Down And Dirty

Epilogue

The new locks that Jennifer had had installed were so efficacious that Brennan couldn't let himself into her apartment. That was good, he thought. She'd probably need them.

He sat on the fire escape landing outside her bedroom window and watched the city traffic pass below him. He had hated the city when he'd first arrived. Still did in fact, but now he hated the thought of leaving even more.

And he had to leave. When he'd first come to the city, nothing could've stopped him from bringing down Kien. He would have sacrificed heaven and hell to get him. But now he wasn't the same man. Now he had allowed himself to care, and he had to pay the price for his weakness. Kien had won. His vendetta was over. He watched the city move beneath his feet, realizing for the first time how lonely the mountains would be.

The warm spring afternoon had turned to dusk before a small sound in the room behind him made him turn around. Jennifer, home from the library, was looking out the window, watching him. After a moment she crossed the room and opened the window and Brennan ducked inside.

"Well," Jennifer said,

"every few months you turn up just like clockwork."

She was angry, and Brennan knew why. He hadn't seen her since he'd foiled a Shadow Fists ambush at her apartment in the wintertime. There'd been something of an unspoken agreement between them that he'd come back to see her, but he hadn't until now.

"I have to warn you." There was no easy way to say it. "I'm leaving the city. Kien said he'll leave you alone, but I don't trust him."

Jennifer frowned. "You're leaving because of me?" Brennan shrugged. "Let's just say that I've chosen the living over the dead."

Her frown deepened. "He did use me to threaten you. He said he'd send his goons after me if you kept at him."

"Something like that," Brennan admitted. "He pointed out that he'd have nothing to live for if I brought him down. That there'd be nothing I could threaten him with to keep him from killing you."

Jennifer nodded slowly. " I see. Then my life means so much to you that you'd give up your vendetta, that you'd let Kien win?"

Brennan let out a deep breath and nodded.

Jennifer smiled. "It's good to know that. It'll make things easier."

"Things?" Brennan said suspiciously. "What things?"

"Things neither you nor Kien took into account. The fact that I won't allow myself to be held hostage by anyone. The fact that I can't be held hostage if no one knows where I am." She looked at Brennan for a long, long moment, and he felt a stab of pain at the love and beauty he saw on her face. "Good-bye, Daniel, and good hunting."

She ghosted. She stepped out of her clothes and through her bedroom wall and vanished. Brennan stared at the blank wall utterly confounded. She was gone, vanished like an exorcised specter.

"wait-" he croaked, but it was too late. The room was empty, except for him and her belongings, abandoned and deserted now and forever. "Wait…"

He sat down heavily on the bed, overcome by shock and a sense of overwhelming loss that struck him with the force of a physical blow.

"You don't understand," he said aloud to the empty room, partly to himself, partly to a vanished Jennifer, struck with the force of his sudden insight. "Kien presented me with the choice, but I'm making it freely. I want you more than, him. I want love more than hate… life more than death… "

His voice trailed off and he stared at the wall where Jennifer had vanished. His eyes nearly bugged out of their sockets when she stuck her head back through the wall.

"Good." She smiled. " I hoped you'd say something like that."

He shot off the bed. "Christ Almighty! Get back in here and get solid!"

"Why? Are you going to kiss me or slug me?"

"You'll have to take your chances," Brennan started to say, but her mouth covered his before he could get half the words out.

"You know," Jennifer said when they finally got their breath back, "it may be be best to play Kien's game… at least for a little while."

Brennan nodded, his right arm tight around her waist, his left hand gently tracing the delicate curves of her jawline and chin.

"You're right." His voice, his eyes, were dreamy and strange-looking. Jennifer was startled, and then immensely pleased, to see happiness and perhaps even contentment in them. "I have a beautiful place in the Catskills I'd like you to see. And I haven't been back to New Mexico since… since… Christ has it really been that long?"

She smiled and kissed him again.

"And Kien?" she asked him when they broke apart. Brennan shrugged. "He'll be here. I can wait." His smile came back, but there was a chill in it that both frightened and attracted her, drawing her like a moth to a dangerously burning flame. "It's what a hunter does best."

All the King's Horses