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NYU expelled that guy, and Mason’s pressing charges on Remy’s behalf.
It’sover.
It should be over.
She yawns and goes to bed around ten, Mason long since shut up in his bedroom with Charlotte, and I leave the penthouse with murder on my mind. This time, I don’t take the shiny car I drive to Phoenix to keep up appearances. I take my comfortable one. It’s smaller and older and more beat-up. Less likely to get recognized on one of my missions.
Everybody dealt with Remy’s attacker. I know that. There’s still a part of me that wants this asshole to face real consequences for what he’s done. That part of me is so loud and demanding that I have to get away from the city before I act on any of the way-too-far ideas popping like tiny fireworks in my head.
I’ve made it a point not to get arrested since everything happened last October. That doesn’t mean I don’t have a list of corrupt government pricks who’ve done shitty things to the people they represent and businesses who conduct research on animals whose only crime is existing.
For the last few miles, I try to remind myself of the positives. Nobody’s charged me with murder. Mason’s going to handle it like the protective prick he is. Remy will be okay. The memory of her red cheeks at Saturday brunch spins me back through memories of her crying at age ten and nine and eight and seven, crying and crying and crying and—
Fuck.
Everything that happened to us was so goddamn unfair. I could never make up for it. Nobody could. All these years, and it’s easier to let my blood boil than think of my sister crying.
I stop thinking about it, pull the SUV over by the side of the road, and get out to walk the last few hundred years to this so-calledfarm.
A lone floodlight illuminates a patch of asphalt off to one side. This place has one building, which they’ve called a research facility in their business filings. No movement. It’s ten-thirty, so that’s not surprising, but it seems hollow.
I move closer, disappointment more palpable with every step. There aren’t enough lights. Places like this want to protect the animals they experiment on from people like me, but a single floodlight above their weird parking area isn’t enough to do that. No visible cameras on the front of the building, either.
I’m too late.
I let out a heavy sigh. At minimum, I wanted an adrenaline rush from this. I’d have taken a resisting-arrest charge over this empty, useless feeling. I’m never at the right place at the right time unless it’s for some soul-destroying event. I’m always on time to have my heart torn out of my chest.
At the pole barn, I stick out my hand and give the handle a brisk tug.
It’s not even locked.
Either I had bad information, or I waited too long to act. That’s annoying as hell for me and worse for the animals this company’s using. Now I have to figure out how to solve the problem another way. Not the problem of commercial research farms, which is bigger than one man can solve, but the problem of existing in my body.
I have to do something with this rage. I have to makesomethingfair. One thing.
I’m about to let the door slam shut and walk away when there’s a sound.
A sweet, slightly mournful little tune.
I open the door wider instead. “Somebody in here?”
The tune happens again. I shine my iPhone’s flashlight and shine it around.
Industrial-strength metal shelves line both sides of the pole barn. Smaller wire cages sit at odd angles. Only six of them, like someone went through and determined thatthesecages had seen too much shit to come along to the next unholyresearch facility.
Five of them are empty.
One of them is not.
“You’re kidding me.”
I stride down to the end of the left hand shelving unit. The occupied cage is right at my eye level.
There’s a little bird in there.
It tweets at me, ruffling its feathers, and hops from a tiny metal rod that’s supposed to be a branch of the floor of the cage. It’s pure white, like a snowball, except for two black feathers over its wings. Tiny beak. Black eyes. A black-and-white tail that sticks out at a jaunty angle from its backside.
“Those motherfuckers left you here?”
