Vin of Venus Read Online Free PDF Page B

it.
    The ruby bracelet was gone.
    "This, you mean," Dorian said, pulling the band of gleaming red facets from his pocket.
    Vin stared. He looked down again at his empty wrist. "Impossible. That was fused on. No one's been able to remove it."
    "Easy enough, if you know how." Dorian's smile showed an expanse of porcelain. "As to the bracelet's origins, that's a rather lengthy story."
    "I have time."
    "Do you?" The doctor's other hand produced a small automatic, and leveled it with Vin's chest. "First, perhaps, you'll explain how you've come into the bracelet's possession. An artifact stolen from this very museum, four years ago."

-VIN OF VENUS-
     
     
    PART I
     
     
    When he opened his eyes there was always the same thing: a checkerboard of tiles. White squares alternating with Aegean blue. A tributary of fine cracks ran through the caulk between the tiles, and he could stare up at these for what seemed like hours, trying to follow where the tiny rivers started and where they ended up.
    Sometimes a woman came into the room.
    She wore a pale green smock and her dead eyes radiated the calm of a snake-charmer. She'd move his limbs and take his pulse. Snap on a pair of gloves. Then she'd insert a thick, latex-smelling finger into his mouth, pull down his jaw, and thrust a handful of pills inside. Close his jaw. Watch him until his throat moved and the whole mess went down.
    Then blackness.
    This
blackness was different from before. There were no dreams. No flashes of alien landscapes; of ochre-colored clouds or the heaving seas beneath them. No rainstorms lasting days. No moonless nights, or the calls of multi-limbed terrors crouched in steaming jungles.
    No Venus.
    * * *
    "Why do just stare at the ceiling all the time?"
    This from his new roommate.
    They'd brought her in two days before. She'd been comatose at the time, but now she was alert. Bone-thin, with ragged hair and a junkie's filmed teeth. Her eyes shone bluer than the tiles over his bed.
    He raised his shoulder in a one-armed shrug.
    "They must be giving you something good," she said, frowning. "Not me. I'm on a fucking detox protocol. What happened to your arms and legs?"
    He checked to make sure he still had the two. Still there. His expensive prosthetics, however, were gone. The discovery didn't shock him. Nothing shocked him in his medicated state. Not even seeing the strip of pale flesh where his ruby bracelet used to be.
    "I lost them in an accident," he said. His first clear words for what seemed like weeks.
    "How the fuck do you get around, then?"
    "With difficulty."
    "You still got your pecker?"
    "Yes."
    "I'm not asking because I want to see it or anything. So don't get your hopes up."
    He looked over at her. She was sitting upright in the bed, a living corpse with an IV tube sticking out of her gray arm. "I won't," he said.
    "What's your name?"
    "Vin."
    "I'm Charlotte."
    "Where are we, Charlotte?"
    "Private psychiatric hospital. In Camberwell. That's South London, in case you didn't know. Pretty posh digs. I reckon you were a suicide attempt, right? I know I'd try to off myself, if I was in your state."
    Why was he here?
    Memories stirred. He saw the dark gap of a gun barrel floating up to point at his chest. A cramped office beneath the British Museum. An old man with gold-rimmed spectacles, asking him a question. A very important question. One that held clues to his past.
    "Are you alright?" the girl asked.
    He tried to vomit over the side of the bed. Nothing came up, so he crouched there and felt his stomach heave.
    * * *
    Instead of the snake-charmer, a male attendant with hairy forearms came in to change Charlotte's glucose drip. He shoved a handful of pills down Vin's mouth per protocol, but wasn't so careful about watching him swallow.
    "Hey, now, what're you going to do with those?" Charlotte asked, after the attendant had left. Vin spat the remaining tablet onto his nightstand.
    "Hide them somewhere, I guess."
    "Give 'em to me. I'm dying over