Lehrer’s hand curled into a loose fist, and his arm dropped back down to his side. That mild smile was back. Of course, Lehrer didn’t want to cause a scene. Not here. And especially not in front of Noam.
Dara looked back at Noam. Noam’s gaze immediately flitted away, staring down at his whisky instead like it was the most interesting thing in the world.
“Why are you with him?” Dara demanded.
Noam sucked in a shallow breath and opened his mouth to answer, but Lehrer was faster.
“I don’t know—whyareyou with me?” Lehrer asked Noam, so lightly it might have been a private joke shared between the two of them, and he laughed.
His hand, again, was at Noam’s back.
Noam startled visibly. For one moment he looked between Dara and Lehrer like he was waiting for one of them to tell him what to say—how to react—and in that second Dara was so sure Lehrer must have done something. Hurt him, somehow. Electricity—or superstrength.
But that wasn’t pain in Noam’s eyes.
It was something else.
Dara rotted slowly, standing here looking at Noam not looking back, at Lehrer’s gaze burning a hole in the side of Dara’s face, Lehrer’s small and self-satisfied smile.
What if Noamchosethis?
Dara’s hand was shaking. He put the champagne glass down on a passing tray, quick, before Lehrer saw the liquid sloshing in the glass.
“This has been an illuminating conversation,” he said, and it was a struggle to keep his voice steady. Noam still wouldn’t meet his gaze. Dara looked at Lehrer instead, and Lehrer arched a brow. “But I’m afraid I have appointments elsewhere this evening.” He pushed the corners of his mouth up and inclined his head toward them both. “Please tell Britta it was a lovely party.”
He left before he could think better of it. And he didn’t look back, not even at Claire, who glared at him as he slipped past her and out the front door. Lehrer must have wasted no time when Dara left—he had a tail on him almost immediately, some baseline in a suit. Pathetic. An insult to all that Level IV training, to every time Lehrer had taken Dara out to the QZ and had him pull a trigger. Even with the man’s mind nothing but a smear of silence, outsmarting him was only too easy. Dara slipped his tail in an alley, lurking in the shadow beneath a fire escape until the baseline passed. Dara caught him from behind. Easy. And as he tightened the garrote around the man’s neck, as the man struggled to breathe—as, a minute later, Dara lowered his unconscious body to the slick asphalt—he couldn’t stop thinking that this was what Lehrer wanted, in the end.
And Lehrer always got what he wanted.
CHAPTERFIVE
NOAM
Lehrer led the way into the apartment, Noam trailing a half step behind. In the dim hallway Lehrer was a shadow limned in gold—light? magic? what did it matter—as he slipped out of his coat.
Noam’s mouth felt sewed shut. All the words he might have said were dead in his lungs.
“I don’t know how he survived,” Lehrer was saying, clearly to himself and not to Noam. There was something sharp about the way he moved through the shadows, flicking on a lamp with a twist of his fingers and sparking telekinesis. “He should have died within weeks. Perhaps days.”
Noam took off his shoes in the foyer and stood there with his toes curling in the faded rug, wondering if perhaps he ought to go. But Lehrer hadn’t yet given him permission to return to the barracks, and Noam knew damn well how Lehrer felt about him leaving prematurely.
“He’s sided with those terrorists in the quarantined zone,” Lehrer said. A scotch bottle uncapped itself and poured two fingers’ worth into a glass. To Noam’s surprise a second glass poured as well. Lehrer turned and offered that one to him. Noam drifted forward as if in a dream and took it. Even from a foot away he could smell the peat. “He came to that party to kill me.”
“You don’t know that,” Noam said at last. He held the whisky between his hands without drinking. Lehrer’s gaze was sharp on his face, all-seeing. “You’ve barely spoken to him.”
“While I’m not surprised you defend him,” Lehrer said, “I should think I know my own child far better than you do.”
It was one of the only times Noam had heard Lehrer call Dara his child. Usually it waswardor evenstudent.
Lehrer sipped at his scotch.
Kill me,Dara had said, pale as parchment paper and clinging to Noam with both hands.
The room tilted, surreal and dizzying. “Why would he want to kill you, then?”
That, at least, earned him a pointed glance. “I’m sure he’s invented his reasons. Nevertheless, I will have to be careful in dealing with this. He’s been seen. Now, quiet; I need to think.”
Noam hadn’t planned to say anything, but he kept his mouth shut. Lehrer’s gaze didn’t falter from his, a frown tugging at his mouth. At last, Lehrer turned away and put his glass down on the windowsill, pacing the length of the sitting room with long hands slid into his pockets.
