Fire and Ice (Ice 5)

“But what did he say to me? What were he and Reno talking about?”

“I couldn’t hear,” Taka said, but she didn’t believe him. “And it no longer matters—it’s over. Next time maybe you’ll listen to your sister when she tells you not to visit. We’ll come to you.”

She slumped back in the seat, closing her eyes. At that moment she wanted to strangle her intractable brother-in-law, but there was nothing she could do. She was going home, bloody and bruised but in one piece, and sooner or later she’d get over it. Get over Reno. And move on with life.

In the meantime, all she could do was something she seldom considered. She prayed.

Reno closed the old man’s eyes, then took a step back. Kobayashi still held him, and he was sobbing, his great chest shaking with it. “We need to leave, Kobayashi-san,” he said patiently. “He wouldn’t have wanted you to die with the rest of them.”

“My place is here,” he said with great dignity. “I served him in life. I will not abandon him in death.”

Reno nodded. He was running out of time, and his grandfather’s words still echoed in his brain, his heart. “This is a good death for him, Kobayashi-san. An honorable death. He would want you to go on. You have more to do in this life.”

Kobayashi didn’t answer, and Reno gave up. Once he’d left the world of sumo, Kobayashi’s life had been tied up with Reno’s grandfather—without him there would be nothing. If he chose to die with Ojiisan, then that was his choice.

Once Reno started moving, he acted quickly. He was sticky with Hitomi’s blood—Jilly had seen him kill the man. That should have finished things once and for all, and he could breathe a sigh of relief. If Taka did what he knew he should do, Reno would never see her again. It was a time of endings. A time of new beginnings.

He set the charge the moment before he slid out the first-floor window. The place would go quickly—there’d be no escape for Hitomi’s soldiers. They would all die, and the ancient organization would disappear, but its name and reputation would stay intact. An honorable anachronism in the world of brutality.

He was just past the outer wall when the place exploded, and he didn’t look back. Jilly and Taka would be long gone, and he had the pieces of a life to pull back together.

A light snow began to fall again, covering the dirty slush that filled the gutters. He walked on, his cowboy boots making a crisp noise on the empty sidewalks, as he disappeared into the early-morning light.

19

“You need to get over this, darling.” Lianne Lovitz came to stand over her recalcitrant daughter, clearly annoyed. “You can’t spend weeks moping. It depresses me, and you know how I hate to get depressed. Besides, the semester started last week, and you only got as far as the driveway before turning around and heading straight back to bed. You need to snap out of it.”

Jilly looked up. She had managed to drag her sorry ass out into the fresh air, and she lay on a chaise by the heart-shaped pool, covered from head to toe in baggy jeans and an oversize T-shirt, sunglasses firmly on her nose. Not that the air was that fresh, of course. First there was the smog, second there were the brush fires currently scouring the canyons. The scent of smoke lingered on the air like a nervous memory.

Lianne, of course, was dressed in the skimpiest excuse for a bikini, which looked magnificent on her perfectly toned and sculpted body. Jilly tilted her head, surveying her mother. She had no idea how old Lianne actually was; she’d told so many lies she probably didn’t know herself. The finest surgeons in the world continued to ensure that Lianne was perfect, particularly if one didn’t look too closely or expect an actual expression to mar her beautiful face.

“Snap out of what?” Jilly said in an emotionless voice. “I’m absolutely fine. I was thinking I may take the semester off. I’m just not in the mood for Mesopotamian archaeology.”

Lianne shuddered dramatically. “I can’t imagine why you ever could have been. If you want to stay home, that’s fine with me, but you need to at least pretend to be happy.”

“Why?”

“Because I need happy people around me. I’m much too sensitive to other people’s feelings, and it upsets me to be surrounded by unhappiness.” Lianne took a sip of her Perrier. “Really, darling, I don’t know how you can be so thoughtless. You know how I am.”

“Yes, Lianne. I know how you are,” Jilly said listlessly.

“You need drugs,” Lianne said, sitting down beside her on the adjoining chaise. Lianne was five foot three inches of perfection, and from the time Jilly turned twelve and begun to tower over her mother, she’d always felt like an awkward, hulking giant. “Some kind of antidepression thing. It will fix you right up—I’ll have Dr. Medellin prescribe some Prozac and some tranquilizers.” She wrinkled her perfect nose, possibly the only feature on her beautiful face that hadn’t been tampered with. “Perhaps some of the new diet pills. I’ve heard they do wonders.”

“I’m not fat, Lianne,” Jilly said, unable to summon her usual outrage.

“There’s no such thing as being too rich or too thin,” Lianne replied. “Wouldn’t you be happier in a size four?”

“I’m almost six feet tall, Lianne. I’d look like a scarecrow.” Though, come to think of it, that wasn’t a bad idea. Apart from her nightly quart of Ben and Jerry’s, she hadn’t had much appetite. Maybe she ought to just stop eating entirely, so that she could waste away—and then he’d be very very sorry.

Not that she was thinking of him. She didn’t even know who “him” was. She was just tired, and her mother was being even more annoying than usual.

“But clothes hang so much better when you’re a little bit underweight,” Lianne said.

“How would you know—you never wear any clothes,” Jilly grumbled.

Lianne’s hurt silence was evocative enough. Jilly should have known she wouldn’t let it go at that. “You’ve been spending much too much time with your half sister. Summer was always un-sympathetic, and now that you’ve come back from Japan you’ve been almost as bad. God knows why you wanted to go there, anyway—it’s filled with foreigners. Your sister may have been crazy enough to move there, but you’re my brilliant daughter. You should know better.”

“Summer’s got a Ph.D. in art history, Lianne.”