Hawkeye, p.11
Hawkeye, page 11
She bit the inside of her cheek, because her parents were a special circumstance.
Milo plucked two napkins from the dispenser on the table and wiped his gloves off. She thought it was odd that he hadn’t taken them off, not even to eat pizza, but she didn’t ask. After all, she was sitting in a cheap pizza joint in her super-hero costume, so she didn’t have much room to talk. “My parents died when I was thirteen,” he went on. “It was . . . a difficult time for my grandfather and me. We didn’t see eye to eye for a long time after that. Not until recently.”
They sat there quietly for a long moment.
“I understand—probably more than you think. My mom died when I was young,” she said finally. Behind the counter, the cashier working the late shift had his earbuds in as he bopped around the kitchen, mopping. He was currently sashaying to ABBA, the song so loud she could hear it across the restaurant. “I always blamed my dad for her death. And myself. She came to my summer camp the day before she died, wanting me to go away with her and . . . I didn’t. I should have. I don’t know if my sister blames me or anything but . . . I blame myself enough for both of us. So I—I understand, if that’s anything.” She reached down and scrubbed Lucky behind the ears for a little comfort. “I miss her.”
“I miss my parents, too,” Milo agreed softly. He closed the book, his eyebrows furrowed in thought. “I can’t remember the last thing I said to them, you know? Was I being bratty? Did I tell them I loved them? I don’t know. They died in a house fire. I don’t remember how it started—the entire night is a blur. My grandfather got out, though. Of course he did. He only ever thought of himself.”
“I used to love the Immovable Castle series as a kid,” she replied. “I used to imagine what it would be like to meet E. L. Albright—but I guess you shouldn’t meet your heroes.”
“They’re not always super,” he agreed.
Her mouth twitched into a half smile. “No, they’re not.”
She reached her hand across the table and set it on top of his. “I’m sorry. For everything—your parents, your grandfather . . . having to deal with the rest of this mess right now. It sucks.”
He looked at her hand atop his. “Did you ever forgive your dad?”
“No,” she replied without a moment of hesitation. She withdrew her hand. “I don’t think I ever will.”
“I feel the same about my grandfather,” he admitted, and turned a critical eye to The Trials of the Immovable Castle. “And now we have to deal with his stupid mistake.”
Kate sighed. “Why are they surfacing now of all times?”
“Beats me.” He opened up the hardcover and pointed to the English words written at the top of each page—where, in the regular printing, there would be Unword instead. So the collector’s edition was the exact opposite. “But at least it’s a comfort to know that whoever is looking for the books needs all of them. To decode my grandfather’s research, you need both the children’s book and these books to know what the symbols look like and which are translatable—and which are sigils. They’re hidden in the Unword language on these pages. So you see, it’s rather foolproof.”
“Seems like a lot of work. Why didn’t he just, I don’t know, destroy it?”
“He couldn’t destroy something he’d spent his entire life working on.”
“It also sounds like it destroyed his family, too.”
“Exactly, so if he destroyed this research, it would all be for nothing.” There was a thin line of anger in his voice. “My parents’ deaths would be for nothing, or so he reasoned.”
A cop car howled down the street, red and blue lights bouncing off the glass windows, toward the high rise. They both froze at the sound, but the cars whirled past them, toward Park Avenue.
Toward Gregory Maxwell’s place?
No, they wouldn’t send that many police to a robbery that had already happened, she thought.
No, the police were just heading in that direction. It could be for a completely different reason. She was just being paranoid, because their plan had gone off better than she’d anticipated. Now they had two books down, and four to go. At least they knew where two of them were—and she wasn’t looking forward to figuring out how to steal them back from Kingpin.
Another two cop cars lit up the night as they whirled down Fifty-Seventh toward Park Avenue. Kate and Milo exchanged the same look.
“Time to go?” he asked.
“Time to go,” she agreed, then fed Lucky her crust, and they dumped their plates in the trash can on the way out.
“Don’t be a stranger now!” the cashier of Bad Pizza cried with a wave, and Kate returned it before they ducked out of the restaurant and turned left toward Broadway.
Milo stuck his hands in his pocket, falling into step with Kate on one side, Lucky on the other. “So, do you commit crimes often in the name of good?”
“I plead the Fifth there,” she replied, recalling one too many times where she, uh, sort of did just that. It usually worked out in her favor. Besides, she wasn’t always lawfully good—more chaotic neutral erring on the side of charity.
The eye on the back of her hand twisted to look at her, and she pressed her thumb against it—hard. Just to make sure the skin was still hers and the eye was just a hallucination. Her costume covered most of her body, so she hadn’t gotten a chance to see if there were more. Though she was sure they were spreading.
“Is something wrong?” Milo asked, glancing at her expression. It must have been pinched—or at least pained. “Was it the pizza?”
“I’m fine,” she replied quickly, letting go of her hand. “Just thinking.”
“That can’t be good.”
She laughed. “Shut up.”
The night was humid, the smell of trash mixed with the unmistakable scent of midnight food stops and car exhaust. Light from open windows and closed stores bounced across the recycled glass in the sidewalk cement, making it glitter like fallen stars. In the distance, towering over them like some benevolent overlord, was Stark Tower, its neon-red sign reflecting ominous red in the puddles on the street.
“It’s nice,” he said after a while, “to talk to someone who understands about the whole”—he waved his hand in an encompassing motion—“dead-parent thing. Most people just look at you like you’re broken.”
“Or that you’re the thing they’ll become eventually when their parents die, and they’re just glad they aren’t you yet,” she added.
“Exactly.”
Lucky trotted between them, sniffing at the ground as he went.
“My mom used to wear this really strong perfume,” Milo went on. “After she died, sometimes I would just get a smell of it, like she’d just walked past.”
“Isn’t it weird how some things just linger?”
“Sometimes I thought that maybe she was a ghost, come back to haunt me.”
“Yours is a ghost, mine’s a vampire,” she replied wryly, and he laughed, not realizing how bizarrely truthful she was being. “But when she was alive, she was a philanthropist. Her job took her everywhere, so she was gone a lot, but when she was home, she’d read to me and my sister, Susan.” She found herself thinking more and more about those moments, these last few days. “She’d read us a chapter a night. I would always beg her for more. She died before we ever got to finish the last Immovable Castle book. I never picked it up after that.”
He gave her a distraught look. “So you don’t know how the story ends?”
She shrugged. “It was just . . . never the same after. I couldn’t finish it without her, and she was . . . well, you know. Gone. Does it end right, at least?”
“That depends. How do you think stories should end?”
“Happily,” she replied without a second thought. “I’m a bit of a romantic that way. I kind of have to be, to believe in the good of people day in and day out.”
“Lest you become a villain like Kingpin,” he replied cryptically. He kicked a piece of trash on the sidewalk, and it went skittering toward a pile of garbage bags heaped on the corner. “How do you think we’ll get the books back from Kingpin, anyway?”
She shrugged. “I have no clue. Do you know where the other two might be?”
“I wish I did,” he replied, and then something occurred to him. “How did you find out about the auction?”
“Funny story, actually . . .” She told him about the summer camp kids and how they were a wealth of Albright knowledge, from the forums they visited to their own private Wikipedia-like biography on a shared notes app. Milo was charmed by it.
Since it was past midnight, there weren’t as many people on the streets, but still enough in Midtown for them to blend rather inconspicuously into the crowd as they made their way back toward Forty-Second Street and then took the subway up to Washington Heights. And bed, Kate supposed, though she wasn’t quite sure how she was going to navigate that.
America was waiting up for them, lounging on the threadbare sofa, her feet kicked up on the coffee table, watching some late-night show on cable. They had Jennifer Walters on, talking about a very rare case of copyright infringement. The second Lucky trudged in through the door, America jumped to her feet and turned the TV off. “About time! What happened?”
Kate gave her a long, tired look as she held the door open for Milo, who shuffled into the apartment after her and plopped down on the sofa. He dug out the book from the duffel bag and held it up triumphantly. “We got the book.”
America plucked it out of his hand and whistled as she looked at the spine. “Did he really paint everything white?”
“The entire apartment. It was the weirdest thing,” Kate replied, and lounged back on the sofa. “But otherwise it worked out pretty well. Did you end up actually signing over your grandpa’s books?” she asked Milo.
He rolled his eyes. “As if. I tore that contract up the second I made a break for it.” Then he frowned, a troubling thought occurring to him. “But speaking of my grandfather, I guess I should . . . see about funeral arrangements in the morning. I don’t even know how to go about it. When my parents died, he did all of that.”
She and America exchanged a look, and then America gave in and said, “I can help you out with that. Kate can, too. We aren’t really strangers to funerals.”
“We’ve been to too many to count,” Kate agreed.
“And you’re still in this line of work?” Milo asked, baffled.
Kate shrugged. “You know what they say, doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.”
“Hoping for different results,” America corrected, and stood from her end of the sofa. She scrubbed Lucky behind the ears and gave a long stretch. “Okay, well, now that you’re both home, I’m going to sleep. I have a date in the morning, because someone cut mine short tonight,” she added with a pointed look at Kate.
“I really owe you one,” Kate replied.
“You owe me a thousand. Good night,” America added, and left for her bedroom.
Lucky jumped up into the warm spot America left behind, spun around on the cushions three times, and then plopped down with a tired grunt. Kate patted him on the rump. He was a good dog.
Milo gave a yawn—which made her yawn.
“Oh, don’t do that,” she complained.
“We should probably get to sleep, too. It’s been . . . a hell of a day.”
But Kate really didn’t want to face her dreams quite yet. Especially when she was afraid she wouldn’t wake up from them. And she was still two books away from any sort of cure. Not only did they have to find remaining novels, they also had to get two books that Kingpin stole, and she had no idea how they were going to do that. She’d barely survived Montana.
But instead of saying any of that, she lifted one of Milo’s curls to look at the gash on his forehead from his run-in with Kingpin. “We should probably change your bandage.”
“Would you kindly?”
“Sure.” She stood and went to get the first-aid kit from the bathroom, then came back to sit down. “Tilt your head toward me.” He did, and she opened up a packet of disinfectant. “You know, the more I think about it, the less I can imagine inheriting something like you have—what was your grandfather going to do, anyway, once someone gathered all the books together?”
“He was quite adamant no one would.”
“Why?”
“Because he was sure no one would ever find the last one. He says he hid it too well.”
“Oh. Well, do you know where it is? Sorry,” she added when she applied the disinfectant, and he winced away with a hiss.
“It’s fine, it’s fine. And no. I do not. The only clue I have is that it is somewhere where everyone can see it and no one knows it’s there.”
“Well, that’s a whole lot of nothing.” She applied the Band-Aid and sat back, thinking.
The ceiling fan spun in slow arcs. Even though it was nighttime, the city was still muggy, and the wall AC units in the apartment barely did anything to stave off the heat, even at night.
“So Kingpin found one, then he got yours,” she said, counting on her fingers. “We have the auction one, and Maxwell’s . . . one is somewhere ‘where everyone can see it and no one knows it’s there,’ and the last . . .”
He shrugged. “It was the one he sold at a secondhand store, that’s all I know.”
So the book could very easily be anywhere in the world by now—even destroyed. But if it was, then they had to confirm that, because it would be very bad for her.
They settled back into silence. Kate ran over all the details in her head once, twice, three times—the books, who she saw at the auction, who could possibly have them, and that last riddle of a book being somewhere everyone could see but no one knew it was there. It all seemed like the answer was right there, but her head was so foggy, she could barely keep more than one thought in it at once. She just wanted to go to sleep. Her eyelids felt so, so heavy. But she knew if she did . . .
“This must be one of the most far-fetched things you’ve had to deal with in a while, isn’t it?” Milo asked wryly. “A children’s-book series hiding a secret hypnotic message that can kill you in your nightmares.”
Kate gave a shrug. “Not that far-fetched. Once, I fought brainwashed frat bros who liked to punch things. Then there was that time a group of vampires thought that America was a goddess. And then that other time I got transported onto an island outside of time where I had to fight all the best archers in the world—including Clint. Oh! And once, Madame Masque used my own face to—”
He threw his hands up. “Okay! Okay. I get your point. It’s not completely out there. And thank you,” he added, lacing his fingers together, putting his elbows on his knees, “it means a lot that you’re helping me.”
She gave a one-shouldered shrug. “It’s what I do. I mean, if Kingpin gets these novels and does manage to crack the code, who knows what he’ll do. . . .” She trailed off, a thought occurring to her. If the people from Misty’s original investigation died through hypnosis, then it meant someone else had to know about the research in order to kill them with it. It meant they already knew what was hidden in the books—so it also stood to reason they had worked with Albright at some point, if they knew how to use the research already. But then why were they going after the books in the first place?
Something wasn’t adding up.
Milo cocked his head. “Is something wrong?”
She glanced at him, the newly cleaned gash on his head, his soft, dark ringlet curls, the way his eyes were a grassy sort of emerald green that discombobulated her a little bit, and she thought better of voicing her opinion. She didn’t want to scare him, not tonight, knowing that someone else his grandfather worked with was likely entangled in this—not only that, but likely a murderer, too.
Tomorrow, she promised herself. She’d tell him both about her new theory and that she was under the same hypnosis as the one that killed his grandfather. He’d freak out, and so would America, which was why she hadn’t said anything yet. In her experience, emotions clouded judgment, and she didn’t need anyone getting reckless.
She was already reckless enough for both of them.
“It’s past midnight,” she said instead. “You must be tired.”
“I bet you are, too,” he replied.
“We can take a few hours to rest. We’re no good sleep-deprived.”
“No, I suppose not,” he admitted as he kicked off his shoes. They were nice loafers, scuffed from running around all evening. The white button-down had blood on the collar.
She asked, “Do you want some clothes to sleep?”
He feigned shock. “Are you telling me I stink?”
“No, I’m telling you you can’t be comfortable in evening wear,” she replied, and went back into the hall closet to scrounge up a shirt and some pajamas that would fit Milo from the donation box America kept from all her exes (and, let’s face it, the people who just crashed here, like Kate). She returned as he was shrugging out of his three-piece suit, having a bit of trouble with the buttons on his waistcoat.
She motioned to him as she said, “Do you want me to . . . ?”
His shoulders sagged. “I fear my hands are still shaking pretty badly from . . . well, everything.”
“That tends to happen,” she replied. It had been a long day. Being tossed around and beaten up was just all in a day’s work for her, but for a nerdy bookworm? She doubted he’d seen this much action since PE class. She stepped up to him and undid the vest as he had asked, then went ahead and helped him out of it. He moved like he was already sore, and winced when he turned a certain way.
“You probably pulled something. Frozen peas are the best for that,” she advised.
“This, oddly enough, isn’t my first rodeo,” he replied matter-of-factly.
That surprised her. “You’ve been in worse situations?”
