Page 2 of Heart and Soul
“Remember? Remember what? What black chin?”
“The vampires.” He shakes his head, correcting himself. “Therevenantsthat killed Haley. One had…” He hovers trembling fingers over his chin. “Black, like a stripe—maybe a tattoo—from his bottom lip, down his chin and neck.”
“Okay…” I don’t know what else to say. My heart is convulsing with fright. This is bad. This is… One of his eyes twitches, a storm overcoming his expression. This is that broken part of Brenner, triggered by some memory. “And you’re thinking about that now?”
“I didn’t remember. I never remembered…I mean, until now, even though…but I can still remembernotremembering.”
Fragmented thoughts. Twitchy. Overwhelmed. I remember first meeting Brenner like this. I remember describing him to Agent Hillerman asspazzy. I laughed about it back then.What a spazzy hot mess.
I don’t laugh about it anymore. Rushing to his side, I wrap my arms around him, pressing my cheek against his chest. I feel his hammering heart. He holds me tightly, massaging the back of my neck, as though I’m the one who needs consoling. “Shayne, this wasn’t there. It wasn’t there, I’m telling you. But it’ssupposedto be there—I saw him that night. There were three vamps, but only one that I saw clearly. Pale gray skin; white, cataract eyes; sharp fangs, all bloody. I shot at him.”
“I’ve heard all that. You’ve always told it that way.”
“But that wasn’t everything. I mean, thatwaseverything I remembered, ever since I first met you. I’ve played it out over and over in my mind, and there was never a black chin. Until now. It’s like…watching a movie you’ve seen a million times, only now somebody has added a part that wasn’t there before. Just now, it just popped into my head.”
My heart sinks.Ever since I first met you, he said. Ever since he first met me…on the same night master vampire Henry Stadther compelled Brenner to forget everything he knew about vampires and the underworld. The next day, I forced Henry to reverse the compulsion, to restore Brenner’s memories.
“The compulsion,” I say, pulling back to look Brenner in his haunted eyes. “When Henry Stadther restored your memories, he must have held that part back.”
“The black chin.”
“It must mean something to him. Henry was fine with you remembering everything else, just not that one thing.”
The obvious one-word question—Why?—hangs in the air between us. But when Brenner voices it, I’m surprised to find that we’re thinking of differentwhys: “Why now?” he asks. “Why did the memory suddenly come back?”
The answer is very simple, and very bad. “There’s only one way a compulsion could be released without him being here in person, touching you.”
Brenner’s eyebrows raise. “He’s dead?”
I nod. “Like, just now. Somebody just killed Henry Stadther.”
I feel Brenner’s body tighten with repressed energy. This will revitalize the search for Haley’s killers. He wants to go. He wants to gonow, go at this hard, and he won’t stop until he finds that black chin. Brenner will throw himself at this the only way he knows how: all caution to the wind, a bull in a china shop. My anxious butterflies scoff.More like, china in a bull shop. A human doesn’t belong in the underworld.He’ll be crushed.You can’t possibly keep him.
“I know,” I say to both the butterflies and Brenner, “I know, you want to jump on this—”
“Let’s go to the Agency.”
I grasp both sides of his collar, as though jerking on a dog’s leash. “We will.”
“Let’s go.”
“No, but—”
“This changes everything. Henry Stadther was hiding this. He knew something about those revenants.”
There, Brenner’s just given me an inch. I’ll take a mile. “Exactly! He knew something, and now he’sdead, Jay. Do you know how hard it is to kill a master vampire? Do you have any idea how long he’s lived? It’s…this is huge. Whatever happened, it’s a kick to the hornet’s nest. All the most powerful underworlders in Detroit will rampage for better positions on the food chain. Trust me, we don’t want any part of that.”
“What, so we do nothing?”
I shake my head. “No, I’m saying that this is way bigger than us, so we have to play the table, not the cards.”
Sighing, Brenner leans his head back against the wall, obviously frustrated to hear yet another of my endless poker analogies, or metaphors, or whatever the hell they are. I have to suppress a sigh myself. This is such a perfect moment for me to slug him in the shoulder and call him a jerk, even though on the inside I’m thrilled that Brenner finally feels comfortable enough to be exasperated by my bullshit. It’s such areal boyfriendmoment.
“This is high stakes, Jay,” I explain. “Lots of players in the game. We’ve got a seat at the table, but we’re small fry. Everybody else has a way bigger stack of chips than us. We make one mistake, we’re out. So we hold our cards, and we wait.”
Brenner throws his hands up. “Wait?”
“Stay out of the crossfire,” I continue. “Play the table. Let the big stacks knock each other out. They’ll do most of the work for us. Some of those big stacks are on our side. The Agency is working on this.”
