Mortal Danger

“Do you talk to your mom much?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I can’t be around her when she’s using. But I pay for rehab when she chooses to go. Once a year, she has a ‘breakthrough,’ makes a bunch of promises about how it’ll be different, and we start the cycle all over again.”

“That sucks.” Possibly the least insightful response ever offered.

“Yeah.”

“Is it possible for me to tour Wedderburn, Mawer & Graf?” I asked, mostly because I regretted prying, and it was the first topic that sprang to mind.

“Sure. Why?”

“Knowledge is power.”

He studied me for a few seconds, then nodded. “I’ll talk to my boss and set it up. Just … be prepared. If he permits you to access more than the public areas, you’ll see some … strange things.”

“I can hardly wait.” The reply was pure bravado. I couldn’t let him see how nervous I was, or the fact that I was in way over my head.

After that, we finished our food—it was really good—and he drove me home. I was wary of getting too deep before I had a handle on what I’d learned. Kian tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. The more I learned about him, the more torn I was. Part of me thought that with so much tragedy in his past, he just couldn’t be as simple and straightforward as he pretended. It made me feel like he had to be playing me. He cast a few looks in my direction, but I couldn’t meet his gaze. Instead I stared out the window at the passing buildings. Once he reached for my hand, but I pulled back and flattened it on my knee. His breath caught, a whisper of sound I barely heard against the rush of the vents.

Smooth, Edie. You hurt his feelings.

By the time he pulled up in front of the brownstone, tension quivered in the air between. I hardly knew what to say. Finally, I managed, “Thanks for dinner.”

“I’ll call you.” He didn’t ask for a kiss or suggest we go out again. In fact, he wasn’t even looking at me.

The distance came from me, but crazily, I didn’t like it. Sitting here wouldn’t solve anything, so I offered a jerky nod and climbed out. It took all of my resolve not to look back, but as I climbed the steps to the entryway, the Mustang roared off. Then I did spin around, watching the red car weave into traffic and turn the corner a block down.

Sorry, Kian.

I plodded upstairs. My dad was home, but my mom wasn’t. He still had on his tweed jacket, which made him look like a professor, and maybe that was the point. He glanced up from the journal he was reading and asked, “How was your day?”

“Fine. I had an early dinner, so I’m getting started on my homework.”

“Good idea.”

That concluded the parental talk for the day. He went back to his article as I headed for my room. I did try to focus on the assigned reading, but certain aspects of Kian’s story gnawed at me. Guilt plucked at me because I’d definitely cooled off toward the end, communicating my reservations unmistakably. With a muttered curse, I threw down my World History book and opened my laptop. I pulled it across my lap and opened the browser.

First I searched for information about his father, just in case his phone had been tampered with, but I came up with the same results. Albert J. Riley’s house of cards tumbled today. After defrauding hundreds of investors, the self-styled financial genius died at his Pennsylvania home. In a double tragedy … I read on, confirming that Kian had, in fact, lost his sister that day. Riley is survived by his wife, Vanessa, and his son, Kian.

But this wasn’t enough to put my mind at ease, so I input “local girl suicide” plus the town name and the story came up, short and to the point. Tanya Jackson of Cross Point, Pennsylvania, took her life today. She had a history of mental instability and she overdosed on her mother’s prescription medication. EMTs attempted to revive her, but ultimately failed, and she was pronounced dead on her arrival at Cross Point Memorial Hospital. It seemed … bizarre that whatever Kian was meant to achieve, it had been tied inextricably to one teenage girl. What if I screwed up my timeline unintentionally?

You’ll end up enslaved to Wedderburn, too.

That sent a shiver down my spine. Well, at least now I had proof that Kian hadn’t made it all up to engage my sympathies. Reassuring, even as I suspected there was something off about the whole thing. I couldn’t dismiss the possibility that he had, in fact, wanted Tanya dead. Maybe that was his wish, not for her to fall in love with him. I had no idea if murder could be one of the favors; he’d said it was limited only by imagination and the company didn’t seem to value human life very much.

You could ask, a little voice whispered.

Someone at Wedderburn, Mawer & Graf might be willing to talk, though that would reveal that I didn’t trust Kian. No way to tell how that would impact the game he was running on his boss about making me fall for him so I’d use my favors faster. Damn. It’s too much to decide about tonight. My life had turned from untenable to unfathomable in the space of a summer, and each step felt like walking across a high wire.

On impulse I searched Wedderburn, Mawer & Graf, just to see what came up. A glossy Web site provided very little information on what the company actually did. The mission statement was about as illuminating as the one in Blackbriar’s brochures. Our responsibility, professionally, is to leverage resources in order to orchestrate diverse opportunities. Our challenge is to proactively maintain information to allow us to innovate cutting-edge mindshare. Our goal is to seamlessly create new technologies to stay relevant in tomorrow’s world. Losing interest in figuring out if WM&G had any products or services, I clicked around the site. In time I found Kian’s name on one of the subpages. He was listed as a financial analyst and it gave his e-mail address. I almost added it to my laptop contacts, then I decided we probably shouldn’t use company servers.

The executives had pages all to themselves, especially the titular ones. I selected Karl Wedderburn and read his bio. In his picture, he looked like an elderly man, well-groomed mustache, and a thick head of white hair, but there was an unnerving look in his eyes, even in the photo. He looked older than the sixty years the picture gave him, and when I narrowed my eyes, it was like the pupils swallowed his irises, leaving only black holes where light should be.

“Creepy,” I whispered.

Restraining a shiver, I shut down my laptop entirely. It was possible that Kian’s talk about shadowy enemies and trusting no one had worked on me until I was suggestible, but there was just something not right about Karl Wedderburn; I could tell that much from that quick glimpse. And Kian’s at his mercy.