Brooding City: Brooding City Series Book 1 Read online

  He rubbed his hand over his eyes, willing himself to stay awake, but his eyes were heavy and he was losing focus. When his phone rang, he jolted in his seat. “Yeah?”

  “Um, Uncle Arty?” It took Brennan a moment to recognize the voice on the other end.

  “Greg? What’s up? Is everything all right with your mother?”

  “That’s why I’m calling,” he said.

  His nephew sounded on edge, and Brennan sat up a little straighter. “What’s wrong?”

  “She’s having one of her fits, it’s really bad. I don’t know if I can handle her this time. Can you help me? I think she might need to see a doctor.”

  A weight dropped in Brennan’s gut. He knew what they would be told if she was taken to the hospital in her condition.

  “Do you think you can come over?” his nephew asked plaintively.

  “Yeah, Greg, just keep her calm until I get there.” He grabbed his jacket and was halfway through the door. “I’ll be over in ten minutes.”

  Chapter Eight

  The first sensation he had was of pain.

  It felt as if someone were going to work on the inside of his skull with a sledgehammer. His shoulders were stiff, and small flares of pain burned along the left side of his body as he struggled against the heavy sheets that were wrapped around him. Scrapes and bruises called out their existence to him as he slowly regained consciousness.

  He hadn’t yet opened his eyes, but his other senses compensated. He felt a dry heat against his face and heard the crackling of a well-fed fire, and he knew he was back in his bedroom at the ranch house. Only one ear seemed to be hearing properly, though. His lips were cracked and his throat yearned for water. He heard a low growl and realized it had come from his stomach.

  Jeremy opened his eyes and tried to rise in bed, but the simple sheets proved too much for his feeble strength. The fire continued to crackle as he lay there, though he couldn’t manage to fall back asleep. He was too painfully aware of the aches in his body.

  “You’re back with us,” remarked an unfamiliar female voice.

  Someone shifted by the door, and footsteps rapidly approached the bed. “Jeremy?” That was undoubtedly his mother’s voice.

  He hadn’t realized there were other people in the room until just then. Jeremy struggled to rise, and this time succeeded in gaining a more upright sitting position, his back leaning against several pillows. In addition to an unfamiliar Asian woman and his mother, Jeremy noted with surprise that his father, Nathaniel Scott, stood by the fire, his face half lit by the flickering orange light. His arms were lightly wrapped in bandages and he held them crossed against his chest.

  “Dad,” he said uncertainly.

  The strange woman gently placed a hand on Jeremy’s head. “Don’t overexert yourself.” She felt for his temperature and evidently found it acceptable. “My name is Dr. Kai,” she said, taking a stethoscope from around her neck. She placed it over his heart as she asked, “Can you tell me where you are?”

  Jeremy’s mind was too fragged to come up with a clever response. “I’m at home,” he told her directly.

  Dr. Kai nodded. She replaced the stethoscope and took out a short, thin flashlight, no wider than a pencil. “I want you to follow the light with only your eyes.” He followed the light as she moved it in straight lines, this way and that. “Do you remember what happened?”

  “I was—” Jeremy faltered for a moment. The memory came to him, but it seemed an absurd fabrication now. Of course there was no snow. “I fell,” he said simply.

  “You remember,” she said, her voice pleased. “That’s good. I don’t see any signs of concussion, which is fortunate.” Her dark eyes met Jeremy’s for a moment before she looked away. If there was something significant in that glance, he didn’t know what it was.

  He raised an uneasy hand and felt a long strip of gauze wrapped around his head over a thick bandage. “I’m not in a hospital,” he said numbly.

  “Dr. Kai works with me,” his father said, speaking for the first time. His gray eyes turned from the fire to look at Jeremy, and then the Asian woman. “You can go,” he told her.

  Dr. Kai nodded. “If anything else happens, or his condition worsens, you will need to take him to a hospital,” she warned him.

  Nathaniel nodded. “I understand, thank you.” He opened the door for Dr. Kai, who gathered her supplies and left quickly and silently. A prolonged, awkward silence reigned. There was only the crackling of the fire to fill the room with sound until they heard the engine of the doctor’s car come to life and fade as she drove away.

  “Anna,” his father said quietly.

  “He just woke up.” Annabelle spoke firmly, dismissively, then turned to face her son.

  Jeremy took note of the wearied look in her eyes. The skin of her face was anchored less tightly to her high cheekbones than it might have been a few years ago, and her chestnut hair had lost its luster, but the loving smile she gave him had remained unchanged throughout his life. It was a comfort, even in the darkest of times.

  “Jay,” she said softly. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m fine,” Jeremy said, swallowing hard. Honestly, his throat was parched, and he cringed to think of what he would see if he looked in the full-length standing mirror across the room.

  “Do you need me to bring you anything?” his mother asked. “Some more blankets?”

  Between the fire and the heavy covers, he was already sweating. “A glass of water?” he suggested.

  She nodded, rising fluidly from her chair. “I’ll be right back.”

  Jeremy’s father waited for her to disappear before he left his post near the fire and walked slowly to the bed, all leonine grace and poise. He wasn’t terribly tall or broad in the shoulders, but he carried a certain sense of purpose that gave him an air of subtle, implacable power. Nathaniel replaced his mother on the stool by his bed and looked into Jeremy’s eyes. He sat there patiently, eyes never wavering. “You were playing in the ruins,” he said finally. It wasn’t a question.

  “How did you know?”

  His father’s patient stare gave him all the answer he needed.

  Jeremy’s heart fell. “Ellie told you,” he concluded.

  Nathaniel nodded. “You shouldn’t have left her here alone,” he said. His voice was harsh, his words reproachful.

  Jeremy cowered beneath the gaze of his father’s gray eyes as his mother returned with a glass of water. “Thanks,” he mumbled, taking a sip.

  Annabelle looked between Jeremy and his father, and they stared back at her in silence. With a sigh, his mother left the room again, closing the door behind her.

  “I didn’t mean to leave Ellie alone,” Jeremy blurted out. “I meant to be home before Mom showed up, I swear.”

  His father shook his head. “You aren’t in trouble because you were caught,” he said. “You’re in trouble because you did the wrong thing. It’s never safe to go off on your own, especially when your mother and I aren’t around.” His face softened for a moment. “And you know how lonely your sister gets without your company.”

  Jeremy tried to shrug, but the movement hurt his shoulder. “I tried to hang out with her yesterday, but she wanted to be alone.”

  “Really?” His father sounded skeptical. “That’s not like Eloise.”

  “I don’t know what it is about this place,” Jeremy said, referring to the valley. “She seems to love it, but at the same time I feel like she’s a different person here.”

  “Regardless of how your sister is acting,” his father said, “family still comes first.”

  Jeremy let out a harsh laugh. “When did that become your motto?”

  He wished he could bite back the words as soon as he said them. Anger flashed across his father’s eyes like a bolt of lightning, sparking from nothing before disappearing. If he hadn’t been watching, Jeremy might have missed it altogether.

  His father sighed, his face suddenly much more haggard than Jeremy was used to s
eeing. “I’m sorry, Jeremy,” he said, his eyes taking on a quality that was as rare as Bigfoot. They looked almost warm. Friendly, even. “Living with me, dealing with the effects of my work schedule—I know that it must have been difficult for you. I’ve always been one step too far away from you kids for my comfort, but that’s just the nature of the industry. Business is a beast, and I’m in its clutches.” He placed a long, slender hand on top of Jeremy’s, and he smiled. “But I am trying the best I can to be your father.”

  Jeremy tried to respond, but he was suddenly gripped with an overwhelming sense of vertigo. His eyes danced with light as the world around him was swapped out, piece by piece. Gone were his desk and schoolbooks, the mirror and the fireplace, and even his father.

  In place of his bedroom was a large office of some sort. A long, oval table of sturdy wood ran the length of the center of the room, and men and women in smart business suits sat along both sides. An entire wall of the room was made of plate-glass windows, and the office had an incredible view of Odols. The sun was setting, silhouetting the city’s skyline in inky black contrast to its vibrant red and orange and purple.

  Jeremy stood by one of the other walls, and every member of the meeting had their eyes trained on him as he spoke. His voice was confident and powerful, and his arms accompanied the speech he was giving with animated gestures. He ignored his phone as it vibrated once in his pocket.

  “As I’m sure you are all well aware,” Jeremy said, speaking with his father’s confident voice, “the acquisition of Brüding Pharmaceuticals represents a significant opportunity to increase SymbioTech’s share of the biomedical consumer market. In the first year, we will recoup the total investment cost of the acquisition.”

  Heads nodded approvingly around the table. The only exception was a beak-nosed man named Lester Crowe. His face darkened when he met Jeremy’s eyes, and his mouth twisted in a sneer. “Those are rather bold claims, don’t you think?” he challenged. His tenor voice carried a distinctly Scottish accent, and his general temperament was one of conflict and complaint. Jeremy had been expecting his contestation since the start of the meeting.

  “A bold claim, yes, but not without merit,” Jeremy said. “Within the last five years, Brüding Pharma has grown in leaps and bounds. Their research and development department outpaces their closest competitors, and they will pose a significant threat to our economic security unless we act now.” He straightened his crimson tie and cleared his throat, commanding even Crowe’s attention. “We have the capital to buy out their executive board, and I know at least two of the seven sitting members are already in our pocket. Turn two more, and we will have the controlling interest of pharmaceuticals in Odols for the next twenty years.”

  Jeremy held his mutual glare with Lester Crowe, who remained stone-faced even as the rest of the room filled with applause. He felt his phone begin to vibrate persistently with an incoming phone call. He raised one finger in apology to the assembled group of executives and excused himself from the room. Once in the hallway, he raised the phone to his ear and winced as his wife’s plaintive request arrived, unprompted, to his inner ear.

  “Anna, I can’t come home right now. I’m in the middle of a very important meeting.”

  “I can’t find Jeremy,” she said. “It’s getting dark and Ellie says he hasn’t been home all day.” Annabelle sounded as nervous as he had ever heard her.

  As Nathaniel, Jeremy sighed and looked at his watch. “I can leave in fifteen minutes. The entire executive board is here, and we are about to break ground on a new—”

  “You can come home right now,” Annabelle argued, “and the board be damned. I don’t care how important these men think they are, your family comes first.”

  Jeremy nodded wearily and checked his watch again. “Family first,” he agreed. “Of course. I’ll be home as soon as I can.”

  He replaced the phone in his pocket and made sure his tie was perfectly straight. He stepped back into the conference room to apologize, and a moment later he called for a close to the meeting. The gathered men and women stared at him with blank, confused looks, but he was already out the door before they could protest, phone in his hand.

  “Put me through to Kai,” he said, and after a second continued, “Dr. Kai. My driver will be downstairs in three minutes; I expect you to be waiting for me there.” A pause. “Excellent,” he said. “And bring your kit.”

  Jarringly, the vivid, mad hallucination ended.

  Jeremy was abruptly back in bed, staring up into his father’s gray gaze. He recoiled from the touch of his father’s hand. Less than a second had passed; the slight smile which had graced his father’s face slid away to be replaced by a thin frown.

  He felt violently ill, as if he had been reading while riding a rollercoaster that had just pulled out of a quadruple corkscrew. It was motion sickness on steroids. The conference room, his father’s conversation with his mother, the—well, everything—had been so real. His father asking a question was all that kept him anchored in reality.

  “Jeremy, what were you doing so far from home?” Nathaniel asked, his voice at once regaining its former edge.

  “I was exploring the Tower,” Jeremy choked out. He bit back the bile that threatened to rise in his throat. His head was pounding worse than ever in the aftermath of his…experience, hallucination, whatever it was he had just gone through.

  “You were exploring the tower,” his father repeated. He stood and moved to stand by the fireplace once more. Jeremy glimpsed his father in the mirror, and he looked like he was wreathed in flames.

  “Your mother was nearly hysterical when she came home to an empty house,” he said quietly.

  “I didn’t mean to worry her—”

  “And more than anything you disappointed me, Jeremy.” His father turned, his gray eyes briefly ablaze before cooling, and he contemplated the wounded boy whose head was half-wrapped in fresh bandages. It covered both ears, wound beneath his chin, and was stained crimson by one of his temples.

  “I was worried for you, Jeremy,” he said, approaching the bed. Jeremy flinched back, afraid of making contact again, and his father stopped just outside of arm’s reach. He crossed his arms as he addressed his son. “I don’t know what I would have done if you had—” His father paused. He wasn’t welling up with tears, on the verge of an emotional break; that would have been truly unnerving. He was simply taking a moment to choose his words.

  “This,” Nathaniel finally said, gesturing to Jeremy’s bandaged head, “could have been so much worse.”

  Jeremy wasn’t sure what to say. He hadn’t been expecting a tearful confession or anything, but his father’s words still spoke measures. It was as close to a bonding experience as they’d had in years. He looked his father directly in the eyes.

  “Family comes first,” Jeremy said, his tone even.

  Nathaniel eyed him appraisingly and nodded. He patted Jeremy’s knee through the blankets and left the room without another word.

  Unable to move, uncomfortably warm now beneath the blankets and basking in the fire’s glow, Jeremy watched his father’s shadow disappear down the hall. He didn’t know what to make of the memories that lingered in his head, as fresh as if he had experienced them himself. His father had received the call about Jeremy’s absence, he realized, just as he himself must have been lying unconscious on the floor of the Tower, head bleeding profusely against the cold stone.

  And it had indeed been his father who rescued him from the old fort. The vision had flooded into him with the others, as vivid as his own memories. Unbidden, the captured images flooded his mind as he laid back down to rest.

  His father had entered the first level of the Tower sometime after sundown, though light still filtered in through the windows of the second floor. His face had turned ashen when he saw Jeremy’s motionless body lying against the stone table, and he’d carried him in both arms like a child. Nathaniel had stepped through the doorway of the ranch house while the moon hung
low in the sky, and the next few hours had been frantic with Annabelle’s fussing, Ellie’s plaintive cries, and the attentive care of the doctor.

  Another memory pushed to the fore, picking up earlier in the evening when his father had been leaving from work.

  Jeremy emerged from the elevator and turned to see Dr. Kai waiting as he strode into the parking deck.

  “Why am I here, sir?” she asked, her tone just barely on the side of tolerant politeness.

  “I need some bloodwork drawn up discreetly, and I know you are loyal to this company and to me. I understand you requested updated equipment in the diagnostics lab.”

  Dr. Kai nodded.

  “Consider it done,” Jeremy said in his father’s voice.

  “Th-thank you, sir.”

  “Of course. And remember, absolute discretion.”

  The memory dissolved as a powerful wave of agony pulsed from Jeremy’s temple and he lost his fight with consciousness.

  Chapter Nine

  Brennan arrived just two minutes late of his estimate.

  The apartment smelled stale, stagnant, and the specter of death loomed close by. He let himself in and marched straight back to his sister’s room. A pair of lit candles feebly fought against the cloying odors emanating from Madison Warner’s body, but they were no match for the final stages of her Fractured decay.

  He was dismayed at the state in which he found her. It was obvious that she had not been able to leave her bed for several days. Her skin, once full and beautiful, now clung tightly against her bones, giving her face a hauntingly gaunt impression. The full bags under her eyes were colored like watery tea, and her eyes themselves were equally moist and ruddy. They stared lazily at one corner of the room, and she was either uncaring of Brennan’s presence or unaware of it altogether. Her body writhed in bed, unattended, with her arms and legs shooting out violently at random intervals as she babbled at invisible phantoms.