel into your spine.”

Hearing Miles’ name in Greaves’ mouth gave her a sickening thrill of fear. She stiffened against it.

“Finally, I can explain myself properly, and no one needs to get hurt,” Greaves said. “It’s what I’ve been trying to communicate all along. The last thing I want to do is hurt anyone.”

“Tell that to Davy McCloud,” she said.

“Ah, yes, that. That was a shame. But he survived, didn’t he? And his little girl is just fine. I would never hurt a child. It was all a bluff.”

“You don’t consider what you did to me hurting?” Lara said, cradling her throbbing hand.

Greaves crossed his arms, his foot tapping as he thought it through. “Not at all. Most would have been broken by what you went through, but not you. It tempered you. Just look at you. Flashing eyes. Chin up. Indomitable. You are breathtaking, Lara.”

Her throat tightened with revulsion. “Oh, f*ck off. I’ve been through too much to tolerate being slimed by you.”

His eyes flickered. “Moderate your anger,” he said. “You’re in no position to use language like that with me.”

True. She resolved to keep her mouth shut. Then her gaze happened across the large, dark ceramic vase, displayed on a black marble stand against the wall, and she felt the same shock of recognition she’d had in the vault. Hers. The big, squat, circular vase was a moving vortex of clay, the multicolored swirling glazes misleading the eye as if it were spinning. She had to look away quickly, before she started tripping. Part of the way up the vase was a triangular crack, seemingly natural, just below eye level of an average person, to peer inside.

Into Persephone’s dungeon.

To think she’d cast that sculpture right before her own dungeon had swallowed her. Maybe she’d had a gift of prophecy even before psi-max. A small yellow light was placed above the sculpture, sending a single ray of what seemed like sunlight through a small hole, right down upon Persephone’s upturned face, but she was immobilized by the stalagtites and stalagmites from above and below, pinned among them, as if she were clamped in toothy, goblin jaws.

“Oh, your sculpture. Yes. I was wondering if you would notice. I have several pieces of yours in my vault.”

“I saw them,” she said.

“I bought those for the Emerging Artists exhibit, at the new Greaves Museum of Modern Art, right here in Blaine. It will be inaugurated in just a few weeks. Your work is brilliant, by the way. I bought Persephone’s Pride for the museum, but then I got attached to it myself. That bland, graceful fa?ade, and inside, agony, tension, but also hope. The ray of light, the threads of hanging plant roots—it’s amazing.”

She stared, stonily. “You didn’t have me kidnapped and beaten and dragged here to fawn over my sculptures.”

“No, I didn’t,” he said.

A wave of faintness throbbed through her. Her heart beat deafeningly loud in her ears for a moment. She dragged in a sobbing breath, and thought of Miles to steady herself. “Tell me, then.”

Greaves steepled his hands in a businesslike way. “All right. I told you how I wanted to save the world, didn’t I?”

“Yes,” she said faintly. “You said something about that.”

“I meant it quite literally. I’m conducting a very ambitious project. It started years ago, when I was on a mission that involved researchers who were studying a virus. One of the effects of exposure was a decrease in aggressive behavior, a balancing of seratonin levels, a general state of increased calm and well-being. Naturally, I was intrigued by the possibilities. I funded further private research myself.”

Ice gripped her belly as the images of the quiet, wind-whipped world full of skeletons played before her mind. “No,” she whispered.