Bone Music (Burning Girl #1)(50)

“Clever,” Dylan says, “but I haven’t made that much progress. You want your phone back?”

“I have other phones.”

Dylan hurls it at him anyway.

Cole catches it but with both hands.

When he looks over one shoulder, he sees even Ed has his gun drawn now. The rest of the security team are standing with Glocks aimed at Dylan, rather than braced across the hoods of their vehicles. Cole gestures for them to stand down. They all comply. Except for Ed. He doesn’t move an inch.

“Why here?” Cole asks.

“Think.”

There’s no hint of malice in Dylan’s expression. Not even a hint of challenge. But there never is. He’s smart enough to make someone believe personal destruction is in their best interests.

“I’m not an Arizona historian, Dylan.”

“But you know history is the reason we’re here. Which means you know me. So think. Why would I pick this place?”

Think back on our relationship, is what he’s saying. Think back on all the conversations we had, all the private movements we shared together, moments I was willing to throw away completely as soon as you cut off my funding so more volunteers wouldn’t die.

Luckily Cole doesn’t have to. He knew the answer after a brief web search. He knew the answer when Ed asked him the question on the flight, but to say so would have meant admitting to a level of intimacy he wasn’t ready to reveal to Ed just yet.

Still, he scans their surroundings to see if there’s some clue that might suggest his first guess is wrong.

Just behind Dylan great shafts of dusty sunlight stream through the restaurant’s ruined ceiling, falling across the scattered rows of booths inside. Stacked against the hole-filled walls are piles of rotting chairs and sun-bleached cushions pulled from the booths. The booths were red leather once, Cole assumes; now most of them are bone white. The preservative effects of the dry desert air have done a steady battle with the wind and whatever other forces have passed through this place, taking bites along the way.

To the east is the slight downhill grade Ed mentioned. The freeway is so far away it’s almost impossible to see the sunlight winking off the roofs of passing cars. But if the map he studied before he left is to be believed, somewhere down there is Aravaipa Creek.

“Grant’s massacre,” Cole says.

Dylan smiles. He gets to his feet slowly, brushing the sand from his knees. “One hundred forty Apache women murdered and scalped by a coalition of Natives, Anglos, and Mexicans. Mutilated. Another testament to mankind’s bewildering appetite for inflicting suffering.”

“There were political reasons for the attack.”

“There is never a political reason for mutilating anyone.”

“The federal government was reducing the money they provided to ensure peace between merchants and the Natives, especially the Apache. The merchants were afraid they wouldn’t have the goods to pacify the tribes. It set the stage for the attack. I’m not saying it justifies it.”

“Nonsense. Women and children scalped and mutilated in their beds. It was sexual sadism. No different from this Mask Maker in Los Angeles. They just didn’t have the word for it yet.”

“Do you have other women?” Cole asks.

Dylan cocks his head to one side, as if he’s waiting for Cole to finish this question.

“Out in the field, I mean,” Cole adds, “enjoying your gift.”

“Just one. The one you saw.”

“Did you test it on any others?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“One.”

“Not Charlotte Rowe, the girl I saw on the tape.”

“No.”

“Did you sleep with them?”

“The first girl, yes. Not Charlotte.”

Cole regrets asking the question as much as he regrets the blush Dylan’s answer brings to his cheeks.

“I told you,” Dylan says. “I don’t adhere to popular labels in that area.”

“There is no popular label for someone whose sexual identity is entirely professional ambition. Well, there is. But they don’t give them out at Harvard.”

“What are you accusing me of, Cole?”

“The first girl. The one it didn’t work on. Is she dead?”

“Yes.”

Cole feels his pulse beating in the side of his face. Amazing that this news, amid the rest of it, makes him feel like he’s breathing through a straw. Dylan’s expression is blank. He studies Cole as if whatever emotional reaction Cole will have to this information is a tiresome but necessary inconvenience. But Cole isn’t seeing Dylan anymore. He’s seeing video footage he long since destroyed; footage of a decorated war hero chewing on his right arm after he’d torn it from his body and beaten himself with it until one of his legs broke.

My money, he thinks. My money funded all that bloodshed, all those scenes I can’t erase from my nightmares. All of it, thanks to my money. My father’s money.

They’d come up with a phrase for it, for the swift orgy of relentless, cannibalistic self-destruction that consumed all four test subjects within minutes of their trigger events. Going lycan. If only they had truly become something else in those final moments, another creature, not a wide-eyed howling human suddenly programmed to quite literally tear itself apart in a frenzied rage.