Where all paths meet, p.2
Where All Paths Meet, page 2
part #3 of The Adventures of Holloway Holmes Series
The hall ended in an enormous multipurpose room: forty-foot ceilings; exposed ductwork and rigging where colored lights offered enough illumination to temper the darkness; high-def displays mounted high around the room displayed a montage of the Zodiac campus, their logo, and Blackfriar Holmes’s smiling face.
Tables broke up the space, gleaming with white linen and floral centerpieces, and twelve ice sculptures stood at intervals. It took me a moment to make sense of the gleaming, dripping blocks—the Zodiac signs. Jesus, I thought, on the nose much? Caterers mixed with the partygoers, offering canapes and crab rolls, melon wrapped in ham, mini Yorkshire puddings, even edible flowers. I know because I tried them. All of them. The edible flowers were a big pass, but I hit the crab roll guy so many times he started trying to dodge me, which only meant I had to work a little harder. I’d gotten carded at two of the four bars spaced around the room, and I was really regretting my lack of fake ID, when someone spoke behind me.
“Excuse me, sir.” He was about my height, probably twenty years older, and dressed in the kind of suit that said security instead of executive. “Will you come with me, please?”
“I’ve got an invite,” I said.
“This way, sir.”
He didn’t grab my arm. He didn’t have a cattle prod. He’d even said please. But something in his body language made me tense. Other people must have gotten the vibe too because he cut through the crowd like a hot knife. I’d seen movies like this. They usually ended badly for the guy who wasn’t supposed to be at the party. Like, strapped-to-a-chair-with-a-car-battery-hooked-to-your-’nads bad. That kind of bad.
The transition happened so quickly that it felt like popping a bubble: one moment, I was following the security guy through the crowd, and the next, I was in a clearing. It was disorienting, like floating in outer space. Then I saw the cluster of people ahead of me, and I started to understand.
Blackfriar Holmes stood at the center, his dark hair combed back, his eyes like chips of tarnished tin. The woman next to him was tall—almost as tall as I was—and slender, her blond hair threaded with silver, the off-the shoulder dress revealing clean, elegant lines that were disturbingly familiar. She had to be Holmes’s mother, and even in that moment of terror, I was surprised to realize that I’d never thought about him having a mother. I’d assumed she’d died. Or been a mad scientist. Probably both. She met my eyes for a moment, and her gaze was cold and hard and knowing. She recognized me; that was the first message she wanted me to get. And she didn’t like me.
“Jack,” Blackfriar said. “What a surprise.”
He looked like he was about to say more, but a shrill voice interrupted him: “What’s he doing here?”
The words came from a guy who might have been a few years older than me. He had sun-streaked brown hair, blue eyes, and thin, stooped shoulders. His suit and skinny tie were hipster chic and obviously—annoyingly—expensive, although the suit didn’t seem to fit him quite right. In the dim lighting, it was hard to make out what he held low against his leg, but it looked like a black leather doctor’s bag.
Blackfriar threw the guy an annoyed look and then glanced across the small group. I hadn’t spotted Paxton Adler until then, which was saying something—Paxton was the kind of guy genetically engineered to draw every eye. He had dark hair in a faux hawk, thick eyebrows, almond skin. The last time I’d seen him had been at a bus station, where Holmes and I had caught him trying to collect a payoff. He’d looked worn out that day; tonight, in navy trousers and a silk shirt with a plunging neckline that left nothing to the imagination, it was obvious he’d bounced back.
At Blackfriar’s look, Paxton burst out laughing. He sounded genuinely amused, and the longer he laughed, the more annoyed the guy with the doctor’s bag looked.
Blackfriar’s expression revealed nothing, and after a moment of watching Paxton laugh, he turned back to me. “This is Tom Watson, Jack. Say hello. Tom, meet Jack Moreno. One of the…branches of the Watson tree.”
In the past few months, since learning the truth about my family, I’d spent a lot of time learning about the Watsons and, of course, the Holmeses. I’d never seen the name Tom Watson anywhere. I stared at him, and he stared back. His jaw was set, and a flush speckled his neck. After a moment, I stuck out my hand, and he switched the bag to his other hand and shook.
“My wife Cecilia,” Blackfriar said, indicating the woman I’d recognized as Holmes’s mom. “And my daughter Noneley.”
The final member of the group had her father’s dark hair, her mother’s hazel eyes and build, and when she moved, she looked like Holmes. My Holmes. Not the same cold-chiseled perfection, but the mannerisms. She was his older sister, I had learned from my research—because Holmes, of course, had never told me anything about his family. But watching her move, I knew in that moment that, at some point in his life, for what must have been a long stretch, Holmes had idolized her, studied her, copied her. The way younger kids do with older siblings. Where have you been, I wanted to ask her. Why haven’t you been helping him?
Noneley was grinning at me, and it took me a moment to process what I was seeing. Instead of something suited to the semi-formal dress code, she wore a cheerleader’s uniform: a blue and silver top that left her arms and midriff bare; a pleated blue skirt that revealed long, toned legs. On the front of her top was printed the name of my old high school, along with the bulldog mascot.
“Don’t you love it?” she said, laughing. “I couldn’t wait to see your face.” And then, as though her father hadn’t introduced her, she said, “I’m Noneley,” and kissed my cheek.
The last few minutes had been a lot, and most of my processing power was being taken up by serial realizations: the presence of someone calling himself a Watson, the uncanny similarities between Noneley and Holmes, the fact that somehow she’d known I was coming and managed to get a cheerleader uniform in time, and her sudden intrusion into my space, followed by that kiss.
All of which is to explain why I said the smartest thing possible: “You’re supposed to be dead.”
That cracked them up. Paxton and Noneley laughed, and even Blackfriar allowed himself a twitch of his lips. Tom didn’t laugh, though; he stared at me, color still mottling his face, holding the doctor’s bag in front of him with both hands now. Cecilia didn’t laugh either. She studied me. Her fingers were white around the glass she was holding.
“I made a miraculous recovery,” Noneley said with a huge smile. “We Holmeses are notorious for it.”
Apparently, my brain couldn’t leave well enough alone: “But I read the articles—” I managed to drag myself to a halt there. I fished for something better and came up with nothing.
“A misdirection.” Noneley paused to hit her vape, and I got a whiff of cannabis. “Government work is so boring, shuttling back and forth between D.C. and London, but every once in a while, I get to do something fun.”
Blackfriar shot her a dirty look—whether because of the vape or the statement, it wasn’t clear—but his focus settled on me again. “Tom asked the pertinent question, I believe. What are you doing here, Jack?” He threw another look at his daughter, who struck a cheer pose and did jazz hands. “Or are you simply another of my daughter’s misdirections?”
The silence seemed to demand an answer, so I said, “I was invited.”
I showed him the invitation itself. He studied it for a moment. Then he looked up at me and bared his teeth, a mockery of a smile. “Well, here we are. The Holmeses, the Watsons, and the Adlers. This promises to be an interesting evening.”
As though that had been some sort of cue, Cecilia passed her glass of wine to Noneley and produced a small enameled box from her clutch. She withdrew a pill, placed it on her tongue, and accepted the wine from her daughter. We all watched as she sipped at the wine and swallowed the pill. It had the feeling of a ritual.
I pulled my gaze away and, by accident, caught a glimpse of Blackfriar’s face. What I saw there startled me—some intense emotion that I couldn’t parse, breaking through the wall of reserve he normally hid behind. Something buzzed, and Blackfriar’s face emptied itself again as he took out his phone.
“Daughter,” he said after a moment, “why is my head of cybersecurity asking me about a backdoor in the company firewall?”
Noneley’s face was cartoonishly innocent. She even spread her hands.
“From my personal device, Noneley. Really?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Father.”
Blackfriar scowled, pocketed his phone, and stalked away from us. Tom lingered for an extra heartbeat, giving me a double whammy of his glare, and then hurried after Blackfriar.
“His little Boswell,” Cecilia said drily, her voice tinctured with an English accent. Her face looked different now, the tiniest bit slack. Her movements seemed slower, her attention fogged. Whatever she’d swallowed, she probably shouldn’t have taken it with wine. “It’s grotesque; I don’t know why he permits it.”
“Next, Tom will be following him into the bathroom,” Noneley said. She turned to Paxton. “Tell the truth: did you invite Jack?”
“I fink I’m a little smarter than that, luv,” Paxton said with a smirk. Like Cecilia, he had an accent that Noneley, probably for the same reason as Holmes, did not. The problem with Paxton, though, was you never knew how much he was faking. “Kind of thing you’d do, innit?”
“Don’t be silly; I didn’t invite him.”
“Spoze you had the uniform lying around.”
Noneley grinned. “I did, actually. As soon as Holloway started up with Jack, I thought of it. Holloway will go insane when he finds out.”
“Don’t antagonize your brother,” Cecilia said in that same affectless voice.
“Come off it,” Paxton said to Noneley. “You had that lying around, and you just happened to put it on tonight.”
“Of course not. As soon as I knew Jack was in the building, I got it out of my car and changed.” Her grin widened. “It made Father furious, didn’t it?”
Paxton shook his head and took a drink. He caught the eye of someone across the room, passed me his empty glass, and straightened his shirt. The dark wedges of his nipples pressed through the linen. “How do I look, bruv?”
I chose not to answer that.
He smirked at me anyway, but his attention roved back to the other side of the room, where a young blond guy in catering digs was leaning against the door. “Right, then. ’Bout to make this lovely boy see God in the bog. Evening, evening.” Some of the swagger dropped from his voice when he said, “Evening, Mrs. Holmes.”
“Be careful,” was all she said to him.
He nodded—no comeback, no cocky bullshit. And then he was gone, sliding through the crowd, and I was alone with Noneley and Cecilia Holmes.
“I’d love to stay,” Noneley said. “I want to ask you all sorts of embarrassing questions about my brother—and I will, I promise. But right now is the perfect opportunity to set Father’s desk on fire, and I’ll kick myself if I don’t take it.”
“Uh—”
“Bye, Jack. It was wonderful meeting you.”
She darted in for another quick kiss on the cheek, and then she was gone.
And then there was one. Cecilia stared at me. Even swaddled in medication, that gaze was intense. I tried to think of what people said at parties. Hello, maybe. But I’d already said that. Or had I? Hello, how are you? How are you doing? How are you doing tonight? How are you doing tonight, Mrs. Holmes? And then something short-circuited, and all I could do was stare, hearing my own breathing inside my head, wondering if my jaw had dropped and I was currently mouth-breathing in Cecilia Holmes’s face.
I was still staring when she handed me her glass and walked away.
For a moment, I stood there, a glass in each hand. Then I retreated, trying to get away from—it wasn’t exactly the scene of a crime, but maybe the scene of death from sheer humiliation? I found one of the staff collecting empty glasses and got rid of the ones I’d been carrying. I wriggled through the crowd until I had my back to a wall. And then I tried to regroup.
That had not gone well, I informed myself. That had not gone well at all.
I suppressed, for a moment, the thousand different ways that little debacle had gone wrong. I made myself focus. The whole point of the night was to get information about my mother. But had I gotten information? Maybe a little. By accident. I’d learned that Cecilia Holmes might be even more frightening than Blackfriar, who at least pretended to be human. I’d learned that Noneley was legit psycho. Oh, and that apparently she’d been carrying around a cheerleader uniform from my old school on the off chance that she bumped into me. Or had that been a lie? Maybe she’d sent the invitation. From the way Blackfriar had responded to my presence, I didn’t think he had—but then, I didn’t think Blackfriar would send me anything in the mail except possibly anthrax. Except he could have been lying too, and maybe he’d invited me here to lure me into a trap—
And if you wanted to impress them, a part of my brain spoke over the rest of my thoughts, if you wanted them to think you were smart and sophisticated and, at least potentially, an acceptable match for their son, no matter how much better he is than you, well, you really did a wonder-fuck on that one.
“You look like you’re having fun.” The voice was cool and cultured, with a kind of dollhouse, Oxbridge coquettishness. I knew it, and a frisson ran up my spine.
Maggie Moriarty stood to my side. She wore her usual getup: a fashionably ripped red shirt under a leather jacket, leather pants, knee-high leather boots, every piece of gear bristling with studs. “Hello, Jack.”
I did a quick scan. There were probably two hundred people in the room, and not one of them was paying attention to us. When my gaze came back to Maggie, she was smiling, the expression predatory.
“Hold on,” I said. “Let me get my Taser.”
She laughed. “I understand you’re a Watson now. Remarkable how things change, isn’t it? How do you feel?”
“I had to send a lot more Christmas cards than usual.”
She didn’t laugh at that, but her smile grew.
The babble of the party, the heat of too many bodies, the smell of alcohol and microwaved pastries and sweat—it all pressed in on me.
“Well,” I said. “Did you want something?”
“I always want something; that’s the nature of being a Moriarty. What about you, Jack? Do you want something?”
“Do you have those little pretzel dogs?”
Her smile tightened. “We should talk, Jack.”
“Uh, sounds great. Tell you what: you get a head start, and I’ll catch up.”
“There’s a great deal I could tell you. Information that helped Sarah. You and I could be friends, Jack, and although you may not realize it, you need friends right now. You’re in very real danger.”
“Trust me, I know.”
“Not from me, you imbecile.” Then she paused, and her mouth slanted with amusement. “Not exclusively from me.”
A list of names ran through my head. I hadn’t only been doing research on the Holmeses over the last five months; I’d done some family history as well. Brian Roe, June Watson, Florrie Sheahan, James Watson. On and on. They were a drumbeat at the back of my head.
This time I met her eyes, and I said it just loud enough for her to hear me over the hub of the party. “I said I know.”
For a moment, her face revealed nothing, but those dark eyes had an intensity to them that hooked me, held me. In a low voice, as though speaking to herself, she murmured, “Who brought you out to play?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m his toy. I get it. You used that one before.”
Her voice was stronger as she shook her head and said, “No, Jack. Not a toy, not anymore. A piece on the board. And don’t you wonder whose hand is moving you?”
My phone buzzed before I could follow that particular strand of madness; I reached for it, and when I looked up, Maggie was gone.
The message was from a number I didn’t recognize: Moriarty’s office. Now.
For a moment, I considered ignoring it. Two facts weighed pretty heavily in favor of that: one, out of all the people who might lure me into a trap by inviting me to a Zodiac party, Maggie Moriarty was near the top of the list; and two, I’d just seen Maggie, and I didn’t like the idea of having a follow-up, private chat with her. The last time I’d done that, she’d let her goons try to separate my shoulder.
But I was kidding myself. I was going to go. On the off chance that this was legit, on the off chance that I could learn something about my mom, I had to go.
I left the party, and the corridor was cool and quiet in comparison. My steps rang out on the expensive concrete. When I got to the elevators, I remembered they all operated on keycards; I’d have to jimmy the lock on the fire stairs, the way Holmes and I had our first time. But one of the elevators dinged, and the doors slid open.
Jesus Christ, I thought as I stepped into the car. That wasn’t creepy at all.
The door glided shut, and the elevator took off without me pressing any buttons. My ears popped as we raced up the building. The digital display changed as we hurtled past each floor. I thought of the Wonkavator, or whatever it was called, bursting out of the top of the building.
But this wasn’t a Wonkavator, and it slowed as we approached the final floor. The doors slid open, and I stepped out into the hall.
And all the power went out.
Chapter 3
The Thief
The darkness dropped over me, and I froze. It wasn’t total darkness—emergency lights still gave a weak glow, but they were spaced out along the hall, and they didn’t do much more than offer an impression of the space: the long, empty hallway, a sketch of doors.
