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Asylum - Lindsay Buroker.txt
| 2 |
Mari Moonrazor adjusted her ocular implants to simulate normal human eyesight as she gazed over the forest of evergreens toward the rising sun. Pinks and oranges burnished the blue sky, the sight gorgeous and still novel to someone who'd spent most of her life on spaceships and habitats. She couldn't, however, help but wonder if she was truly seeing the sky as unaltered humans would. Her mother had surgically installed numerous chips and cybernetic implants in her before she'd been a year old, and Mari couldn't remember what it was like to be fully human.
As she watched the sky slowly change colors, an increasingly familiar sense of hiraeth crept over her. Why did she keep coming up to this clifftop to look at the sunrises when they kept stirring up emotions that could only get her in trouble? Emotions that prompted her to take action. To leave.
With her mother's plans to assemble an ancient wormhole gate and lead their people to another system recently thwarted, Mari's life's work seemed insignificant. What need did the astroshamans have for a terraforming scientist, or the technology she made, now that they were hunkered in an underground base on a planet that already had the rich atmosphere, soils, and climates of Old Earth?
Behind her, heavy feet crunched through the foliage on the clifftop. Her augmented hearing had no trouble picking up the noise over the hum of the generator that kept a camouflaging shield over their base to hide it from the network of satellites that orbited Odin. It was her mother's crusher, a huge tarry-black combat robot that could liquefy and re-form into any shape. Its approach had to mean that her mother was also coming.
Concern stirred in Mari's gut, though she wasn't doing anything wrong. Not yet. Surely, even beings who longed to integrate themselves with machines, if not eventually give up their biological bodies entirely, could appreciate the aesthetical appeal of a sunrise.
"It is not the worst view one could have for a secret base," her mother said, stepping around the crusher and up to the edge of the cliff to join her. Her short white hair stuck up in all directions, as if she'd just roused from bed, though it always looked like that, and implants made her eyes appear the same whitish-blue as Mari's. Her skin was bronze, a few shades darker than Mari's, who had the coloring and slim build of the father she couldn't remember, a father long gone. "I should know. I've spent much of the last twenty years hiding in one place or another."
"It's an improvement over the ice base on Xolas Moon," Mari said, "but can we truly consider it secret? The land was a gift, right? At least one person in the Star Kingdom government knows we're here."
"It was not a gift but a prize acquired through negotiations. And it is only temporary, until we can build a gate from scratch with the data we gathered—" her mother waved to the ground, indicating the complex engineering project their people had started in the freshly excavated base built under the cliff, "—and resume our quest to travel beyond the Twelve Systems and find a new home, one not impinged upon by humanity's spread. A place where we will not be judged for seeking the next logical evolution."
Mari didn't point out that astroshamans were as apt to judge normal humans as vice versa. "When? Shall I continue my research?"
"Of course. Our allies in System Geryon are manufacturing an automated ship that will take our finished gate to the new system we've chosen, install it, and link it to the existing network, so we can quickly travel there ourselves. If you've completed work on your prototype terraformer, we can build more of them and send them along on the ship to create a world suitable for biological matter. Since our people have not yet been able to agree collectively to give up our original forms—" Mother waved at her mostly human body, "—for entirely machine-based bodies, that will be necessary."
Mari grimaced. She hadn't yet told her mother that she'd lost the terraforming device. It had been in her lab on the Celestial Dart, one of the spaceships that had battled the Kingdom Fleet in their Arctic Islands and crashed. She'd had instructions to grab everything valuable before transferring to a transport vessel that wouldn't go into combat, but there had been too much to take and not much time. She'd forgotten her prototype.
"Do you think it's necessary for us to leave now that the Kingdom is under more progressive rule?" Mari asked to change the subject. "Perhaps we could stay here and be..."
"What? Welcomed with open arms?" Mother snorted.
Mari knew that was unlikely, but she couldn't help but think of the list she'd made on her eighteenth birthday. The Human List.
It was full of things she had never experienced and only read about in books, things that were frowned upon in the astroshaman community because they appealed to "base human emotions." Drinking caffeinated and alcoholic substances, air-bike racing, hang-gliding, kissing, having sex, eating chocolate, even walking barefoot on a beach with sand squishing between her toes. They were all things she was curious about but had never been permitted to do.
"Even if we hadn't gone along with high shamans Chatelain and Cometrunner," Mother continued, "and attacked this world, the Kingdom never would have accepted us. They never did before. Even those in progressive systems call us freaks and weirdos, always making it clear that we do not belong. If you doubt that, all you have to do is go out among them and walk in their streets with your implants visible."
"Can I?" Mari smiled to make it a joke, but that sense of longing returned. Her mother had never given her or her siblings the opportunity to go out among normal humans. But it would be easy now that they were living on this world. Even though she couldn't see the distant capital of Zamek City, not even with the binocular setting on her implants, she knew it was there, a mere two hundred miles to the east. Mari envisioned Glasnax-windowed skyscrapers glinting pink in the rising sun.
"No." Her mother turned a horrified expression on her. "Especially not now. They're still repairing their cities from the bombings. They would kill you on sight."
That would be unfair. Mari hadn't had anything to do with the bombings, nor would she threaten any humans if she went among them. All she wanted was to experience the items on her Human List.
"Give up such notions," her mother said, as if reading her mind, "and focus on perfecting the terraformer so we can make more of them."
It struck Mari that if she confessed to having lost it, she might have the excuse to leave. If their lost ships hadn't been salvaged, someone could fly up and retrieve the device. She could volunteer. Oh, the frigid Arctic Islands weren't anything she longed to see, but while she was out, maybe she could also visit one of the cities on the mainland. Since her people had few working transport devices, maybe she would even need to go to a city first to acquire a small craft to fly up there.
"I should have told you earlier," Mari said, "the prototype was on the Celestial Dart."
Her mother grimaced. "You didn't take it with you when we left?"
"There wasn't much time, and I didn't even think of it. I left it in a cabinet in my lab."
Her mother radiated displeasure.
"I hadn't truly believed our ships would be defeated."
"They shouldn't have been," her mother growled. "If I had been in charge, I wouldn't have underestimated Casmir Dabrowski and his pesky clone."
"Perhaps I could go up to the crash site and see if the terraformer survived. I had it tucked away in an insulated box."
Her mother squinted at her. A suspicious squint?
Mari raised her eyebrows, turning her expression into what she hoped looked like a desire to be helpful, not a scheme to escape.
"It would be easy to find it," Mari added. "I know you prompted the other ships to self-destruct when you and the survivors fled, so that the Kingdom wouldn't get our technology, but I found the Celestial Dart on their satellite imagery."
"It was also supposed to self-destruct, but the program failed, or the equipment was too damaged by the crash. The rest of us were too injured and concerned about surviving and escaping to go back to finish the job. By then, their troops were crawling all over those mountains."
"The terraformer was locked in a cabinet. Scavengers might not have found it. I can—"
"No. It is too dangerous. They have a military outpost near the crash site, and unscrupulous salvagers are likely still fighting over the pieces." Her mother's mouth twisted in distaste. "I assume you have the schematics. You can build it again."
"The raw materials—"
"Make a list. I'll find a way to acquire whatever you need."
"But Mother. Shouldn't we at least check?"
"It's too dangerous," her mother repeated, her voice hard. "You may not go."
Mari clenched her jaw. She was twenty-four. Had she been a normal human born into a human household on almost any planet or habitat in the Twelve Systems, she would have been considered an adult, free to make her own decisions. Free to go where she wished.
"It is for your own good, Mari," her mother said, her voice softer. "They would see you as a spy if not a saboteur, and they would kill you. If I thought you merely wanted to sneak in and out of the crash site without being seen, perhaps I would say yes, but I believe you want more than that. As you've admitted before, you want to walk among them, a scientist experiencing the culture and curiosities of the indigenous people."
Mari's cheeks warmed, and she looked out upon the forest instead of meeting her mother's gaze. She shouldn't have been so frank about her desires in the past.
"Perhaps they would not kill us," Mari said. "Perhaps one could prove that one had no ill intent and might be permitted to explore their world."
Just proving she didn't have ill intent might not be enough. What if she was willing to share her knowledge about terraforming with the Kingdom? Her prototype was far more advanced and faster working than the equipment they used. If she could find it and show it to them, maybe they would want to hire her. Or even grant her asylum.
"Just because Minister Dabrowski is willing to turn enemies into allies doesn't mean the rest of them will see us as anything but threats to be destroyed. He is not in charge of their people. The very fact that we must remain hidden—" Mother pointed upward toward the camouflaging shield over the base, though it was only visible when Mari shifted the setting of her implants to detect energy instead of light waves, "—is a testament to that. Their military would destroy us if they knew we were here. You will stay here in hiding, as we all will, until it's time to leave the Twelve Systems forever."
Mother glanced toward the rising sun, then turned her back on it and headed to the tunnel that led into their base. A temporary base on a temporary planet.
Forever. The word haunted Mari. If she didn't go out soon and experience humanity and what it was like to be one of them... she would never get a chance.
For her entire life, she'd obeyed her mother and the elders. But as she looked toward the rising sun, she decided she'd had enough. She would take her chances and trust she could keep herself alive among potential enemies. It was time to leave her people.
"I never thought I would rob a greenhouse."
"These buildings are experimental seed and plant germination centers," K-45 said in his robotic voice.
"I never thought I would rob a germination center."
"Are you having misgivings about this mission?"
"You might say that." Kenji Chisaka—who went by Kenji Backer, in the vain hope that neither the Kingdom Guard nor Zamek City Police would find out he was the son of a terrorist—pushed his hands through his hair hard enough to dislodge strands. "When we were robbing from the corrupt nobility, who are hell-bent on keeping commoners enslaved in a backward system, it seemed right and just. But these are Queen Oku's greenhouses, and she's in charge now. By all accounts, she's a progressive academic who remembers the names of the little people, and she's dating a commoner."
Kenji didn't want to rob anyone at all. For the last eight years, he'd been doing honest work, whatever jobs he could find without being chipped and in the system. Just when he'd eked together enough physical currency to bribe a spaceship captain to take him out of the Kingdom so he could start a new life, not one but two invading forces had come to Odin. They'd dropped bombs all over the planet, including onto the apartment building where he'd been squatting in the basement. He'd lost all of his meager belongings; he'd almost lost his life.
"Minister of External Affairs Casmir Dabrowski was cloned from the legendary war hero Admiral Mikita," Kay said, "and, in the aftermath of King Jager's death, was awarded a position in the nobility."
"Yeah, but he was born a commoner and raised in an apartment in the Brodskiburg District. That's as common as it gets."
"I was born in Refuse Collection Bin Thirty-Seven," Kay said, "but I am uncommon."
"That is true. I used to take classes from Minister Dabrowski. He was Professor Dabrowski back then."
"You were accepted into an institute of higher learning?" Why did his robot companion sound surprised?
Kenji wished he could legitimately say yes, but... "I squatted on campus for a while and sneaked into classes in the huge lecture halls where nobody took attendance."
It was unlikely Dabrowski had known he existed.
"Backer!" one of the thieves standing guard outside the greenhouse whispered harshly. "Quit yapping with your junkyard of a robot. This isn't the coffee house. You're supposed to be standing guard. Alertly."
Kenji sighed and focused on the parking lot across the field from the greenhouses. He was stationed next to an irrigation shed halfway to the lot, and his duty was to delay the authorities if any shuttles or ground vehicles flew or drove in.
His stomach growled, a reminder that he had few crowns in his pocket, and it had been more than a day since his last meal. He didn't want to rob anyone, but he needed to eat.
"I am also having misgivings about this mission," Kay said in a lower tone of voice. "My materials may have been acquired in a junkyard, but like human beings, I am worth more than the sum of my parts."
"Yes, you are." Since Kenji had assembled Kay, he wouldn't disagree, though even he admitted his multi-metaled bipedal companion wasn't the most state-of-the-art robot in existence. None of his parts were dented or rusted, but the service panel on his back that allowed access to his internal wiring did not look like anything other than the toaster door that it was. "I'm sorry I let myself get talked into this. If I had money to rent a shuttle, we'd be up in the Arctic Islands, scavenging the wrecks from the big battle there. It's rumored that some of them were astroshaman ships. Even if they've mostly been picked over by now, can you imagine how much we could get for even a few smidgens of their technology?"
Kenji picked up his borrowed DEW-Tek rifle, prepared to do his duty if police or the Kingdom Guard showed up. He tried to hand a pistol to Kay, but the robot closed his mechanical fist, refusing to accept it.
"You're not willing to help out?" Kenji asked.
"You know what my foundational programming is."
Yes, when Kenji had been building the robot, there hadn't been many free options for embedded operating systems. He'd wanted Kay to be able to help him with the mechanic job he'd been holding down at the time, but the only foundational programs that had been available were Kitchen Assistant and Academic Tutor. Figuring the kitchen-assistant operating system would have left Kay prone to chopping and roasting everything in sight, Kenji had opted for Academic Tutor. For the most part, it worked fine, and he'd been able to add numerous engineering and repair programs afterward, but Kay did have a tendency toward lecturing. Even worse, he often opined on philosophical and moral matters. Such as robbing greenhouses.
"I am incapable of acting in a violent manner toward human beings," Kay added.
"You could shoot out their tires."
"I am incapable of acting in a violent manner toward tires."
"I had no idea tutor robots weren't allowed to do that."
"We are programmed to be serene role models for impressionable young humans."
"Will you at least wave a wrench menacingly if someone threatens me?" Kenji asked.
"I will consider this."
A police shuttle flew along the border of the park, its distinctive green and blue lights identifying it even on the dark cloudy night.
Kenji leaned into the shadows of the irrigation shed. Against his advice, the gang of thieves had shot out the lights around the shed and the four big greenhouses before sneaking in, but their flashlight beams were visible through the glass walls as they searched for the "special seeds that would go for a fortune to the right buyer," as the leader had put it.
Kenji held his breath until the police shuttle flew out of view beyond the trees edging the grassy fields. Maybe they hadn't seen anything. Maybe this would work.
So long as shooting out the lights hadn't activated an alarm somewhere. Even though the greenhouses had been secured by nothing more than padlocks on the doors, Kenji had a hard time believing there wasn't an alarm system, not if the contents were as valuable as the gang thought.
"If we make as much as the guys think, our five percent could be enough to finally get us passage out of the Kingdom—and away from my father's inimical legacy." Kenji wiped a hand on his trousers, as if he could wipe away the blood that had once been there, blood of the people he'd been forced, as a boy, to help his father kill. If the authorities ever found him and ran a DNA test...
Two police vehicles swung into the parking lot, lights flashing. Damn it.
"Police," Kenji whispered into his comm unit. "Everyone out."
"We've almost got the seeds. Lay down cover!"
The police vehicle doors flew open, and officers in gray combat armor leaped out. Kenji grimaced. That meant that even if he dared shoot them, they would be protected.
His teammate at the greenhouse door fired at the police and their vehicles, crimson DEW-Tek bolts lighting up the night. As expected, the energy blasts bounced ineffectively off the armor and the armored vehicles.
As Kenji pulled out one of the three grenades he'd been given, the police shuttle flew back into view.
"Abort," he whispered into the comm. "There are more coming. Abort now."
"We only need thirty seconds! Keep them busy!"
The fearless police officers charged across the grassy field toward the greenhouse. Kenji threw one of the grenades, aiming well in front of them. He wanted to deter them, not hurt anyone.
The grenade blew a crater, the boom echoing across the park, hurling grass and dirt in all directions. Unfortunately, the officers ran into the smoke, navigating the smoking crater easily in their armor, and kept coming. They would soon pass his shed on the way to the greenhouses.
"This is unacceptably violent." Soft clanks sounded as Kay did the robot equivalent of wringing his hands. "I do not approve, Kenji. You should not have involved yourself in such a scheme."
"No kidding. You need to run. Get a head start. Meet beyond those trees over there."
The robot didn't need to be told twice. He clanked away from the shed and the parking area. One of the officers must have noticed his movement, for he shifted his rifle in that direction.
Kenji stepped away from the shed and lobbed the second grenade in the officer's path.
Shots fired from another direction, and glass shattered as one of the thieves blew a hole in the back of the greenhouse they were in. Four members of the gang sprang out through it, some carrying sacks of seeds, two carrying what looked like potted ferns with huge balls of fruit dangling from the fronds.
They would have to run hundreds of yards across a field to the trees and the getaway vehicle parked on the road on the other side. Kenji was even farther away from that escape.
Though instincts told him to flee, Kenji knew the thieves wouldn't be able to outrun the authorities, not when the officers' armor gave them greater strength and speed than typical. He had to try to delay them further. They'd gotten out with hopefully valuable goods. This job could still be worth it—if they could escape.
As the second grenade blew, Kenji lifted his rifle and fired at the police officers. He targeted the seams in their armor at their knees, shoulders, and ankles, keeping his aim steady though his heart pounded. If he got caught, he'd be screwed for more reasons than shooting at the police and robbing a greenhouse.
His aim was pinpoint, thanks to his father's training and a few not-quite-legal enhancements his parents had made to his genes before he'd been born, and one of the police yelped and grabbed his shoulder. He stumbled to the side and out of the formation, but two other officers spotted Kenji in the shadows.
"Get that one!"
Two men veered toward him as the others continued after the rest of the gang. As Kenji sprinted away in the opposite direction, he threw his last grenade over his shoulder. It landed by the shed, blowing it to pieces and pelting the men with wood and metal.
Doubting that would slow them for long, Kenji raced across the field, not toward the getaway car but in the direction Kay had gone. Trees loomed up ahead. If he could reach them, maybe he could lose his pursuers and escape.
He had to. He couldn't be captured, couldn't take the chance of being identified and linked to his father. If that happened, he would be charged not with a misdemeanor but with murder, and spend the rest of his short life in the penal asteroid mines.
Kay, who clearly had no objections to fleeing, kept running, his mismatched legs propelling him with impressive speed. Kenji glanced back, worried about the lack of cover as they raced across the open field. But his grenade had either deterred the pair of men pursuing him, or they'd realized the main group was the bigger threat. Maybe Kenji could get away.
As he neared the trees, a dark figure in black armor leaped out of the branches.
What the hell? This wasn't one of the policemen.
A silver logo above the faceplate on the man's helmet gleamed in the night, the letters ME standing out against the surrounding black. Kenji groaned. He'd heard of this guy.
Kay halted so fast that he clattered, his bulbous head jerking forward. He flung up his arms in surrender, but the armored figure grabbed him and hurled him twenty feet through the air.
Kenji pointed his rifle at the man, but he couldn't keep from gaping. Even with strength-accentuating armor, that was an incredible feat. Kay wasn't light.
With a thunderous crash, the robot struck a trunk hard. Kenji gritted his teeth as anger surged up in him. Kay wasn't indestructible either.
"You bastard," Kenji snarled, firing at the man's armored chest. "That's my friend."
He kept himself from saying his only friend, since that was pathetic. Even if it was true.
The armored man focused on him, his face too shadowed to make out behind his helmet's faceplate. As they had with the police, the energy bolts bounced uselessly off him. Kenji shifted his aim to the neck, again hoping to find a seam, but that looked like much more expensive—and higher quality—armor than the police had.
He should have run, but where? His genetic enhancements were modest; he couldn't escape this man. Kenji's only hope was to damage that armor enough to deter him.
But the man sprang at him, powerful legs taking him through the air as if he'd leapt off a trampoline. Kenji jumped to the side, turning his rifle into a club at the last second, hoping vainly to smash through his foe's faceplate.
A hand snatched the rifle out of the air, tearing it from his grip. So fast Kenji didn't know what was happening, he found his legs knocked out from under him. He hit the ground hard, landing on his back, his head thudding against the earth. A weight landed on his chest, pinning him. The armored man's knee.
"I surrender!" Kenji jerked his hands up.
He had no idea if the capital's new self-proclaimed superhero known only as the Main Event killed criminals, but with all the weight on his chest, and his ribcage creaking, Kenji worried the guy would crush him to death by accident. The Main Event was reputedly cybernetically enhanced, giving him strength and agility even beyond what the armor offered, and it would be easy for someone like that to carelessly snap a rib—or a spine.
The man paused, looking toward the police and the other thieves. The leader and someone else had been captured before they reached the getaway vehicle.
"I didn't seriously hurt anyone." Kenji struggled not to panic at the crushing weight on his chest, and the fear that he'd scraped by his whole life only to die helping thugs steal seeds. "I didn't want to do this mission, but I've got no job and can barely buy food. My home and everything I have was destroyed in the bombings."
He doubted the Main Event cared.
But Kenji's captor kneeled back, the painful weight coming off his ribs. He hefted Kenji to his feet, a steel grip not letting him go.
"The city has shelters and offers jobs to those who need them," the Main Event said in a passionless but surprisingly cultured voice. He sounded like a noble.
"Only if you're chipped and in the system."
The Main Event looked at him, his face still too shadowed by the night—or was he wearing a mask?—to see. "You can get chipped and get into the system."
"No, I can't. Uhm, family troubles. That would be a really bad idea for me. I have a father who's, ah, he didn't treat us well." Why was he babbling and explaining this to some justice-fighter? "A real scum. Mom's dead because of him. I don't suppose you know what it's like to come from a bad family?"
Surprisingly, the man barked what might have been a laugh. It also might have been coughing up of phlegm. Something that was hard to spit out when one was in combat armor.
"I also really don't want to have a blood test done by the police," Kenji went on, hoping he could somehow talk his way out of this. "You're into anonymity, right? You've got to get it."
Another firefight broke out in the trees across the park. A couple of the thieves had made it to the getaway car and grabbed bigger weapons. One turned a hand cannon on the police officers. That might be powerful enough to cut through their armor. Kenji willed his captor to go help the police and leave him alone.
An alarmed yell came from the firefight. One of the police? That was the first hint that the encounter might be going poorly for them.
The Main Event released Kenji but only to pick up his fallen rifle. He flexed his armored arms and snapped it in half. All right, that was impressive. Kenji's thoughts of having his spine snapped returned.
A faint rattle came from the other direction—Kay trying to get to his feet. The Main Event glanced at him but only tossed the pieces of rifle to the ground.
"I've dedicated myself to protecting this city, boy," the Main Event said.
Kenji bristled at being called a boy—he'd just turned twenty-four—but if his youth might lead this guy to be more lenient, he would keep his mouth shut.
"I'm watching out for it. Thieves who shoot at police officers aren't welcome. If I come across you in Zamek City again, I'll drop you off at Police Headquarters, and you can burble tales of family woes to them." Without waiting for a response, he took off across the field toward the fighting.
Not questioning his good luck, Kenji ran to Kay and helped him up. His robot buddy was a whiz at repairing everything from kitchen appliances to vehicles to spaceship engines, but his junkyard body, as one of the thieves had called it, wasn't evenly weighted, and he struggled with things like standing up and climbing stairs.
"Are you badly damaged?" In the dark, Kenji couldn't tell how smashed Kay was after being hurled against a tree.
"My housing is dented in numerous places, but my circuitry and skeletal framework appear sufficient for fleeing this odious place, which I dearly hope is next on our agenda. I will do a full diagnostic scan shortly."
"Yes." Kenji helped him through the trees and away from the park, frowning at the robot's lopsided gait, though his hip ached, and he was also limping after being hurled to the ground. "When I get some money, I'll buy you better parts."
Whenever that would be.
"Most thoughtful, but unless I am mistaken, you will not be receiving a five-percent stake from tonight's mission."
"I know, but there's something else I've been thinking about. Something that could be more lucrative."
"You are not going to sell me, are you?"
"No. Friends don't sell friends." Kenji didn't point out that he would have had to pay a junkyard owner to take an ancient K-45 off his hands, especially one with toaster parts.
"Excellent. I concur. What is your new plan?"
"Since we can't stay in the city..." Kenji glanced back, but neither the police nor the Main Event were in sight. "Maybe it's time for that salvage mission in the Arctic Islands that I've been dreaming about."
"You said you couldn't afford to rent a craft to take us up there."
"We'll borrow one."
"From a friend?"
"From a shuttle-rental service with lax lending standards."
Kay rotated his bulbous head, his oval-shaped optical sensors looking at him. "I am concerned for your future, Kenji."
"It'll work out."
"Who will I converse with if you end up in a detention center?"
Kenji didn't mention that, as his personal property, Kay would end up deactivated and stuffed in a storage locker in the same detention center. "We're going to make it work this time, Kay. We're going to make enough money to get out of the Kingdom and start new lives. You'll see."
"I do hope so. I believe one of my toes just fell off."
"I'll build you a new foot. Once we're on the way to the Arctic."
|
Asylum - Lindsay Buroker.txt
| 3 |
The wan sun did nothing to warm Mari as she sped over ice fields and away from the military outpost on a rented air bike, the wind needling her even through multiple layers of clothing. Her fingers were numb inside her gloves, and she could barely feel her toes, but she didn't care. She had done it.
She'd sneaked away from her mother's base, sabotaging the security system long enough to slip out without leaving a trace. After a few miles of walking, she'd found and taken over an automated logging vehicle, altering its programming to give her a ride to a mill on the outskirts of Zamek City. Once in the capital, she'd located a rental shop with a clerk willing to take her money without asking for identification. She'd checked out a bike from him, ridden to a military base near the city, and used a couple of her hacking programs to unlock a hatch on a cargo ship heading to the Kingdom outpost in the Arctic.
Mari smirked as she imagined what her mother would think of her using the engineering and computer knowledge all of her people were educated with to become a serial stowaway. It had been easier than she'd expected. Oh, she'd expected to be caught at any point along the way, but after dealing with her people's ultra-secure networks, getting into and navigating the Kingdom networks, even the private ones, hadn't been that difficult.
The harder part had been avoiding scrutinizing stares from people in the city who'd noticed her implants and must have wondered if she was an astroshaman. Normal humans sometimes got cybernetic upgrades, and most of them had embedded banking and network chips, but few people had their working eyes replaced with implants or the equivalent of a circuit board with ports and an extra bank of chips stuck in the side of their head. Mari had kept her shoulder-length blonde hair combed over that the best she could, but it was noticeable.
She hadn't dared shop for food or to experiment with any of the items on her Human List. Once she had her terraforming prototype and could offer it and her knowledge in exchange for asylum, she could explore the world. She just had to hope it was still in the wrecked ship and that it hadn't been destroyed. And that the Kingdom government would want what she offered enough to overlook that her people were their enemies.
Jagged white mountains rose up ahead of her, the sun glinting on their frosty slopes. According to the satellite imagery, the Celestial Dart had crashed on a cliff on this side of them.
She increased the magnification of her ocular implants, looking for any hint of a ship's hull amid the snow and ice. Also searching for signs of people—especially the soldiers from that outpost. Hopefully, they didn't run patrols out here, but she didn't know.
Even though her mother had negotiated something of a truce with Minister Dabrowski, and he apparently owned the land they'd constructed their new base on, Mari doubted the planet's military had instructions to leave astroshamans alone if they saw them. More likely, they would try to capture and interrogate her.
As she tilted back on the handlebars to lift the nose of her air bike and climb up into the mountains, an alert blinked in her vision, a silent ding sounding in her mind. Her implants had detected an anomaly in the terrain. It was atop a cliff, as she'd expected. The wreck.
She sped up. This was it.
An unexpected tangle of emotions filled her as she came upon the wreck, what had once been a great spaceship capable of housing hundreds of engineers and researchers now buried under numerous feet of snow. The Celestial Dart hadn't been her only home, but it had been the ship she traveled on when her people were not staying on one base or another, doing their best to avoid human civilizations. She'd studied and researched aboard that ship, been raised with her siblings, and learned the religious and secular ways of her people. It had been a more permanent part of her life than most of the homes they'd fleetingly lived in.
Loss and regret and sadness made her slow down as she surveyed the mess. Moisture filmed her eyes and dampened her lashes until they froze, little crystals battering her cheeks every time she blinked. Since her tear ducts had never been altered, she had no trouble crying, but she rarely did. As her mother and others had told her so often, intense human emotion was a reminder of their biological evolution and a sign that one was regressing toward a more primitive state. Rational computer-like beings did not cry.
"Just be glad you weren't on board when it crashed," she muttered, navigating around the snow-covered wreck and looking for a spot where she might gain access to the interior.
In addition to a few weapons for protection, she'd brought a toolbox that included a plasma cutter, but as she eyed the white drifts piled atop the mangled remains of the hull, she wondered if it would be enough. She navigated toward a spot on the windward side of the cliff where the mounds of snow were less substantial and lucked across a hatch. Scorch marks marred the hull around it, as if some scavenger had tried to force his way in but failed.
"Open," she told the hatch and wasn't surprised when it didn't budge. There wasn't likely any power left to run the computer system.
Mari removed a glove and rested her hand on a panel, resisting the urge to jerk it back at the icy chill. The hatch hissed open with the breaking of a seal. At least the battery-powered mechanisms still worked.
The hatchway led into a corridor near the crew cabins. Would she be able to find an intact route to the laboratories? And would they be intact? They were in the interior of the ship, next to sickbay, and well-protected, so maybe. But finding a navigable route to them would be difficult.
After putting her glove back on, Mari pulled out her plasma cutter and nodded to herself. She could handle difficulties. If she wanted asylum here in the Kingdom, she had to have something valuable to offer in exchange. She would find her terraformer and also take any other valuable technology she came across that she might be able to trade. At least, unlike the scavengers who had already been here, she had a rightful claim to the devices inside the ship.
The wind howled across the cliff, tossing snow over the side. Before climbing through the warped hatchway, Mari scanned her surroundings to make sure no soldiers or other craft were nearby. She also guessed that her mother had found out she was missing by now and might have sent someone after her. Hopefully not that crusher. With her tools and weapons, Mari believed she could defend herself against most humans, but a nearly indestructible combat robot was another matter.
Fortunately, the barren landscape was empty. Good.
Mari climbed inside, grunting in annoyance when a collapsed ceiling and caved-in bulkheads stopped her right away. She ignited the plasma cutter. This was going to take a while.
"Have you previously been educated on how to fly aircraft?" Kay asked from the copilot's seat of the shuttle.
It was Kenji's first time traveling out of Zamek City in years—and his first time taking Kay anywhere. He assumed the robot's skepticism had more to do with their conveyance than his piloting skills. As they'd entered their seventh hour of flight, an ominous rattle and a puff of black smoke had come from one of their thruster housings. A readout next to a flashing yellow light on the navigation console kept insisting they service the engine. Earlier, Kenji had commed the rental place about the alert. The man working there had said it was fine and to ignore it.
"My father taught me how to pilot everything from a flyer to a galaxy charger spaceship. I'm a little rusty, but if we crash, I won't be the reason for it."
Per the man's instructions, Kenji tried to ignore another puff of smoke wafting from the thruster. Since they were flying over an iceberg-filled sea, there was no place to stop and do maintenance.
He'd been so pleased to find a rental service clerk who would wheel and deal with him that he hadn't questioned his luck. He'd promised to pay after he got back and sold some of the salvage he was determined to find. Surprisingly, the man had agreed, so long as he brought double the usual fee. Maybe he'd only agreed because he'd known the shuttle would crash, and he hoped to make an insurance claim.
"You have not spoken of a father," Kay said. "Are you close?"
"No."
"If he taught you to pilot, that suggests an interest in your education and ability to care for yourself as an adult."
"He wanted me to be able to fly the getaway craft after he bombed buildings, stations, or habitats."
Kay's bulbous head rotated toward him. "Did you say bombed?"
"Yes. He's a terrorist. He wanted me to be his little acolyte." Kenji didn't mention that he had been his father's acolyte, or at least his assistant in his vile endeavors, until he'd turned sixteen and mustered the courage to stage his death and run away. To this day, he didn't know if his father truly believed he was dead or simply hadn't cared enough to track down a son who didn't want to serve him and therefore had no purpose.
"I thought you said you came from a noble family."
Had he told Kay that? Maybe one night when he'd been drunk. Drinking took the edge off. "My mother did, but she's been gone since I was eight. He might have done it. I never had any proof, but she kept trying to keep him away from me. He didn't like that. I'd been his idea, you see, the gene cleaning and enhancements and everything. A little scion to the business. You want to know the funny part?"
"This is a funny part? I am not an expert on human emotions, but your tale appears to lack in humor."
"No kidding. But he hated King Jager and having a senate comprised of nobles. He always railed about all that, and how the common man had no power, and also the idiocy of genetic engineering being outlawed in the Kingdom. He was trying to make statements, blowing things up as a way of fighting the system." Kenji eyed another puff of black smoke and checked to see how far they were from land. "That was how it was in the beginning anyway, at least according to my mother. I guess she silently supported him back then. Even though she was a noble, she didn't approve of the system. But later..." Kenji shook his head, memories popping up of dead people—murdered people—and blood everywhere, including on his own hands. "I think he liked it. Likes it. He's still alive out there somewhere, but not in System Lion, I think. He had a couple of close calls with knights who'd been sent to hunt him down, and it's been a few years since anyone saw him here. He's reputedly a thief, bounty hunter, and who knows what in another system now, but the Kingdom hasn't forgotten his crimes. They want him dead."
And they would happily take out the son who'd assisted him too. Kenji had to get out of System Lion. He couldn't keep flirting with the authorities. And now that damn self-proclaimed superhero.
When Kenji had checked the news, he hadn't been surprised that the rest of the greenhouse-incursion party had been arrested. He was still shocked that the Main Event had let him go. He wouldn't press his luck and return to the capital longer than it took to drop off the shuttle. Even though he'd lived in Zamek City for years and knew it well, Kenji could make the money he needed to charter a space flight elsewhere.
"Such as right here," he murmured, spotting white land coming into view on the horizon. "We're going to make it."
"I am most relieved," Kay said.
"Me too."
The trip back might be dicier, but while he searched for valuables, Kenji would have Kay perform any repairs that might be possible without spare parts. Earlier, he'd seen a toolbox in the back.
"There is a military outpost on this island," Kay said as they flew over a glacier, a herd of walruses near the water, startled by the shuttle's passing—or the plumes of smoke. "Will they not object to salvage operations taking place near their compound?"
"We're not going to ask for their permission. And we're one man and a robot, not a salvage operation."
"Do you seek to acquire more trouble for yourself?"
"No. We'll be circumspect."
"I have concerns."
"If anyone asks, we'll say we came up here to hike," Kenji said.
"Robots do not participate in recreational physical activity."
"You can fix the shuttle while I recreate. Don't worry. I think the wrecks are several miles from the outpost and in the mountains." Kenji banked to head toward the snowy peaks on the horizon.
He had been doing research on the network, learning everything he could about the battle and the likely locations of wrecks. Too bad there wasn't more information. Reports that Military Intelligence and Royal Intelligence had filed about the conflict had been classified, leaving the media outlets to share only opinions and guesses. Kenji hoped what he'd gathered from those sources would be enough.
He fished his glasses out of his pocket and put them on, activating the network interface and display to bring up the maps and data he'd bookmarked. The research would have been easier if he'd had a chip in his temple wired directly into his brain, as was typical for people in the Kingdom and most of the Twelve Systems, but the government could use such devices to locate a person, so his father had never had Kenji embedded with one. And after Kenji had run away from the old man, it had seemed wise to continue to stay off the grid.
"Watch the scanners, will you?" Kenji asked. "Let me know if any other ships are in the area."
"Certainly." Kay tilted his body forward at the hip to peruse the limited instrumentation. They would be lucky if the dilapidated shuttle could detect obstacles in their flight path, much less other ships in the area, but maybe the scanners were more advanced than they looked. Kay scraped at something brownish and gunky on a display with a finger. "I believe this is food detritus."
"Looks like mustard. The last copilot may have been into ham sandwiches."
"Did he not grasp the merits of cleaning up after himself? This is a societal courtesy that those of us in the tutoring industry are programmed to impart to our charges."
"Not everybody has a robot tutor when they're growing up."
"Very unfortunate. Still, one would think that sanitation protocols would be implemented between one rental party and the next."
"Not when one doesn't pay in advance or share his identity with the clerk."
"I do hope you will succeed with this mission and achieve your goal to reach a more financially elevated rung of society."
"So you don't have to scrape week-old mustard off the consoles of future aircraft that we rent?"
"Precisely."
Kenji piloted them past the small military outpost, staying well south of it, and continued west until they reached the mountains. The chain ran roughly north-south, and he turned them north, assuming most of the fighting had been near the outpost. The shuttle hiccuped and spat another plume of black smoke.
"Another aircraft is entering the local airspace," Kay said.
"Military?"
"This equipment is not sophisticated enough to differentiate between military and civilian vessels, but it is coming from the southwest rather than the outpost. It is possible it is flying to the outpost."
"What's off to the southwest?" Kenji mentally retraced their route. They'd come up the coast from Zamek City and flown northwest over the sea. There were a few towns in the inland mountains of the northern continent, but the majority of the population centers were along the eastern and southern coasts. The far distant western coast was prone to tsunamis and had few towns of size.
"Little," Kay said.
"Hm."
They flew over a snow-blanketed cliff with a lumpy surface that might have been rock or might have indicated something buried under the snow. The scanners were ineffective at determining if wreckage lay underneath, but the equipment did detect one anomaly. Kenji squinted over at Kay's console.
"Is that an air bike parked on top of that cliff?"
"Actually, that is a large mountain directly ahead of us." Kay pointed at the forward display.
"Don't tell me someone else has already been here scavenging."
"I will tell you that you must veer to the side promptly." Kay's hands twitched toward the navigation controls, as if he meant to take over.
"I see it. We've got plenty of time." Kenji adjusted their course to swing around the mountain, so he could come back and check on the air bike.
"Few humans would consider 4.3 seconds until impact plenty of time."
"And few robots, apparently."
"Indeed."
As the shuttle flew around the mountain peak, the scanners detected the air bike flaring to life behind them. Kenji adjusted the display to bring up a visual off the shuttle's rear. A white-cloaked figure who almost blended in with his or her surroundings jumped onto the air bike and flew down a steep slope and toward the east.
Toward the military outpost? To report him?
No, that cloak wasn't a part of any military uniforms he'd seen. It looked like it had been chosen specifically for camouflage. The white backpack the figure wore also blended in but not so much that he couldn't see it bulging. As if with choice scavenged parts plucked from a crashed astroshaman ship.
"Someone beat us here," Kenji grumbled.
"Given that the battle was weeks ago, it is likely that many people—or salvage operations—beat us here."
Kenji sighed. Well, he wouldn't chase someone off across the ice to mug him. Just in case it mattered later, he used his glasses display to record a video of the bike, including stickers on the back that read Lease to own! and Blazing engines! Someone else was making use of rental vehicles for the trip up here.
"I'm going to see if I can find a stable place to set us down." Kenji flew toward the clifftop, activating the shuttle's hover feature. The craft shuddered and bucked before obeying. "Let me know if that other ship you detected comes this way. I hope it doesn't. It's hard to believe this place is so delightful that everyone is visiting it at once."
"If the wreckage contains a plethora of valuable materials to salvage, would that not cause a human to find it delightful?"
"I suppose it might." Kenji frowned as they descended, noticing a lot of boot prints and evidence of landing skids from numerous types of vehicles in the snow. "It definitely might."
Had he been delusional to think that this was an original idea? Maybe a steady stream of salvagers had been up here since the battle.
"There might not be anything left inside," he admitted, guiding the shuttle gingerly down next to the snow-covered wreck. There wasn't a lot of space between it and the edge. "Let's hope they overlooked something, and we'll get lucky. If we even found enough to cover the rental cost and the supplies we bought for the trip up here..."
He wouldn't say that would be enough. It wouldn't. Why couldn't he catch a lucky break?
Wherever his father was skulking these days, Kenji hoped some Kingdom agent would soon capture him and deliver him to a penal asteroid for years of arduous mining by hand. Possibly while being beaten up by prison toughs who didn't like terrorists.
"You may wish to hurry," Kay said. "The other aircraft is continuing in this direction."
"Wonderful. While you wait, see if you can give the shuttle a tune-up, will you?"
As soon as Kenji stepped outside of the climate-controlled interior, he realized how ill-prepared he was for an arctic excursion. The sun was bright, almost blinding as it glinted off the snow all around him, but the air wasn't remotely warm.
He should have brought cold-weather clothing and emergency camping gear, but he didn't own either of those things, nor would his meager funds have covered their purchase. He would have to work quickly and hope the shuttle didn't break down fully and lose power. If it did, he would be forced to trek to the outpost and beg for shelter.
"This is why I'm a city boy," he said, teeth chattering as he walked along the wreckage. "A city boy from a temperate climate zone."
His boots crunched on detritus in the snow as he walked around the area. Pieces of warped metal from a spaceship hull. This was the place.
The snow was packed from other people's feet, so Kenji didn't need special shoes to get around, but he grimaced at this further evidence that this spot had already been thoroughly scavenged. He stopped at a hole in the hull, the dark interior warped and broken with pieces torn from the ceiling to dangle down. It reminded him of a stalactite-filled cavern he'd once seen on a vid.
Most of the boot prints led to this spot. Kenji continued around the wreck, hoping to find a less obvious place where he might enter and find choice items that hadn't yet been looted.
His comm beeped.
"Already?" he answered.
"If you wish to know if that aircraft is already approaching," Kay said, "the answer is yes. It is coming here, not to the outpost."
The breeze shifted, carrying the distant roar of an engine. Frustration bubbled up inside Kenji as he glowered at the southern sky where an unremarkable gray shuttle had grown visible. It did appear to be heading for this clifftop.
"Do you wish to flee?" Kay asked.
"No, damn it. We just got here, and this is Kingdom land, a park open to the public. We're hikers exploring an interesting wreck in the middle of these geologically interesting mountains that naturally draw tourists such as ourselves. We're not doing anything wrong." His self-righteousness might have been less pronounced if that had been a military or Kingdom Guard shuttle approaching.
"Do you want to know if I wish to flee?"
"Not really."
"Your disregard for the feelings of robots is noted."
"Just watch my back if a bunch of thugs in combat armor spring out of it and attack me."
"Do you wish me to wave my wrench menacingly at them?"
"Yes." Kenji continued to tramp around the wreck, but he tugged a rifle off his shoulder, an old-fashioned firearm full of gunpowder cartridges. It had been all he could scrounge up after the Main Event snapped his previous rifle like a stale breadstick. "And then pilot the shuttle over to land on them."
There were fewer footprints on the back side of the wreck. Only one set, small and maybe belonging to a woman. They appeared fresh, and he looked in the direction the air bike had gone, but it had disappeared from view.
The shuttle continued its inexorable approach. Kenji hoped he wasn't being an idiot for staying, but the incoming craft didn't have weapons or appear that threatening. It might even be another rental shuttle. If it carried another scavenger—or hiker—maybe they could share the wreck.
Kenji spotted an open hatch and climbed up a drift toward it. A gust of wind kicked up snow—the shuttle was hovering right over the wreck now. He eyed it warily, hoping it didn't have weapons that he'd missed on first glance.
In case the pilot was looking down at him via a display, Kenji smiled up and waved. "Might as well be friendly with the competition, right?"
"Was that question for me?" Kay asked, reminding Kenji that their comm link was open.
"No, but I trust you agree."
As he scrambled up to the hatch, the gray shuttle landed not far from Kenji's rented craft. It was about the same size, its sides dented and its paint faded with age. The name of a competing rental company stamped the side above a picture of a shuttle flying toward a sun with a comet streaming from its backside.
Kenji had reached the hatch and thought about flinging himself inside, but the twisted mess of a corridor promised that he wouldn't be able to advance into the interior quickly. Fresh snow prints dotted the tilted deck—from the woman? He was surprised drifts of snow hadn't made their way in. Maybe the hatch had only recently been opened.
"The limited scanners of this vessel are not allowing me to determine how many people are aboard that shuttle," Kay said.
"So it could be an entire mercenary company, or it could be an old man with a divining rod?"
"That is correct."
The new shuttle powered down, and its hatch opened. Kenji shifted his rifle so it wouldn't be visible and waited to see who or what would come out.
Two people in civilian parkas with the hoods pulled up stood on the threshold. If they carried weapons, they weren't as obvious as a rifle. Steps unfolded from the craft and lowered to the ground. The pair descended in tandem, stopped, and peered straight at him.
"Hello." Kenji offered his best friendly wave again. "Are you here to explore this fine mountainous park?"
They looked at each other without speaking. He trusted they were communicating chip-to-chip. Even if he'd avoided the technology all of his life, he was familiar with it. His glasses replicated it, for the most part, though he had to speak queries or laboriously enter them via the eye movement reader. He couldn't simply think commands into a chip attached to his brain.
"What are you doing here?" one of the figures finally spoke, looking at him again. It was a woman. She sounded young.
He supposed women could lead scavenging careers too. He'd certainly come across female thieves.
"Exploring," he said.
"You seek to steal from the Celestial Dart?" the other one asked, another woman with a young voice.
Kenji could make out a wisp of blonde hair escaping from her hood.
"The Celestial Dart?" He pointed at the wreck. "I don't know if that was its name, but I think it's just a hunk of metal now."
"It belongs to our people." One of the women pushed back her hood, revealing fingernails that looked like chips of metal, cold mechanical eyes, and a strange implant at her temple that ran halfway down the side of her face.
Astroshaman.
A chill ran through Kenji as the other woman also pushed back her hood, both of them oblivious to the cold, and gazed at him with the same inhuman eyes. The astroshamans had been responsible for the second invasion fleet that had bombed Odin.
Kenji swallowed. He would rather have dealt with soldiers or the police.
One woman drew a small metal box from a pocket. Kenji started to swing his rifle toward them, but astroshamans or not, he couldn't shoot women his age. Instead, he sprang through the hatchway so he wouldn't be in their line of sight.
But whatever that box was sent a blue beam of energy arching around the hull of the ship and through the hatchway. It slammed into his chest like a lightning bolt.
Pain ricocheted through his body as he lost control of his limbs and almost his bladder. His heart throbbed, threatening to explode in his chest. Terror clenched him, but he couldn't run away. He couldn't do anything at all except drop to the deck and flop around like a dying fish.
The beam winked out, but his body kept twitching, his heart beating hard and erratically against his ribs. The pain faded slowly, but many long seconds passed before his spastic tremors subsided. He gasped in air, only realizing then that his lungs hadn't been working, and he hadn't been breathing. A headache pulsed behind his eyes.
"I take it back," he groaned, rolling onto his side and hunting for his rifle. "I can shoot women."
As he wrapped his hand around the barrel, a shadow fell across him. One of the women had climbed up and stood in the hatchway. With that little metal box in her hand, her thumb on the button. Hell.
Kenji had little doubt that it could kill him.
"I think there's been a misunderstanding," he said.
"You are not a lowlife opportunist attempting to capitalize on our people's misfortune by scavenging what your kind may deem valuable technology from our ship?"
"No, noooo. Of course not. Is that what you thought?" Kenji clutched a hand to his chest, in part to feign innocence, and in part to massage his heart back into a normal rhythm. He didn't have the medical background to know if that would work, but soothing rubbing seemed like a good idea. "This is a misunderstanding."
"What is your purpose here?" She eyed his rifle.
Kenji crossed hiker and tourist off his list of possible answers. They would never fall for it.
"I'm a bounty hunter." That would explain his rifle, anyway. "I'm up here after a fugitive. He's a lowlife opportunist scavenger. Very bad man. You should appreciate that I'm trying to capture him and turn him over to the law."
She squinted suspiciously at him. "What is his name?"
Uh, good question.
"Tenebris Rache." Kenji used the name of the first criminal who wasn't his father that popped into his mind. "I trust you've heard of him? He used to be a pirate captain loathed by the Kingdom, but now he's lost his ship and his crew. He supposedly died in the very battle that crashed these ships, but rumors suggest that he may have survived. Lots of people are willing to pay for his head." All that was true, at least according to the news and all the press coverage there had been after the battle. Kenji had no idea what had happened of late to the infamous pirate, but he wagered the astroshamans didn't know either. "I believe that he's out here and has resorted to scavenging. Opportunistically. Like the lowlife that he is."
She kept squinting at him. Was she buying any of this?
Maybe he should have chosen someone who wasn't known and detested in all of the Twelve Systems. Someone that a young guy like him could reasonably capture. Given that she'd taken him down with a button, she probably doubted his ability as a bounty hunter.
The silence stretched. Her metallic irises appeared glazed and unfocused, but she was likely communicating with her twin out there. Why astroshamans didn't get implants and prosthetics that looked like normal human bits and bobs, he didn't know, but it was like they wanted to appear freaky.
"You seek out and capture people?" she finally asked. "For a living?"
"Absolutely. I'm not a veteran, admittedly." As in, he'd never collected a single bounty. His father had trained him well enough that he probably could become a bounty hunter—so long as he could avoid people with metal boxes of death—but it wasn't a career he'd ever longed to pursue. "I'm out to make a name for myself by getting Rache."
He kept an eye on her as he sat up.
A clink-clunk came from somewhere in the depths of the wreck. Kenji hoped that was an icicle falling or the ship settling and not another scavenger to deal with. There weren't any more ships or air bikes parked out there, so it shouldn't be, but well-off people sometimes had slydar hulls that camouflaged their craft, so he couldn't assume that they were alone. And where was Kay? He hadn't spoken for some time, despite their comm line being open. Was he waving a wrench at the other woman, or had she pressed a button and zapped him?
"It is unlikely you will find Tenebris Rache," the woman said. "If you do find him, he will kill you. The Kingdom and countless bounty hunters have attempted to capture or slay him for many years. However, should you succeed, our people would reward you. He has vexed us."
"He's vexed a lot of people."
"Yes, but we believe he is dead. There is no need for you to seek him. But we are seeking someone. How much do you charge to find a person? This person must be captured alive."
"Er, what?"
"One of our kind has escaped with knowledge that is important to us. It is, however, difficult for us to go among your people. In other systems, humanity lets astroshamans pass with only wary glances and snide comments. Here, in the xenophobic Star Kingdom, it is a different matter, and we find it difficult to enter your population centers without costumes. If you are a bounty hunter, you must have ways to track people down and find them."
"Yes, of course." Kenji pushed himself to his feet, slowly picking up his rifle so she wouldn't find the movement threatening. He was careful not to aim it in her direction. "But I'm already on a mission."
"A suicidal mission that you will fail."
"But if I succeed, I'll make a lot of money and, even more important, make a name for myself."
"You will not succeed."
Kenji opened his mouth to argue further, but what was the point of defending his fictitious story to death?
"Despite the recent thwarting of our plans, we are not financially insolvent or without means," the woman said. "What payment do you require for finding a fugitive?"
"Some guy has committed a crime against your people?"
"Some woman. As I said, she has escaped with knowledge."
"Epically criminal."
She squinted at him again. "It is considered so among our people. She had no right to take the knowledge. It is also possible she means to betray us in some way. We must have her back. We will pay fifty thousand of your Kingdom crowns for her to be returned to us alive."
"Fif—" Kenji choked on the amount. "Fifty thousand, you said?" He'd never had even fifty hundred crowns. Right now, his net worth was closer to fifty.
"Yes. We will pay you five percent up front and ninety-five when you return her to us. I assume physical currency is acceptable?"
Hell, yes, it was. That would be enough to pay the shuttle owner back with plenty to spare.
Once more, she delved into her pocket. He tensed, hopeful that she was pulling out money and didn't intend to zap him again. She withdrew a wad of Kingdom crown bills and a compact comm device.
"We must have her back within the month. If you agree to the terms, you will take this and contact us when you have captured her. We will meet you at a designated area to pay the remainder of your fee and pick her up. Do you agree to the terms?"
Uh, did he?
He'd never bounty hunted before, and these astroshamans were no slouches, but what if their missing person was the woman he'd seen flying away on the air bike? He might be able to find and capture her before sunset. It could be the easiest money he'd ever earned, and it wasn't as if he cared one way or another about astroshamans hunting other astroshamans. For all he knew, these people had been the ones to bomb his last home.
"You came up here looking for her?" Kenji asked. "Was she in the battle?"
"She was in one of our ships in orbit, as were the rest of us siblings, during the fighting on your planet, but..." The woman glanced at her twin, who was doing who knew what outside—Kenji couldn't see her from the corridor. "Our leader thought she might come here. This ship has meaning to us."
Kenji thought about telling them he'd seen her, but he didn't know that he truly had. That could have been any woman on an air bike. This was clearly the hot spot of the Arctic Islands. Besides, it would be better to catch her himself. And collect the bounty. With fifty thousand crowns, he could finally buy passage on a ship heading out of the Kingdom. A luxury ship. He and Kay could head off to a new life, to a system where nobody had heard of his loathsome father.
"I can find her," Kenji said. "What's her name, what's she look like, and I'll take any other information you can give me."
"Her name is Mari, and she looks like us. We are sisters, all born of genetic material from the same mother and father."
"Bunch of test-tube twins, huh?"
"There are more than two of us, so that term is inaccurate, but as I said, we share identical genetic material. We are, however, all very different." She sniffed. "Tari and I would never leave our people."
"I'm sure your parents appreciate your loyalty."
She stepped outside, waving for him to follow. "Loyalty is expected among our people."
Before Kenji could step out of the corridor, a clatter-clank came from behind him, followed by a buzz. He whirled as he sprang out of the hatchway, anticipating weapons fire.
Four drones flew around obstacles in the corridor toward the exit. Kenji raised his rifle but hesitated. Were these astroshaman devices? Drones made from the very technology he sought to find and sell?
No, they looked like typical Kingdom drones, and each one was carrying either a bag or some device clutched in mechanical graspers. They had to be someone's remote scavenging tools. Which meant that he and the astroshamans weren't alone out here.
As the drones buzzed out the hatchway, the sister, who hadn't yet given a name, ducking, Kenji lifted his rifle to fire at one of them. But his brain caught up with his reflexes and reminded him that he had a new gig. He didn't need to worry about another scavenger taking things from the wreck. Besides, someone in a nearby ship would be irked if he fired at their drones.
But it didn't matter. The astroshaman produced a pistol and shot.
"Those are our belongings!" she yelled, pelting the rearmost offender with energy blasts similar to but different from DEW-Tek bolts. The drone exploded like a grenade going off.
The other sister was at the base of Kenji's shuttle—with Kay flat on his back at her feet.
Kenji cursed and ran down the snow drift, hardly caring about the drones. "That's my robot. Back away from him!"
The three remaining drones flew past the shuttles, then over the cliff where they descended out of sight.
The astroshaman woman next to Kay frowned and faced him, one of the metal boxes in her hand.
Kenji ground his teeth, lifted his hands, and made himself politely say, "I would prefer it if you not damage my robot, ma'am."
Was it too late? Kay wasn't moving. Maybe he'd also been zapped with that current, and it had fried his chip.
"Especially if I'm going to be working for you," he finished.
"The robot was going to attack me," the woman said.
"That's not in his programming. I assure you it was a bluff, that he waved nothing more menacing than a wrench, and only because he thought it would protect me."
The astroshaman he'd been making deals with ran past Kenji to peer over the side of the cliff. She was still clenching her pistol, her mouth twisted in righteous anger. Kenji was glad she'd believed him when he'd said he wasn't a scavenger.
"Repairing him will be a simple matter," the closer woman said.
Kenji shook his head, lifted the inert but heavy Kay, and dragged him into the shuttle. The roar of an engine came from somewhere below the edge of the cliff. The drones' owner? And his ship?
As Kenji settled Kay on the deck, the faint buzzes of weapons fire came from outside. Something slammed into the side of his shuttle, knocking him into a wall.
Cursing, he ran to the hatchway, though he wasn't foolish enough to go back outside. A huge black vulture-shaped ship hovered over the cliff, casting a winged shadow. A railgun mounted on its belly swiveled toward them. It fired at the astroshamans' shuttle, blowing a hole in the side.
The women ran for cover by the wreck, but the railgun swiveled to follow them. It fired again, blasting a blizzard's worth of ice and snow into the air.
Kenji had no idea whose ship that was, but he felt it his duty to try to protect the women, astroshamans or not. He fired at the hull, realized his bullets would do nothing against the armored vessel, and targeted the railgun. Maybe he would get lucky and blow it off.
But it was one of the twins who came up with an effective attack. She dipped into that pocket of endless wonders, threw something at the ship hovering over them, and dove away before a railgun blast slammed into her.
The projectile she'd thrown looked like little more than a large marble, but it splatted against the hull instead of clanging off. A field of sizzling blue energy spread from the device like wildfire ripping across a prairie. The railgun stopped firing, nothing but popping and crackling noises coming from its barrel.
The winged ship wheeled away, soaring over the cliff. Kenji stood on tiptoe, hoping to see it crash in the foothills far below, but after a few wobbles from its wings, it recovered and gained altitude. Before it had gone far, it disappeared from sight. He blinked. He knew about slydar hulls, and their ability to camouflage spaceships except from very close up, but he'd never witnessed such a craft before, never watched a ship disappear before his eyes.
He tensed, afraid it would bank and come back to attack again. But the clifftop grew silent.
The astroshamans tugged at the hems of their parkas, then smoothed them, the gestures so similar that Kenji was sure the word twins applied just fine to them. Even if there were more than two. They weren't quite identical, but they were very similar. If this Mari looked like them, identifying her wouldn't be a problem.
"Is the woman you want to catch armed as well as you two are?" Kenji asked.
"She did not leave our base without resources."
He'd been afraid of that.
|
Asylum - Lindsay Buroker.txt
| 4 |
From the icy tundra behind the military aircraft hangar, Mari sat on her air bike and contemplated the gray smoke rising from the mountains. Unless she was mistaken, it originated from the clifftop she had just searched. Was someone bombing the wreck? Whoever had been approaching in a shuttle as she'd left?
When she'd heard the craft flying in, she'd hurried to leave, not wanting anyone to spot her up there. She had no idea if the Kingdom military had placed some claim on the wreck and would drive off—or shoot—trespassers. Someone had spent a lot of time up there, scavenging and looting the remains.
Fortunately, they hadn't thought of the science labs as places that held valuables. Mari had found some of her equipment, including her prototype terraformer. The compact spherical device didn't look like much from the outside, but it held a tiny fusion reactor and had the power to break down the surface layers on a hundred square miles of land, creating rich fertile soil and depositing seeds and growth-enhancing enzymes. Essentially, it could turn a portion of the inhospitable surface of a moon or planet into a thriving garden in a much shorter time period than traditional terraforming technologies.
She was proud of the work she'd done on it and relieved she'd found it still tucked in a cabinet in her lab. By offering this technology to the Kingdom, maybe she truly had a shot at winning asylum. A place in their world and protection from her family, who would doubtless prefer Mari shared nothing with humanity.
The hangar door rattled and started rolling open.
Mari hit reverse on her air bike and nudged it back around the corner. She pulled out a device that activated the same astroshaman stealth technology that hid their base in the Kingdom forest. The air shimmered faintly to her energy-detecting implants as a flexible camouflaging shield enrobed her and the bike. Unless someone came very close, they shouldn't see her.
Though the technology was powerful, it was good not to move when it was activated, so Mari put the bike on idle as the first of two aircraft roared out of the hangar. Their hulls were painted gray and blue, Kingdom military colors.
As soon as they took off, heading to the mountains to check out the smoke, Mari rode her bike into the hangar. Two aircraft remained parked inside, with voices coming from the other side of them.
She nudged her bike into a corner near stacks of supply crates so she could wait for her opportunity to catch a ride back to the mainland. Earlier, she'd spied on the soldiers and read their schedule, so she knew the same cargo ship that had flown up here to deliver supplies should have been emptied and would be heading back soon.
The voices, both belonging to women, continued on, talking about a mess needing to be cleaned up. At first, Mari took it literally and assumed some chemical spill might be endangering the hangar, but she didn't smell anything, nor did the women or any cleaning robots come out to attend to messes.
She nudged the bike forward, glad the battery-powered craft ran silently, and found the women—two soldiers in parkas and uniforms—pointing at a wall display. It showed the gray smoke wafting from the snowy clifftop.
The feed had to be coming from the camera of one of the aircraft flying closer, for it was a much better view than Mari had gotten from outside the hangar. Now, she could make out a gray shuttle perched on the cliff—surprisingly, not the one she'd seen arriving as she'd taken off on the bike. It was smoking, recently damaged by weapons fire. More damage appeared to have been done to the Celestial Dart too, though she couldn't imagine why.
Two figures in parkas came into view. They were working inside an open panel on the back of the shuttle, probably trying to repair it for flight. An uneasy feeling came over Mari. Even though she couldn't see their faces, they oozed familiarity.
One turned toward the camera, a pale face coming into view for a second, before poking the other. They ran inside, closing the hatch, and an instant later, the shuttle took off.
Mari sank low on her bike. That had been one of her sisters. No, two of her sisters.
How had they known she would come here? Mother must have sent them—and mentioned their sunrise conversation. If their shuttle—that was some rented Kingdom craft, not astroshaman technology—hadn't been damaged, would they have already found her?
Mari closed her eyes. Her escape had barely begun. She couldn't let them drag her back.
Now that her mother knew she wanted to leave the community, she wouldn't let Mari out of her sight again. She would never get another chance at freedom. She hadn't even done anything on her list yet.
She'd meant to acquire chocolate for her trip up here, or some other delectable human pastry or dessert she'd read about, but she'd received so many odd looks from people in Zamek City that she hadn't dared do something as prosaic as grocery shopping. On top of that, there were so many people in the Kingdom's capital. Millions of them in the streets, on the magtrains, in the subways, walking along sidewalks, shopping in stores. And all speaking. So few had communicated with each other via their chips. It had been overwhelming to her senses.
"Didn't know this duty station would have so much action," one of the women said, still watching the display.
"The only action I've gotten is in Sander's bunk."
"Lucky you. He's a cutie. So earnest, so handsome."
"He's earnest in bed too. If I had to get stuck up here in this armpit of an outpost, at least it was with someone with a squeezable ass."
They shared snickers.
It took Mari a moment to realize they were talking about sex. Even though she'd read books and seen vids, she hadn't been around people in sexual relationships very much. There were others like her in their teens and twenties who'd been birthed and raised in the astroshaman community and had an interest in such things, but far more were oldsters who'd been born into a normal human existence and come to the Advanced Path later in life. None of them seemed like promising partners, and most of them considered themselves above human biological needs now that they were ascending up the Path. They were experts at frowning with disapproval when any of the youths experimented with amorous activities.
"Be glad you've got a bed buddy. All I've got are my Moon Melters, and I'll have to ration my stash." The soldier rattled a bag of what must have been a food item, for she dug out a piece to toss into her mouth. "If what we unloaded from the supply ship is any indication, we're not getting anything good for our entire tour of duty."
"You don't think the crate labeled firm cakes sounded promising?"
"Not when I dropped it on my foot and it weighed fifty pounds. No good cake could be that heavy."
"Military rations are meant to be filling. And firm."
"Like cement bricks."
The ding of a comm unit came from another room, and the women trooped through a doorway and into a corridor of offices. They'd left something on a table under the display. A package. The aforementioned Moon Melters? What was that? Candy? Chocolate?
Mari eyed the cargo ship she needed to sneak into with her bike. The hatch was closed and likely locked. Her software for thwarting electronic locks would take a minute or so to run, and the soldiers might come back any second, so she shouldn't dawdle. She knew that, but her curiosity turned that package of candy into a neodymium super magnet.
With great willpower, she made herself ride over to the cargo ship first. She rested her hand against the lock while running a program to find the right combination of electronic signals to order it to open.
From her spot, she could see the label on the candy bag. It was the package of Moon Melters.
The women hadn't returned yet. Maybe she could—
A breeze whispered through the hangar door, bringing the distant sound of an engine. The soldiers returning?
The lock thunked open, the hatch unsealing and rising as a ramp lowered. She drove her bike inside, a much easier feat than it had been when the cargo area had been full of crates. Only a few crates remained to be unloaded—or maybe they were going back to the mainland for some reason.
Mari tucked her bike against the wall beside them, stepped off, and trotted to the open hatch. She paused on the ramp to look back.
Since she was carrying her cloaking device with her, the bike was now visible. Visible and blatantly out of place in the cargo hold. Any soldier peeking inside would be puzzled about where it had come from. And the sound of an approaching engine was getting louder. The aircraft had to be angling for the hangar.
"This will just take a second," she whispered, trusting her cloaking technology would continue to make her hard to detect.
As Mari hopped to the ground and ran across the hangar to the table, the display continued to show footage of the cliff. At least one of the military aircraft remained there, recording the area around the wreck. Her sisters must have repaired their shuttle well enough, for it had successfully taken off. Was it possible they knew where she was and were heading here?
"Can't dawdle," she whispered.
Mari picked up the package of Moon Melters. It was nearly full. Another reason not to linger. The soldiers would surely return soon for their prize.
She dumped several of the items into her palm. They were brown lumps and didn't look as appealing as she had expected. They reminded her of animal droppings more than moon rocks. She sniffed the open package, debating if the faintly waxy scent promised something delicious. The contents did smell sweet. Wasn't there a human expression about appearances—and perhaps scents—being deceiving?
The engine roared closer, and she spun, about to run back into the shuttle with her prize, but she realized she was stealing candies without paying for them. A twinge of guilt came over her. It was a small theft, but...
As she fished into her pockets, depositing the candies and seeking some barter of equal value that she could leave, the pitch of the engine changed. It was landing outside instead of flying into the hangar. Maybe she had a couple more seconds.
She couldn't leave any of her weapons or various tools behind as payment. They had far more value than lumpy brown candies, and she would need them in her adventures. Her fingers brushed a wrapped rectangular item. Ah ha.
She laid a ration bar on the table. Her people made them out of the edible mushrooms and algae they could easily grow on their spaceships. They weren't particularly appealing, but they were nutritionally substantive. A soldier would appreciate such a gift.
Mari turned to run back but spotted someone standing in the hangar doorway, someone with a rifle pointing at her. The young man with bronze skin, short black hair, and intent brown eyes wasn't what she'd expected. He definitely wasn't an astroshaman or anyone her sisters or mother would have sent. Judging by his mishmash of clothing, none of it appearing warm enough for this climate, he wasn't a soldier either.
With her camouflage activated, he should have struggled to see her, but that didn't seem to be the case. He was looking right at her.
Only then did she realize she was standing in front of the display. Her technology could hide her effectively against stationary objects, but the movement on the display had to be a challenge for it to match itself to. He was squinting, so she doubted he could see her well. She risked sliding to the side.
His eyebrows flew up, and the rifle followed her, but its aim was less certain once she was out from in front of the display.
"Stop right there!" It was a whisper instead of a shout, immediately making her positive that he'd sneaked into the area too—and that the soldiers would object to his presence. "I need to... talk to you."
Sure, he did. With a firearm.
Was this another scavenger who wanted some astroshaman technology? Mari had the urge to sprint toward the cargo ship, but fast movement would also make it difficult for her cloaking technology to compensate. She made herself ease soundlessly toward the open hatch.
He glanced at the door leading to the offices, frowned briefly at the bar on the table next to the rest of the candies, and stepped warily into the hangar. He murmured something into a comm link too quietly for her to hear the words, then trotted in her direction. Though he kept his rifle up, he didn't fire at her.
She pulled out a compact stunner, opting for that instead of the more painful—and potentially deadly—arc blaster, one of her people's favored defensive weapons. Thus far, she didn't know who this man was, but if she started killing Kingdom citizens, the probability of her gaining asylum on their world would plummet.
Unfortunately, he headed straight for the cargo ship and the open hatch. She picked up her pace, but he got there first, springing lightly onto the ramp and glancing inside. His glance turned into a second look, and she knew he'd spotted her air bike. She had no choice but to stun him.
But a second before she squeezed the trigger, he stepped inside. She was off to the side and couldn't see into the hold yet.
The sound of another engine grew audible. The display on the wall had turned off. The aircraft that had been recording the clifftop had to be flying back. Had the second one chased off her sisters? Mari hoped so.
She hesitated beside the cargo ramp, debating if she wanted to leap inside and stun the man or simply wait for him to come out. If the soldiers returned and found an unconscious body in their ship, they might start searching for her. Her cloaking technology fooled human eyes well, but it wouldn't stand up well to a hangar full of soldiers with scanners.
A soft clack came from inside. Was he messing with her bike?
Mari leaned around the corner of the hatchway, finger on the trigger, but he startled her both by being right inside and by throwing something at her. A gritty brown powdery substance struck her full in the face and plastered her open eyes and mouth. Whatever it was surprised her with a sweet taste, but that didn't keep her from stumbling back.
She heard a thump as he leaped down from the ramp, and she fired at him. But with the gritty stuff tearing her eyes, she missed and hit the side of the cargo ship. Her attacker bowled into her, probably seeing her easily in the middle of a brown cloud of powder that hadn't yet dissipated. Before she could shoot again, he caught her around the waist and knocked her to the ground.
A strong hand tore the stunner from her grip and flung it across the hangar. It clattered far out of her reach as it bounced across the cement floor. He wasn't a huge hulk of a man, and Mari tried to buck him free, but he was strong, tenacious, and had the body weight advantage, so he succeeded in pinning her to the floor. As she squirmed, she maneuvered her hand toward a pocket, not the one with the candy but the one with her arc blaster.
"I don't want to hurt you," he whispered, squeezing her tightly as he tried to flip her over and pull her arms behind her back. He managed to get her onto her side, but she fought mightily. She needed to free a hand to grab her weapon. "But your sisters hired me," he added. "They said you went rogue with their information."
"I don't know what that means," Mari growled, jerking her arm free, "but it's not true."
"They said you're a fugitive. They're paying to get you back."
"I'm not a fugitive. You don't know anything about it. Let me go."
Mari managed to clip him in the stomach with her elbow. Judging by his gasp and pained grunt, that might have been lower than his stomach. His grip loosened enough for her to grab her arc blaster.
She spun onto her back, startling him, and for a moment, they were face to face in some parody of a lovers' embrace. He must have realized she'd pulled her weapon free, for he grabbed her wrist. But she fired first, the burst of energy slamming into him like an electrical current and knocking him back.
"Not again!" he gasped around jaws spasming open and closed.
Mari scrambled away as he rolled on the floor, his entire body jerking and flopping about, his face contorted in pain. If he hadn't just tackled her, she might have felt sympathy for him, but anyone willing to hunt someone down for money, not knowing if they were innocent or guilty, deserved some pain.
Aware of the roar of the engine growing ever louder, Mari sprinted for her stunner. She released the button on her arc blaster as she picked up the less lethal weapon.
The spasms of his body lessened, and from flat on his back, he managed to say, "Thank God. That thing is horrible."
She stepped into his view and pointed the stunner at his face. "I am not rogue."
"Uh." His bleary eyes focused on the muzzle of the weapon. "You didn't run away from your people with top-secret valuable information?"
"I did not run. I walked away with only the information in my brain."
"Is it top-secret and valuable?"
She opened her mouth to deliver an indignant answer, but Mother and her siblings might genuinely feel that way. It had been almost ten years since she'd finished her schooling and moved from the derivative work of replicating others' experiments to running her own and creating devices such as the prototype terraformer.
He must have found her pause condemning, for his wary gaze turned into a suspicious squint, and she could see him trying to figure out how to relieve her of her weapon. She stunned him. He only had time to get half a curse out before losing consciousness.
"Of course the information in my brain is valuable, you idiot." She should have said that before she shot him.
Alas, there wasn't time to pin a note with the message to his chest. The engine was roaring closer, and she had no doubt that the aircraft would swing into the hangar. And find the stunned man and start a search unless she could hide his inert form quickly.
Mari grabbed him under the armpits and leaned her body weight into pulling him across the floor. The upgrades to her skeletal system and a few muscular enhancements that Mother had given all of her children helped, but she was not some cybernetically enhanced supersoldier. With much grunting, under-her-breath swearing, and straining of muscles, she dragged him toward the closest stack of crates. As she got him tucked out of sight, the aircraft she had expected roared into the hangar.
Only one flew in, hopefully meaning the other was indeed chasing her sisters out of the area. Mari didn't want them to be harmed, but if they were driven all the way back to their forest base on the mainland, it might give her time to reach Zamek City again and speak with people who could grant her asylum. And if they refused... she could leave the Kingdom and try another system. Somewhere far away from bounty hunters, or whatever this man was, and her oppressive family.
Mari made sure her camouflaging device was active again and crept out from behind the crates. The pilot was hopping out of his aircraft, and she grimaced. He'd landed close to the cargo ship with its suspiciously open hatch and the also suspicious pile of brown powder that had settled to the floor.
The pilot glanced at the cargo ship, but he must have assumed that one of his fellow soldiers had left it open. Without checking inside to see her damning air bike, he trotted toward the offices.
Just as she thought she was in the clear, he paused at the table and stared down at the ration bar and the package of candies. Mari slumped against a crate. Would her guilt and need to deliver a fair trade result in the search she'd been trying so hard to avoid?
He reached for the goods but grabbed the package of candies instead of the bar. He tilted his head back, dumped the brown Moon Melters into his mouth, shoved the now-empty package in his pocket, and continued toward the offices.
Not questioning her luck, Mari made sure the bounty hunter was still unconscious, then ran toward the cargo ship. She hoped he was a criminal bounty hunter and that the soldiers would find him and have a lot of questions for him. No, maybe she didn't. That could lead them to realizing she was stowing away on their cargo ship.
The thought made her halt, run back, and find a tarp. She draped it over him like a blanket. Better they not find him at all.
With that accomplished, she hid in the cargo ship and closed the hatch. One of the crates was open that hadn't been before, and she peeked inside. The bounty hunter must have done that. A canister was open with a label that read cocoa drink mix powder.
Was that what he'd thrown at her? She wiped her face, finding some of the gritty stuff still on her nose and in her eyelashes. Someone had written past the expiration date on the top of it and several other food containers in the crate.
As minutes passed, Mari debated what she would do if the bounty hunter woke up from the stun before a pilot came back to fly the cargo ship to the mainland. But the engine soon reverberated through the deck, letting her know that it was being made ready to fly. Another minute, and it navigated out of the hangar and took to the air. Nobody had checked the cargo hold.
Thankful, Mari leaned against her air bike and pulled off her pack. She hoped the bounty hunter hadn't damaged any of her equipment, especially the terraformer.
A couple of the favorite tools she'd collected from the lab had been bent in the skirmish, and she frowned. It didn't seem right that they had survived a crash only to come to a bad end in her backpack. Hopefully, she could fix them. At least the terraformer was in an insulated box. She let out a relieved breath when she pulled out the dormant sphere, flicked it on, and the glowing indicators came to life. It was ready to terraform a planet, or at least a hundred square miles of a planet.
Who in this planet's government would appreciate such technology? Mari had been reading about the new Kingdom queen, Oku, and knew she was a scientist. A botanist by training who engineered seeds to grow plants that thrived on space stations. She would appreciate terraforming technology; Mari was certain of it. But how to get it to her?
The queen would be in her castle, guarded by hundreds of trained men and security robots who would forbid an astroshaman—or even an unknown Kingdom subject—from entering the premises. She highly doubted she could send a contact request direct to Queen Oku's chip and that she would accept it.
As she put away her device, she pulled up a digital copy of the recent bestselling novel by Kim Sato, wondering if it might have any clues as to how she could get an audience with the queen. Mari had already read it, since it was the Kingdom's rendition of the events that had led up to the battle between the Kingdom Fleet and the astroshamans, but it was mostly about Sato, Casmir Dabrowski, a couple of knights, genetically engineered cat women, and a crazy bounty hunter lady from another system. The mercenary Tenebris Rache had also featured in it. A strange collection of characters. Her mother had called it propagandistic drivel and forbidden Mari to read it. Naturally, she'd read it three times.
It occurred to her that the author was good friends with Minister Dabrowski, the man who was now dating the queen. Could he be a possible route to Oku?
No, Dabrowski also knew Mari's mother. They might have started as enemies, but now they had a truce—he'd even given her that crusher—so he might tell Mother that Mari was in his city.
Maybe Kim Sato was a better option. The novel had mentioned her home, a cottage on the Zamek University campus. Was it possible she still lived there? The book hadn't been written that long ago. A university campus would be easier to gain access to than a heavily guarded castle. And this Kim Sato was also a scientist, perhaps someone who would see the merits of a terraforming device... and an astroshaman looking to defect.
"That's the plan," Mari whispered. "Find Kim Sato, show her my equipment, show her my earnestness, and see if she can get me an audience with the queen."
Nerves tangled in her belly. It was quite possible this path would lead her to an audience with a dungeon—or a torture chamber. What if neither the queen, Sato, nor anyone else in the Kingdom believed Mari was what she said she was?
She poked into her pocket, determined to put the worries out of her mind. It would be hours before she got back to the capital, and she had a plan to follow. There was little point in fretting.
Most of the Moon Melters had fallen out during her skirmish, and she found only two sad brown nuggets with lint attached to them. She wiped them off and stuck her tongue out to taste one. The coating wasn't that appealing—she remembered the waxy scent she'd detected—and if she hadn't seen the soldier scarf down the entire bag, she might have tossed the candies away, but she plopped one into her mouth and chewed with determination. She had left her people to experience life as a human, and humans ate Moon Melters.
The candy was sweeter than the scent led her to expect, and under the layer of coating, there were crunchy pieces mixed into a gooey substance that pleased her taste buds. It took a few seconds of analysis before she decided she liked the combination.
She ate the second candy slowly, knowing it was her last. When it was gone, she was disappointed that she hadn't managed to keep more of them. If she ran into that bounty hunter again, she would let him know how inconsiderate he'd been to tackle her and send her Moon Melters flying. And then she would shoot him again. Possibly not with the stunner.
|
Asylum - Lindsay Buroker.txt
| 5 |
Kenji woke on his back, his vision blocked by something blue. He was shaking—no, shivering. The chill from cold hard cement seeped through his clothing and into his stiff body.
Before he figured out where he was, someone lifted the blue blanket off him. A tarp, he realized, feeling like a pile of lumber covered in someone's backyard.
He lifted his hands protectively, expecting soldiers with rifles or the woman—Mari—with her horrible astroshaman weapons. Kay stood looking down at him, the tarp in his metal hand, the open hangar door behind him.
"Where are the soldiers?" Kenji rolled gingerly onto his side, his entire body aching, both from the aftereffects of the stun and because he'd been left lying on a freezing floor. "And who repaired you?"
Since he'd been hoping to catch up with his prey, Kenji hadn't taken the time to run a diagnostic on Kay. When last he'd seen his robot buddy, Kay had been dented and offline, lying on the deck of their rented shuttle. He'd had a hunch Mari might plan to stow away on a military vessel heading back to the mainland—the only other place on the island where one might find a ship was a harbor that supported only ocean-going ships—and he'd been right. For all the good it had done him. He was lucky she hadn't killed him.
Some bounty hunter. Less than an hour into his mission, and his target had electrocuted him and stunned him. His father would have been so proud to see the results of Kenji's childhood training and gene enhancements.
"I waited until none of them were present in the hangar," Kay replied, "but they left the rolling door open, so it is likely they expect another aircraft, which could arrive at any time. I suggest you move swiftly and we retreat before they come out to investigate the shuttle that you opted to land distressingly close to their base."
"I didn't realize my parking spot caused you discomfort. I thought it was clever feigning mechanical failure and landing behind their satellite dish. It's about the only cover out there." Kenji stood up, wobbled, and caught himself on a nearby crate. Had Mari dragged him back here all by herself? Strong woman. He'd been foolish to take her on without more of a plan than, Stop! I want to talk! But he'd been afraid she would get out of the Arctic and be much harder to track if he didn't act quickly.
"It was not clever," Kay said. "It was brazen."
"In some contexts, the word brazen would be considered complimentary."
"Not in this context. You can imagine my alarm when I came out of my repair cycle and noticed I had not only been left on the deck of a shuttle by myself but that said shuttle was parked less than a quarter mile from the military outpost we have been seeking to avoid. Of course, as an innocent robot, I should have nothing to fear from Kingdom soldiers, but since I have been associating with a thief of late, one never knows what kind of retribution might be in store."
"I doubt they'd zap you worse than the astroshamans did." Kenji hadn't seen Kay's zapping but trusted it had been as unpleasant as the not one but two zappings he'd now received. He rubbed his aching chest at the memory.
Kay's head swiveled on its neck mount. "An aircraft has come within range of my auditory detectors."
"We should leave then." Kenji hobbled toward the door, his legs like jelly. If he had to run before the effects of the stun wore off, he would end up face-planting.
"Precisely what I've been saying. You are fortunate the soldiers have not come out to investigate our shuttle. Perhaps they have been distracted by the winged ship at the wreckage."
"Let's hope."
As they left the hangar, hustling across the packed snow and around the corner of the building, Kenji also picked up the sound of an approaching aircraft. Probably one of the two that had flown up to investigate the skirmish atop the cliff. He and Kay needed to get to the shuttle, but he worried about being spotted by the incoming pilot.
"As for repairs," Kay continued, "it is within my base-level programming to run a diagnostic via my backup CPU, should my main CPU ever be knocked offline, and issue any repairs necessary to my software and operating system before attempting to come back online. Unfortunately, I must rely on humans to hammer out dents and repair wiring."
Kenji could hear the aircraft getting closer, so he tugged Kay to the side of the hangar. They could run for the shuttle after the military craft landed inside.
"I trust you will repair me fully on the way back to civilization," Kay said. "As if being electrocuted by a crabby astroshaman wasn't bad enough, this cold is gnawing away my lubrication like a flesh-eating bacteria."
"Thank you for the imagery." Kenji pressed his back against the hangar as the aircraft flew inside. He noticed a camera on the wall above them and wondered anew how the soldiers hadn't spotted them—or their shuttle.
"Did I mention the snow? When the wind blows, the tiny crystals embed themselves in my seams. This is particularly noticeable on my left side where the gaps between my shoulder, arm, and torso panels are greater than on my right. I am not ungrateful to you, since you did bring me to life from scrap, but I do admit to a longing for a slightly more refined body."
"Many humans long for that. Join the support group."
Soft clanks sounded as the hangar door rolled closed.
"Is there a network address you can refer me to?" Kay sounded serious.
Kenji imagined an online forum where robots bitched to each other about their assembly deficits. "I'll look it up later. Come on."
He pointed toward the satellite dish and their shuttle parked behind it, hoping he could take off again without being noticed.
He and Kay made it to the dish without anyone running out of the hangar to ask who they were, and he was almost laughing at how easy it had been to get in and out—given that two different women had kicked his ass today, he decided smugness wasn't called for—when they rounded the shuttle and came face to face with two soldiers in parkas. One of them, a man, had forced open the hatch and was about to step inside, and his cohort, a woman, was pointing a rifle right at Kenji.
Kenji halted so quickly that Kay bumped into him. The armed woman scowled at them.
Panic flashed through Kenji, and he jerked his hands up as he groped for a way to save himself.
"Oh, there you are," he blurted loudly over the woman's demand to know who they were. Kenji pretended he hadn't heard her question and pointed to the hangar. "We were looking for someone in there. I was hoping one of you fine soldiers might be able to help us. We came up for some sightseeing, but the shuttle we rented in the capital is flying terribly. All the way here, it was making noises and spitting plumes of black smoke like the Castle Tower geyser on its hourly eruption."
The soldiers blinked and looked at each other. Whatever they'd expected him to say, that wasn't it.
"This is one of the shuttles that was at the wreck," the woman told the man. "Sightseeing."
"Yes." Kenji could hardly deny it when they'd likely been caught on camera by the military aircraft. "But I barely got it back in the air. It's just a rental, you see. Not reliable. I'm concerned it won't make it back to the capital. Is there any chance you have a mechanic or someone here who can look at it? I can pay."
"This isn't a service station," the male soldier snapped.
"We are the only facility for a hundred miles in every direction," the woman said.
"If people wouldn't fly up here, they wouldn't need the use of facilities."
"I didn't intend to bother you," Kenji said. "As I said, I'll pay of course."
"I could use some more Moon Melters," the woman grumbled. "Someone slurped up all of mine like a vacuum robot with its nozzle stuck on turbo-suck."
Kenji was familiar with the candy—he remembered finagling some from an elderly vendor in one of the public markets when he'd been a boy—but he'd been thinking more along the lines of the crowns the astroshamans had given him for his five percent. It also crossed his mind to bribe them to let him go. Would that work?
"Let's see the problem," the man said, eyeing Kenji suspiciously.
"It'll be apparent if you turn it on. And you're welcome to do that. You know the old saying. He who has the biggest gun does whatever the hell he pleases."
"If only that were true." The man climbed inside, leaving the woman still pointing her weapon at Kenji.
He kept his hands up and attempted to look innocent.
A gust of wind sent snow skidding across the tundra. Kay sighed.
"Uneven gaps?" Kenji asked.
"You know my difficulties well."
"Especially since you've been so kind as to make me aware of them. Repeatedly."
The shuttle started up with a hiccup, two shudders, and an uneven rumble. A vent spat enough black smoke that the woman stepped back, as if afraid the craft would explode. It did seem to be a possibility.
"You flew here in this thing?" She pointed her rifle at it. "You must have really wanted to sightsee."
"I find astroshaman technology fascinating. They're a strange but interesting people, don't you agree?"
"They can all go to hell," the man called from inside the shuttle. "They demolished entire blocks in several of our cities while trying to steal an artifact that was rightfully ours. If I ever see one of their kind again, I'll shoot 'em between the eyes."
"You might want to be careful calling them interesting." The woman was less vitriolic, but her eyes were cold, their focus back on Kenji.
"Yes, of course. It's really more their technology that calls to me than them per se." Though one was calling to him now. The one worth fifty thousand crowns.
More plumes of black smoke came out of the exhaust vent. The male soldier leaned out to look at it. "Guess the kid isn't lying after all."
"We believe in being forthright and honest and doing the right thing," Kay said.
Kenji nodded. "It's true."
"Uh huh. Bunch of scavengers." The man hopped out with a toolkit and scanner, and opened the engine panel in the back of the craft.
"You're lucky," the woman said. "In addition to being an expert candy thief and a mediocre pilot, Corporal Sock is our aircraft mechanic."
"I don't know how you're so sure it was me," Sock said, his voice losing the frostiness from the astroshaman discussion. "There aren't even any working cameras in the hangar."
"You'll eat anything sweet. Even the rock-hard and rock-heavy military firm cakes that keep coming with our rations."
"The chocolate chunk cakes aren't so bad."
"True. I used one to squash an arctic wolf spider in my shower the other day. Loathsome thing. You wouldn't think the original colonists would have felt the need to bring the embryos of so many of Old Earth's species to Odin."
"I'm sure arctic wolf spiders fulfill an important ecological niche," Sock said.
"The niche under my five-pound firm cake, yes."
Kenji looked at Kay, amazed at how chatty these soldiers were—and that the corporal was actually doing some repairs to the shuttle. He'd been certain they would throw him in whatever the tiny outpost's equivalent of a jail was. Probably a storage closet full of these dubious firm cakes.
If they truly helped him and let him go, he would have to reassess his opinion of the military. As someone who'd grown up on the wrong side of the law—thanks, Father—he was predisposed to mistrust and dislike anyone in a uniform.
"They shouldn't be renting this thing out to anyone. The parts are older than I am." Sock pulled out an air filter choked with black particles and crud. "Possibly older than anyone is."
"The life-extension treatments available in other systems mean there are some pretty old people out there," the woman said.
Sock blew off the filter the best he could and inserted it again. "I stand by my statement."
He tweaked a few more things, grumbling about the lack of replacement parts, then closed the panel. "It might get you back to the capital. Fly slow. Don't stop to sightsee along the way."
"Did he steal anything from the wreckage?" the woman asked, cocking an eyebrow toward Kenji.
"Not that I saw," Sock said.
Only then did it occur to Kenji that his invitation to have the soldier repair the shuttle had also allowed him to snoop inside.
"All right. You and your dilapidated robot can go." The woman pointed toward the hatch.
"Dilapidated?" Kay protested. "I am a perfectly serviceable robotic companion. The dents I have received while assisting my human creator in battle are badges of honor."
"Is that corrosion?" She waved at the piece of copper that made up his abdomen.
"It is a patina that adds character to my housing that other robots lack."
"Uh huh."
Kenji patted Kay, whispered a low, "Sh," then told the soldiers, "Thank you for your help."
"You're lucky it was a slow day," the woman said. "We only had four scavenger ships to chase off. I recommend you don't come back. It can be dangerous up here."
"Just ask the spiders." Sock winked at Kenji before putting away the toolkit and walking toward the hangar with his colleague.
"We got lucky today," Kenji said when he and Kay were back in the shuttle and taking off.
"That is an interesting statement from a man I recently found unconscious under a tarp."
"You didn't find me dead under the tarp. I consider that lucky." Kenji rubbed his achy chest again. "I may have underestimated this Mari. Given the reputation astroshamans have, it's surprising she didn't kill me."
"Will you continue to pursue her?"
"For fifty thousand crowns? You better believe it. That's life-changing money for someone like me." And, dear God, how he wanted his life to change. "We are going to have to get some better weapons before confronting her again." He wondered how much it would cost him to get a stunner, energy nets, and whatever might be out there for thwarting the fancy astroshaman technology that could make her invisible to the naked eye. Had he truly been a bounty hunter, he would have had all of those things and more. "It was rash of me to try to capture her without even a stunner."
"Some would even say foolish."
"But my loyal robot companion wouldn't be so insulting."
"Hm."
Kenji set course for the mainland and eventually Zamek City. Maybe it was his imagination, but the shuttle seemed to jerk and wobble less after the mechanic's brief tinkering.
He wondered what the soldiers would have done if his story about needing repairs hadn't been as convincing. Or if they'd caught him and Mari fighting in their hangar. Their frostiness toward astroshamans might have made them shoot her outright and not with a stunner. Since she'd had the opportunity to kill him and hadn't, he wasn't inclined to want her dead. Also, her sister had stipulated that she be brought back alive for the knowledge in her head. If Kenji wanted his reward money, he couldn't let anyone kill Mari.
"You have set course for Zamek City," Kay said. "Do you believe she will go there?"
"I'm guessing the military cargo ship she's stowing away on is going back there. They have a huge base north of the city, between the urban area and the launch loop. I think most of the military supplies for the continent—and the arctic outpost—are distributed from there."
"Since she has an air bike, could she not open the hatch and let herself out at any point along the way? There are numerous cities along the coast north of the capital, as well as towns inland."
"That's a good point."
Kenji thought of her rental bike and the stickers he'd seen on the back. He'd gotten a picture of them, so he brought them up on his glasses display and murmured a search query to look for matches on the public network.
"That blazing-engines sticker is from Rent the Stars." Kenji laughed. "She got her air bike from the same place we got our shuttle."
Maybe, when he turned in his shuttle, he would see if he could ask—or bribe—the clerk for the ident chip of Mari's air bike. With the right software, he might be able to track her down with that.
"An interesting coincidence," Kay said.
"I think it's just that we both found the only place in the city that would rent vehicles to people without banking chips or proper identification. That's implied by the sign out front. We take gold, silver, jewelry, and trade. No questions asked!"
"Yes, but why do you think an astroshaman would have traveled to such a populated place as Zamek City? It is as likely that the police will apprehend her as they would you."
"Maybe she planned all along to get a ride on a military cargo ship leaving from Zamek City. Also, the police shouldn't have gotten a good look at me at the greenhouses. There shouldn't be a warrant out for my arrest." Or so he hoped.
"The Main Event got a good look at you."
"True, but I think he's an independent, not someone who works alongside the police. His methods are unorthodox. Meaning often illegal. They should be trying to arrest him."
Kenji rubbed his hip. Though he had bigger bruises elsewhere now, he hadn't forgotten being knocked to the ground by the over-muscled superhero. It worried him that he was heading back to the city the Main Event had told him to leave.
Only long enough to capture Mari, he told himself.
"Perhaps the police do not wish to be thrown against trees." Kay mirrored his gesture and rubbed one of the dents in his metal torso.
"We'll use some of the money the astroshaman gave me to pick up weapons and supplies so that such things will be less likely to happen in the future." Kenji started some new searches, specifically for energy nets and other tools useful for bounty hunters who didn't like to be bested by their prey.
"Are there supplies that can keep one's robot from being smashed against dendritic obstacles?"
"I think so. This catalog I dug up on the network has everything from caltrops to stunners to police flex-cuffs to armored tanks and drones to historically accurate landmines from the era of the World Wars on Old Earth."
"I believe tanks and landmines would be more likely to result in robots being smashed into dendritic obstacles than less."
"That's true. We'll stick with the stunners and flex-cuffs. Besides, tanks and landmines are out of my price range."
"As a robotic tutor designed to encourage good social development and acceptable law-abiding behavior from his charges, I won't mention my concern at the chagrin in your voice."
"I'm your creator, not your charge, so I don't think you need to feel responsible for my social development."
"That's a relief."
|
Asylum - Lindsay Buroker.txt
| 6 |
Mari did not find it difficult to locate Kim Sato's address in the directory of Zamek University's student and faculty housing, nor was there a security checkpoint that she had to navigate through to get onto the campus. But as she drove the air bike through the streets to the residential area, she noticed law-enforcement drones with cameras flying about in threes and fours.
Were they on the hunt for a criminal? Mari pulled the hood of her parka up to hide her face.
The night air wasn't as cold here as in the Arctic Islands, but it was damp and misty, so she didn't think her disguise was that out of place. Perhaps the drones disagreed. A group of four of them started following her, having no trouble keeping up with the air bike.
Maybe she was exceeding the speed limit. She forced herself to slow down, though she had the urge to crank it to top speed to evade them.
A teenage girl peddling a wheeled bicycle came from the opposite direction, several boxes and bags from shopping destinations piled precariously on a perch behind the seat. The drones buzzed off to follow her.
Odd but fortunate. Mari's plans would be seriously derailed if she were captured by the authorities. If she had any chance at being believed as someone who wanted to help the Kingdom, she had to approach the government first.
Queen Oku would never believe her story if she shared it from behind bars, even if she volunteered to be questioned with truth drugs. Judging by the general opinion on their public networks about astroshamans, they would think she had some technological—or magical and mystical—ability to thwart drugs. Which was silly, since her biological body worked the same as that of a normal human.
A scream came from behind her, and Mari halted her bike to look back. A few other students were out walking or riding in the rain, and they also froze to peer toward the noise. The girl had fallen off her bicycle, and the drones were buzzing away from her, carrying the boxes and bags that had been stacked behind her seat. How strange.
The girl sprang to her feet, shouting that the drones were stealing from her, and rode her bicycle after them, yelling for help. For a second, Mari was tempted to lend assistance—with her faster air bike, she might be able to catch up with the drones, and she did have weapons that could knock them out of the air—but that would draw attention to her. Besides, for all she knew, the girl had stolen those items, and the drones were returning them to their owners. Given that they had Campus Security written on the sides, that seemed more likely than a random theft by robots.
"I've got to stop drinking after classes," a young man nearby muttered and continued his trek to wherever he'd been going.
Once the bicyclist and the drones were out of sight, the rest of the pedestrians returned to their business. Mari brought up the campus map on her ocular implants again, the information feeding through her cranial nerves to form the image in her mind. Only six blocks to Sato's house. Good.
She rehearsed what she would say when she arrived. Greetings, I'm Mari Moonrazor—no, she had better not mention her surname. The Kingdom soldiers who'd battled the astroshamans had interacted with High Shaman Moonrazor and might not think favorably of her.
Greetings, I'm Mari, an agronomist researcher and terraforming expert who wants to defect from her people and seeks asylum in the Kingdom.
That was better. Agronomists were unthreatening and had no link specifically to high shamans. Should she tell everything to Kim Sato? She was the only conduit Mari could imagine that might lead her to the queen, but Mari suspected she would have to convince her of a lot before Sato would consider making that introduction.
Another pair of drones whizzed down the street as Mari was about to turn onto the dead-end road that led to Sato's cottage. They slowed down and hovered in the intersection. They had cameras at four points on their disc-shaped bodies, so it was only her imagination that they were watching her specifically.
Or was it? The pedestrian traffic had diminished as she'd moved into the residential area, and nobody else was around.
Reluctant to have them track her to the house, Mari drove the bike past the turnoff. They spun to follow her.
She grimaced and kept driving, hoping they would find some other more interesting target to stalk. They couldn't be after her because of her backpack, could they? She'd passed a lot of students with such packs. Granted, hers bulged with the box, tools, and equipment she had jammed inside, but it didn't look anything like a stolen shopping bag.
But the drones continued to pursue her, even as she drove down a side street. Maybe they had scanners more sophisticated than the simple visual recording cameras she'd noticed. If so, they might know she had more cybernetic parts than the typical human. But that wasn't a crime. Even here in the somewhat backward Kingdom, a place that frowned on mechanical enhancements to the body outside of prescribed medical uses, people had cybernetic parts.
Two more drones flew out of a side street ahead. They turned and flew straight toward her. Not sure if they would try to halt her or fly past, she veered into the parking lot of an apartment complex. All four drones followed her.
What was this? Mari had picked Kim Sato as a first point of contact because she'd assumed it would be easier to get onto a campus than into the queen's castle. Maybe that had been a mistake.
As she drove under trees with leafy branches extending over the sidewalk and pavement, she hoped the drones would be deterred, but she doubted it. She braced herself for them to voice orders for her to halt for a search or some such. With one hand, she surreptitiously drew her arc blaster from her pocket. It was designed to work on humans, but the electrical shock could short-circuit robots as well. And drones.
But they all had cameras, with footage that could likely be recovered even if they were wrecked, and what were the chances of her making it through a skirmish without her hood falling back?
She sped back out of the parking lot. Her bike was meant to be steered with hands on both handlebars, and it wobbled as she tried to follow a bend in the road while holding her weapon.
Without warning, all four drones zipped at her. They dove under tree branches or around the trunks like dire wolves attacking prey in the forests of Algar Nine.
Ready for them, Mari fired at the closest two. Her first shot connected, blasting the drone across the street with a satisfying zap of electricity, but her bike wobbled again, and she missed the second one. Something thumped her in the back—one of the other drones. She spun to shoot at it but pitched sideways, almost falling out of her seat.
Cursing, she halted the bike and jumped off, crouching beside it for cover as she fired again. She'd caught the first drone by surprise, but the remaining three had enough intelligence to be ready for her attacks. Her target anticipated her and zipped sideways as her blast sizzled through the air, hitting a tree branch instead. The branch cracked and fell to the street, twigs snapping and leaves flying. The scent of burning wood stung her nostrils.
Two drones flew at her from the front while the third circled behind her. She crouched low, putting her back to the bike, bumping her pack against it, and fired at that one. For some reason, they wanted to hit her from behind. She was surprised they didn't have stunner technology to deal with people they wanted to arrest. Maybe they did and they just hadn't used it yet.
She fired, her target too close to evade her in time. Her shot only clipped the drone, but that was enough to knock it ten feet. It crashed into a block of mailboxes and fell lifeless to the ground.
While she was distracted, the two others swept in again. They bumped her, one thudding against her shoulder and one the back of her head. It was so puzzling that she didn't react for a moment. Was this truly the arrest protocol here? She knocked one aside with her elbow, though striking its hard carapace hurt her more than it deterred the drone.
"Cease and desist," came a call from farther up the street.
"They're attacking me!" she blurted, bewildered as she imagined some scenario where she got in trouble for being a victim.
The two drones backed off as two wheeled security robots with humanoid torsos, heads, and arms whirred down the street.
"You are malfunctioning," one stated, speaking not to her but to her flying assailants. "Return to the drone depository."
From behind her bike, Mari watched the robots approach. The drones flew off between the trees and then over the rooftops of houses, but she wasn't convinced she would be safe from these new robots. She gripped her arc blaster, then realized they might be sophisticated enough to recognize it as astroshaman technology. She stuffed it in her pocket and groped for a story to explain what she couldn't begin to explain.
But the robots were focused on the retreating drones rather than Mari. Once they disappeared, they wheeled around and rolled back toward the main street.
Mari's mouth dangled open as she watched them go. A breeze blew the mist onto her cheeks, making her realize that her hood was down. She swore, yanking it back up. Had the robots identified her as anything other than a typical human? Had the drones?
She glanced around, hoping there weren't any pedestrians on the street. It was night, but copious street lamps illuminated the neighborhood. She didn't see anyone outside, but lights were on in several houses, and a couple of faces peered through curtains at her.
"Great."
She climbed on the air bike and drove slowly back to the main street, not wanting to catch up to the robots. With her ears straining to detect the whir of more drones, she returned to the intersection that led to Sato's cottage. It was clear of drones. Warily, she turned down the street toward the home at the end. A giant zindi tree in the yard partially blocked the cottage, but she could tell that the lights were on inside. She could also tell that a hulking black robot stood in front of the door.
No... She squinted. That wasn't a robot. It was a crusher.
It was identical to the one her mother had and, knowing how formidable the constructs were, Mari had no idea how to bypass it. The arc blaster wouldn't work, nor did she have anything else that could damage one. Even if she'd had a grenade and could blow it up, the nearly impervious crushers were capable of reassembling themselves within seconds. Not that she would have hurled explosives at the door guardian of someone she hoped to befriend. But what was she supposed to do?
Mari stopped her air bike on the sidewalk several houses away.
Since she'd read Sato's novel, she knew that a crusher was a constant companion for Minister Dabrowski, but Sato hadn't mentioned having one of her own in their adventures. She'd given the vibe, through the text, that she wasn't enamored with the killing machines, even though Dabrowski's apparently had personality and had been programmed to be a bodyguard rather than an aggressive killer. That didn't mean the one at the door was his. In the months since the book had been published, Sato might have gotten one of her own. An aggressive one.
Mari rubbed her face, wondering if this was worth it. Maybe there was someone else connected to the queen who would be easier to visit. Such as the knights that had also been a part of the events depicted in the book. Or even the genetically engineered cat woman or bounty-hunting pilot. But she had no idea if any of those people were on the planet right now. Besides, Sato was a scientist, like her, and Mari thought they would be more likely to form a kinship. Or at least an understanding. And a scientist should be rational and not as prone to jump to conclusions about astroshamans.
But this scientist was under the protection of a crusher. Mari stared glumly at the black robot, its face indistinct, only vague orifices where a human's eyes, nose, and mouth would be. She didn't know how to proceed.
The shuttle was smoking again by the time Kenji flew over the rental shop toward the landing and parking area behind the building. A crater—damage from the attacks on the capital that hadn't yet been repaired—ensured nobody parked out front. The bomb that had left it had also taken out what had once been a house-cleaning service on the same property. The sign out front had survived, but the building was missing. Meanwhile, a vehicle maintenance facility at the far end of the property had been left unscathed. The vicissitudes of the universe.
With the front parking area out of commission, the rear lot was packed. Kenji landed gingerly, setting the shuttle down among other aircraft, ground vehicles, racks of air bikes, and a random bratwurst vending cart. He eschewed the auto-park and guided them into a narrow slot, glad for his piloting skills even if he resented the man who'd instructed him. He'd only been nine or ten when he'd learned to fly, but he well remembered his father watching from the copilot's seat with his disapproving nothing-is-ever-good-enough glower firmly affixed.
"It is fortunate the shuttle is handling better," Kay said.
"If you don't mind the smoke billowing out of the back."
"Robots are indifferent to airborne particulates and gases."
"Unless they signal a swift and rapid hurtling to the ground from great heights?"
"They are concerning when they lead to that, yes," Kay said, "but our flight back to the city was without difficulty. I was able to run further diagnostics and download software updates over the network."
"It's good to be updated."
"It is. I trust you'll need my assistance to locate the astroshaman woman."
"I will." Kenji turned off the shuttle, looked for belongings to unload, and remembered that he had none. At least the wad of bills in his pocket ensured that he could buy the gear he needed to finish his task. "I'm prepared to bribe the clerk, if necessary, but the advance the astroshamans gave me won't last forever. The less I spend on bribes, the better. Let's plan for me to distract the clerk while you sidle around the counter, plug into his computer, and find out if Mari's air bike has been returned. If it hasn't, get the ident for its locator chip."
"Do you not think we could simply ask the clerk for that information?"
"The guy didn't even let me use the lavatory the last time we were here."
Kay looked over at him. "This indicates an unwillingness to share data?"
"If you're not willing to share your toilet, you're definitely not going to share data. Come on."
Kenji led Kay to the cracked and pitted walkway that took them past the crater and to the front entrance of the rental shop. One would have thought the owner would have put some caution tape around the great hole to keep customers from falling in, but other than an amusing orange cone ten feet down in the center, there were no warnings.
The buzzes and whirs of drills and other shop equipment came from the repair shop on the other side of the crater, and a surly-looking man in coveralls stood in an open side door, glaring at Kenji and Kay.
Kenji faltered, wondering if the man somehow recognized him—he lived in fear that he would come across some of the people his father had tormented in the past—but the glare seemed to be for the building behind them. Maybe the clerk had also rented him a faulty shuttle.
When Kenji stepped inside, two other people were waiting in front of the chipped counter, their shiny black combat boots contrasting with the stained and cracked floor tiles. Their backs were to him, leaving him a view of utility belts bristling with weapons that ranged from DEW-Tek pistols to stunners to knives, and each had flex-cuffs dangling in between the armament. Despite the combat boots, they didn't look like soldiers or police officers, not with their distinctly civilian attire, the oddest combination of camouflage and... was that purple fur trim? And were those... sequins?
Even though they had long black hair, one with it in a ponytail and one in a braid, it took him a moment to realize they were women. Maybe because they were significantly taller than he—at least six-feet-two—and had the powerful builds and broad shoulders of bears.
The clerk wasn't behind the counter. Maybe they'd scared him off.
One of the women glanced back at him, and Kenji nearly fell over. They had pointed ears and... was that fur? Not on the trim for their clothing but on them.
He gripped the doorjamb for support, inadvertently blocking Kay, who bumped into his back. The woman smiled at him, which was almost as alarming as the fur—she had fangs—and turned back to the counter. That was good, because he realized he was gawking. Rudely.
Kenji closed his dangling jaw and swallowed. She wasn't entirely furry. Her face was mostly normal, aside from the fangs, and feminine despite the large muscular frame. And her hands only had a light dusting of fur on the backs. The rest appeared almost normal except for...
He swallowed again. They had claws. The other one was tapping a rhythm on the counter with a claw painted purple to match the fur trim on her jacket. Kenji caught his jaw dropping again.
Maybe they'd eaten the clerk.
No, they wouldn't be standing there impatiently if they had recently been sated by a tasty meal. Kenji resisted the urge to flee and stepped into the lobby. They were obviously genetically engineered women from another system. He'd read all about such creations after he'd learned that his genes had been altered before his birth. Maybe he should be relieved that his father hadn't made him fanged and furry.
He reminded himself that the Kingdom was turning more progressive and allowing foreigners of all types to visit, so he should expect to see more beings—people—like this. The queen had even put out some incentives, giving bonuses to tourist businesses that brought in foreign crowns and Union dollars. Since Zamek City was the capital, and the closest major city to the launch loop, it made sense that these foreigners would be popping up here.
Kenji glanced at Kay as he clanked in behind him, wondering if this might be their opportunity to snoop in the computer system. Would the large women object if they ambled behind the counter and helped themselves to some data?
But he must have stepped inside far enough to trigger the door chime, for a soft bing echoed through the building. The same clerk Kenji had dealt with before—wearing the same grease-stained shirt with a hole under the armpit—walked out of an office. He jerked in surprise when he saw the women.
"You're still here," he blurted, stepping back, his shoulder clunking against the doorjamb.
Kenji imagined a lot of people ran into doors when they saw these women.
"Yes," the one who'd smiled at Kenji said. "You said you would let us know what you found."
"I meant in general. At some future date. Actually, that was a brush off. I thought you would take the hint and leave."
"At least he's honest," the other one said. They had pleasant voices, though they would definitely be singing alto in the cat-woman choir, should such a thing exist.
"I'd be happy to help you if you want to rent something," the clerk said. "We'll rent to anyone. No questions asked. As long as you've got money."
"As we said, we're interested in buying the lot next door, not renting a shuttle. Our real-estate developer friend did some research and learned that you own this building, the now-empty lot, and the repair shop on the other side of it. All the taxes have been paid, and you seem to be doing well despite the disrepair here."
She eyed the floor tiles and then the armpit hole in his shirt. His hand was up to scratch his head, so it was easy to see.
"I don't waste needless money on frivolous things. Look, I don't know if you noticed, but the lot next door is now a crater. I'm still waiting for the insurance money. There have been a lot of claims, and they're backed up. Do you... women need air bikes? A way to get around town? Like I said, I don't discriminate." He eyed their pointed ears with the same dubiousness that they were eyeing his armpit.
"We know that it's a crater. That's why we're interested. Our friend said we could get a good deal, fill it in, and build on it."
"What do you want to build? A cat cafe?" He snickered at his wit.
The women did not.
Kenji groped for a way to butt in to the conversation. For his distraction, he planned to ask the clerk to come outside to see the repairs needed on the shuttle. Before Kenji got a word out, the rumble of a hover van came from out front. Instead of parking in the back, it floated a couple of feet over the crater, not far from the front door.
"This isn't a very good part of town," one of the women said. "We understand there's a lot of crime. We plan to open up an office so people can visit us and inquire about our services. We're bounty hunters, and we're going to branch out into private investigations and possibly hiring ourselves out as bouncers. There are quite a few of us, and my captain doesn't need all of us all the time when she flies."
"Bounty hunters?" Kenji asked, considering their weapons again. Maybe they knew where to get good deals on the right kind of gear.
Both women turned to face him and smiled, one hiding her fangs with her lips, the other revealing them and the rest of her teeth. Hers was a brazen smile, and she looked him up and down with a speculative gaze. It took him a long moment to realize she was checking him out.
"Yes," she said.
"Are you in need of our services?" the more subtle one asked. "I'm Liangyu Qin Three. You can call me Qin."
"Or you can call her Squirt." The flirty one winked.
"That doesn't seem like a bounty-hunter name," Kenji said.
"We gave it to her when she was six. She was a runt."
Kenji eyed Qin's substantial height and muscles and found that hard to believe.
"I'm Tigress. I was never a runt."
"This is true," Qin said. "She was always a big brute."
"A big sexy brute." Tigress looked Kenji up and down again. "What's your name, Cutie? For select customers, I might be willing to throw in certain bonus services alongside the bounty hunting."
"Uh, I was actually going to ask where you got your weapons or if you have any used gear for sale. I'm getting into the business myself, but I don't have a lot of start-up funds yet."
"That female is looking at you with the alarming mien of a predator," Kay whispered. "Perhaps you shouldn't engage them in conversation."
"It's all right." Kenji hoped.
"You're going to be a bounty hunter?" Tigress raised her eyebrows. "You look like a Squirt yourself."
Qin elbowed her. "Don't assume that. Kim isn't very big, and she kicked Rache's mercenaries across a submarine."
"Rache?" Kenji mouthed as the clerk did the same thing.
"The lot isn't for sale," the clerk said firmly.
A clank came from out front—the sliding door on the hover van being thrown open. Six men in camouflage uniforms with masks covering their faces sprang out, landing at the edge of the crater. They carried DEW-Tek rifles and charged straight for the front door of the rental shop.
"Move, Kay." Kenji grabbed the robot and tugged him over to a corner as the men charged inside.
"No freaks!" They yelled and opened fire at the counter—no, at the women.
But Qin and Tigress had leaped into action before the men made it through the door. Instead of running away, like the clerk did, they charged their assailants, knocking aside rifles and bowling them over.
Energy bolts hit the ceiling and the walls as the women put themselves back to back, kicking and punching rather than drawing their weapons. That didn't keep the attackers from using their weapons, but the women were close enough—and fast enough—to knock aside the men's arms and the barrels of the rifles, sending the shots flying.
Kenji, afraid random fire would take him down, looked for something to hide behind. The only thing in the lobby was a fake rubber-tree plant in a cracked plastic pot. He ducked behind it, intending to drag Kay with him, but Kay headed for the counter. A stray bolt clipped his metal shoulder, burning a hole in his housing and almost knocking him over.
"Get down, Kay! Or run into the back with the clerk." Kenji wished he'd done that.
But Kay went behind the counter as the fight escalated, more energy bolts slamming into walls—and people. Yelps of pain sounded amid the thuds of fists hitting flesh. Kay disappeared with a clank, and Kenji worried he'd been struck with a more damaging attack.
Something slammed into the base of the potted tree. A rifle that had been ripped from someone's hands. One of the men followed, flying through the air and slamming into the wall a few feet from Kenji. He thudded down with a groan.
One of the women grunted in pain. Kenji wondered if he should help them, but he had no idea what this was about. If he got involved, it would only be in the hope of stopping the fight so innocent bystanders wouldn't be killed.
An energy bolt blasted through the trunk of the faux tree, dropping plastic leaves on his head. He also wanted to stop the fight so innocent lobby decorations wouldn't be killed.
The man crumpled next to him grabbed his rifle, rose to his knees, and aimed at one of the women. They were busy dealing with the other attackers and didn't seem to see him.
"Look out!" Kenji barked and lunged over to kick the man's rifle aside.
He was in the nick of time, and the man's shot went wide. The women glanced over. Unfortunately, the attacker growled and swung the rifle toward Kenji.
Kenji jumped up, fear making his second kick lightning fast. His toe connected with the barrel an instant before the man fired. The rifle flew out of his hands and struck the ceiling.
Before Kenji had to defend himself further, one of the women sprang over, landing beside the man. She hefted him from his feet as if he weighed twenty pounds instead of two hundred, lifted him over her head, and threw him across the lobby.
Kenji glanced around, afraid someone else might be targeting him now that he'd picked a side, but the battle was winding down. Four men lay groaning or unconscious—hopefully not dead—on the floor. The other two, realizing the odds had rapidly gone out of their favor, glanced at each other and sprinted out the door. They leaped into the van, and it took off, not waiting for the other four.
The women dropped their fists to their hips.
"As we said," Tigress said, "this isn't the best of neighborhoods."
"But that makes it the perfect place to start a business for hunting criminals," Qin said. "We'll have to set up a network site, so people who are afraid to visit the area can reserve our services online."
"Good idea. Maybe Casmir would help."
If the clerk was listening from the back, he didn't reply. Kenji eased along the wall, stepping over one of the crumpled men, to check on Kay.
Other than the melted blast hole in his shoulder, Kay didn't appear damaged from the battle. He had tilted over at his trunk crease and was accessing the shop's computer, which was tucked into a nook below the counter.
"Are you almost done?" Kenji whispered.
"There was a passcode to bypass that delayed me, as well as weapons fire squealing over my head, but I have almost achieved the objective."
"Good work." Kenji turned and leaned an elbow casually on the counter to hide Kay from view if the clerk walked in.
One of the downed men tried to belly-crawl toward the door. Tigress plucked him up and shoved him against the wall, his boots dangling six inches above the floor.
"Why did you attack us?" She pinned him in place with one hand against his chest while she searched him with the other.
"Because you're freaks." He tried to kick her, but she lifted a knee and blocked the attack while removing laser cutters, pistols, and even a grenade from his pockets. "Nobody wants you here."
"That's not true." Qin picked up one of the rifles and held it on the other three men. "No fewer than seven people are quite tickled to have us on this planet. Did someone pay you to attack us? How'd you know we would be here?"
The clerk stepped into the doorway and peered warily around. Kenji put a hand on his hip to take up more room and block his view of Kay. The clerk looked at the women and the men on the floor and barely noticed Kenji. He didn't seem to see Kay at all. Good.
A boom and a flash of light came from outside. It startled everyone, and Qin stepped outside to peer down the street.
"That's unexpected," she said. "I believe that's their getaway van. It was their getaway van."
"What happened?" Tigress asked.
"I'm not certain, but the remaining pieces are scattered up and down the street out there for a block."
Kenji didn't know what was happening either, but he couldn't have hoped for a better distraction. So long as the clerk didn't glance over and notice Kay.
"Maybe whoever hired them turned on them when they failed," Tigress said.
"That's murder." The man she'd pinned craned his neck to peer out the door.
"You needn't sound so affronted," Tigress said. "Weren't you going to murder us?"
"Yes, but you're freaks. We're Kingdom subjects."
"This planet is so backward, Squirt. Are you sure you want to set up a shop here?"
"You said yourself that it has nice trees."
"It does, and like you said, your captain doesn't have enough work for all of us, so it makes sense for half of our sisters to find work here, but..."
"The Kingdom will get better for people like us. Queen Oku is making improvements." Qin smiled brightly. "Casmir is advising her."
"I thought they were just snogging on the sofa."
"I'm sure he's taking his duties more seriously than that."
"While snogging."
"Ha ha."
Kenji ignored the bewildering conversation and resisted the urge to look over his shoulder to check on Kay. He didn't want to risk bringing the clerk's attention to him.
Qin picked up another man trying to crawl for the exit. "Look, you can leave if you tell us who hired you. You didn't kill anyone, so we're not terribly upset with you. We just want to know."
"I'm terribly upset," Kay muttered. "I lost my shoulder plating."
His words drew the clerk's attention. "What are you doing back there?"
"Hiding from deadly weapons fire." Kenji shifted to further block Kay's activities as the clerk tried to peer around him. "I started out behind that fake tree over there, but it was a frequent target. You can see that it's been terribly defiled." He pointed emphatically at the topless tree, willing the man to look at it. To look at anything except the robot fiddling with his computer. "You may need to order a new one. Perhaps an entire forest of potted trees, thus to provide cover for innocent patrons needing to hide from firefights in the lobby."
Frowning, the clerk stepped toward him and lifted a hand.
"Were there any injuries in here?" a new voice said, a man in black armor and a mask striding through the front door.
Kenji barely kept from shouting a curse. It was the Main Event again.
He crouched so quickly he cracked a knee on the floor. Kay was now visible to the clerk, but Kenji couldn't do anything about it. If the Main Event recognized him after warning him to stay out of the city...
"These men are somewhat battered," Tigress said, not sounding even minutely surprised by the appearance of the would-be superhero. "And that plastic plant has taken grievous damage."
Kenji eyed the corridor leading to the offices and maybe a back door, but the clerk blocked it. He was looking at the Main Event instead of Kenji cowering behind his counter, but how long would that last?
"Their getaway van also took grievous damage," the Main Event said dryly.
"That was you?" Qin asked.
"It may have been."
"Where did you come from?"
"The nightmares of criminals hell-bent on mayhem and violence."
"Did Casmir give you that line?"
"He's been advising me in the ways of superhero speak. Apparently, one must have memorable one-liners available to trot out in case reporters are within earshot."
"You want reporters to... report you?"
"I need the populace of Odin, preferably of the entire Kingdom, to realize that I am on their side. A protector of the average citizen. An inexorable force for justice in the city. Then one day when Queen Oku pardons me, there will be no question that it was the right thing to do."
"You're a strange man."
"I'm strange? Did you know that your pointed ears twitched when you said that?"
"They do that."
Even more bewildered by the conversation and the odd assortment of people in the lobby, Kenji looked back at Kay. They had to get out of here.
Kay withdrew from the computer and turned without lifting his upper body into view. This time, he kept from speaking and drawing attention to himself. Maybe he remembered his recent encounter with the Main Event—and that tree.
"Where did you come from?" the clerk asked. "And who are you?"
"A concerned citizen across the street called the police," the Main Event said. "I was in the area and arrived sooner than they, though I suspect they'll toddle along soon. I saw that these two warriors had the attack under control but noticed that a man in the repair shop over there was watching the goings on with binoculars while getting updated by someone on the comm. I have enhanced hearing and heard the van driver delivering the updates." He looked at Qin. "It seems that your inquiries into buying the adjacent real estate alarmed the mechanic enough to take matters into his own hands."
"He hired thugs to attack us so we wouldn't buy the crater next to his shop?" Qin asked.
"That is what I gathered from my eavesdropping. You're welcome to question him yourself."
"We didn't even make an offer," Qin said in a sad, hurt tone.
Kenji would have felt for her if the hard floor hadn't been grinding into his knees and he hadn't been afraid of being caught.
"We were just trying to get some information," Qin added.
"Kingdom subjects sleep with their prejudices cuddled close at night," the Main Event said. "You may have difficulty finding neighbors hospitable to a pack of feline bounty hunters."
"Are you done?" Kenji mouthed to Kay, hoping the robot had a program downloaded for lip-reading.
Kay's metal fingers curled into a fist, and he poked his thumb up.
"We're not felines," Qin said. "We're genetically engineered women with dreams, goals, and feelings."
"We're also not properly called a pack," Tigress said. "Viggo calls us an ambush."
"You know that's a gathering of cats, right?" the Main Event asked.
"Of tigers," Tigress said.
The clerk cleared his throat. "I have a business to run here. And a mess to clean up. I believe I hear police sirens. Maybe you'd all like to leave the premises. And take those creeps with you." He waved at the remaining attackers.
Kenji nodded firmly, though he expected the Main Event to object. He worked with the police, didn't he?
"The police can gather the rest of these miscreants," the Main Event said. From his voice, it sounded like he was turning to leave. Dare Kenji hope? "My work here is done."
"Maybe we can find another crater to buy," Tigress said. It sounded like they were leaving too.
"They are proliferating this city currently," Qin said, "and I've got another week before the captain plans to leave again. We can keep shopping."
"Or maybe we could save money by setting up an office by the street on Asger's property. He's your boyfriend. Boyfriends are supposed to let you use their property for the dreams and ambitions of you and your sisters."
"I don't think you can have a bounty-hunting office on a nobleman's estate."
"Why not?" Tigress asked, their voices growing quieter as they walked farther away.
"Zoning rules."
"Huh."
Kenji carefully poked his head over the counter, worried the Main Event might still be standing there with his arms folded across his chest. But he and the fearsome women had departed. They had neglected to take their assailants with them, but the men had recovered enough to crawl to the door by themselves.
Kenji grew aware of the clerk frowning down at him.
"Sorry." Kenji straightened and put the key fob for the shuttle on the counter with the money he owed. "I came to return that, pay you, and thank you for the shuttle. It served its purpose, and I believe we're done here." He waved for Kay to follow him around the counter and to the exit.
"Hold on." The clerk grabbed his arm.
Kenji tensed, prepared to rip his arm free and sprint for the door.
"You owe me another hundred crowns," the clerk said.
"For what?" Kenji glanced at the holes in the walls and the broken rubber-tree plant. "I didn't engage in the fight."
"Mileage charge." The clerk tapped the spot on his temple where people's chips were embedded. He must have already gotten a report from the odometer system in the shuttle. "You flew way more than the two-hundred-and-fifty miles allowed for a one-day rental."
"Was a mileage allotment in the contract?"
"It was in the fine print." The clerk released him but held out his hand and rested his other hand on a bulge under his shirt. A weapon?
Kenji didn't think the very brief and indifferent digital contract he'd signed had mentioned miles, but since he'd just stolen information from the man, and his shop had taken more than a hundred crowns' worth of damage, he decided to pay without argument. As soon as he captured Mari and returned her to her people, he wouldn't have to worry about such small amounts of money.
Once he and Kay stepped outside, finding—to their vast relief—no sign of the Main Event, they headed off the property and toward the nearest public transportation system.
"You got the locator chip number?" Kenji asked.
"I did, and I have already downloaded a program to tap into the vehicular database to make use of it."
"That's amazing. Where's her air bike?"
"It is amazing, especially given the trying and bizarre circumstances I had to endure while working."
"Tell me about it."
"I am. The air bike is currently parked in a residential area on the Zamek University campus."
"That's less than ten miles away." Kenji clenched his fist. "This is it. We can capture her tonight."
"Do not forget to purchase used bounty-hunting supplies on the way."
"I won't. We can find a weapons shop easily in this neighborhood."
Youths in black leather scurried around, scavenging valuables from the van that had blown up, even as a police vehicle descended into the rental shop's parking lot.
"I believe we'll easily find ten or twenty weapons shops in this neighborhood," Kay said.
"Good." Kenji thumped him on the back. "Let's do this, my metal friend."
|
Asylum - Lindsay Buroker.txt
| 7 |
While Mari was debating if the crusher would allow her to stroll up and knock on the door, it surprised her by leaving its post on the single step that led up to the cottage. It walked across the grass and around the home to a fenced backyard. She leaned off to the side to see it spring over the fence and disappear into the yard.
"Hm." Mari waited a minute to see if it would return, but it did not.
A faint whir sounded behind her at the turn-off for the street, and she glanced back in time to see a drone buzz past. It wasn't safe to stay outside on the sidewalk.
Taking a deep breath, Mari drove the bike to the yard, parked it, and walked up to the door. She lifted a finger to press the chime but hesitated. After being attacked by drones, Mari was flustered and struggled to remember the words she'd been rehearsing.
"I came to see if you are in need of protection," a male voice floated out an open window. "I did not know you would have a crusher poised to protect you from campus hooligans."
"Zee is here to protect Casmir from campus hooligans," a woman said, "though I suppose he is programmed to protect me from danger as well. Also, according to the news, the crimes have been committed by drones that are malfunctioning, not hooligans. Are you allowed to use your superhero crime-fighting powers to thwart one-foot-wide drones primarily used for pizza delivery purposes?"
"I fight crime wherever it originates and in whatever shape it appears, but I'm sure someone is behind the drones' actions. Probably a younger, less rectitude-conscious version of Casmir."
"That seems likely." The woman had a flat almost monotone voice. Was this Kim Sato?
Mari shouldn't eavesdrop, but she had hoped to speak with Sato alone and was hesitant to ring her chime when an unknown man was present. Perhaps it was one of Sato's brothers. Mari's research revealed that she had half-siblings that lived in the city. Or perhaps a lover? No mention of marriage was listed on her network profile.
"And since when do the campus-security drones deliver pizzas?" the man asked.
"Casmir reprogrammed one to be at his beck and call for deliveries."
"I withdraw my statement about his dedication to rectitude."
"Pizza delivery isn't immoral. Where is your crusher?"
Mari glanced back, worried that a second one might show up.
"Ordering more flex-cuffs and a new stunner for me," the man said, "while wallowing in depression over the execrable state of my soul."
"Did you revert to your old ways and do something villainous?"
"I was in fact delivering miscreants to the police headquarters in the Temple District. A gang of youths were stealing from the offering boxes in one of the churches. They deserved to be dropped on the lawn in front of the police building."
"What was Amit's objection?"
"That the dropping was literal. And from a height of twenty or thirty feet. Bones may have broken."
"Ouch."
"I would find it easier to assist with crime fighting if the police weren't attempting to arrest me themselves to find out who I am. I'm forced to fly past swiftly when dropping off criminals. Can you believe that they and some of the crusts on the senate object to my tactics for halting crimes?"
"Your tactics aren't always legal."
"But they are effective. I employed similar methodologies as a mercenary."
"Yes, I believe that's the problem. Just be glad nobody seems to have associated you with—"
Someone grabbed Mari under her armpits and hefted her off her feet. She couldn't stop herself from blurting a startled squawk, and the conversation in the house halted.
She tried to wrench herself free, but her captor's grip was like steel. When she kicked backward, her boot connecting with something solid, she only hurt herself. Her captor didn't budge.
As she tried to wriggle a hand into the pocket with her arc blaster, she glimpsed the tarry black body of the figure behind her and groaned. There was no point in using her weapon. The crusher had her.
It hadn't made a noise while sneaking up on her. She would have expected it to stomp around with the subtleness of an elephant.
The crusher extended a finger to reach past her shoulder. If she hadn't been aware that it could liquefy and reshape itself, she would have found that disturbing, since the two hands gripping her hadn't let go. The finger rang the chime.
The door opened promptly, making Mari suspect the people in the cottage had already been on their way to check on the situation.
Surprisingly, only Kim Sato stood inside. Given human cultural customs, and beliefs that men were more capable of dealing with dangerous threats than women, Mari would have expected the man to answer.
Sato regarded Mari calmly, her face surprisingly non-emotive given the stranger dangling a foot above the ground in front of her, though her dark eyes were curious. She wore exercise clothing, with her black hair back in a ponytail, and had come to the door without a weapon.
Wonderful scents wafted out of the house from a meal cooking in the kitchen. It smelled far more appealing than the chocolate candies, though Mari had enjoyed those. This was exactly the kind of exotic human fare she'd hoped to sample. She supposed, given the circumstances, Sato would not invite her in for dinner.
"I have apprehended an eavesdropper, Kim Sato," the crusher said in a monotone even flatter than hers.
"I was about to ring the door chime," Mari said, though she couldn't legitimately deny that she'd been eavesdropping. It wasn't her fault that a window had been open. It was chilly and drizzling. Who left windows open in such conditions?
"You are not a reporter," Sato said.
Had she expected reporters? Maybe the success of her novel had made her a Kingdom celebrity.
"Uhm, no. I'm a scientist."
"She was studying the house for several minutes before she approached," the crusher said. "I saw her but could not legally constrain her before she stepped onto the property. I believed she would approach, if not for my formidable presence, so I hid in the backyard, thus to lure her closer. My ruse was successful." Did the crusher sound... smug?
"You are an effective crime fighter, Zee. And the legality of your tactics is admirable." Sato glanced back into the house—at the man she'd been speaking with?—but he didn't comment.
"Yes. I am an admirable crusher." It was definitely smug.
"I'm not a criminal." This introduction wasn't going at all how Mari had rehearsed it. "As I said, I'm a scientist. I admit I was deterred by the crusher's, ah, formidable presence, and that is why I paused. I didn't have anything criminal in mind, Scholar Sato. I came here hoping to speak to you about a private matter."
"Are you an astroshaman?"
Mari squirmed as much as she could. The steel—no, that was an alloy much stronger than simple steel—hands holding up her weight from under her armpits were not comfortable. "Yes."
"Did High Shaman Moonrazor send you?"
"No." Not even close...
"Do you wish to speak to me?" Sato touched her chest. "Or Casmir?"
"Uhm, I had thought you might be most interested in my work." And least likely to turn Mari over to her mother. "I've come to offer my services, and also my prototype terraforming device, to your queen, or whoever in your government might deal in such matters, in exchange for asylum."
"Terraforming device?"
Mari had assumed Sato would ask first what she had done and why she wanted asylum, but perhaps because she was also a scientist, the promise of useful technology interested her more. Mari hoped that was the case.
"Yes, I'm an agronomist and also have some modest engineering capabilities. The terraformer is in my backpack. I can show it to you if you like." Mari gestured over her shoulder at the pack, inasmuch as she could while she dangled in the air. "If your door guardian will set me down."
"I object to releasing the intruder," the crusher said. "The humans Kim Sato and Casmir Dabrowski, as is the case with many others of their kind, have had numerous hostile interactions with astroshamans. The eavesdropping nature of this astroshaman suggests inimical intent."
"I wasn't eavesdropping."
"Please put her down, Zee. She looks like she's in pain."
"This prisoner should be held captive while she is searched. If my grip is painful, I can modulate the surface tension of my hands so that they have a cushioning aspect to them. I have grown quite skilled at this."
"Yes, I've seen you become a couch for Queen Oku's dog. Put her down, please. You know Casmir likes to give people the benefit of the doubt."
Did he? Maybe Mari should talk to him.
"This is true, but I am a bodyguard. I must regard all strangers from enemy nations warily." Despite his objection, the crusher set Mari's feet on the ground. Unfortunately, it didn't let her go. The crusher did soften its grip, but it remained in place, as unyielding as before. "Casmir Dabrowski is returning now from the carbohydrate retrieval mission. Perhaps he will search the prisoner."
"Casmir's too shy and polite to pat down a strange woman," Sato said. "What did you say your name is?"
"Mari." She didn't know whether to be relieved or not that Sato didn't want to search her. She had nothing to hide, but she was armed. Only because she'd believed she might have to deal with situations exactly like the one with the strange bounty hunter in the Arctic. It hadn't occurred to her to remove her weapons and stash them somewhere before coming to Sato's home.
"Just Mari?" Sato frowned slightly. Indicating suspicion?
"Yes. Since I am leaving my people, I have no need of a surname that indicates astroshaman origins."
"You mentioned wanting asylum." Sato's gaze shifted past Zee toward the street. Someone was riding up on an air bike. "Have you committed a crime among your kind?"
"No, but it is not encouraged to leave our society, especially if you are young and were born into it. It's possible they will send someone to retrieve me." Not just possible; that man who'd attacked her ensured people were hunting her right now. She trusted her sisters hadn't given any bounty hunters orders to kill her, but what if she inadvertently caused Sato or some other ally of the queen's to be injured? Her chances of being offered asylum would plummet.
"Are you saying you ran away from home?" Sato asked.
"Who ran away from home?" the newcomer asked, parking the air bike on the walkway and trotting up to join them.
He carried a long narrow loaf of bread in a brown bag, the fresh scent of warm sourdough filling the air. It was so enticing, especially compared to an algae ration bar, that it momentarily distracted Mari from answering.
"I perpetrated a ruse to capture an eavesdropping astroshaman who may have inimical intent," Zee said.
"Good work, Zee." The newcomer patted the crusher on the shoulder and looked curiously at Mari.
"I do not have inimical intent. I am seeking asylum." Mari, assuming this was Minister Dabrowski, looked at him with equal curiosity.
Even though she'd seen pictures of him, she'd expected him to be taller and more physically formidable. She wasn't sure why, since he'd earned her mother's respect by hacking into a highly secure astroshaman network, designing the crushers, and somehow winning the trust of the AIs that had settled Verloren Moon, but it startled her that he was no taller than she, with skinny arms and shaggy brown hair that hung to his eyebrows. He wore a T-shirt with a cartoon character on it. She'd envisioned someone with a title like Minister of External Affairs wearing expensive and fashionable clothing when running errands.
"Apparently, she left the cult," Sato said.
Mari frowned. "We are not some strange religious sect. Astroshamans believe in using advanced biotechnology to meld our bodies and consciousnesses with computers to allow us to achieve greater intellectual feats. We seek to live in a state less reliant on and motivated by biological frailties while we partake in the journey to humanity's ultimate fate, becoming one with the machine."
"Cult," Sato mouthed to Dabrowski.
"I know," he mouthed back.
Mari resisted the urge to argue further. After all, hadn't she left because she wanted to experience more than her people's strict lifestyle within a community that frowned upon any experimentation that wasn't in line with its goals?
"Perhaps I can show you my prototype terraforming device," Mari said, "as an example of what I can offer. I do not expect anyone to grant me asylum without a reason. I am prepared to trade my knowledge and my abilities for a place where I can work and experience your Kingdom culture."
"Wait, are you looking for asylum with us?" Dabrowski pointed the tip of his bread loaf at himself, then at Sato. "It's only a two-bedroom cottage, and the couch isn't that comfortable."
"Or typically uncluttered and available to sit on," Sato murmured.
"My tools aren't clutter," Dabrowski said.
"What about the comic books and dolls?"
"Those are limited edition collectible action heroes, not dolls. I'm waiting for someone to make one of the Main Event. That's when he'll know he's made it."
"Hm."
Mari didn't know what to make of these two. They weren't at all what she had expected, nor did they seem to be taking her offer seriously.
"I am not looking for refuge here," she said, "but perhaps in a secure location unknown to my people where I could pursue meaningful work that would help your people. I have much to offer, and I believe this would make the exchange equitable."
"Let's see this device," Sato said.
Mari attempted to pull her backpack off, but she couldn't manage with Zee still holding her. As she shifted, something clunked to the ground—a pistol that had been in her pack. Strange. That shouldn't have been able to fall out.
Sato and Dabrowski looked down at it.
"That's not it." Mari hoped they didn't recognize the astroshaman pistol as a weapon. It didn't look much like their DEW-Tek pistols. "I can't reach it."
"Zee." Dabrowski wiggled a finger in what might have been a let-her-go gesture.
"That is a weapon," the crusher said. "She may have other weapons on her person. I have not performed a body search yet."
"Let's save that fun for later. I trust you can stop her if she tries to shoot us."
The crusher gazed at him. Since it took Zee a moment to comply, Mari suspected a text exchange over the network. Finally, the crusher released her, though it remained nearby, blocking her escape should she wish to run.
But running wasn't her intent. She slung the pack off, alarmed at how light it felt. She patted the bottom and found a hole ripped in the fabric. Her shoulders slumped as she looked down at the weapon and back toward the street, hoping to spot not only the case for the terraformer but the other laboratory tools she'd taken from the ship. Almost everything had fallen out of her pack. She poked her hand inside, as if she might be mistaken, but only small items stored in inner pockets remained.
"The drones." Mari looked back toward the intersection, half expecting to see the pack of four hovering there, her items dangling in their mechanical grips as they taunted her. "I was attacked by drones. They must have cut my pack and taken my device."
That sounded ludicrous as soon as it came out, and she wished she could explain further.
Dabrowski's eyebrows rose. "They usually deliver pizza when they visit me."
Sato lifted a hand. "There has been a rash of drone attacks and thefts on campus today. It's in the news. Ra— someone came over to protect me tonight."
"Is someone here now? Should I have brought more bread?"
"Yes, but you know he rarely eats anything as devoid of nutrients as bread."
"Right, only superfoods for a superhero."
"Who controls the drones?" Mari asked. "My device represents a great deal of work and is valuable." Not to mention it was her bargaining chip.
"Usually some nerd in the computer lab," Sato said.
Red lights flashed at the intersection, and a municipal police van rolled down the street.
Mari tensed, afraid the authorities were here for her. She wasn't the one mugging people, but as long as the Kingdom considered astroshamans to be enemies, she was in danger of being reported for her mere existence in their city. Her hood had fallen back more than once since she'd arrived on campus—it dangled around her shoulders again now.
Zee, who'd released her so she could search her pack, clamped down on her shoulder again. Mari caught herself before reaching for a weapon but barely.
"Kim?" Dabrowski asked.
"I have not messaged campus security or the police, but it is possible someone else did, especially if they saw Zee apprehend our visitor." Sato looked toward other houses on the cul-de-sac, lights on in the homes. More than one face was pressed curiously to a window, and at one property, a couple stood outside, openly watching the exchange.
"I haven't done anything wrong," Mari said.
"As High Shaman Moonrazor was told," Dabrowski said, "her people have free reign of the thirty-thousand-acre parcel in the forest two hundred miles to the west of the capital, and they—you—are welcome to have deliveries made for projects, but I haven't yet been able to finagle the senate into giving astroshamans permission to walk freely on the rest of the planet. Relatively few people even know you're there, and it's probably a good idea to keep it that way for now. For your own safety more than anything. There are a lot of people who lost family in the bombings. I know your people had nothing to do with the first set of bombings, and you even helped me deal with the person responsible, but... our people are kind of fuzzy on who to blame, and there's a lot of blanket hatred toward astroshamans right now."
"That means you believe I have done something wrong?" Mari asked. "By leaving the forest?"
The police van stopped in front of the cottage, the doors slid open, and two policemen jumped out. They carried flex-cuffs and stunners instead of deadly weapons and wore uniforms instead of combat armor, but Mari didn't know if she could overpower them, especially now that many of her tools and weapons were missing.
"I don't think so." Dabrowski touched his chest. "But the police may insist on questioning you. I wish you'd gone through High Shaman Moonrazor. Maybe she could have messaged me, and we could have worked out permission for you to visit other places on the planet with some kind of diplomatic passport."
Mari looked bleakly at him as the policemen walked up with their stunners drawn. "She wouldn't give me permission to leave. She's the person I'm seeking asylum from."
"Oh," Dabrowski said. "Why?"
"She's my mother."
He mouthed another, "Oh."
"Minister Dabrowski?" One of the policemen stopped, looking warily at the crusher. "I'm Sergeant Schutze. Are you all right? An astroshaman spy on campus was reported. It's possible she's here gathering intelligence that may be used in a raid." He eyed Mari darkly. "Military Intelligence has warned our department to watch out for their kind. They may be angry that we thwarted their plans and could be plotting vengeance against our people."
Mari shook her head. Her mother had been annoyed to be defeated, but she hadn't been the high shaman behind the attack on Odin. She'd never wanted to kill people, only to seek technology that could help the astroshamans further their goals of leaving the Twelve Systems and finding a new home, one where they wouldn't be shunted off as kooky cult members by the rest of humanity. The two high shaman leaders who had pressured her into the invasion had died in the attack. None of the astroshamans who'd settled in the forest here wished the Kingdom ill will. Few of them had warm, adoring feelings for the locals, but Mari didn't think any of her people were plotting against the Kingdom. That would be a foolish thing to do while they were living on the planet that was the seat of the Kingdom.
"That's what Military Intelligence is warning?" Dabrowski scratched his jaw.
"Yes, my lord. We have orders to apprehend any astroshamans and question them under the influence of truth drugs."
Mari's insides knotted. She personally didn't have anything to hide, but what if they took the opportunity to ask all about her people? About their command structure and their technology? And what they were up to on the land they'd been given? Nothing Mari would consider nefarious, but would the Kingdom military agree? And what would her mother and sisters think if she allowed herself to be questioned in such a way?
"Is there any chance I can override those orders and send you off to find the drones that are robbing people on campus?" Dabrowski offered an easy smile, but his eyes were intent.
"Ah, no, my lord. It's my understanding that the Minister of External Affairs is a diplomatic position. You can only order diplomats around."
"Which has indeed been satisfying, but..." Dabrowski gestured at Mari. "I don't suppose you'd like to change up your story and say you're here on a diplomatic mission for High Shaman Moonrazor, thus falling more into my domain?"
"I..." Mari couldn't tell if he was serious—would that actually work?—or if he was humoring her. Surely, he had to be on the same side as his law enforcers, not trying to work against them for her sake. "I would rather not get her involved."
"If only you knew someone with broader authority," Sato murmured to Dabrowski.
"She's on one of the lunar bases, currently in a meeting with several of the nobles who rule over the habitats. They're discussing the crown's authority over them and how much leeway they have to set trade tariffs and the like. These meetings tend not to be short. Much to her consternation."
"Ah."
The sergeant cleared his throat. "Minister, if we may take the prisoner?" He eyed the crusher again, as if he didn't want to tangle with it. "For your safety and that of your neighbors. And for Kingdom security."
Dabrowski hesitated, and Mari held her breath, thinking he might object and that the crusher would keep the policemen from hauling her away. Maybe it wasn't too late for her to feign diplomatic status and hope that would protect her. But no, that would only end up with them contacting her mother to verify it—and thus letting her mother know where she was.
"Of course," Dabrowski said. "But be nice, eh? We have a treaty with the astroshamans, and we're not at war with them right now."
"Certainly, my lord. We are not brutes."
"Good to know. Mari, ah, it's probably best if you cooperate with the police. If nothing untoward comes up, maybe I can get you a diplomatic passport, and then you can make your proposal when the queen returns."
Mari feared whatever help he could offer—if he truly meant to follow up on her case—would come too late. Soon, she would be questioned under those drugs and would blab all of her people's secrets to government agents with recording devices. Mari also worried that Dabrowski would let her mother know she was here and that she would mount a rescue mission to retrieve her before any such secrets could be sucked from her brain. Such an action, especially if it couldn't be done without violence, might start a war.
"Thank you," Mari made herself say, but bleakness filled her as the crusher stepped aside, allowing the policemen to snap flex-cuffs around her wrists.
|
Asylum - Lindsay Buroker.txt
| 8 |
Kenji crouched in the shadows behind a tree several houses down from the cottage of Professor Dabrowski—now Minister Dabrowski, though from what the news said, he still taught a couple of classes on campus. Kenji watched as a crusher released Mari into the hands of two policemen. A third officer sat in the driver's seat of their van, waiting while the others trundled her toward an open sliding door in the back.
"This isn't good," Kenji whispered, trusting Kay's auditory receptors would pick up his words, though the robot stood behind a different tree several feet back. "How am I supposed to capture her, return her to her people, and collect the bounty if she's in a jail cell?"
"It will be more difficult," Kay said. "It was already difficult obtaining the code for her air bike and tracking her here."
Tracking her hadn't been that hard once they'd had the locator code—Kenji glanced toward where she'd parked her air bike—but he agreed that the situation at the rental shop had been unexpectedly fraught. If he didn't get off the planet, or at least permanently out of the capital soon, he worried he would end up in the Main Event's sights again. Fate kept thrusting him in that man's path.
Kenji chewed on his lip as Mari disappeared into the van. "It would be foolish to risk the ire of the police and other local authorities by rescuing her, right?"
"Rescuing her in order to capture her?"
"Yeah. I doubt the police want to collect her bounty. They probably don't even know about it. They just came because..." Kenji wasn't close enough to the cottage to have heard the whole conversation, but he'd arrived in time to see the crusher restraining Mari, with Dabrowski and Scholar Sato—a figure almost as renowned as the professor after publishing that book—questioning her. "Probably because Dabrowski commed them. He must have felt threatened. Maybe the crusher caught Mari spying on them for nefarious purposes. Her people could want her back not just because she has their top-secret information but because she's a threat to the tenuous peace between the astroshamans and the Kingdom."
The sliding door shut, and the police van started up.
"Stay there," Kenji whispered to Kay.
He left his tree and hugged the shadows of the sidewalk to hurry back to the intersection before the police van rolled down the street. A harebrained idea popped into his mind, one that might work, since he'd purchased a stunner on the way over. The police weren't in armor, so they would have no defense against a stun blast. Not that stunning them was a good idea—it certainly wasn't a legal one—but if Kenji could do it without being identified, maybe he could get Mari. The police might figure out his identity later, but if he first collected her bounty and could get out of the Kingdom before they caught up to him, maybe it wouldn't matter.
He cut through a yard to run around a house on the corner, then jumped out into the main street. Fortunately, the evening had grown late, and there was no other traffic on it.
As the van drove toward the intersection, Kenji grabbed his side, started limping dramatically, and shambled toward it. He feigned being gravely injured, hoping the drone muggings on campus would give him a plausible reason for being wounded.
The van slowed as it reached the intersection, the driver spotting him.
Kenji crumpled to his knees, then flopped onto his side directly in the police vehicle's path. The driver could navigate around him, but he was counting on policemen feeling obligated to help a poor injured student.
The van halted. It wasn't the driver that got out but one of the men in the back. Even better.
Kenji prepared to draw upon all of his meager thespian talents. His father had insisted he learn to fight, pick locks, and pilot, but acting lessons hadn't been in the mix.
"What happened, kid?" The policeman stopped beside him and looked down. His hand rested on the butt of his stunner, and there was wariness in his eyes.
Kenji groaned and slurred, "I dunno... was walking back home... got attacked... by drones." He turned puzzled eyes toward the police sergeant, working pain into his wince. "Why? I didn't... do anything. They took... took my bag."
He resisted the urge to elaborate on a story of purchases he'd made and was bringing home, both because he was supposed to be in terrible pain and because his father had always told him that people who were lying tended to blurt out way too many details for their made-up stories. Kenji had no idea what was going on with the drones and was only aware of the problem because the news had popped up when he'd been researching events on campus, trying to figure out why Mari had headed here.
"Yeah, we've got a team checking on the security station to find out what's going on with them. You need a ride back to your dorm?" The policeman sounded sympathetic, but he hadn't taken his hand off his stunner.
"Hospital?" Kenji asked hopefully, still gripping his side. That was farther away and would give him more time, and he didn't know the campus well enough to make up a fake address. "I think they... broke some ribs."
"All right." The policeman held up a finger to the driver. "Can you get up? Or do you need a hover gurney? I can call an ambulance."
"I can get up." Kenji rolled to his knees without letting go of his ribs. He didn't want to risk being carted away in a different vehicle from Mari. "Just need a little help."
The policeman offered him a hand. How solicitous. Kenji hoped he wouldn't ask to read the chip that Kenji didn't have or ask for proof that he was a student.
Limping dramatically, Kenji tried to guide the policeman to where he wished to go while seeming to appear that he was being guided. He could already tell the man wanted to maneuver him toward the passenger seat next to the driver instead of into the back of the van with their dubious astroshaman prisoner.
"Just need to lie down for a few," Kenji muttered, limping toward the sliding door in the back.
He glimpsed Kay watching from his spot in the shadows of an oak tree. At the end of the cul-de-sac, Dabrowski and Sato had disappeared into their house. That was good. The odds of Dabrowski recognizing him were extremely low, especially since Kenji had never officially been on the roster, but it was possible Dabrowski would think him familiar and look him up. Of all the people he didn't want researching him on the network, Dabrowski topped the list. Anyone who could hack into astroshaman networks could easily find old photos linking Kenji to his father.
"It would be better if you sat up front," the officer said.
Not for Kenji.
"The floor is all right. Don't need any... special treatment." Kenji feigned a stumble that happened to take him toward the open sliding door, and he tumbled into the van.
The other policeman sat on a bench across from Mari, sipping from a coffee cup with a Beans and Brews logo on the side. Kenji had no trouble seeing it since, unfortunately, the lights were on in the van. He'd hoped for a dark identity-hiding interior.
He tried to hide his face so Mari wouldn't recognize him until he was ready to enact his plan. Flex-cuffs bound her wrists in her lap, and her pack and weapons had been taken, but she wasn't gagged and could blurt out that she recognized him.
Sighing, the policeman who'd helped him to his feet climbed into the back and maneuvered him onto a bench before shutting the door. Still hoping Mari wouldn't recognize him, Kenji slumped down and kept his chin to his chest, but he was now across from her and worried that wouldn't be enough.
"Go ahead, Anzhong," the officer said, presumably to the driver, for the van lurched into motion.
"Hospital first?" the driver asked.
There was a wall separating the cab from the back of the van, and the voice came over a speaker. That potentially meant Kenji only had to stun the two policemen in back with him, and one was drinking coffee, so he might not be that attentive. After they were knocked out, Kenji could stun Mari, throw her over his shoulder, and slip out while the van was idling at a traffic signal.
"Yeah. Hospital, then headquarters. We'll make sure the astroshaman doesn't try to get out along the way."
"She's not going anywhere." The coffee drinker had a stunner in his other hand, and he kept it pointed at her.
The other one also aimed a stunner in her direction. That she had their full attention was good, but Kenji was slumped on the bench between them. He thought he could get his stunner out of his pocket without them noticing, but he didn't know if he could stun one to either side of him before anyone stunned him. He imagined a scenario where he knocked out the policemen even as they got him, and Mari was free to escape all of their clutches, leaving him to wake up later in jail. That would not be ideal.
If having the weapons pointed at Mari concerned her, she didn't show it. She was eyeing the Beans and Brews cup.
"Your beverage smells sweet," she said. "It contains something other than black coffee?"
The officer's eyebrows went up. "Cinnamon. It's a horchata latte."
"Cinnamon is a spice obtained from the inner bark of numerous tree species from the genus Cinnamomum." Mari's head tilted. "Its scent and flavor come from its principal component cinnamaldehyde as well as the allyl chain-substituted guaiacol eugenol."
"Thanks for the encyclopedia entry." The officer rolled his eyes and mumbled something about being sent to arrest computers.
"I do not believe I have had cinnamon," Mari said. "Or a latte."
"Maybe Kovacs will let you try his." The other policeman smirked.
"May I?" Mari asked.
Kenji almost laughed. It seemed a genuine request, and he imagined her guzzling the man's drink if given the chance.
"No." Kovacs glared at his colleague, then gave Mari an even more hostile look. "There's no way I'm letting some astroshaman freak leave saliva on my cup."
Even though Mari's ocular implants made her eyes seem more robot than human, Kenji didn't have any trouble reading the wince of discomfort—or shame?—as she looked away from them. Her cheeks turned pink, and she appeared far more affected by the glare and the insult than she had been from having weapons pointed at her.
Kenji shifted uneasily in his seat, questioning for the first time if he was doing the right thing. When he'd accepted the bounty-hunting gig, having one astroshaman pay him to capture another astroshaman hadn't seemed morally ambiguous. They were all enemies to his people, after all. But Mari asking to try someone's latte because she'd never had cinnamon before didn't seem very... enemy-ish.
A message from Kay popped up on his glasses display. You are coming back for me, are you not?
Yes. I'll get out with Mari as soon as I can. Kenji used eye movements to type the response—a slower and kludgier way to enter commands than by voice, but it worked in a pinch. As he replied, he groaned, keeping up his ruse. If you can, follow the van so you're not far away when we slip out.
Follow the van? It is moving at more than twenty-five miles per hour. I did not know robot calisthenics would be required tonight.
The mention of speed reminded Kenji that he didn't have much time. He was fairly certain they were still on campus, but they wouldn't be for long, and the hospital wasn't far away.
Just give me a minute, and I'll let you know where we end up. Kenji pretended to adjust his grip on his ribs while slipping his other hand into his pocket. Since he was an injured and innocent bystander, the police hadn't searched him. He wrapped his fingers around his stunner.
Mari must have noticed his movement, for she was scrutinizing him openly. Kenji suspected she'd recognized him as soon as he tumbled into the van. She hadn't tried to out him as something other than an injured student. Was that promising?
He widened his eyes, shifting his pupils to the left and the right to try to hint at what he meant to do, in case she was willing to distract them, but he didn't dare do anything as obvious as pulling out the stunner before he intended to use it. Mari might be the officers' focus, but since Kenji was shoulder to shoulder with them, they would notice anything he did.
What are you doing, bounty hunter? A message scrolled down his display.
From... her? How had she known the ident chip in his glasses to contact him? For that matter, how had she messaged him without sending one of the ubiquitous requests for permission to contact him that were designed to keep away spammers?
Questions for later.
Rescuing you. Work with me, eh?
Her eyes narrowed with suspicion, and she didn't do anything helpful. If anything, she kept staring at him, which he worried would lead the policemen to stare at him.
Maybe she didn't want to be rescued. Or, more likely, she didn't believe that was his intent.
The van drove through a pothole, jostling everyone, and Kenji took his chance. He tugged out his stunner, fired at the man on his right, and whipped it toward the coffee drinker, firing again.
But the second policeman had the split second he needed to react. He dropped his cup and knocked Kenji's arm away. The stunner blast struck the wall. The policeman tried to smack the weapon from Kenji's grip, but Kenji jerked his arm back in time to avoid the blow. He sprang from his seat, giving himself room so he couldn't be blocked again.
As the policeman surged to his feet and opened his mouth to shout a warning to his driver, Mari kicked him in the groin. His warning shifted to a pained grunt as he staggered back a step. That gave Kenji time to fire again. The stunner blast struck the policeman in the chest, and he crumpled to the floor.
Mari sank down and dug into his pockets, pulling out a fob and tapping the button to unlock her flex-cuffs. They clanked to the floor.
"Come on." Kenji pointed his stunner toward Mari to ensure she didn't kick him as he opened the sliding door.
He'd planned to stun her, but he didn't think he could jump out of a moving vehicle with her slung over his shoulder.
No sooner had he had the thought than the van halted abruptly, not bothering to pull over. The driver must have figured out what was going on.
The door opened automatically. Kenji leaped to the side of it for cover as the driver got out and ran back. He sprang into view, a stunner in each hand, and fired into the van before he could have gotten a look inside. Mari had grabbed a fallen stunner and also jumped for cover, taking up a position on the other side of the door. The twin blasts hit the back wall, the edge of the nimbus buzzing against Kenji's skin as they passed but not catching him fully enough to knock him out.
As if they'd planned it, he and Mari leaned out together and fired. The policeman saw her first and jumped to the side in time to avoid her blast, but Kenji's caught him in the chest. He pitched backward into the street.
Kenji jumped down, spotting the headlights of other vehicles heading in their direction. Though he was tempted to pause and drag the policeman out of the street, there wasn't time, not if he wanted to get away. Someone else would come along and help the men.
Besides, Mari leaped out and raced into a parking lot, not glancing back. Kenji cursed. A woman was supposed to stop and say thank you after being rescued.
He rushed after her, relieved that his longer legs let him gain on her. He raised his weapon to stun her, but before he got the shot off, she glanced back, then darted sideways onto a walkway between two buildings.
Instincts warned him that charging around the corner after her might be dangerous. Instead, he threw himself into a roll, the pavement pummeling his shoulder and back as his momentum carried him across the walkway and to the building on the other side. His instincts had been correct: a blue stun bolt zipped past above him. It would have hit him if he'd been standing upright.
He jumped up, firing at her from around the corner of the building. Mari had ducked behind a lamppost, but it wasn't wide enough to hide her fully. His blast caught her in the side, and he held his breath, waiting to see if that would be enough to knock her out.
When he poked his head around the corner, she'd dropped to her knees and slumped against the lamppost, but she wasn't fully out. She scowled at him and fired again. He jerked back a split second before the shot blasted past, the skin on his cheeks instantly going numb. As much as he cursed his father, he knew he had his better-than-average reflexes to thank for still being conscious.
Kenji squatted low and leaned around the corner, prepared to fire again before springing back, but she'd crumpled the rest of the way to the ground, her fingers open with the stunner falling out of her grip. Though he half expected it to be a trap, he risked trotting closer.
Shouts came from the street, and the flashes of police lights reflected off building windows in the parking lot. Kenji didn't have much time.
He snatched Mari's weapon, and her fingers twitched. Her eyes were half-open and glassy, but she didn't otherwise react. He'd only stunned her partially, meaning she would rouse soon.
"My apologies for the manhandling," he said, rolling her over enough to fasten his set of flex-cuffs to her wrists.
A twinge of guilt went through him at how bad a night the woman was having, and the uncertainty returned that maybe he was capturing someone who didn't deserve to be captured. As he hoisted her over his shoulder and continued down the walkway, he hoped he was doing the right thing.
"I am," he muttered.
Just because she was curious about things and hadn't had cinnamon before didn't mean she was a good person. Besides, if Minister Dabrowski had commed the police to come collect her, she had to be a bad guy—bad gal—right?
Kenji wished he wasn't deemed by many to be a bad guy himself, and that he dared to go knock on Dabrowski's door to check. Instead, he turned onto a trail that led through trees toward more classroom buildings. He needed to reunite with Kay and get off campus as quickly as possible, but his strength wasn't so vast that he could run for miles with a woman over his shoulder. He would need to find a vehicle soon. Maybe he should have kept the smoking shuttle.
Mari stirred faintly, an elbow clunking him in the spine. He ran faster, reluctant to stun her again, as more than one hit in rapid succession could damage a person's nervous system. Maybe later, he could—
Something stabbed him in the butt, and he yelped, dropping her in the bushes beside the trail. He grabbed his butt as he pointed his stunner at her, imagining that she'd stabbed him with a knife and his hand would come away bloody.
She rolled out of the bushes and lumbered to her feet, still dazed from the stun. But not so dazed that she hadn't been able to stab him. How had she even gotten out a weapon when her hands were cuffed? Wait, they weren't cuffed. She'd gotten free of them somehow. What the hell?
Kenji's finger tightened on the trigger of his weapon as he wrestled with the temptation to stun her again, medical side effects be damned.
He checked his free hand, but there wasn't any blood on his fingers. She lifted not a knife but her finger, showing him a gray metallic ring with a needle jutting from the bottom. Moisture on the tip caught the yellow light from a nearby lamppost.
"Is that poison?" Kenji demanded, then winced. His words came out slurred.
"A tranquilizer." Mari lifted her chin. "I am not a murderer."
"You stabbed me in the ass."
"I do not know who you are or how you keep finding me, but I refuse to go with you. I have something I must retrieve, and even after I retrieve it, I will not be going back to my people."
"You." Kenji lifted a finger to point at her, but he wobbled and saw double for a moment. His legs grew rubbery, and the feeling that he had better sit down before he fell down came over him. "Didn't the police search you?"
"They did not search my jewelry."
Kenji's arm drooped, and his body followed, his shoulder too numb to feel pain when he thudded down on the trail.
"I'm going to have to... speak to them... about their carelessness," he mumbled, his cheek mashed against the dirt, its earthy scent filling his nostrils.
Mari stood over him, and he feared she might do more than knock him out this time. Maybe he deserved it. All of his father's training, all of the precious genetic enhancements, and Kenji couldn't catch one astroshaman girl.
|
Asylum - Lindsay Buroker.txt
| 9 |
Mari wanted to leave the university campus, having found nothing but trouble here, but she needed to get her terraformer back. Maybe it was naive, but she still believed it might be a way to prove her usefulness to the Kingdom government and get that meeting with the queen. And a diplomatic passport! Minister Dabrowski had mentioned that twice, as if it might truly be a possibility.
As uncomfortable as it had been dangling from the crusher's grip, Sato and Dabrowski had been willing to talk to her, willing to listen. If the police hadn't shown up—and if her terraformer hadn't been stolen—her night might have gone according to plan.
A part of her was tempted to circle back to Sato and Dabrowski's home and try again, but she had to get her terraformer first. Then she could make her case. The next time she approached, she would try to catch Sato without Dabrowski—or his crusher—around.
Mari found the public campus map she'd used earlier and looked for a security building. There had to be a depot where those drones went to recharge their batteries. Maybe the hoodlum who'd reprogrammed them to attack and steal from people was hunkered in there now, examining his or her loot.
A single building on the map was labeled Campus Security. It didn't say anything about drones, but she headed in that direction, winding along dirt trails and cement walkways between buildings and through grassy areas so she could avoid the streets.
She'd left that man crumpled on the trail for the police to find, and she hoped they locked him up. Her mother would call her a fool for leaving an enemy behind to try to capture her again, but she couldn't kill any of these people, not when she wanted to work for them. Even if that bounty hunter might be a criminal in his own right, he had a Kingdom accent, and she couldn't be positive he didn't have ties to some law-enforcement agency.
Though if he had, he wouldn't have had to stun the police to get her. What exactly had that been? A rescue, he'd said. How ludicrous. He'd only wanted to rescue her, so he could capture her himself. And collect whatever reward her family had issued for her.
A part of her wanted to message her mother and tell her to knock it off, that she was leaving, and that was that, but she'd spoken to her family of her desires in the past, and neither her mother nor siblings had been willing to accept them. One didn't leave the astroshamans, especially when one had specifically been raised to be an asset to one's people, not out of some feeling of love or a desire for children. If her mother had ever hugged her or expressed warmth, Mari couldn't remember it.
Her throat tightened with a sense of longing that she usually succeeded in pushing out of her mind. Distracted, she almost ran into a pair of students in dark clothing walking along the path in the opposite direction. She muttered an apology, tugged her hood lower over her eyes, and hurried around them.
"Focus," she muttered to herself.
Even though she hoped the police would assume she'd fled the campus, and weren't looking for her here, Mari couldn't be positive about that. Further, she'd passed several stationary cameras atop lampposts. It was possible someone was monitoring them and had been alerted to watch for a blonde woman in a cloak and hood.
She came off the trail and onto a disturbingly open grassy lawn around a three-story building. Numerous security shuttles and autoflyers were in the parking lot, and lights were on in the foyer and front offices. Campus Security, a sign out front read. Someone passed by a window in one of the lit offices. A night shift was working, maybe the very night shift that monitored the cameras and was looking for Mari.
Following the trees edging the lawn, she circled to the back of the building. Maybe the drones were in a less populated garage or shed.
Thwarting electronic locks and sneaking into the building shouldn't be difficult, but she didn't want to risk running into people. The police had taken her arc blaster, her destroyed backpack, and everything in her pockets. The stunner she'd grabbed and the dual-purpose rings she wore were the only meager tools she had left. It had only been luck—actually, it had been the bounty hunter's lack of foresight—that put her in a position to use one.
There was a smaller detached building in the back, with only a few vehicles parked out front, one police van and two air bikes. The police van might have made her draw back and reject the idea of entering there, but a plaque on the door read Security Drones and Robots.
Maybe the policemen were inside, interrogating whoever had reprogrammed the drones. Her first thought was to applaud that, but if the police confiscated all of the stolen goods that had been brought in, they would take her terraformer right along with shopping bags full of knickknacks.
She assumed that the rightful owners of the latter would be able to come claim their goods, but how could she walk in and do that? She had to get her device before it was locked up somewhere. Or, worse, taken to a government facility for study. Would the police recognize astroshaman technology when they saw it?
After checking her hood again, Mari headed for the entrance, giving the police vehicle wide berth. The front door wasn't locked, and she eased it open. With her stunner in her pocket and her hand around the grip, she paused to listen for voices. A man and a woman were talking somewhere down a hall.
Mari stepped inside and crept past closed office doors on the left and a bank of windows on the right looking into a large repair bay. A few vehicles, a couple dozen ambulatory robots, and shelves full of dormant drones were inside. The lights in the bay were off, but she found an unlocked door and stepped inside, hoping to find the bags of stolen goods on a table.
The air smelled of metal, chemicals, and lubricant, and a few indicator lights winked on equipment. Nothing stirred, and Mari didn't see her property. She thought about activating one of the drones and hacking her way into its system to look for answers, but she doubted the responsible units were in this bay.
The female voice grew louder, and for the first time, Mari could make out words.
"What do you mean you were playing video games?"
A new voice replied, young and squeaky. "Didn't know," were the only audible words.
Mari grimaced, fearing the drones who'd stolen her terraformer weren't here. Maybe some outside entity had taken control of them, and the owner of the young voice was a kid on staff who'd been sleeping on the job.
A man spoke, his tone conciliatory, and Mari started. That sounded like Dabrowski.
Would he have interrupted his dinner to come over here? He was a roboticist and worked on campus, but he was also an important government official. Did such people get called in after hours to help with malfunctioning drones?
Mari reached for the door back into the hallway, thinking she might eavesdrop after all, but she paused with her hand on the knob. If Dabrowski was here, the crusher might be too, and he was convinced eavesdropping was a heinous crime.
Before she'd decided what to do, someone stepped into the hallway. The woman. She wore a police uniform and walked beside another woman in a campus-security uniform.
Mari ducked low, glimpsing weapons on both of their belts. She was stuck right in front of the door, and they were heading down the hall toward the exit. What if they paused to check the bay?
She drew her stunner. Though she hated the idea of leaving a trail of unconscious bodies behind her, she was determined to get her terraformer back, one way or another.
Fortunately, the women walked past without stopping. Mari let out a relieved breath and waited a long moment to make sure they didn't come back inside. The male voices started up again, Dabrowski and the kid.
Did she need to eavesdrop? What if she... strolled in and offered to help?
Assuming Dabrowski had been telling the truth that neither he nor Sato had commed the police, he might not be that perturbed if she walked in to continue their conversation. He'd seemed open to helping her, or at least listening to her story. He'd helped Mari's mother, after all. Of course, that might be more of a minus than a plus. If he considered her mother an ally, he might feel compelled to report her missing daughter to her.
Maybe, but Mari decided to take a shot. She needed to prove herself to these people if she was to earn asylum.
She eased down the hallway, their voices growing more distinct as she approached.
"Good," Dabrowski was saying. "Now see if you can find their locator chips. Their range is limited, so they should be within five miles."
"Yes, sir. Er, my lord. Minister." The kid sounded as flustered as he had when dealing with whichever of the women had been lecturing him. Maybe more so.
"Casmir," Dabrowski said dryly.
"You can't call a noble by his first name," the kid protested. "They flog you for that."
"I don't think that's been true for a thousand years, but even if it were, I'm mostly an honorary noble."
"Didn't they give you land? And a title?"
"And government work," Dabrowski said.
"That means you're a real noble."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes, my lord. Professor Teabottom covered it in my sociology class."
Dabrowski sighed, as if he would have preferred to be Casmir over anyone's lord.
"I can't find the locator chips, sir. None of them. Is it possible the drones were destroyed?"
"Probably not. And since they were in the bay this afternoon, and the security cameras suggest nobody was in here to alter them physically, the hackers likely remotely installed software to cloak their signatures as well as take over access. That sounds like the Chipfogger program. Or maybe Artarus 7. Here. You've got system-administrator privileges, right? Check for recent downloads of those programs from the underground campus servers to chips registered with the university. At this point, I'm more inclined to guess a student did this rather than some master hacker living in the city. Mugging students for what's in their backpacks isn't typical of an experienced criminal mastermind."
Mari, having been mugged, wasn't sure she agreed.
Remembering that she'd already gotten caught once for eavesdropping, and that the crusher might be standing silently in there with Dabrowski, Mari took a deep breath and knocked on the doorjamb. Since the door itself stood ajar, that was the best she could do.
The towering tarry black crusher appeared in the doorway. Mari jumped back, bumping against the wall. Not again.
Surprisingly, the crusher didn't lunge out and capture her.
"Casmir Dabrowski," it stated. "Your police authorities have failed to retain the astroshaman female. She is here eavesdropping once more. Do you wish me to apprehend her again?"
"Uh?" Dabrowski peeked around the crusher's shoulder. "Miss Mari, wasn't it?"
"Yes. I am looking for my terraformer that was stolen by security drones." She hesitated, tempted to pretend the incident with the police hadn't happened at all and see what he did, but the crusher had already brought it up. "The police were not interested in assisting me, so I had to... depart from their presence."
"I see." Dabrowski seemed more amused than annoyed or judgmental. "Yes, I've occasionally had to depart from the presence of law-enforcement authorities myself, when their mission goals deviated from mine."
"Really, sir?" the student asked. "I mean, my lord."
"Yes." Dabrowski crooked a finger to invite Mari into the room, then patted the crusher. "Let her come in, please, Zee. I believe someone on campus has illegally obtained astroshaman technology."
"I read the book, but I didn't know how much was, you know, fictionalized." The speaker, a shaggy-haired kid who looked like a younger version of Dabrowski, raised his eyebrows when Mari walked in. "Do you really know astroshamans?" He touched his chest uncertainly; a logo on his blue T-shirt proclaimed in gold that he heart-symbolled the Kingdom.
"There's only one who's deigned to talk to me."
"High Shaman Moonrazor." The student barely glanced at Mari, instead turning his worshipful eyes toward Dabrowski. "Did you really kiss her?"
That didn't startle Mari, since it had been mentioned in Sato's book, but Dabrowski lost his equanimity, nearly tripping over nothing and pitching sideways. The crusher reached out and steadied him.
"Kim put that in the book?" Dabrowski blurted. "The book that all of the Kingdom has read?"
"Yes, my lord. Uhm, you haven't read it?"
"I lived it." Dabrowski recovered enough to lift a hand and rub the appalled expression off his face, though his left eye blinked in some tic. "I hope the book explained that she kissed me and only to use me as a shield so Tenebris Rache, whose mercenaries were demolishing her base, wouldn't shoot her. She's at least twice my age and..." He looked at Mari, maybe remembering her admission that Moonrazor was her mother, and edited his words on the fly. "We were more enemies than allies at that point."
At that point. Mari couldn't help but grimace at the reminder that they were allies now and wondered if she'd made a huge mistake. What if Dabrowski had already contacted her mother, and her family was on the way to round up their wayward charge and drag her back to their isolated base?
"That's amazing, my lord. You've had so many stellar adventures."
"Yes." Dabrowski clasped his hands behind his back, resuming the teacherly tone he'd been using with the student earlier, and nodded toward the computer terminal the kid was parked at. "Have you found recent downloads of those files? The drones started deviating from their programming this morning, so you only need to check back a day or two. It's possible this was being planned for weeks, but students tend toward the impulsive, so I'm inclined to believe this wasn't premeditated. Someone who had more time to think about it might have realized it would be a bad idea."
"They're going to get expelled for sure. One minute, my lord." The student turned his focus back to the terminal.
Mari thought about volunteering to do the search herself, since she could likely find the culprit in seconds. For that matter, Dabrowski probably could too and was using the opportunity to teach the student. But Mari didn't care about that; she only wanted her terraformer back, ideally before a police officer sprang in to arrest her again.
"You mentioned that the device the drones absconded with is a prototype?" Dabrowski asked her, not sounding skeptical about her claims. "And for terraforming?"
"For rapid terraforming. It breaks down the original matter on a planet or moon within minutes and can soon start rearranging molecules into fertile soil, complete with seeds and enzymes and water."
A pensive crease appeared on Dabrowski's forehead.
"And yes, it's a prototype. That's why I risked going to the wreck to get it. I have the plans, of course." Mari waved toward the chips integrated into her brain. "But it uses a unique alloy that my people—those who settled in the forest here—can't make more of until we're able to gather more resources. Your people—nonastroshamans—would find the alloy alone extremely valuable. It's used in a great deal of our advanced technology, including ship hulls."
"Ship hulls that can be made all but invisible?"
"The invisibility is conveyed by a shield generator, but the hulls do have technology that insulates against scans."
The part of Mari that had been fully indoctrinated to be loyal to her people, and hold their secrets even in the face of death, squirmed at this openness with a near-stranger, but if she got what she wanted, to be granted asylum in exchange for working for the Kingdom, she would have to share a lot more secrets. If she did, would her family go from wanting to capture her and bring her home to perhaps trying to kill her to keep her quiet?
Maybe she could offer to work for the Kingdom without betraying any secrets, volunteering only her skills, not her knowledge. But unless her family knew she was doing that... would it matter?
Fortunately, Dabrowski looked only mildly curious, not like he was contemplating drugging her so he could extract everything she knew from her. "That technology and alloy would be very valuable then, yes. We'll try to get it back for you. Maybe the thieves don't realize what they've got, and it's currently being used as a paperweight."
"Found it, my lord!" The student opened a desk drawer and pulled out a pen and paper to scribble an address. He tore off a corner and ran it over to Dabrowski, who accepted the scrap with the same bemused expression that Mari might have had at being given information on a physical medium. "The files were accessed from that network account and at that address."
"Thank you." Casmir glanced at it, probably taking a picture with his contact camera, and handed it back.
Mari also recorded the address, experiencing the temptation to sprint away and check it before Dabrowski could send anyone.
"I had to track it through a few relay stations. They were trying to hide their location, but I found them." The student lifted his chin.
"Good work, Brodeur. Hm. This address is in faculty housing, not a dorm. Assistant Professor Donadieu lives there without a roommate. He teaches economics."
"Is the pay for faculty here insufficient?" Mari asked. "Such that someone would be tempted toward theft?"
"I don't think so, but I suppose it depends on what financial desires you have. One wonders if he might have been conducting some experiment for a class. An irritated student could also be framing him. This will require an in-person visit." Dabrowski considered her. "At this junction, the mature, professional thing for me to do would be to contact the police and send them to visit, but it will be problematic if they run into you."
"Yes. They may be somewhat distracted by the bounty hunter I left crumpled on the sidewalk, but I doubt they've forgotten me."
"Your mother sent a bounty hunter after you? Is she trying to get you back, or... just how forbidden is it to leave the family?"
"I believe my sisters may have sent him. They're as inexperienced with dealing with outsiders and outside societies as I am. That could explain why they sent someone young and inept. I think my mother would seek me out through the network and send our own people." Something that might still happen. "It's also possible she's waiting for me to realize I was foolish to leave and slink back home as a failure."
"Hm. Why don't we go check it out? Zee is a good protector if Assistant Professor Donadieu resorts to physical violence, though I'd like to think I don't have much to fear from an economics professor."
"My lord?" The student had pulled up a picture of Donadieu, a tall fit man in a martial arts gi with a black belt tied around his waist.
"Ah, maybe I would have something to fear. Fortunately, Zee is without peer when it comes to physical confrontations."
"Crushers are superior warriors and defenders of the helpless," the crusher—Zee—said in a flat monotone, then patted Dabrowski's head.
"That's me," Dabrowski said dryly, then gestured toward the hallway. "Please lead the way, Zee." He bowed politely to Mari, nodding for her to go next.
Mari didn't know if she could trust him but appreciated that he hadn't treated her any differently than one of his own kind. And he didn't seem inclined to help the police find her. Too bad she didn't know if he was inclined to help her mother find her.
|
Asylum - Lindsay Buroker.txt
| 10 |
Kenji woke up in a brilliantly lit cell with the municipal police logo on a white wall, and he groaned. He didn't have the headache or sore muscles that he'd had after waking from being stunned, and didn't know if he should be glad Mari had used a tranquilizer on him instead. Mostly, he was embarrassed that she'd gotten the best of him. Again. His father would have lectured him vastly about underestimating an opponent. Not that Kenji cared about having his father's good opinion, but he couldn't help but feel like far less than the sum of his parts.
A uniformed officer stepped up to the force field at the front of his cell, her brown hair swept back in a tight bun. "You awake?"
Kenji sat up and faced her, wondering if the police had taken a blood sample while he'd been out. They would have scanned him and found the lack of an ident and banking chip. His clothing—and weapons—had been taken, and he sat in baggy blue trousers and a smock. All ready to be shipped off to a permanent detention center? He pushed his sleeves up, trying to spot a needle mark from a blood draw, though it only would have taken a tiny smudge of blood or a cheek swab for them to test his DNA.
"I'm Lieutenant Hanabusa. You'll get your one comm call, but I need some information from you." Her tone turned dry. "Like your name and why you don't have even a banking chip."
"I don't have a bank."
"What do you do? Barter for food?"
"The cheesemonger at the night market accepts chickens and cows in trade." A true fact, though Kenji had never brought either. Several of the market merchants accepted gold, silver, and old Kingdom crown coins and bills, even if they had to jump through hoops to cash physical currency these days. "My name is Kenji Backer."
"You're a Kingdom subject?" Hanabusa should have been able to tell from his accent that he was from the system, but she lifted her eyebrows.
"I was born here. I'm sort of... off the network."
She sighed and rolled her eyes. "One of those. I trust that means you don't pay taxes or contribute to society in any meaningful way?"
"Is it your job to judge me?"
"No, but it's a fun perk of my position. You helped an astroshaman spy escape. Why?"
Kenji debated on an answer that wouldn't immediately prompt her to send someone in to do a blood draw and search for his DNA in the Kingdom databases, if they hadn't done so already. It hadn't occurred to him that they might believe Mari was some kind of nefarious spy. All he'd been thinking when he helped her was to capture her for himself, but he might have gotten himself in far more trouble than if he'd simply stolen something. The truth might be better than a lie here.
"I'm a bounty hunter, and she has a bounty on her head."
"No, she doesn't," Hanabusa said. "Military Intelligence ran an image search and checked the bounty-hunter message boards in the Kingdom and the rest of the Twelve Systems. There wasn't a match."
"The bounty was offered to me in person by the people after her. Her sisters. Maybe astroshamans don't put bounties out to the system as a whole and just pick suitably talented people."
"And that's you? My men found you crumpled on a trail with a needle hole in your ass."
"Someone did an impressively thorough search of my anatomy to spot that."
"Sergeant Woodrow thought you were cute."
"I feel molested. Can I have my comm call now?" They'd taken his glasses along with his clothes, so he didn't have access to the network, though he suspected the detention cells were insulated to block wireless signals anyway. The police wouldn't want prisoners romping freely across the network and contacting allies to arrange jail breaks while locked up.
"Yes. Do you want recommendations for a lawyer?"
A lawyer, right. He didn't know yet who he would call, but a lawyer wasn't it.
Kay was his only ally. Had they collected him after finding Kenji unconscious? Or was the poor robot roaming the campus lost while wondering what had happened to Kenji? Maybe he should make Kay his one call, but Kay couldn't break him out of jail. Kenji lamented that his impulsive plan had parted him from his robot ally. Would Kay be all right by himself? He wouldn't know where to go on campus and, without an identifiable owner nearby, might end up locked up in some groundskeeper's maintenance shed.
"If you're flush with chickens," Hanabusa added, "maybe we can find one who barters in livestock."
"I'm chickenless at the moment."
She tapped a button, lowering the force field, and Kenji walked out. Along with the rest of his clothing, they'd taken his socks and shoes, leaving him barefoot on the cold tile floor.
Hanabusa waved to a comm terminal on the wall, one that recorded all calls, no doubt. Reaching it would involve walking past other cells, some with solo occupants, some with groups of thugs that looked like the kinds of people his father had once hired to pummel Kingdom troops and create distractions while he masterminded his terrorist activities.
A man in a white lab coat walked into the cell block with a medical kit in his hand. Uh oh.
Kenji strode toward the comm terminal, hoping vainly that the doctor was there for someone else.
"While you're chatting," Hanabusa said, "Dr. Ancelotti will take a sample of your blood."
Kenji halted midstep. "Oh?"
Hanabusa was armed with a stunner and a DEW-Tek pistol, and two more policemen stood guard at the only exit from the area. No escape.
"Call us strange," Hanabusa said, "but we like to identify the people we arrest." Hanabusa's eyes narrowed, and her tone turned hard. "Especially those who help astroshaman spies, astroshaman spies who could only have been on campus for heinous purposes."
"You're sure that's not an invasion of people's privacy?"
"No. You better hope nothing happens to Minister Dabrowski or anyone else on campus. If your actions allow that woman to hurt someone that important, you might not survive the night."
"You're threatening my life? That seems uncalled for from a protector of the populace."
"Oh, I wouldn't kill you. But maybe we'd put you in a communal cell." Hanabusa tilted her head toward one such cell, which was full of muscular, tattooed brutes who managed to look fearsome even in the blue pajamas. They were listening to the conversation, and several brazenly met Kenji's eyes, one cracking his knuckles in the anticipation of some entertainment. "Dabrowski is pretty popular even with felons. Something about saving the entire planet from the AI supership." Hanabusa nodded for the doctor to approach Kenji.
"Must be nice to be liked." Kenji faced the terminal, debating on who, if anyone, could get him out of what was escalating into a dangerous predicament.
It was hard for him to imagine Mari, the girl who'd ask a policeman to try his latte, assassinating Minister Dabrowski, but... what did he truly know about her? Just because she'd left him alive—twice—didn't mean she wasn't on a mission. And Dabrowski had been integral in defeating the astroshamans scant months earlier. Maybe they were holding a grudge.
While he was debating, the doctor pushed up Kenji's sleeve. He didn't bother with a needle, simply using a tool to prick his skin and take a quick sample.
"How long does that take to analyze?" Kenji asked, aware of his heartbeat racing.
"Only a few minutes."
Great. They would throw him in the cell with the thugs as soon as they found out about his father. Kenji didn't know if that association would move them to anger as readily as the death of a beloved public figure, but he doubted the brutes had to be angry to enjoy pummeling a stranger.
"There's a selection of lawyers who work with prisoners." Hanabusa pointed at the menu on the comm screen.
Kenji ignored it and punched in the name of the only person he could think of who might be able to get him out of this—and who might be moved to help, if Kenji could convince him that he had information he might want. Did he?
Casmir Dabrowski had two contacts listed, a home number and an office number at the university. Given the hour, and that Kenji had recently seen Dabrowski standing outside of his home, he opted for the first one.
"Uh." The doctor was close enough to see his choice and looked over at Hanabusa.
"We're old friends," Kenji said.
"That can't be true." Hanabusa had come to look over his shoulder.
Didn't he get any privacy for his comm? "You're right. I took one of his classes once."
Hanabusa and the doctor exchanged looks, but they didn't scoff again. Since Minister Dabrowski had formerly been Professor Dabrowski, they had to accept that Kenji could be telling the truth.
The comm chimed for a long time, and he feared it would drop to voicemail. What happened if nobody answered his one comm call? He was pretty sure the law dictated he get another one, but Hanabusa seemed to play loose with prisoner rights.
Someone answered the comm, a face popping up on the display. It wasn't Dabrowski but his roommate, Scholar Sato, who'd also been out on the stoop confronting Mari. Kenji stared at her, worried Dabrowski might have left the house and that his one comm would be wasted on someone who would be indifferent to helping him. Would she even pass along his message?
"You are not Captain Kucharski," Sato stated in a flat, almost robotic voice, making Kenji realize he'd never heard her speak. Unlike Dabrowski, who'd appeared in numerous interviews after the invasions and the coronation of Queen Oku, Sato was reclusive.
"Uhm, no."
"Captain Kucharski is our usual police liaison." Sato glanced to the side, probably rechecking the origin of the comm call.
Kenji didn't know why she might have a police liaison, unless people pestered the now-famous Dabrowski often, but she might only have answered because it was a familiar number.
"Sorry, ma'am. I'm a former student of Professor—Minister Dabrowski's and need a little help. Is he there?"
"He is not."
Crap. The doctor had departed to run the blood test.
"Can you give him a message for me? I'm in a bind. Actually, I'm in jail. I don't expect him to help with that—" admittedly, he hoped Dabrowski would be eager to discuss astroshamans with him and would bail him out of jail for the ease of discussion, "—but I have some information on the astroshaman who visited you, and I'm, ah, available here if he wants to know what I know."
Sato's expression had been as flat as her voice for most of this—she hadn't twitched even an eyebrow at his confession to being in jail—but the brows elevated slightly at the last. Less surprise and more skepticism, he guessed. Maybe she assumed that Dabrowski could get whatever information he wanted whenever he wanted.
That was possibly true. Kenji didn't know if he had any more information than Dabrowski on Mari, but if he showed he was willing to be helpful, maybe...
"What is your name?" Sato asked.
Kenji hesitated, tempted to give her the name of someone who'd legitimately been a student, but he didn't remember the names of any of the people who'd been in those lecture halls. "Kenji Backer."
"What class of his did you take?"
Why did he suspect she didn't believe him and was trying to catch him in a lie?
"It was the entry-level mechanical-engineering class two years ago. He may not remember me that well." Or at all, since Kenji hadn't been on the roster or ever registered at the university. "It was a big lecture hall."
"Casmir doesn't forget any of his students."
Er. Kenji groped for something that might prove he'd been there. "Please let him know that I enjoyed his T-shirt collection."
Kenji promptly wished he'd thought of something less idiotic to say.
"T-shirt collection?" Hanabusa, who lurked nearby, mouthed.
"Which one was your favorite?" was what Sato asked.
Hell, Kenji remembered that Dabrowski had worn one every day, sometimes under a blazer when he was dressing up to Zamek University faculty code standards, but he groped for a specific one. There had been several with robots on them, but that seemed such an obvious answer that someone who hadn't been there could have guessed it. Besides, he was fairly certain Dabrowski had been caught in robot T-shirts for some of those recent interviews.
"The one that says I paused my game to be here," Kenji said, plucking that out of his memory at the last moment.
Sato nodded, as if he'd answered correctly. "I will tell him."
The screen went black. As Hanabusa guided him back toward his cell, the doctor returned. He glanced warily at Kenji—that couldn't be good—then nodded to her.
"I need to talk to you, Lieutenant."
Definitely not good.
Hanabusa secured Kenji in the cell again and followed the doctor out of the area. Kenji sank to the floor with his back against the wall.
It was amazing how often desperation prompted one to make bad decisions. He wondered if he would live long enough to regret all the ones he'd made this week.
A soft rain fell, mist dampening Mari's cheeks, and she tilted her face toward the sky. It wasn't her first time in the rain, but she'd spent most of her life in spaceships or climate-controlled stations or moon bases, so it was an unusual experience for her. Something about the damp air made the smell of the nearby sea more noticeable. That was also something she'd rarely experienced. What would her mother say if she admitted to finding Odin, with its amazing array of climate zones and weather options, intriguing?
To her surprise, Minister Dabrowski led her toward faculty housing on foot. Maybe nothing was that far away on campus, or maybe he couldn't drive. He appeared to have strabismus in his left eye, and Sato's book had mentioned seizures. Strange that he hadn't opted for ocular implants or even cybernetic replacements for a superior visual experience. And a responsive neurostimulation system placed under his skull could have minimized seizures.
"Assistant Professor Donadieu didn't show up for work today," Dabrowski murmured, running network searches while they walked. "We'll see if he answers his door."
Mari didn't know if he was speaking to her or only to himself. The crusher walked sturdily along beside him, gazing alertly about, not commenting on Dabrowski's mutterings.
It seemed presumptuous to start a conversation with him, though it was more his connection to her mother that made Mari uneasy than anything about his personality. She found she wanted to trust him, and for him to be an ally, but if he was already her mother's ally, she didn't see how that could work.
"How do you like Zamek City so far?" Dabrowski looked at her and waved toward the campus, maybe indicating the entire city. "Other than the drone attacks. And the rain. I would say that's rare, but it's not. Our maritime location leans toward dampness, but Odin also has tropical equatorial regions and deserts and a large variety of climates."
"Yes, I am more intrigued by your rural zones than your urban ones. I hope to explore and take soil samples from various agronomically productive areas. Naturally, many studies of Odin have been done, and I can find soil macronutrient analysis reports online, but it seems that when one is down on a planet, one should experience it firsthand and take samples oneself. There's so much that can be learned from natural habitats and applied to space stations and terraforming projects on other worlds."
"Your people have been here for a few months, but I suppose you've stayed in your base. I did suggest that to High Shaman Moonrazor, at least until the attacks aren't as fresh in the minds of Kingdom citizens. When you get a chance to sightsee, you might enjoy the astrophysics museum on the Southern Continent, or the botanical domes down the coast a bit from Zamek, and of course there are some great exhibits and studies ongoing at the Terraforming and Agroclimatology College on the moon. I'm sure you would find that remedial but possibly enjoyable."
"I believe so. I am eager to experience more things that normal humans experience. They need not all be related to my field of study. For instance, I have read about various types of alcohol made from crops, but I have never consumed them."
"You've never had alcohol?" Dabrowski asked.
"Mind-altering substances are frowned upon among our people. You're supposed to be able to reach a higher computational level simply by meditation and mental exercises."
"Reaching a higher computational level isn't usually the goal when drinking alcohol. I'm sure you can find a student to share some beer with you if you want the experience. This is the street." Dabrowski pointed toward a cul-de-sac not unlike the one where he lived, though it appeared to back up to a large field. Something for sporting events?
"I appreciate you helping me retrieve my terraformer," Mari said.
He gave her a lopsided smile. "Sure, but I'm actually just trying to get to the bottom of the drone mischief. I am the faculty advisor for the drone program."
"You have duties here even though you are now Minister of External Affairs?"
"Oh, yes. I requested it. I wasn't ready to give up teaching, which I enjoy." When they reached the house, Dabrowski started up the walk, but the crusher strode past him to take the lead.
"I will go first in case of danger, Casmir Dabrowski."
"The lights are off, so the probability of danger is likely minimal, but thank you, Zee."
A dog barked in a nearby backyard. Mari hoped they would find all of the stolen goods in a pile inside this professor's house, and that she could return to her mission. Perhaps Dabrowski could help her get an audience with the queen.
Zee rang the door chime.
"Hm," Dabrowski said. "I'm pursuing some recent network activity related to astroshaman technology. The wreck up in the Arctic Islands has been a hot topic of late, and there are people willing to pay for any technologically advanced equipment retrieved from the site. I need to see if I can find someone in Military Intelligence to clue me in on the happenings up there and elsewhere. Royal Intelligence usually keeps me in the loop, but I don't know the upper echelon of MI well, or any of the lower echelons either. And there's still a little drama going on right now that Queen Oku is trying to work out with the military heads who are giving fluffy reports to her because she's a girl and a scientist." Dabrowski lifted his eyes toward the stars. Or maybe that was what normal humans called an eye roll.
"We do not have a military per se," Mari said. "Everyone is essentially a scientist or an engineer. We use our technology to defend ourselves."
"Yes. I've noticed that. It's effective."
"Nobody is answering the door," the crusher said. "Shall I force it open in order to search the premises?"
"That would unfortunately be illegal," Dabrowski said. "We need to get a search warrant."
"Are search warrants issued to crushers?"
"In the city, they're typically issued to the police, though nobles have the right to search the premises of people living on their properties or to assign the duty to appointed representatives." Dabrowski tapped his chin. "Zamek University is public, owned by the crown, which would technically mean the queen has the power to search the campus or issue a warrant to an appointed representative. Hold one moment, please."
Mari was bemused that a high-ranking government official seemed to be hunting for loopholes, but since she wanted to look inside, she would not object.
The faint clang of a vehicle door—or maybe a hatch—shutting reached her ears. It seemed to come from the field behind the houses. A strange parking area, if that grassy land was reserved for sporting activities, but Mari had no idea what was customary here. She hoped it wasn't a police vehicle spitting out more officers to come after her, but surely it would be parked in the street nearby instead of behind the housing area.
"I am poised to enter the premises, Casmir Dabrowski." The crusher still had his hand on the door.
"Thank you, Zee. I'm debating with Oku whether this situation justifies her issuing a search warrant—and whether I, as the faculty advisor in charge of the security-drone program, qualify as a proper authority figure to receive such a warrant. She accused me of scheming."
"Is that not correct?"
"Oh, it is. I'm choosing to believe that her accusation was lovingly crafted with affection and does not connote disapproval." Dabrowski lifted a hand and waved to an electronic keypad. "Let's not force the door, Zee."
A beep sounded, followed by a soft snick. The door unlocked. Presumably, he'd overridden the electronic lock.
It was dark inside, with no sound of voices or anything else, though Mari thought she heard an engine starting up on that field out back.
"I have obtained a warrant," Dabrowski said. "We're legally allowed to enter now."
"Was it crafted with affection?" Zee entered first.
"Of course."
Mari stepped inside after the crusher. With her implants already in night-vision mode, she had little trouble making out the details of the living area and a kitchen beyond. Stairs led to an upper level, but she paused with Dabrowski in the living room. Several of the furnishings were overturned. Numerous bags had been set on a table, all of them opened and pawed through. Stolen clothes, electronics, and knickknacks spilled out onto the table and the floor.
Mari hurried to the spot to look for her missing device.
"There is blood on the floor," Zee announced from the kitchen.
"Blood?" Dabrowski turned on lights.
Mari's implants adjusted automatically so the brightness did not overwhelm her eyes, and she continued to sort through the stolen goods. She used her built-in scanning software to search for the familiar alloys she'd used on the terraformer, but it didn't sense anything.
"It is still damp and warmer than room temperature." Zee walked to an attached laundry room. "There is a body in here. I will attempt to identify the person using the university's public network."
Dabrowski swore, joining him in the doorway. "That's Assistant Professor Donadieu. I just looked at his face. What the hell happened?"
"Unknown," Zee said. "There are signs of a fight, and his throat was cut by what appear to have been claws. He is already dead."
"Claws?" Dabrowski asked. "Like... bear claws?"
"I cannot discern what animal, modded human, or mechanical construct was responsible. Perhaps a forensics study by your police services may be in order."
"Oh, I'm sure." Dabrowski pushed a hand through his hair. "This just got a lot more serious than I was expecting."
Mari slumped, both because of the daunting escalation of a simple theft to murder and because she'd searched the pile of stolen goods twice, and her terraformer wasn't there. If the man who'd arranged the theft was dead, how would she find—
The roar of thrusters came from the field, loud enough to penetrate the home's walls.
"Is that a ship?" Dabrowski pushed open the back door. "On the soccer field?"
Mari rushed out past him, wondering if whoever had parked the ship there could be linked to the stolen goods—and the murder. If that was a suspicious location to land a space craft...
"I will check, Casmir Dabrowski." Zee hurried past Mari, springing over a back fence and onto the field.
Mari ran after the crusher and vaulted over the fence, wanting a glimpse of the ship herself. Too bad she'd lost her explosives and most of her other tools. She might have been able to force it to stop.
But whatever craft was taking off was invisible—it had to have a slydar hull. Only the roar of the thrusters gave it away.
Zee sprinted across the field toward the spot, but the vessel was already airborne. He leaped upward, but it must have taken off vertically and quickly. Despite his powerful jump high into the air, he did not reach the craft. He came back down, landing with a thud on the field, the damp grass scorched by the ship's takeoff.
The ship roared as it flew to the north. Mari cycled through all of her scanners and optical options, but she did not have anything that could see a craft coated with a camouflaging material.
She slumped again, afraid that ship had her terraformer. Though she did not yet have evidence to support that notion, some human instinct—a gut feeling, the books often called it—told her she'd just missed her chance to retrieve it. And if that ship was heading into space, she might have lost her chance forever.
"Tighten security on the launch loop," Dabrowski spoke into a comm unit as he walked up to them, grass stains on the knees of his trousers. "We may have a slydar-hulled ship trying to take off tonight. Or—" he met Mari's gaze, "—could that be an astroshaman ship with one of your stealth generators?"
Mari hadn't considered that, but it didn't make sense. "Other than myself, I do not believe any of my people are seeking the terraformer. It was my project and is of most concern to me."
Granted, her knowledge of terraforming and making such devices might be the primary reason her mother wanted her back, but Mari couldn't imagine any of her people murdering someone simply to retrieve her prototype.
"Probably slydar," Dabrowski said to whomever he'd commed. "Will you please have customs tighten security and search all vessels trying to use the launch loop tonight? See if you can get one of the Fleet warships with one of our new slydar detectors down there. Thank you."
"I got close enough to the vessel to glimpse it through its camouflage before it flew out of range," Zee stated.
"Oh?" Dabrowski asked. "Did you record it? Can you send video?"
"Yes."
"Will you share it with me?" Mari asked. "There was a slydar-hulled ship searching the Celestial Dart in the Arctic Islands. I wonder if it's possible this was the same ship. Lured down for a chance to obtain more of our people's technology from a thief who found something more valuable than he expected?"
"That sounds plausible," Dabrowski said. "I'll see if I can find anything on the network that Donadieu might have posted announcing that he had such technology. Ah, thank you, Zee. The ship is black and shaped like a hawk or maybe a vulture. Hm, that's not a typical Kingdom design."
"I wish I'd gotten a look at the camouflaged ship in the Arctic." Mari had been riding away from the Celestial Dart before it arrived and only knew about it because it had bombed the shuttles. Her sisters might have seen it close up, but she would not contact them. The bounty hunter had also been on that clifftop. Would he have seen it? He was a more readily available resource. "I think I know someone who might have," she admitted.
The idea of asking him questions after she'd stabbed him in the butt with a tranquilizer seemed ludicrous, but he had tried to capture her first. Twice. He shouldn't be the one holding a grudge.
"Oh?" Dabrowski asked. "Someone who might have gotten a name or further identifying markings?"
"Maybe. He said he's a bounty hunter. I think your police may have him now." Mari waved in the direction of the trail where she'd left the man unconscious. "I'm not sure what his name is. We only tangled briefly. Twice."
"In the Arctic Islands? And here? On campus?"
"Yes. He's persistent."
"You're his target? Who's paying him to collect you?"
Mari hesitated. Dabrowski asked the questions casually, maybe curiously, and not as if he were trying to trick her into revealing information, but she still didn't know if she could trust him. It boggled her mind that she was standing here talking to her mother's ally.
"Your mother?" Dabrowski guessed. "I wouldn't have expected her to turn to outsiders to handle, ah, internal affairs."
"I think my mother sent my sisters to fetch me, and they might have hired him. They have their own projects and would gladly hand the job off to a stranger if it meant they didn't have to chase me across the system."
"How is this bounty hunter tracking you?"
"I don't know."
"Maybe I should have a chat with him."
Mari curled a skeptical lip.
Dabrowski's eyes glazed as he read some message on his contact display. "Hm, this bounty hunter doesn't go by Kenji Backer, does he?"
"He didn't tell me his name before he tried to capture me."
"No? That's rude."
"I thought so."
|
Asylum - Lindsay Buroker.txt
| 11 |
Two hours passed before Lieutenant Hanabusa returned to Kenji's cell, not with the doctor but with two police sergeants in blue combat armor with rifles cradled in their arms. She lowered the force field and stepped back behind them.
"Come with us, Backer." The way she said his surname made him certain they had figured out what his real last name was. That she'd felt compelled to return with armored men further suggested his threat level had been elevated. Or maybe she planned to take him out back to a nice firing squad.
"Right," he muttered.
Kenji trailed them into a hallway, up a set of stairs, down another hallway, and into a conference room. Mirrors lined the walls inside, the kind that people could no doubt see through from adjacent monitoring areas.
Two high-ranking police officers sat in chairs at one end of the table, but they were the least imposing of the room's occupants. Two knights with purple capes draping their silver liquid armor stood against a wall, pertundos hanging from their utility belts. As Kenji knew from the news and vids, the collapsible halberd-like weapons had telescoping handles that could extend to eight feet, and the blades could slice through the most advanced combat armor while the points fired like DEW-Tek weapons. Knights came out of the nobility and were highly trained to work for the crown as special agents, so Kenji found their presence here ominous.
The older of the two men had short gray-blond hair and a trimmed gray beard, and Kenji was fairly certain this was Sir Bjarke Asger, the new head of the knights, a recent appointment by the queen. The younger knight, who resembled Sir Bjarke but whose blond-brown hair fell to his shoulders, was closer to Kenji's age. He looked familiar, like Kenji had seen him on tubes of underwear, but he doubted knights were allowed to have modeling careers.
Sitting in the seat to the side of the head of the table was a uniformed woman in her fifties. She had a lean face, with thin lips pressed together in disapproval, and hard eyes that squinted suspiciously at him. Kenji didn't recognize her, but her insignia and rank said she was someone high up in Royal Intelligence. Maybe even the highest-ranking officer, Chief Superintendent Van Dijk, who reported directly to the queen on a daily basis.
To her side, a granite-jawed man with short, slate-gray hair wore a Kingdom fleet uniform. He had the rank of general and a Military Intelligence insignia. If he wasn't the head of Military Intelligence, he was certainly someone important in their command structure.
Kenji had already known he was in trouble, but with this many high-ranking people here, there could be no doubt. They had to think they'd caught a very special fish. He almost wished Hanabusa had dragged him out to a firing line.
It was possible the presence of an astroshaman spy in the city was the reason these people had been called together late at night, and he was only going to be questioned about her, but he doubted it.
The doctor was also in the room, sitting at the table with his medical kit. Two jet injectors rested next to that kit, and Kenji swallowed, fearing he was about to be questioned under the influence of a truth drug that would make it very difficult to lie.
What would they ask him? About his father's whereabouts? It had been years since he'd communicated with the man, so Kenji couldn't even tell them if he was in the system. Too bad. Maybe if he could have, he might have traded that information for his life. He had a feeling they would ask about far more than that, about all the crimes he'd helped his father commit when he'd been too young to say no, too young to dare stand up to the man.
Would it matter to them that he'd been a boy? That his father had punished him severely when he hadn't performed acceptably, and that he'd been too afraid to do anything but what his father wanted?
Given the severity of the crimes, probably not. Supposedly, juveniles couldn't receive a life sentence to the penal mining asteroids, but in the case of heinous crimes, they could be tried as adults. And Kenji was well aware that, even though the Kingdom supposedly didn't have a death sentence, a lot of accidents happened in those mines. A lot of criminals died horribly.
All this because he'd been dumb enough to come back to the city and get caught trying to collect a bounty when he had no experience as a bounty hunter and even less experience with astroshamans. What had he been thinking? He deserved to die for his stupidity.
"Sit down." One of the armored men shoved him in the direction of the seat across from Van Dijk.
Kenji managed not to stumble, though the armor gave the man more strength than typical, and the shove wasn't gentle. He sat gingerly across from her, surprised nobody had cuffed him, but with the armored officers and two knights in the room, they probably weren't worried that even the son of Kuchikukan Chisaka could kill someone. He would be suicidal to lunge across the table, grab Van Dijk by the neck, and try to use her as a shield and captive to barter his way out of here.
It was the kind of thing his father would have tried. Kenji folded his hands on the table, hoping that told them he had no such intent.
"You don't cuff terrorists around here?" the younger knight asked dryly.
Kenji slumped in his chair. There was the confirmation that they knew all about him.
Van Dijk, who might have been wondering the same thing, looked toward Lieutenant Hanabusa.
"We were asked not to, Sir Knight," she said, her tone much more respectful than it had been when she'd been teasing Kenji about chickens.
"He has a plan," the older knight said, looking sidelong at the younger, not saying who the he was.
The seat at the head of the table had been left open. Kenji couldn't imagine who else beyond the knights, Military Intelligence, and Royal Intelligence might show up. Surely not the queen. She wouldn't oversee anything to do with terrorists or questioning prisoners. She had these people to report the findings of such things to her, should it be necessary. Besides, Kenji didn't imagine that he was important enough to warrant the queen's attention, though he supposed his father was notorious enough that his name came up in royal meetings. Now that the infamous pirate Tenebris Rache was believed dead, Kenji's father had probably been elevated higher on the list of the Kingdom's most loathed enemies.
"I know that," the younger knight said, "but it seems wise to take precautions with terrorists and the sons of terrorists. I trust he was searched thoroughly."
"Yes, of course," Hanabusa said.
"Even my butt cheek was examined," Kenji muttered before he could think wiser of it.
"That's a notorious spot where criminals store contraband, isn't it?" a new voice asked from the doorway. A voice that Kenji recognized.
Even though Kenji had tried to comm him two hours ago, it bewildered him to see Minister Dabrowski amble into the police conference room, trailed by a hulking crusher. In part, because it didn't seem that a diplomat would have a reason to come to a meeting about a terrorist's son and in part because Kenji was far more used to seeing him in a classroom setting.
"You're thinking of the anal cavity," the older knight said. "Though I suppose implants can go anywhere."
"Versatility is important. Wait by the door, please, Zee." Dabrowski patted the crusher on the chest and headed for one of the chairs on the side of the table.
Chief Van Dijk cleared her throat and pointed to the head of the table. "Your spot, my lord. Unless you're concerned about sitting next to Chisaka. Per your request, we didn't cuff him, but that can easily be changed." She gave Kenji a hard look. "We would be happy to duct tape him to that chair mummy-style and ensure he can't so much as twitch a finger."
"Oh, I'm rarely concerned when Zee is nearby." Dabrowski veered toward the head of the table, giving Kenji a curious—and maybe faintly bewildered—look when their eyes met. "Though if I'd known you were terrorist Kuchikukan's son when you were lurking in the back of my lecture hall, I might have been concerned then."
Apparently, Scholar Sato had been correct. Dabrowski didn't forget any of his students. Even those who'd never registered for classes, never spoken in the lecture hall, and never presumed to turn in an assignment.
"I... I'm not dangerous, Professor. My lord." Kenji smiled self-deprecatingly, or maybe bleakly. "As evinced by my inability to capture even one slender astroshaman woman."
"The astroshamans are usually modded to the moons, have the IQs of supercomputers, and possess tech our engineers can only dream about in their beds at night. I'd be more surprised if you could capture one."
"Well, she's young. I thought she might be less... uhm, less."
"You're dating the beautiful and vivacious queen, Casmir," the younger knight said, "and tech is what you dream about in bed at night?"
The older knight elbowed him, though his eyes glinted with similar irreverence.
"You can see why I don't gravitate toward heads of tables," Dabrowski told Van Dijk. "It implies a certain level of in-charge-ness that I don't feel I possess, perhaps because the big kids still tease me mercilessly."
"Yes, but they would follow you into battle to their deaths. Whether they're supposed to do so or not." Van Dijk's eyebrows arched.
The knights exchanged looks that didn't suggest disagreement.
Dabrowski only smiled briefly and said, "On a more distressing note, I just got word that our thieves managed to get a ride on the launch loop and flee into space. We're going to have to go straight to Plan B."
Van Dijk and the general swore.
"They were supposed to get a slydar detector to the launch loop," Van Dijk said.
"They did, but the ship avoided it by landing on an automated freighter already started up the loop. They somehow grasped on and remained attached for the ride up—piggybacking essentially. That shouldn't be possible but..." Dabrowski spread his hand, palm toward the ceiling. "One of the cameras on the pylons caught footage of the two ships as they zipped past, close enough for it to see through the camouflage."
"Piggybacked?" the general mouthed. "How?"
"Presumably, they've got some powerful clamps. We can figure out the how later. What matters now is how we're going to get the stolen astroshaman device back now that the thieves are off the planet." Dabrowski sat and turned his attention to Kenji. "Hello, Kenji. May I call you that?"
"Yes, my lord."
"We haven't exactly met, but I'm Casmir, and you can call me that instead of the lord thing. And that is Chief Superintendent Van Dijk, and that's General Heim in charge of Military Intelligence. The older knight there is head of the knights, Sir Bjarke Asger, and the younger fellow at his side is Sir William Asger. You've met Lieutenant Hanabusa, and her officers are Oxford and Endo."
"The older knight, Casmir?" Sir Bjarke asked. "That's how you describe a knight of my stature to people? I'm wounded."
"What adjectives do you prefer?" Dabrowski asked.
"Virile, cunning, and fearsome. Or, since my first name means bear, you could use that. That fearsome bear of a knight."
"Bonita calls him osito," the younger Asger said.
"What does that mean?" Dabrowski asked.
"Teddy bear."
"Oh?" Dabrowski's eyes glinted. "I could use that."
Van Dijk cleared her throat. "Gentlemen, it's getting late, and I haven't had dinner yet. Could we?"
"My apologies, Chief." Dabrowski bowed to her from his seat, then faced Kenji again. "What would you have said," he asked curiously, "if I'd been home to answer the comm?"
"I was hoping to get out of my current predicament by offering information on the astroshaman woman Mari." Kenji watched Dabrowski's face to see if he'd known the astroshaman's name or if it surprised him. "That was before the doctor analyzed my blood and sealed my fate."
"I believe your fate is somewhat ambiguous at this point, depending on what you're willing to do."
"Just about anything to avoid life—or death—in a penal asteroid mine." Kenji looked into Dabrowski's eyes, doing his best to appear earnest and trustworthy. He doubted the flinty Intelligence heads would give him a break, but Dabrowski appeared as approachable as he had when he'd been a full-time professor. "I'm also not loyal to my father. I ran away as soon as I thought I was old enough to take care of myself, and I haven't seen or communicated with him in eight years."
"I'd hate to say something as pompous as the crown is open to giving you a chance to prove yourself—" Dabrowski rolled his eyes and looked at Van Dijk, "—but if you were willing to work for the government, certain past transgressions might be forgotten."
"Not forgotten," the general growled, "but not punished."
Van Dijk nodded. "Work with us instead of against us. Your father is still at large, as I'm sure you know, and you could help us get him."
The feeling of bleakness returned. Kenji had spoken the truth and didn't feel any loyalty to his father, but the idea of working for the government and trying to set him up to be captured and likely killed... That held no appeal. And it might get him killed. As long as his father had thought he had a use for Kenji, he'd more or less taken care of him, but Kenji doubted his father felt any biological imperative to continue to watch out for him these days. He might shoot Kenji in the chest if he proved to be a thorn in his side.
"At the moment," Dabrowski said, "my interest is more in having Kenji's help to get back the stolen astroshaman tech than pitting him against a relative. It can be difficult to betray close relatives, even when their actions are criminal and you have ambivalent feelings toward them." Dabrowski smiled ruefully.
Kenji hid a sigh of relief.
"Besides, the elder Chisaka hasn't taken action against the new regime, right?" Dabrowski asked. "He may object less with a more progressive ruler in power."
General Heim grunted. "I wouldn't presume he has any adoration for Queen Oku. He tried to kill her mother once."
Kenji kept his face neutral. That defining moment in his father's career had been before he'd been born, so he couldn't be linked to that. It had been years afterward before his father had been identified as the culprit. Had Kenji's mother known exactly what kind of man she was having a relationship with back then, Kenji might never have been born.
Van Dijk waved a hand in acknowledgment of the arguments and focused on Kenji again.
"You haven't come to our awareness over the last eight years," Van Dijk said, "so you've either been very talented in carrying out crimes or you stopped assisting your father at some point and have stayed under the radar."
Hadn't Kenji already told them he'd broken ties to his father? He almost said something snarky but paused. It sounded like they might give him a chance, that they wouldn't assume he was pure evil and punish him. He had better not annoy them.
"I admit," Van Dijk went on, "I'm inclined to believe you just haven't gotten caught, not that you've been leading some virtuous life, but..." She extended a hand toward Dabrowski.
"Since you attended university classes," Dabrowski said, "even if you weren't enrolled and shouldn't technically have been there, I'm inclined to believe you wanted to better yourself and find a less criminal way to make a living. Not that mechanical engineering isn't a perfectly useful class for a criminal to take, but I seem to remember Professor Leeman mentioning you lurking in her art history class too."
"I didn't realize people were keeping track of me," Kenji murmured, wondering how Van Dijk could believe he'd been a criminal flying under the radar when he hadn't even avoided gaining the attention of the professors whose classes he'd been crashing. "I'd be willing to help the crown retrieve stolen astroshaman technology if it meant I could get a pardon." He raised his eyebrows, not positive that was what they were offering. "But I'm not sure why you think I could help with that." He turned a puzzled look on Dabrowski.
"Mari mentioned that you witnessed what might have been a black wing-shaped ship with slydar technology taking off after salvaging tech from the astroshaman wreck up north," Dabrowski said. "We encountered it down here tonight, the crew possibly responsible for murdering someone and stealing more astroshaman tech. Mari thought you might be able to identify the ship."
"You've... chatted with her? A second time since having her arrested?" Kenji shifted in his seat. Had Mari gone back to Dabrowski? Why had she risked that? And why did it sound like Dabrowski was on a first-name basis with her? Wouldn't astroshamans be treated with suspicion? He glanced around the table and the room, but nobody appeared surprised.
"I have. And I wasn't the one to comm the police."
"Oh."
"The ship?" Dabrowski prompted.
"I did see it, yes. Only briefly. It sent some drones into the wreck to collect items. One of Mari's, uhm, sisters destroyed one. That irked the ship owner, and it opened fire on us. We were in rented shuttles rather than anything with great defenses, so it might have blown us all up, but the astroshaman women destroyed its railgun with some little gizmo. Also, right about then, the military from the nearby outpost decided to investigate, and the ship flew off and didn't return. It had a slydar hull, so I have no idea which way it went, but it was black and shaped like a vulture with wings outspread. I didn't get a chance to scan its ident chip."
"Hm," Dabrowski said. "One wonders just how much astroshaman technology its crew has obtained."
"I'm surprised anything like this terraforming device you described was left in the wreck," Van Dijk said. "Military Intelligence combed over that ship weeks ago and took what it believed were choice pieces worth examining for itself. It was the only one of the wrecks that remained. The other two ships that crashed self-destructed—or were remotely detonated—soon after the battle."
"We're here because Military Intelligence reported to us—" Sir Bjarke pointed to the general and then to his own chest, "—that rogue drones were caught on camera sniffing around a secured warehouse on the base outside Zamek City where Intelligence stored the tech they scrounged from the astroshaman ship."
"Funny how things Casmir gets himself involved in end up tying into other troubles," the younger knight said.
"Did the drones get anything from the secured facility?" Dabrowski asked, ignoring the dig this time.
"Lasers up the ass from what I heard," Van Dijk said.
The knights nodded.
"The drones had asses?" Dabrowski asked. "Goodness. How inspired."
Van Dijk snorted. "They were blown up and examined. There wasn't anything sophisticated or special about the drones, but they weren't Kingdom stock. The serial numbers matched work out of a factory in System Cerberus, off-the-shelf models."
"My people took a thorough inventory," General Heim said, "and there's nothing missing from the warehouse, but there are pieces missing from laboratories that we've had studying the technology. Further, I'm concerned that more serious attempts will be made to get the tech in the warehouse—and that these thieves intend to sell everything to the highest bidder. Some of the missing items are believed to be weapons."
"Even the devices that weren't intended as weapons could be used that way. I want to speak further with Mari later, but Kim and I had a chat about how a rapid-deployment terraforming technology might work." Dabrowski grimaced. "And what the ramifications might be for anything existing when it started its work."
It took Kenji a moment to twig to what he meant. Judging by the lack of surprise from most of the people in the room, they had already considered possible repercussions.
"We want to make sure Mari's terraforming device doesn't end up in enemy hands," Dabrowski continued, "but I've spoken to Queen Oku, and she agrees that the technology would be useful to study for its original purpose, so she ideally wants it back and intact." Dabrowski nodded to Kenji. "Are you interested in helping retrieve Mari's tech? And, if possible, identifying the thieves so that our knights can lead some people in to capture them and reacquire the rest of the stolen devices?"
Kenji almost pointed out that he was more interested in retrieving Mari, but was that still true? He'd already been questioning whether he'd made the right choice in accepting the assignment, and if Minister Dabrowski wanted to help her instead of arresting her... He had to know more about astroshaman politics and who was an enemy and who wasn't than Kenji did. As much as Kenji could have used that money, maybe it was time to let that quest go.
"I'm not opposed," Kenji said, "especially if it gets me out of jail, but what would you want me to do?"
"That the thieves," Dabrowski said, "were not seeking one thing in particular and made off with several astroshaman items suggests they don't have a specific interest in the terraforming device and are likely collecting whatever they can to sell. I'm certain we have the resources to find out if they list it for sale on the black market—"
"There are a few illegal sites and auction networks for the exchange of such stolen items," Van Dijk said. "I've got someone watching them now to see if these devices pop up."
Dabrowski nodded. "If it shows up there, we can have someone pretend to make an offer and try to arrange a meeting for exchanging money for the goods. Practiced thieves, however, will be suspicious of an offer from someone who might be an undercover government agent." He glanced at the knights. "We can try to cobble together a persona that might fool them, but if they get even the slightest bad feeling about the setup, they'll take off for the gate with plans to sell the tech in Cerberus or another system. At which point, it will become increasingly difficult for us to get anything back. It might be more plausible if a known buyer of stolen goods makes an offer."
Dabrowski raised his eyebrows and gazed at Kenji.
"Uhm, I only buy food, booze, and parts and lube for my robot."
"Robot?"
"Kay. A K-45 robot that I made from scrap to help me repair things when I was working as a mechanic. The poor guy is probably wandering around campus, wondering what happened to me. Any chance I can get my glasses back so I can communicate with him?"
"You could communicate with him all you wanted if you got chipped," Van Dijk said.
"And be easily found by the government," Kenji said.
"Hate to break it to you, young man," Sir Bjarke said, "but the government has a pretty good idea of where you are."
"Your father has purchased some weapons and other stolen goods in the past," Van Dijk told Kenji.
"Oh." Kenji slumped in his chair, realizing where this was going. He'd hoped the gig they offered him wouldn't have anything to do with his father. "Has he purchased terraforming devices?"
"Not that we're aware of, terrorists so rarely being into farming, but as I implied, if we understand the technology correctly..." Dabrowski looked gravely at Van Dijk. "It could be used as a weapon. According to Mari, their intention was always to take it to a new system and use it on lifeless planets or moons in conjunction with technologies for melting ice caps and creating an atmosphere, but if the device was used on a planet where life already existed...." Dabrowski grimaced. "It works by rearranging raw materials at a molecular level to create the conditions to support life. It would destroy what's already there in an attempt to fulfill its programming."
"So if it was used on Odin, it could be deadly?" Kenji felt that he was in over his head. This was far more than he'd expected to be involved in.
"It's unlikely that one device could destroy the planet," Van Dijk said, "but it is a prototype that could be used to make more."
"So if anyone questions why a terrorist might want it, there's a plausible reason." Dabrowski eyed Kenji.
"Yeah," Kenji said bleakly. He would have liked to think that his father wouldn't traffic in anything that could kill masses of people—or all life on a planet—but he wasn't sure. He'd never fully understood the man's motivations.
"We'd like you to pretend to be a representative for your father, interested in doing some purchasing on his behalf," Dabrowski added.
"Yes, I understand," Kenji said, haunted by memories of missions he'd gone along on as a boy.
Van Dijk and Heim exchanged significant looks, making Kenji wonder if it was truly we who wanted to rely on Kenji to perpetrate this ruse, or if this was all Dabrowski's idea.
"You'd have leeway," Dabrowski said, "to tell the story in your way, to make it work on the fly. You'll need a ship, of course, as the thieves won't likely agree to come back to Odin for a handoff. One that doesn't have a known link to the Kingdom."
They were going to get him a ride into space? Kenji thought about how he'd been working for so long to save up the money for a trip to another system. It would be much easier for him to leave Odin forever if he ended up halfway to the gate, thanks to this mission. Could he play his role and then disappear? He wondered how many guards Dabrowski was thinking of sending along to keep an eye on him.
Dabrowski looked toward Sir Bjarke. "I'm tempted to ask if Captain Laser is free. Thieves wouldn't find a freighter with one old railgun concerning, and the last I heard, she and the Stellar Dragon are visiting Odin."
"They're visiting me," Sir Bjarke said, a smug twinkle in his eyes.
"Both of them? I didn't know you serviced Viggo as well as Bonita."
"I'm a man of many talents."
Van Dijk cleared her throat. "Thanks to Sato's book, that freighter, and its link to the Kingdom, is now well known."
"Ah, right," Dabrowski said. "I'd forgotten Kim said she named it in there."
"All of the principal characters in that book would have a difficult time going undercover now."
"Actually," Sir Bjarke said, "Bonita got a new name and ident chip for her freighter for exactly that reason."
"She was getting in trouble because of her association with us?" Dabrowski frowned and touched his hand to his chest.
"Not exactly. She was getting requests for tours and star cruises from passengers who wanted to ride on the Stellar Dragon and be a part of history."
"I can see where Captain Laser Lopez might not see herself as a cruise-line operator."
"She prefers bounty hunting," Sir Bjarke said, "especially now that she has access to Qin and several of Qin's formidable sisters."
Kenji lifted his brows. Hadn't one of the two big women with pointed cat ears been named Qin?
"Her ship has also been painted," Sir Bjarke added. "I gather she still calls it the Dragon when she speaks about it to friends, but the ident chip and the name on the hull now proclaim it the Espada Ancha."
"Does that also mean teddy bear?" Dabrowski asked.
"It means wide sword in her language. I gather she and Viggo argued over an appropriate name until she put her foot down."
"Not on a robot vacuum, I hope," Dabrowski murmured.
Kenji opened his mouth, but he didn't know what to say to the odd conversation. Maybe he could find a ship of his own. Assuming he meant to help them. Did he? He wouldn't be betraying his father, and it was possible the old man wouldn't even hear about this. And if succeeding at this mission could get Kenji pardoned... didn't he want that? Even if he planned to leave for another system, the idea of not having to spend the rest of his life worrying about Kingdom agents finding him was appealing.
"I'll talk to Bonita. If Kenji is willing to help us with this mission." Dabrowski extended his hand toward him and raised his eyebrows. "And willing to work with Mari."
Kenji blinked. "She's going along?"
"To retrieve her belongings? Yes. She wants to."
The idea of working with someone he'd tried to capture not once but twice daunted him. Would she believe him if he said he'd lost interest in collecting her bounty? Would she hold a grudge? What if, at some point during the mission, he had to depend on her to watch his back? She might be tempted to get revenge for all the trouble he'd caused her by letting him get shot.
But, as Dabrowski smiled affably, waiting for his answer, Kenji couldn't imagine saying no to this opportunity. This was his chance to finally get somewhere in life, or at least get himself into a position where he could enter the races. For so long, he hadn't even been able to claw his way to the starting line.
"I can work with her if she can work with me," Kenji said.
"Think she'll be able to refrain from sticking another needle in your butt?" Lieutenant Hanabusa asked.
Eyebrows arched around the room.
"I'll try to keep my butt away from her," Kenji muttered.
"Wise," Van Dijk said.
"Excellent." Dabrowski nodded to him and stood up to leave.
"My lord?" Kenji asked.
"Casmir. And yes?"
Kenji hesitated, not wanting to ask for more favors, but if anyone would be willing to help him find Kay...
"Like I said earlier, I lost my robot on campus. If you hear of anyone finding a K-45, would you mind collecting him? He's a..." Kenji, aware of all the important officials looking on, caught himself before saying Kay was a friend. "He helps me repair things. I think he'd be useful on this mission."
"I understand." Dabrowski nodded. "I'll check."
"Thank you."
|
Asylum - Lindsay Buroker.txt
| 12 |
"Are you sure you don't mind sharing?" Mari sat at a table in Sato and Dabrowski's home, eating candies called chocolate-covered espresso beans out of a bowl while waiting to hear back from Dabrowski on his meeting with his government leaders and the bounty hunter. Kenji Backer, as Mari had since learned his name was.
"I can acquire more," Sato said.
Mari hesitated, unsure how to interpret that. She hadn't specifically said no.
Sato also sat at the table while reading on a tablet, as she had through the dinner Mari had consumed with her after Dabrowski dropped her off at the house with instructions to stay there until he returned. Sato hadn't appeared that comfortable with having a strange astroshaman dinner guest, and Mari wouldn't have stayed if she'd had somewhere else to go. But without a ship of her own, she couldn't chase the thieves, and Dabrowski had the political power to help her. Though she couldn't imagine why he cared, he seemed willing to do so, and she was relieved.
Kim ate a couple of the chocolates, though she'd warned Mari they contained caffeine and might not be an appropriate evening snack, especially for someone unaccustomed to the chemical. Mari was extremely unaccustomed to it. She'd had coffee only once in her life—twice now, since Sato had brewed some of the steaming liquid after their shared dinner. It had smelled wonderful, but Mari had found the taste strong and unappealing. That was when Sato had suggested the chocolate-covered version. It was delightful. The chocolate wrapping the beans was much smoother and more pleasing than the Moon Melters had been, and the beans were strong and sharp but somehow perfect under the layer of sweetness.
It was ridiculous, but a part of her decided it had been worth leaving her people if only to sample sweets. Though she still hoped to experience other human pleasures of the body, that would have to wait until she got her terraformer back.
"Will you require sleeping accommodations?" Sato asked without looking up from her tablet. It was full of graphs and text laden with footnotes.
"I have slept in numerous places without trouble since leaving my people. Outdoors, it is possible to find secluded spots where strangers will not stumble across me during my required rest hours."
"You've been sleeping outside?"
"Since I left, yes. I am able to regulate my body temperature sufficiently to stay comfortable outdoors in all but extreme climates." Mari knew humans had hotels and various other places where one could rent rooms, but she'd been doing her best to avoid commercial establishments. All establishments.
But Sato was staring at her, so maybe her choice was not considered normal or acceptable.
"I am uncertain if social conventions dictate that I offer you a pillow and blanket and the opportunity to sleep on our sofa. You are..." Sato groped in the air with her hand. "I do not know if I am required to consider you a guest."
It surprised Mari that Sato, a human who had been born into this society, would be uncertain about its social conventions. "I do not require it."
"Casmir might." Sato sounded glum. "I do not like having strangers in my home, and I believe that even well-liked guests should stay in hotels, but Casmir believes that friends and family should be kept close, and he extends those terms to include a great many people. Last month, he invited a student he had five years ago to sleep on our sofa." Her lips pinched together in disapproval.
"I do not wish to make you uncomfortable." Mari didn't even know if she would want to sleep on these people's sofa. It seemed overly intimate and familiar. Dabrowski had dropped her off here to stick around and enjoy some dinner, as he'd said, while he went to the police station. She hadn't thought she would stay long. "I do not expect anyone in the Kingdom to consider me a friend or family. Or even a guest. My mother... I believe most in the Twelve Systems who are not astroshamans would believe her an enemy. She does not speak of it, but I know she has committed what would be considered crimes to your people, in addition to..."
"Leading an invasion to our doorstep?" Sato suggested.
"She was coerced by others to do that, but yes. I assumed... I kept expecting Minister Dabrowski to call the police back to get me." Mari glanced toward the window, still not entirely positive they wouldn't show up again.
"If he can't defeat them by hacking into their network or stealing their robots, Casmir prefers to befriend his enemies. Also, I believe he now considers Moonrazor an acquaintance if not an ally."
Mari noticed that Sato hadn't implied that she felt that way.
"If she showed up at our doorstep," Sato added, "I am certain Casmir would offer her a blanket and pillow and our sofa, if not inviting her to use his room while he took the sofa. He would also offer her the use of his reading material, including his comic-book collection."
"Since they are acquaintances, if not allies, I've been a little concerned that he would tell my mother I'm here."
Sato opened her mouth but didn't answer right away. "If you asked him not to, I believe he would respect your wish, but he is also a poor liar, so if Moonrazor messages him and outright asks if you're here, that could be problematic."
"Then I will hope she believes I'm off Odin by now." Mari drew more of the chocolate beans out of the bowl and consumed them. Earlier, she had been tired, weighed down by knowing she'd come so close to reacquiring her terraformer only to have the thieves escape right in front of her, but now, she felt much perkier.
"Why have you left your people?"
Mari had placed another chocolate in her mouth, but she paused before chewing it. This was the first personal question Sato had asked, and it was the last one Mari wanted to answer. Voicing how she felt seemed almost as much a betrayal to her people—to her mother—as sharing technological secrets.
"I do not require that you answer," Sato said, "but I am trying to determine if you are yourself a threat or if your actions will bring trouble to Casmir and our people. As far as I know, he is the only one in the government—perhaps on the planet—who considers Moonrazor something of an ally, and he is occasionally naive in wanting to believe the best about others. As a more cynical person, I can't help but wonder if your actions, your request for asylum, would cause Moonrazor to use force to retrieve you—or prompt her to wish to retaliate."
"I do not believe she would blame your people for my choice," Mari said quietly. "I left because our plans were thwarted when the AI ship took the gate, and it will be much longer before we are able to settle in a new system that humanity hasn't yet touched. My work as an agronomist and terraforming expert will not be needed by my people for a long time now."
"You could not train in a new field?" Sato's flat voice made it difficult to determine if she was suspicious or not.
In truth, she spoke a lot like many of the astroshamans, with little inflection—little emotion—and Mari wondered if her mother had ever offered her a place among their people. She knew her mother had invited Dabrowski to join them, even offered to help him obtain a position of leadership among them. The reclusive astroshamans occasionally accepted outsiders with cybernetic parts, especially those with desirable skills to further the goals of their community, but it was rare for them to recruit outsiders.
"I could," Mari said, "but I also wished to experience... human experiences."
Sato's only reaction was a slight raising of her eyebrows.
"For as long as I can remember, I have lived in our community, usually on spaceships or in reclusive habitats with little interaction with human civilizations. There are some astroshamans who go back and forth, working and trading with people in normal human habitats, but my mother has always kept us—my siblings and me—close, not wanting us to be tainted by outside influence. Our inception was not originally her idea, but once she acquired us, she decided we would be raised to be the best scientists and engineers possible—and loyal to our people and the goals of our society."
"Your inception was not her idea?"
"For a time, she had a lover—our father—who was an intelligent and creative engineer, and who apparently admired her intelligence. He lived on Jotunheim Station in System Hydra and enjoyed his work there building medical equipment. He had always wished to have children, and suggested they get married, but he did not want to join the astroshaman community. Over time, my mother had been more and more drawn into it, and she'd recently taken a leadership position. She was unwilling to leave, even for him, and eventually, her duties called her away, so they ended their relationship. Unbeknownst to her, he took a sample of her genetic material and had us made—me and two sisters and three brothers. We were less than a year old when pirates attacked Jotunheim Station. My father was killed. We were found in the aftermath, and his will dictated that we be taken to our mother. I do not know what her response was, but she took us in and raised us and trained us to be assets to our community and to help further its goals to leave humanity and the Twelve Systems behind and settle elsewhere among the stars."
Mari clasped her hands on the table to refrain from eating more of the stimulating chocolates. "She has never been cruel to us or even unkind, but she is not... loving in the human sense of the word, and she has been stifling by not allowing us to leave, even for brief adventures, to experience other types of civilizations. I suspect she worries that if we ever left, we would not want to come back. It is understandable when people who were raised in human societies decide they want something else and join the astroshamans, but it is not fair to force us to choose that way of life before we've had an opportunity to try others. And especially now that our mission is on pause..." Mari shook her head. "There was no reason for her to insist we stay, other than concern that we would be seen as enemies in the Kingdom."
"You keep saying human society, as if you are not human. Many humans have replaced some of their biological parts with cybernetic ones, either to give them an advantage or to solve medical maladies. And more of us are chipped than not these days." Sato waved at her temple.
"I understand this, but a core tenet of our people is that we wish to become less and less human over time and to give up emotion and irrational feelings in order to become more like machines. Approximately half of our people have forsaken their biological forms to upload their knowledge and memories into android bodies. Some have placed themselves directly into computer systems."
"Yes, my mother is a loaded droid."
"She is?" Mari blinked, surprised since that wasn't common outside of the astroshaman society.
"Her death was imminent, and she chose that path."
"Many of our people do it even if their deaths are not imminent."
"Yes. I understand the differences and that there is a religious component."
Mari remembered Sato saying they were a cult. It wasn't entirely inaccurate, but humans put a negative connotation on that word. Mari wouldn't know if she wanted to return to her people until she'd experienced what it was like elsewhere, but she would hate to not have the option to return. She did not feel ill will toward her mother or siblings; she simply wanted the freedom to choose her fate.
The front door opened, and Mari tensed and turned, still expecting the police to come again for her.
Minister Dabrowski walked in, trailed by a clunky robot that looked like something Mari's brother would have made from spare parts as a toddler. The much sleeker and more elegant crusher followed after it.
"Hello, Kim. Mari." Dabrowski lifted a hand. "Is there any food left?" He looked toward the bowl of chocolates on the table. "Food without hidden bitter beans in the middle?"
"Mari Moonrazor likes my chocolate-covered coffee beans," Kim said.
"Probably because she's had a long day, and they're like eating caffeine pellets."
"And because they are delicious."
Mari nodded.
Dabrowski shuddered.
"That is not the bounty hunter who was seeking me out." Mari assumed Dabrowski knew that, but in case he'd somehow been confused, she pointed at the robot.
"I am a peace-loving K-45 who is willing to assist my owner in attaining his goals," the robot said, "but I would not hunt humans, astroshamans, or anyone else of my own accord. I consider such activities likely to lead to violence and to infringe on the rights and freedoms of others."
"But you're willing to help Kenji with such activities?" Dabrowski asked.
"He gave me life, building me from junkyard parts, and I am grateful to him, but I lecture him frequently about partaking in criminal activities."
"Does he like that?"
The K-45 lifted a bronze-and-tin arm toward the ceiling. "My lectures are insightful and appealing."
A bolt fell off his arm and clunked onto the carpet.
The crusher bent to pick it up. "Casmir Dabrowski, this inferior robot is falling to pieces in your domicile."
"I see that. Thank you." Dabrowski took the bolt from him. "We'll give you a tune-up tonight, Kay. You've got a mission tomorrow, assuming you're going with Kenji in the morning, and you'll want to be at your best."
"I always wish to be at my best."
"Kenji?" Sato asked.
"That is the name of my bounty hunter." Realizing she may have suggested that she employed him, rather than that she was hunted by him, Mari clarified. "The bounty hunter who seeks to turn me in to my family."
"Instead, they're going to go on a mission together." Dabrowski left the robots in the living room and wandered into the kitchen, sniffing liberally at the lingering scent of the tomato-based pasta Sato had served for dinner.
"A bounty hunter and the astroshaman he is hunting are going on a mission together?" Sato asked. "Casmir, that plan sounds fraught with conflict, and not only with the enemies they will oppose."
"They have a common goal. It'll be great." Dabrowski filled a bowl for himself and joined them at the table.
"How is Kenji's goal common to mine?" Mari felt the same dubiousness as Sato.
"You seek your terraforming device and asylum among our people, and he seeks not to spend the rest of his life in a penal mining asteroid."
Sato's brows rose. "The young man who commed earlier saying he liked your T-shirt collection is a heinous criminal in danger of receiving that sentence?"
"I'm not sure if a judge would condemn him to that fate, but he's the son of a terrorist who would absolutely receive that sentence, and Kenji apparently worked with his father to commit numerous crimes before running away from him. That's the story he told us. I believe it. Since he's not chipped and has done his best to have no record these past eight years—not an easy thing to achieve in our technological society—Chief Van Dijk and General Heim are skeptical that he's been innocent of further infractions. But I've talked them and the police into giving Kenji a chance to win a pardon. It's not fair to blame a kid for who his father is. That's like blaming an innocent and upstanding robotics professor for who his brother is."
"Not quite," Sato murmured.
"Nonetheless, we've had confirmation that the thieves' ship—make that thieves and murderers' ship—found a way onto the launch loop and is now in space. Mari, I trust you're adept at surfing the various public, and probably not-so-public, networks out there and can watch for signs of someone listing your device for sale."
"Yes."
"Royal Intelligence is keeping an eye out too. I've arranged for a ship to take Kenji into space so he can make a deal with the thieves to buy your device before they leave the system. Mari, it's optional, of course, but I guessed you'd want to go along to make sure we get the right device back and not some replica."
"The bounty hunter and I will go alone into space?" Mari took more of the chocolates, feeling the need for further bracing from caffeine. Or perhaps it was time to experiment with stronger stimulants.
"Not alone, no. Our friend Captain Laser Lopez will take you. I've already arranged payment for her time and her ship's time. And of course, Qin's time. I believe Tigress—one of Qin's sisters—may be going along too. The clan is starting up a bounty-hunting business, and most of them are busy this week, but Qin and Tigress are an army in their own right. Sir Bjarke is also sending a couple of knights to join Kingdom Fleet ships that we're readying. They'll keep a distance, but once you set up a meeting, they'll be able to get there within a few hours if you need help." Dabrowski smiled. "It should be an exciting adventure. If I didn't have so many duties here, and my stomach didn't so much prefer the full gravity of Odin to space, I would be tempted to join you. But you don't need a diplomat; you need the young son of a terrorist willing to partake in some subterfuge to deal with the thieves." He nodded firmly.
"Diplomatic measures can't work on thieves?" Sato asked.
"Even if I were authorized to offer the kind of money the thieves will surely ask for their stolen goods, it's unlikely they would trust that the Minister of External Affairs and queen's advisor would partake in a fair deal with them. Whoever they are. We haven't yet figured that out. We only have a description of the ship."
Mari frowned. They'd had that before he'd gone off to talk to the bounty hunter. It didn't seem like his meeting had resulted in a further acquisition of knowledge. Worse, she would now have to work with a man who had tried to capture her twice—and that she'd stunned once and tranquilized once. Would he truly care about helping her retrieve her belongings or had he only agreed to go along with Dabrowski's plan so he would have another opportunity to capture her?
Mari thought of Sato's words that Dabrowski tended to be naive and eager to believe the best in people. It sounded like that might extend to the criminal son of a terrorist. Mari worried that Dabrowski might have been duped. And that if Kenji had a third chance to capture her, he would succeed.
|
Asylum - Lindsay Buroker.txt
| 13 |
Early morning found Kenji getting a ride in a police van across town toward a private walled landing area near Drachen Castle and Royal Intelligence Headquarters. He wiped his hands on his trousers, eyeing the imposing structures and the well-armed human and mechanical guards in the watchtowers.
If this freighter he was supposed to get a ride in got invitations to land across the street from the seat of the entire Kingdom government, Kenji had a hard time believing that all the thieves, smugglers, and pirates in the system weren't aware of it. That name change and new ident chip Dabrowski had mentioned had better have been recent.
"Never been here before," one of Kenji's police escorts whispered to his colleague, peering out the window as guards halted their vehicle at the gate to check it. There was an espresso cart on the sidewalk, a robot barista serving coffee to uniformed castle and Intelligence staff.
"Our prisoner moved up in the world quickly, didn't he?" the other policeman in back with Kenji said.
The two men eyed him with open rancor. The day before, the police had regarded him with indifference—he'd been just another petty criminal—but that had changed with the revelation of his last name.
For some reason, Kenji was reminded of the hostile look the policeman had given Mari when she'd asked to taste his latte. He'd called her an astroshaman freak. Had she had an opportunity to try such a drink yet? Kenji eyed the espresso cart. Maybe he ought to bring her one as a peace offering. He knew from recent experience what a relief it was to have someone treat him like a human being when nobody else did.
After the meeting the night before, Kenji had been returned to his cell, most of the policemen he'd encountered glowering at him along the way. But the bemused lieutenant had brought him a pillow, a blanket, a bottle of grape fizzop, and a pizza with a smiling robot drawn on the box. She hadn't said so, but Kenji had known the gifts were from Dabrowski. Strange how much better that had made being stuck in a jail cell for the night.
"Your father really Kuchikukan Chisaka, kid?" one policeman said.
"Unfortunately."
"Bet that was a real loving relationship."
"He teach you how to be a good killer?" the other asked.
"He tried. I found it oddly unfulfilling."
Under the pretext of peering out the window, Kenji scooted closer to the door. There was only one person left in line at the espresso cart, but how could he get the police to let him out for a minute? Offer to buy them drinks?
"Uh huh. Sure. Bet you killed a lot of people."
"Innocent people."
"They should be shipping you off to a penal asteroid right now."
"And arranging for an accident to happen along the way."
Kenji missed having Kay to talk to, Kay who had never condemned him, despite his dubious past and his sometimes questionable choices. Had Dabrowski been able to find him? Had he had time to look?
The police lieutenant had returned his glasses to him that morning, so Kenji had been able to check the news, but he hadn't received a reply to the message he'd sent Kay. The idea of leaving him behind on Odin, especially if Kenji found an opportunity to escape the Kingdom during this mission, was depressing. Kenji wanted to take his robot friend with him.
The door opened, a Kingdom Guard officer with a tablet peering in to check on them.
Kenji saw his opportunity. "I need to get a coffee for someone."
He darted out of the van, dodged a reflexive grasp from the officer, and jumped into line at the espresso cart, hoping his captors would realize he wasn't trying to run off and would refrain from stunning him.
"A large horchata latte, please," he hurried to tell the robot as the policemen surged out of the van after him.
The Kingdom officer dropped a hand on his shoulder. "What are you doing?"
Even though two stunners pointed at him, the robot barista repeated the order and set to making the drink.
"Just what I said." Kenji braced himself as the officer tried to pull him back to the van. "I need to get a drink for someone."
"You're a prisoner. You don't have coffee privileges." One of the policemen prodded him in the ribs with a stunner. He must not have been given the message that Kenji was about to go on a secret mission for the crown. "Get back in the van."
"It's not for me. It's for a friend of Minister Dabrowski's. He would want me to get the drink for her." Kenji pointed to the robot now steaming the milk and toward the walled compound. "I'm positive."
"Oh, I'm sure."
"Come on, prisoner."
The robot extended the completed beverage. "One horchata latte. That will be five crowns, please."
Kenji tried to dip his hand into his pocket for physical currency, but the officer, maybe worried he was going for a weapon, stopped him.
"If you're not going to let me pay, you'll have to fork over some cash for me." He smiled, though he was certain the only thing any of them would fork over was a kick in the ass.
"Get back in the van," the officer growled.
"The beverage is for Casmir Dabrowski?" the robot asked, still holding the cup aloft.
"For someone working for him," Kenji said, surprised by the question.
"Casmir Dabrowski is a friend of robots. I will provide this beverage free of charge."
"Uh, thank you." Kenji managed to grab the cup before the policemen manhandled him back into the van.
One lifted a fist to knock the drink away, but Kenji whipped his arm down, avoiding the blow. He sprang inside and settled back into his seat while cradling the drink protectively. Maybe his enhanced reflexes came in handy now and then, after all.
The men shared exasperated eye rolls and got back in without attempting to punish him—or the latte—again.
"Weirdest terrorist I've seen," one grumbled.
"Another damn freak."
Freak? Maybe Kenji had more in common with Mari than he would have guessed possible.
The van rolled through the gate and into the walled landing compound. It passed a couple of shuttles, the hulls painted purple with gold crowns on the side, and headed toward a large dome-shaped freighter with a railgun on the top. Judging by the recently painted hull, it was well cared for, but that model was older than dirt. It had to have been flying for more than a century.
A cargo-hold hatch was open, a ramp lowered to the pavement, and a gray-haired woman in a galaxy suit stood at the top with one of the knights who'd been in the conference room the night before. The older one. Sir Bjarke Asger. They were holding hands and talking and sharing smirks.
The thought that one or both knights might be coming along alarmed Kenji. Hadn't Dabrowski said they would be going with the Fleet and staying well away until after a meeting point was agreed upon? How was Kenji supposed to pass himself off as a terrorist if he had Kingdom knights looming behind him?
The van stopped, and the door opened.
"Out, freak." One of the policemen jerked his head toward the exit.
Kenji climbed out with the latte, expecting someone with a weapon to accompany him and keep an eye on him, but the police van took off. In addition to the knight, there were members of the Kingdom Guard around the private landing pad, so maybe they felt Kenji was properly secured.
The captain looked down at him, a frown replacing her earlier smile. She squinted dubiously at him, making Kenji wonder if the knight had told her all about his past. Wonderful. He could get snide comments for the whole trip.
Before Kenji took more than two steps toward the ramp, a purple shuttle flew over the walls and landed nearby. A hatch opened and a ramp unfolded. The first passenger to walk out had a familiar robot body, and Kenji cracked a smile for the first time in weeks.
"Kay!" he blurted, rushing up to grip the robot's arm.
That arm was free of dents, melt marks, and other blemishes. So was the rest of him. Even the damage he'd received recently had been hammered out. Kay was still a jumble of mismatched junkyard parts, but he gleamed and looked like he'd been intentionally crafted that way out of whimsy.
"You look good," Kenji said.
"Naturally."
Dabrowski walked out next, wearing a suit and button-down shirt, both garments out of place on him. Maybe the shuttle was taking him to some meeting of diplomats or visiting officials next.
Kenji opened his mouth to thank him for fixing up Kay—somehow, he knew Dabrowski was responsible and that he hadn't foisted it off on a repair shop—but Mari walked out next, and he forgot his words.
The last time he'd seen her had been after she'd stabbed him in the butt and then stood over him with that tranquilizer ring. Now, he tensed warily. He wanted to make peace, but she might not want that.
Abruptly, Kenji worried that Dabrowski might not have told her that he was part of this package. What if she kicked him or cursed him or took out that ominous tranquilizer ring again?
The look Mari gave him was as wary as the one he was giving her.
"Hi," he blurted, for some reason ridiculously nervous. "I got you this." He thrust the latte toward her.
Dabrowski raised his eyebrows but didn't say anything.
Mari frowned and looked at the drink. Suspiciously?
He feared so. Strange that he could so easily read someone who looked so different from normal humans. She still wore her cloak and hood, as if she feared being recognized even here, but he could see her pale skin, ocular implants, and a plate full of chips and circuits and who knew what else attached to the side of her head under her blonde hair.
She'd regained her pack since he'd seen her in the police van, though it appeared less filled than before, and someone had given her a stunner and a DEW-Tek pistol. That surprised Kenji. How could an astroshaman woman be trusted like that? Kenji understood why the police hadn't given him a weapon, but Mari had enough deadly astroshaman tech without arming her further. He couldn't help but glance at her hands and note that she still had her rings.
"What is it?" Mari asked.
"A horchata latte," Kenji said.
"Oh, horchatas are good. They're the new thing here in Zamek City, courtesy of a couple of chefs we lured in from System Diomedes." Dabrowski wrinkled his nose. "I'm not sure how or why you mix one with coffee though."
Mari's brows rose, some of the suspicion fading, or maybe being replaced by curiosity. She accepted the cup and sniffed at the opening in the lid.
"Cinnamon." The faintest hint of a smile crept across her face. "I have not tried cinnamon before," she told Dabrowski.
"I'd warn you that the coffee might ruin it, but you liked Kim's chocolate-covered espresso beans, so I can't predict your tastes. At least it will be sweet."
"I have discovered that I like sweets." Her smile turned shy, and she hefted a pink bag of colored candies. It was startlingly bright and perky in contrast to her weapons and the black-and-silver mesh clothing she wore under her cloak.
"Only recently?" Kenji asked.
The smile twisted into a wryer expression. "My mother forbade sweets."
"No wonder you ran away," Dabrowski said.
Ran away? Kenji rubbed his face. Was that the story? She hadn't stolen top-secret information, and she wasn't a spy, but she'd run away from an oppressive mother? If that was true, he felt like a heel.
Having finished her smell test, Mari lifted the latte for the first sip. Kenji held his breath, wanting her to like it. If she hated it, she might be less likely to believe he wanted to make amends.
She swished it around in her mouth, assessing it thoughtfully, before swallowing. He hoped she wasn't wondering if he'd poisoned it. After a few seconds, she swallowed and nodded.
"It is sweet, as you said, yes. And I believe I like cinnamon."
Kenji exhaled, relieved.
"Good," Dabrowski said. "Let me introduce you two to everyone. You've already met each other, I understand."
"Twice," Mari said.
"Briefly." Kenji resisted the urge to rub his butt. It wasn't as if it still stung, not physically.
"That's Captain Lopez over there," Dabrowski continued. "Bonita Lopez, though she prefers Laser. She's an expert markswoman, so don't irk her. Kenji, you met Sir Bjarke Asger yesterday, but he's just saying goodbye to Laser on his way to work. Sir William Asger and another young knight will be out with the Fleet and in the area, but as I said in the meeting, they won't get close, so they won't blow your cover. Laser also has a couple of sturdy combat specialists who should be waiting inside. You may get along with them, Mari. They're friendly. Ask them to paint your fingernails if you're into that."
"Nail-painting combat specialists?" Kenji asked.
Dabrowski grinned. "Yes. I thought about sending even more troops, but if things go awry, and you're boarded, a platoon of soldiers would be hard to explain."
"Yes, my father rarely employed soldiers."
Mari's eyebrows rose. Maybe nobody had told her about his dubious heritage yet. Ugh, when she found out, that might make her even less likely to trust him. Maybe he should have brought two lattes. She was sipping heartily from the one in her hand.
"A pilot and two combatants should be sufficient," Mari said. "We will persevere, and you will see that I can be a valuable ally and that it's worth granting me asylum."
"I believe you," Dabrowski said.
"Do the rest of your people?"
He hesitated. "It may take some time to win them over. Sorry. It's not fair, but we're still filling in craters from the various bombings of our planet this past year."
"I understand," Mari said quietly, though the words seemed tinged with disappointment. "I came prepared to prove myself worthy of a position and your people's trust."
Dabrowski winced at the words prove myself, and he lifted a hand. "It's not about proving anything. People just have to get used to you. And enough time has to pass so they believe you're genuinely here for a job and to experience our culture. And the government needs to see that you can contribute in a meaningful way worthy of a paycheck. That's all."
"Is that not... proving myself?"
"Well, technically, maybe, but you don't have to do anything impossible. Nobody's going to threaten your friends and family if you fail." Dabrowski's mouth twisted.
"My family can take care of itself."
"I'm sure it can." He pointed her toward the freighter. "Laser will give you a cabin. You'll want to take off soon and try to make the deal with the thieves before they're halfway out of the system."
"Yes. Thank you." Mari stepped toward the freighter, but she paused to consider Kenji again.
He worried she would ask for clarification about his father.
"Candy-coated chocolate?" She lifted the bag of candy, startling him.
"Pardon?"
"You have given a gift to me. My understanding of human social conventions suggests that it would be polite for me to reciprocate." She lowered her voice and whispered to Dabrowski, "I do not truly wish to share them, because they are very good, but Scholar Sato shared her chocolates with me, even though I later gathered that she did not wish to."
This honesty surprised Kenji, and he didn't know what to say to it.
"Sharing is good." Dabrowski waved at the candy bag and also the latte cup. "It can help turn enemies into friends."
"Can it cause bounty hunters to be less interested in capturing you?" she asked.
Kenji winced. "Look, I'm sorry about that. I should have researched you more before accepting that assignment."
"Yes." She held out the bag toward him. "Candy?"
Kenji looked at Dabrowski, not certain he should accept, since she'd admitted she didn't truly want to share. But if he didn't, would she think he didn't trust her? That he thought they were poisoned or some such?
Dabrowski nodded encouragement to him.
"Thank you." Kenji only took one of the chocolates and promptly chewed it and smiled at her.
"You are welcome. I am pleased by the latte. Thank you for giving it to me. I had not realized cinnamon should be on the Human List."
"Pardon?"
Mari hesitated, then shook her head. Whatever the Human List was, maybe it was too private to share with enemies.
Why did it make him feel bleak that she considered him that? He had only himself to blame.
"I need a word with Laser before you guys leave." Dabrowski walked toward the freighter, leaving Kenji wondering if he was supposed to follow... or continue to stand awkwardly next to Mari, not knowing what to say next.
"Thank you for fixing my robot, Minister Dabrowski," Kenji called, realizing he hadn't said that earlier.
"Casmir," Dabrowski called back with a wave.
He hopped onto the ramp and gestured animatedly at Sir Bjarke and Captain Laser. Four robotic vacuums vroomed out of the cargo hold and started sucking up dirt around his feet. At least that was what Kenji assumed they were doing. It almost looked like a choreographed dance.
"I already thanked him for the repairs," Kay said. "He has very good hands."
"That must be why the AIs are fans." Kenji told himself not to be envious; he had good hands too. He just didn't have access to an entire robotics lab worth of parts.
"That is likely so."
Mari looked back and forth between them, as if she wanted to say something else, but she shook her head and walked toward the freighter.
"I can't tell if my peace offering worked," Kenji admitted. "She did thank me. And she didn't throw it away. That seems promising."
"Judging by what I know of human body language, you appeared stiff and uneasy with her."
"That's because she's..."
"An astroshaman?"
"No." It was because Kenji had been a dick to her. How was a guy supposed to recover from that?
"You should not allow prejudices about mechanically enhanced individuals to change how you interact with someone."
"I'm not. That's not it. Besides—" hoping to change the subject, Kenji clapped Kay on his metal shoulder, "—I like mechanically enhanced individuals."
"If you refer to me, I am not mechanically enhanced. I am merely mechanical."
"Are you sure?" Kenji pointed to a bump on the front of Kay's shoulder. "Is that a new sensor?"
"Oh, yes. I have a whole new array, front and back. Professor Dabrowski spent two hours working on repairing and improving me last night."
"He didn't reprogram you to spy on me and send back data, did he?"
"Certainly not. However, I believe that captain glowering at you with surly suspicion in her eyes may send data back on you." Kay pointed toward the open cargo hatch. Sir Bjarke was leaving, carefully stepping around and over the still-dancing vacuums, leaving Captain Laser at the top, her arms folded over her chest. She was glowering as she alternately eyed Kenji and the approaching Mari. Somehow, Kenji suspected she'd been fully filled in on both of them and wasn't that happy to have them coming on board. Maybe she had only agreed to this trip as a favor to Dabrowski. He was smiling and gesturing animatedly to her, unfazed by the glowers.
"Would you know it if he had reprogrammed you?" Kenji asked.
"Possibly not. Professor Dabrowski is rumored to have a deft touch."
"Reassuring."
Laser gestured for Kenji to come aboard. As he led Kay to the cargo ramp, he thought about how he was getting on a ship for a voyage and didn't have any luggage. He hoped the captain had a galaxy suit he could borrow—and an unused tooth sanitizer.
As Dabrowski gave parting instructions, the robotic vacuums whirring back inside, Kenji and Kay climbed the ramp to join Mari at the top. Kenji opened his mouth to introduce himself to Laser, but an armored person sailed through the cargo hold and crashed into a wall. The six-foot-plus warrior leaped up and raced back toward another equally tall person in combat armor, who sank low, meeting the charge without giving ground.
They crashed together, going down in a lightning-speed wrestling match that left Mari and Kenji gaping. The combatants traded more blows until one hurled the other off and into another wall.
"Bonita," a male voice came from a speaker. "Your young warriors are leaving dents in my bulkheads. Again."
"Please, Viggo. Laser. We have guests."
"If Casmir is not coming along on this mission to repair my vacuums and the dents in my bulkheads, I must insist you put an end to this unseemly roughhousing."
"They're training, Viggo. Qin and Tigress are the muscle. You know this. And I'm capable of hammering out your dents."
"Your touch isn't as refined as Casmir's."
"Yes, yes, nobody's is. His queen must be a lucky girl."
At the base of the ramp, Dabrowski rubbed his face. Embarrassed?
"If you don't need anything else, Laser," he called up, "I have three meetings this morning. Please apologize to Viggo that I'm not able to come along on this adventure."
"Meetings?" Laser faced him. "What a dreadfully boring life you lead now. There can't be anything in a meeting for you to repair."
"That's not true. I fixed a coffee maker last time, an act that made me a hero to nine out of ten coffee addicts in the room. The tenth had brought her own caffeinated beverage and was indifferent."
"Dreadfully boring." Laser shook her head. "It's amazing you haven't run away to space already."
"Where I could enjoy the delights of zero-g and space sickness once again?"
"Are you sure you don't want to adjust the nozzles on Viggo's vacuums while you're here?" Laser waved toward the robots. There were even more inside the cargo hold, maneuvering along and even on the walls to avoid the battle. "He's missed you terribly."
"It is an honor to be missed by such a fine being. Come by for lunch when you get back. I'll bring pizza and pot stickers aboard and make any adjustments Viggo needs."
"Who's Viggo?" Kenji whispered, wondering if Mari was as lost as he.
"The ship's AI, I believe," she said.
"Good luck on the mission, everyone. Thank you for taking it on." Dabrowski included Kenji and Mari in his bow.
"Actually," Laser said, turning back to them as Dabrowski left, "Viggo was the owner of this ship more than a hundred years ago, and when he died, he uploaded his memories and consciousness into its computer banks."
"Many of our people do that," Mari said, even as Kenji thought about how strange it was that the ship's AI had been an actual person.
"That right?" Laser eyed Mari. "You're my first astroshaman passenger."
"Will that be a problem?" Mari asked quietly. Warily.
"Your fare is paid for. As long as you don't make trouble or try to rewire my ship with your astroshaman computerness, we shouldn't have any problems."
"I hadn't planned on it," Mari murmured. "I'm just trying to get my stolen belongings back."
"You." Laser pointed at Kenji. "You're the one who better not get us into any messes."
Given the task he'd been assigned, Kenji wasn't sure how messes wouldn't be involved, but he decided it would be unwise to point that out. "I'm only here to set up a meeting with a thief."
"Uh huh. Make sure you don't set up any meetings with terrorists. I'm not looking to have my ship commandeered."
Kenji kept himself from suggesting that the hundred-year-old freighter might not be much of a prize to terrorists. Or anyone else.
The two armored figures stopped fighting and removed their helmets and strode toward them. Kenji recognized them—and their pointed ears—and almost laughed. Now he remembered Dabrowski mentioning Qin and Tigress, whom he'd last seen at the shuttle rental shop.
"This is Qin, and that's Tigress," Laser said. "Sisters. You probably noticed the resemblance."
"We've met." Qin nodded to him.
"We had a brief flirtation." Tigress smiled, showing off her fangs, and gave him that long once-over again. "Perhaps we can make a more extended and intimate acquaintance on this trip."
"Uh." Kenji didn't know how to respond to that. Would a simple no, thanks offend her? It seemed unwise to offend tall, fanged, muscular women in combat armor.
Laser watched him closely for his reaction. Something told him she would shoot him if he called either of the women freaks—the typical Kingdom term for anyone who'd been genetically engineered—or was anything but polite, but it wasn't their pointed ears that concerned him. More that this Tigress looked like she wanted to shove him up against the nearest wall and have her way with him.
Qin elbowed her sister. "You're supposed to talk to a man and see if he's interested first before propositioning him."
"Please, if I waited for men to realize they were interested, I'd be forever bereft of company. You have to take action and cultivate interest." She slid a hand over her chest, which might have been more intriguing if she hadn't been in combat armor. It was hard to even tell a person's sex in the hard-shelled gear.
"It'll be good to work with you," Kenji told them neutrally, hoping the words neither annoyed anyone nor suggested he would be available for sex. He didn't think he was as stodgy and stuck in the past as a lot of Kingdom men, but he wasn't ready for fangs and fur in bed.
Mari nodded polite agreement. If she was surprised by the women's feline attributes, she didn't show it.
"They're our fighters," Laser said. "Be nice to them. If you manage to arrange a meeting with these thieves, they'll go in with you to take them down and get the stolen goods back."
"Yes, I've seen them fight." Kenji looked toward the fresh dents in the bulkhead. "I'm sure they'll be effective."
"I'm Mari," she told the big women and held out her bag, not mentioning this time that she was sharing to be polite and didn't truly want to lose any of her precious candies. "Chocolate?"
Qin removed one of her gauntlets, revealing strong elegant hands with retractable claws that sported a different shade of nail polish from the day before. She dipped her fingers into the bag and withdrew a few candies. "Thank you."
"And what's your name?" Tigress asked Kenji. "We didn't get a formal introduction before. Last I saw, you and your robot were hiding behind a fake tree."
"I'm Kenji, and Kay here was hiding behind the counter."
"Right. Now I remember."
"He's the son of an infamous terrorist," Laser said. "You might not want to stand close to him in public places."
"I was mostly thinking of lying next to him—or on top of him—in bed." Tigress winked.
"On top?" Kenji mouthed.
Mari looked over at them, her expression curious or maybe puzzled. For some reason, his cheeks warmed.
"I'm a take-charge girl." Tigress put a hand on Kenji's shoulder.
She still wore her gauntlets, which was good, since that kept him from feeling her claws.
"Your sister is horny, Qin," Laser said.
"I know. And fearless. She had no qualms about propositioning Tenebris Rache's mercenaries when we were on his ship."
Tigress grinned, her fangs on full display. "I do like a nicely firm soldier."
"Who doesn't?" Laser waved for everyone to come inside, so she could raise the ramp and close the hatch.
"I am not overly enticed by such things," Kay said.
"Yeah, me either." Kenji scooted to the side, wanting to extract himself from Tigress's grip without offending a person he might have to rely on in a fight later.
"This way." Laser headed across the cargo hold toward a short corridor and a ladder on the far side. "I'll grab you two galaxy suits and show you the kitchen, lounge, and your cabins."
It occurred to Kenji, as she took them on a brief tour, that unless one counted Kay and the ship's intelligence, he was the only man on the freighter. The women were capable in a fight, but Kenji wondered if this little crew would be enough if the thieves had a lot of troops at their disposal. Nobody had even given him a weapon.
He couldn't help but think the Kingdom, or at least the people who'd arranged this mission, might still consider him a prisoner. An expendable prisoner?
Somehow, he doubted Minister Dabrowski would see anyone that way, but he was only one person. The knights and the Intelligence officers were likely the ones overseeing the mission. And Kenji seriously doubted they cared one way or another if he lived or died.
|
Asylum - Lindsay Buroker.txt
| 14 |
Mari sat in a pod in the freighter's lounge and looked out a porthole as the craft flew along the coast north of Zamek City toward the planet's sole launch loop. Astroshaman ships had the fuel and thruster power to break orbit by themselves, even on planets with strong gravity such as Odin, but she'd learned that most human vessels in the Twelve Systems relied on launch assistance for a boost into space.
The hatch clanged open, and she swiveled her pod from the porthole to face the newcomer, the high-walled seat already cupping her like an egg, though they were not accelerating as rapidly as they would for takeoff.
Kenji walked in, but he paused when he saw her and glanced back, as if he might leave. Because she was in the room?
Mari didn't know what to think of him. After his two attempts to capture her, she should have considered him an enemy, but he'd apologized and given her a tasty beverage. Unfortunately, she deemed it highly probable he was trying to get her to lower her guard, so he could capture her and complete his original bounty-hunting mission.
The more time Mari spent away from her people, and the more interesting human experiences she had, the less she wanted to return. She rubbed the back of her ring with the spring-loaded needle, its tiny reservoir again filled with a tranquilizer. She would work with Kenji to retrieve her terraformer, but she would not let herself trust him.
His clunky K-45 robot trundled in after him, almost bumping him. Kenji plucked at the form-fitting black galaxy suit that he'd borrowed from the captain—Mari had been given one too—then nodded to himself and continued into the lounge.
"Hi." He lifted a hand as he headed for the kitchen built into the wall at one end of the lounge. "I came to see if there's anything to drink."
"The refrigerator contains water, fizzop, two juice-based beverages, and coffee bulbs. I took an inventory earlier." Mari had been looking for alcohol, wondering if she might check it off her Human List one evening while she was aboard, but if the freighter contained the substance, it was not stored in the refrigerator.
"Oh? That's, uhm, efficient."
The way he said it made her think he meant odd. Well, what could he expect? She wasn't yet familiar with human habits pertaining to food and beverage inventorying.
"Perhaps Mari the astroshaman could resolve our issue." The K-45 robot pointed at her.
"I don't think she wants us to bother her."
"As someone who lives among robots and computers, perhaps she would consider it a simple and unobtrusive matter."
"Or perhaps she would consider you a pest."
"This is a matter of mission security, and I am a robot, not a pest. Mari the astroshaman—"
"Kay." Kenji made a cutting motion with his hand.
Even with her limited familiarity with normal humans, Mari could tell what that gesture meant. Still, the robot had roused her curiosity.
"You can just call me Mari. What's your issue?"
"Nothing." Kenji pulled a coffee bulb out of the refrigerator and shook his head at the robot.
"You may call me Kay," the robot continued, ignoring Kenji. "I have recently had repairs done by the renowned roboticist Casmir Dabrowski. Kenji is concerned that he may have installed monitoring software within me that will, unbeknownst to me, send back reports about his activities on this mission."
"Isn't the captain Minister Dabrowski's friend, and wouldn't she just send back reports?" Mari asked.
"Exactly what I suggested," Kay said as Kenji tilted his eyes toward the ceiling. "But since astroshamans are known to be excellent with computers, and presumably robots, perhaps you could examine me and check for monitoring devices."
Kenji lifted an apologetic hand toward Mari. "Sorry, please ignore him. You don't have to examine him."
"Would it not set your mind at ease to know I haven't been bugged?" Kay asked.
"She's not a gastroenterologist. She doesn't want to scrutinize your insides."
"That is an inaccurate analogy, as I do not have an intestinal system."
"I know. It was a joke. Never mind."
"I can take a look if you wish," Mari offered them.
Maybe if she made an overture of friendship, Kenji would be less likely to attempt to capture her again. Besides, it would give her something to do besides look out the porthole and worry about how they might fail to retrieve her terraformer and how she would be inadequate at proving herself to the Kingdom government. If that happened, they would not grant her asylum.
"You don't have to," Kenji said, but Kay was already ambling over to her pod.
"I can get you a toolbox if you wish, Mari," Kay said.
Kenji rolled his eyes upward again, then sighed and sat in a deck-locked seat at the table. Once they reached the launch loop, he would have to find a pod, or he would end up plastered against a wall, but they should have some time.
"I have a few tools." Mari patted one of her pockets.
"Does a wrench come out of one of those rings?" Kenji muttered.
"That would be impressive, but no."
"Sorry." He glanced at her face. "I'm a little bitter because you bested me twice."
"I have no wish to best you at all." Mari opened the robot's housing. "I was only defending myself. I do not wish to return to my family."
"I know. I get that now. Are your parents, uhm, mean?"
"My mother is restrictive. My father is no longer alive."
"That's tough. My mother died when I was younger too. I really miss her sometimes."
"That is unfortunate. I was very young when my father was killed by pirates. I do not remember him."
"I wish I didn't remember my father," Kenji said wistfully.
Mari did not know how to respond to that. Since learning his full name, she had looked him up and was aware of his past and of the crimes he had committed with his terrorist father. She did not wish to judge him for what he had done as a boy, especially since he no longer seemed associated with his father, but that past did make her more inclined to believe that she shouldn't trust him.
"Sorry," Kenji said. "It's not like you asked. Uhm, what do you mean restrictive?"
Mari hesitated. If she opened up about herself, and he found her story sympathetic, was it possible he would no longer wish to collect her bounty? Was that wishful thinking?
Still, she found herself answering. "My mother does not want any of her children to leave the community. We're close-knit and rely upon each other not only to achieve our goals but for protection as well. Astroshamans have beliefs that aren't popular among humans in the rest of the Twelve Systems, and we are often targeted by those who allow themselves to be guided by their prejudices. I am not certain if my mother is more concerned that I will be in danger out here, or that I might develop other beliefs if I experience more of the universe, but she has always forbidden us to leave."
"She forbids it?"
"Yes."
"How old are you?"
"Twenty-four."
"Huh. We're the same age. An age at which humans are supposed to be grownups and allowed to do what they want."
"I thought so." Mari ran her fingers over Kay's circuit boards and servomechanisms, cycling through her ocular implants' various ways to see so she could check for anomalies.
Kenji fell silent, merely watching for several minutes. Before, he'd been avoiding looking at her. Now he wore a pensive expression as she worked.
"I needed the money," he said abruptly, startling her after the silence.
"What?"
"That's why I took the bounty-hunting gig. It's been a rough few years, and I needed the money, but I should have asked for more details before accepting the assignment."
She resisted the urge to emphatically say yes. Instead, she said only, "Ah," and tried to make it nonjudgmental.
"I feel like I should apologize for tackling you. Twice."
"It is what my mother told me to expect if I left our enclave and went out among regular humans."
"Being tackled by men? You are kind of cute, other than the weird eyes, and, er—" He waved to the side of her head.
Mari had been about to correct his assumption, but the comment derailed her. She was cute but weird? She didn't know how to respond.
"Never mind. That was a dumb thing to say." Kenji frowned down at the table. Maybe he realized it had been rude to call her weird. Or did he regret admitting he thought she was cute?
Better to ignore it all. "My mother told me to expect regular humans to believe me to be a spy and to judge me unfairly, and that they might shoot or incarcerate me."
"I wasn't judging you, just trying to capture you. And your people put the bounty out, not any regular humans."
"They likely won't be the only ones. The police came to arrest me simply because someone reported an astroshaman on the university campus."
"Well." Kenji prodded the table. "It's not a good time to be an astroshaman on Odin. Last year, you might have gotten stared at instead of arrested."
"Enormously more pleasant."
"As someone who spent the night in a jail cell, I can say that I'd prefer stares to arrests."
"If it matters to you, I was not among those who attacked your military ships and bombed your planet. I can't deny that my mother was heavily involved in that, but even she was a reluctant participant and coerced by two other high shamans."
"Oh." He didn't look like he had intended to ask. Maybe he didn't care. Maybe it was only about the money for him.
Was it odd that Casmir Dabrowski hadn't asked her about the battle? Hadn't asked if she was innocent or if she had any Kingdom blood on her hands?
Kenji plucked at his galaxy suit again. Mari couldn't tell if it was because he was nervous, because it didn't fit, or because he'd never worn one before. Even if the latter was true, they were generally comfortable without much need for adjustment. Even though the Kingdom version wasn't as advanced as what Mari was accustomed to, she trusted it did its job of insulating against g-forces during acceleration and deceleration and had the trademark sturdy fabric that would protect its wearer from temperature extremes, should a spacewalk be necessary. The suits could also deflect everything from pieces of space junk to weapons fire. They weren't as indestructible as combat armor, but they were much easier to wear on long trips, with a pouch below the back of the neck containing a flexible helmet that could fold out if self-contained operation was needed. There were attachments on the back for an oxygen tank.
"Thanks for checking out Kay," Kenji said.
"You are welcome."
Mari glanced at him, appreciating the little social niceties, even if she was resolved to remain wary of him. She let herself study his face for the first time, for some reason thinking of Tigress's flirtation with him. Presumably, she considered him desirable. He was handsome, with dark intent eyes, tousled black hair, and a jaw defined by a couple days' worth of beard growth, but she did not know if he could stir libidinous thoughts within her. Perhaps if he had not attacked her the first time they'd met. And the second.
"I don't really think he's bugged," Kenji said. "It was just a... Well, he could be. I doubt Minister Dabrowski and all those knights and department heads really trust me."
"Not being trusted is disconcerting," she said blandly.
He snorted. "I guess you'd know."
"Yes."
"Anyway, Minister Dabrowski probably didn't do anything, but he had the opportunity. Last night, he fixed Kay up, improved his wiring, gave him some higher-quality parts, and smoothed the dents out of everything else."
"He also lubed my joints," Kay said, "cleaned some odious gunk out of my foot and ankle creases, and gave me an all-over alignment. My panel gaps are no longer uneven. I am not ungrateful to Kenji for bringing me to life, but I do feel much better now."
"I'm glad," Kenji said dryly. "Anyway, I'm not planning on doing anything shifty, but I'd like to know if my every move is being transmitted back. Especially since I'm sharing a cabin with Kay."
"The captain said that robots don't get their own cabins," Kay said. "I either have to share with Kenji or find room in the closet where the vacuum robots are stored when they're charging."
"I don't see any physical monitoring devices." Mari closed most of the robot's panels.
"That's a relief," Kay said.
"I should check your operating system to see if any new software has been installed."
"Ah, of course."
A faint ding sounded in her mind, and she paused in her inspection. It was an alert from the program she'd created to monitor the black-market sites in the system. She scanned through the results, then smiled fiercely at Kenji.
He seemed taken aback. "Are you okay?"
"My terraformer has been listed on a private site favored by black-market buyers of goods—the Dark Comet Nexus—as has other astroshaman technology that I recognize as having been scrounged from the Celestial Dart. Surprisingly, the descriptions of what the devices are and what they do are reasonably accurate. The thieves must have already had familiarity with our technology. May I have permission to contact you via your chip—" Mari waved at his glasses, "—to send you the details?"
Kenji hesitated, and she wondered if he would find it unpalatable if an astroshaman had permission to contact him chip-to-chip. She recalled that she had contacted him in the police van without asking first. Normally, she would not do that, but that had been a mitigating circumstance. This time, she wanted his permission.
"It's a private site?" he asked. "How were you able to get in? And how will I?"
"One moment." Mari broke into the back end of the site and created an account with the necessary permissions for making purchases. She explained what she was doing as she worked. "I hope this isn't presumptuous, but I'm making this in your name—your real name, as I understand our ruse may hinge on the thieves believing you are your father's son. Even though it's a reasonably large database, and it's possible the thief wouldn't be suspicious about a new buyer with a name he or she doesn't recognize, it sounds like the Kingdom government believes it will be more plausible to the thieves if they can openly connect you to a terrorist."
"Openly connect," Kenji mouthed.
"Yes. Ah, I've found an existing account that your father made years ago on the Nexus. That means he's already known there. It's not under his name, but under a code name linked to him, but if I could find the connection easily, then it's likely many people who operate in this area know it's his account." She kept working as she spoke. "I'm taking the liberty of establishing a purchasing history for you and linking your account to his with some light social connections. It's possible that if he's monitoring things closely, he'll notice your account popping into existence and making links to his, but he hasn't made a purchase on the Nexus for two years, so he's likely busy elsewhere. Your father may not be in this system at all. That would be ideal for this ruse."
"You're doing all that now? In like, thirty seconds?"
"It's been closer to three minutes."
He stared at her, and she once again sensed he believed her odd.
"I have numerous chips integrated with my brain," she explained, though it might not change his opinion of her. "I can perform many mental processes at once."
"Even while you're examining Kay's innards?"
"Yes." Mari shrugged. "I've completed the setup. If you're ready, I'll send the auction site and account information to you."
She pinged Kenji's chip, sending the contact request. Her mother, who'd been a talented computer engineer, programmer, and occasional hacker before she'd become an astroshaman, had taught Mari and her siblings much about getting into secured places, but she wouldn't force her way into Kenji's inbox.
"Okay." He still looked a little stunned—and had that been horror that flashed in his eyes when she said his father might notice the link?—but he accepted the contact request.
It worried her that this mission hinged on him. He had so little at stake. Did he care if the terraformer went into enemy hands? Dabrowski had said he could earn a pardon for his crimes if he performed adequately, but did he even want that? He might plan to collect her bounty and disappear back into the ether.
As she sent the information along, Captain Laser spoke over the speaker. "Come to navigation for take-off, Backer. We need to have a chat about our course once we get out of Odin's atmosphere. Casmir said there would be a rendezvous point but not where."
"Guess I better figure that out." Kenji touched his glasses, then nodded to Mari and rose. "Are you coming, Kay, or are you still being examined?"
"My software has yet to be scanned," Kay said.
"Yes, sorry. I got distracted." Mari blushed, realizing she'd said she could do numerous tasks at once—which was true—but had allowed herself to forget this one while talking to Kenji.
"Understandable, yet distressing, that I am not engaging enough to command full attention."
"I think my robot is flirting with you," Kenji said.
Mari blinked. "Is that a joke?"
"Yeah." Kenji waved and walked out.
"Humans have quirky senses of humor," Kay said.
"Yes," Mari agreed and installed a program to scan his software.
"Since you and my maker will be working together to perpetrate this ruse, I feel compelled to tell you something about him."
"Oh?"
"Kenji has no wish to be a bounty hunter. Nor a thief nor criminal of any kind. In the years I have known him, he has worked hard to accumulate funds legitimately. His goal has been to make enough to pay for passage out of the Kingdom and start a new life elsewhere.
"He had been very close to achieving his goal when the invasion fleet came. His apartment building in town made it through the first bombing unscathed, but then your people came and dropped more bombs. The city's defenses were down—an astroshaman hacker knocked them offline through the network—and a bomb took out our home, the entire apartment building. Many people died.
"We were fortunate to react quickly and spring out before the building completely collapsed, but Kenji had no time to grab his belongings or any of his money. You see, he doesn't have a banking chip, because of his need to stay off the grid, so he's had to work for people willing to pay in physical currency or other physical valuables. He lost everything. He was also injured by the bombing, and I helped him to a lady we know who treats people who aren't in the system and can't use the hospital and other public services. She was treating a lot of people that night.
"By the time he could return to the remains of the apartment building, human scavengers had been all over the place. We spent a couple of days digging in the rubble and looking for his belongings, but everything was inaccessible or gone. And there is no insurance for those who don't officially exist in the system. That, I believe, is what has forced him to take less desirable work."
"It sounds like he has a reason to harbor ill will toward me." Mari didn't know why Kay had told her all that, but she didn't know if it changed anything about her determination not to let herself trust him. If anything, he had more reasons than she'd realized to dislike and work against her.
"I do not know if he does, but perhaps you understand now why he didn't research you before accepting the bounty. He had no reason to believe astroshamans might be good people."
"I gather most of his kind feel that way," Mari said bleakly, then read the results of her scanning program. "There aren't any anomalies that I can detect in your hardware or software, other than that your wiring upgrades are higher quality than one expects in a K-45. Minister Dabrowski must have choice materials lying around his house."
"One would assume a robotics professor would have access to the best. I am pleased to now have high-quality parts."
"Let me run the software scan again to double-check. The first time I heard Minister Dabrowski's name was because he was infiltrating our moon base, and my mother was cursing him for getting onto our network."
"Is that difficult to do?"
"For someone who's not an astroshaman, very difficult. You're clean." Mari uninstalled her scanning program.
"Good. I was disinclined to believe that Minister Dabrowski would have installed spy equipment inside of me, but Kenji is distrustful of people. Even though I have only worked with him for two years, I've seen that he's rarely been helped by anyone and is suspicious of others in general."
"Are you supposed to talk about him to strangers?"
"There's nothing in my programming that forbids that. Do you think he wouldn't approve?"
"I don't know, but you're a very open robot."
"I am open." Kay lifted a finger and closed a panel on his torso. "I have few secrets."
"I see that. I believe if Minister Dabrowski wanted to use you for spying, all he'd have to do is ask you for information."
"That is possible. I do hope that my sharing has convinced you not to hold Kenji's actions against him. He has had a hard life."
"I wasn't going to hold anything against him anyway. I expected to face challenges when I left my people. It's why I've been carrying stunners and tranquilizers around."
"I am pleased that you did not kill him for his presumptuousness."
"I assumed it would be harder to gain asylum if I killed Kingdom subjects."
"Possibly so."
|
Asylum - Lindsay Buroker.txt
| 15 |
Despite calling him up to navigation, Captain Laser didn't say much to Kenji until she'd slid her freighter onto the launch loop and they were accelerating along tracks that left the coast and angled upward and outward over the Arashi Sea. She'd directed him into the copilot's pod, and it cupped his body, making their rapid acceleration less noticeable. The robot vacuums that had been sucking up dust when he'd entered disappeared into their charging cubby.
"You been into space before, kid?" Laser asked.
"A few times when I was younger." Kenji didn't explain the handful of missions his father had taken him on to bomb or otherwise sabotage Kingdom bases and government transport ships. Instead, he poked around the auction site with the account Mari had sent him, somewhat bemused that she'd not only created it but also given it a history of purchases. According to the Nexus, Kenji was the owner of a first-generation star hopper, several rare paintings, and a trio of nukes. It seemed terrorists were supposed to have eclectic tastes. "The farthest out I've been is Forseti Station."
"I know it well, and I'm not getting paid enough to take you that far. You better arrange a meeting point that's on one of the moons or at least within a few days' travel. I'm supposed to be back on Odin to pick up a cargo next week. It was just luck that I had this opening. I've been accusing Viggo of rearranging my calendar to make sure I had this opening. He'll jump through hoops to do favors for Casmir."
"Really, Bonita," the ship's computer said. "It's not my fault you can't remember what's in your own calendar."
"My own calendar that I foolishly store in your memory banks instead of on my chip."
"It's important that I know the route and expectations for our freighter in case you are incapacitated during one of our runs. Naturally, I am capable of landing or docking and even picking up a new cargo on my own."
"Or delaying a cargo pickup to help a friend."
"Friendships are more important than freight."
"Uh huh."
"Do you work often for the crown?" Kenji wasn't familiar with her accent but could tell she wasn't from the Kingdom, and if the computer voice could be judged as a fair reflection of its previous owner, Viggo hadn't originated here either.
"Way more often than is wise," Laser grumbled.
"Working for the Kingdom now is much less fraught than it was six months ago," Viggo said.
"True. I hardly know what to do now that I'm not getting screwed left and right. And it's been handy trotting out that I know the queen when anyone questions me. I hardly ever get searched anymore."
"You know the queen?" Viggo asked. "I thought it was more that you know Casmir who knows the queen."
"She came by the ship once, remember? To pick up Casmir on their way to that hoity-toity luxury transport that's painted purple inside and outside. What a ridiculous thing to fly on. Do you think the toilets are purple?"
"As an ambulatory person capable of stepping into other ships, you would have to confirm that." Viggo sniffed, sounding exactly like a human being. "Not that I know why you'd want to."
"Anyway, kid. I called you up to see if you have a course for me." Laser peered around the high side of her pod to look over at Kenji. "Don't take this the wrong way, but I have concerns about you calling the shots for this trip."
"Because of who my father is?"
"Because you're twenty."
"I'm twenty-four."
"That's so much better. Worldly and wise." She squinted at him. "Do you get space sick?"
"Not unless the piloting is particularly slipshod."
"That will not be the case, unless someone starts shooting at us. Even then, the piloting will be exquisite. Just vigorous."
Vigorous piloting sounded more alarming than slipshod piloting.
So far, Kenji's stomach was fine. Outside, the pale blue sky had shifted to a dark blue. Soon, they would be off the track and shooting into space. And then where?
He adjusted his glasses and shifted from examining his own account on the Nexus to looking for the listing. He needed to find the terraforming device and offer to buy it before a meeting point could be determined.
"Maybe just head to whatever moon base or habitat is close? I need a few minutes to find... Ah, I think this is the right spot." Kenji skimmed through the listings of astroshaman devices. They were all by one person, or perhaps one group, that went by Lupus.
"What site are you on? The Dark Comet Nexus?"
"Yes."
"Have you got an account?" Laser asked. "A way to bid? It's invite-only. They try to keep out the law-abiding citizens."
"Mari made me what will appear to others to be an established account with a convincing history."
"Nobody's supposed to be able to do that, but I suppose astroshamans have hacking in their blood. Or their circuitry."
"I think so," Kenji murmured, then frowned. There were a lot of astroshaman gizmos listed, far more than Mari's terraforming device, and more than he would have guessed those drones could have scrounged from the wreck.
He lamented that he hadn't gotten an opportunity to take a few items from there himself, especially now that he saw how much one could get for them. Or at least what the thieves were asking for them. It was possible nobody would pay that much, but damn. "For the terraformer, our guy has it listed for two hundred and fifty thousand crowns."
Laser let out a low whistle. "You could buy a whole spaceship for that."
"I spent years of my life trying to scrounge up five thousand for a ticket to another system." Kenji shook his head. "According to the site rules and the listing, items like this are exchanged in person—that's what we were hoping—and most of the money is paid at the time of the transfer, but I need to be able to put down... let's see here... ten percent to secure the item."
"Yeah, that's how it works. Normal legal sales on big-ticket items involve going through a third party that holds the money, but the Nexus doesn't work like that. When you show up for the handoff, it's expected that both parties will bring guards to make sure everything goes smoothly. If you don't have suitable protection, you can expect to get the snot beaten out of you and your money or object taken by the other side." Laser looked over at him. "We've got Qin and Tigress for that, but do you have ten percent for the down payment?"
"I don't have anything."
"How are you going to pose as a buyer then?"
"Ask Minister Dabrowski to put some money into our new made-up account." Kenji had assumed proof of funds would be required before the trade could be made and had expected someone in the government to give him money to use, but he hadn't guessed he would need so much money to set this up. What if Dabrowski thought he would take it and run? That general from Military Intelligence would absolutely think that.
"You're going to ask Casmir for money?" Laser asked. "You know he pays in patents, right?"
"What?"
"The kid isn't rich."
"I assume he'll have access to military or government funds... Whatever they use for covert missions and setting up thieves to be captured."
Laser grunted skeptically.
"Besides, he's a noble now," Kenji said. "He should have some money. Didn't he pay you to take Mari and me up for this mission?"
"He schmoozed someone in Military Intelligence to send us some money, but it wasn't twenty-five thousand crowns. From what he's said, being a noble means he got some land, not piles of money. They don't even pay him to be a Minister Whatsit. It's his honor to serve supposedly. I think he's still living on his university pay."
"What's on the land?" Kenji well knew that most noble families ran all manner of industries on their expansive properties, everything from manufacturing plants to wineries to timber mills. He'd grown up among orchards, his mother's family using the fruit for jams, juice, candies, alcohol, and more.
"Trees, I think. It's some remote swath out in your Kingdom Forest. I'm guessing all the good land was given out a long time ago."
"Lumber has value."
"Good point. Offer a few thousand trees to the thieves. I'm sure they'll accept that."
"Probably... not. Will you comm the professor for me? I need to arrange something." It occurred to Kenji that he hadn't asked for permission to contact Dabrowski chip to chip. Maybe he should have. "Uhm, do you know how to reach him?"
"Of course I know how to reach him. At the university, at home, and I've even got a direct line to your Drachen Castle." Laser shot him a dirty look and tapped the comm panel. "Don't you think I have a way to rat you out if you go astray on this mission?"
Yes, Kay had suggested just that, and it didn't surprise Kenji. Laser was a near stranger, so it shouldn't have stung, but all the glares, glowers, and dark comments he'd received since people found out who his father was—who he was—were starting to weigh him down.
Some need to be tough, or at least not let Laser know her comment mattered to him, made him flippant. "You have the comm code to the castle? Impressive."
"Viggo and I are valued." She waved a hand as if it were no big deal.
"That's good," Kenji said and looked away, ignoring the longing pang he felt as he tried to remember the last time anyone had valued him.
It had been his mother, his mother who had been gone a long time. Funny how spending one's life in hiding made it hard to develop relationships. He'd spent the last few years working toward some nebulous future where things would be better, but it hadn't left time for much else, for becoming someone others valued.
He pushed a hand through his hair, annoyed with his maudlin mood. Maybe he should have taken more of Mari's candies. Didn't women swear by chocolate for repairing one's emotional state?
Kenji hoped Laser and her ship truly were valued. It had crossed his mind that he and Mari had been given the clunky old freighter for this ruse, not because it would be more believable but because nobody had been willing to invest that much in them. The knights in their Kingdom Fleet warships might be cruising around the system right now, well-trained Intelligence officers also poking around on the Nexus and determining where the thieves were. Maybe Kenji was even the distraction to occupy the thieves' attention while the experts homed in on them.
The comm display activated, and a dark-haired woman with elegant features and thoughtful brown eyes appeared. Sunlight streamed through walls of windows in the background, with vining plants rising on trellises behind her. For a bewildered moment, Kenji thought Laser had mistakenly commed some gardening center, but it dawned on him that he was looking at Queen Oku. Did the castle have a greenhouse? It must.
His cheeks heated as he remembered his misadventure in trying to help thieves rob her greenhouses in the park.
"Good afternoon, Captain Lopez. Casmir is indisposed but will be here shortly." Oku smiled—or was that a smirk?—and looked off to the side at something not visible on the display.
"Good. Tell him to bring some trees. His secret agent left the planet without any money to make a deal."
The flush to Kenji's cheeks increased.
"Trees?" Oku asked.
"Never mind, Your Majesty." Kenji tried to bow from his pod, but the ship was still accelerating away from the planet, and the seat's sides gripped him protectively, so all he managed was a head bob.
Barking sounded in the background, and Oku glanced away again. Still smirking, she looked back. Since she was in a good mood, maybe she was the one to ask for that ten percent.
"I commed to hopefully arrange some funds for our mission," Kenji said.
"That is Casmir's project, so I'll let you talk to him about that. Here he is."
She stepped aside as Dabrowski slid into view, grease on his cheek and short blades of grass dusting his shoulders. There were even a few green strands in his hair. More barking sounded in the background, as if a dog was having a fantastic time chasing a squirrel.
Kenji decided he didn't know the professor well enough to make jokes or ask what he'd been doing to acquire such hair decorations. Laser felt differently.
"Looking good, El Mago," she crooned. "No wonder world leaders can't keep their hands off you."
Dabrowski blinked. "Uhm, I believe there's only one world leader moderately interested in putting hands on me."
"You sure? Didn't that astroshaman leader kiss you?"
Dabrowski sighed, his eyes rolling heavenward. "Why does everyone keep bringing that up?" he mumbled.
"And I know that sultan at Stardust Palace enjoys your company. I heard a rumor that he was putting you in his will."
"You're in fine form today, Laser," Dabrowski said. "After four hours of meetings, I felt the urge to put my hands to work, so I made some adjustments to the castle's lawn-mowing robots. They now mow more optimally and are programmed to play with Queen Oku's dog."
"And spit their clippings at their maker?" Laser asked.
"Hm?"
The queen had stepped out of view, but she reached over and brushed the grass out of Dabrowski's hair and off his shoulders.
"Oh, yes. I happened to be nearby when Chasca—that's her dog—took a shortcut to head off the robot she was chasing and ran through the compost pile." He lifted his arms expansively, demonstrating an explosion of grass flying everywhere, then nodded to the queen. "Thank you for striving to make me presentable."
"You're welcome. I believe you're about to ask General Heim to allocate funds for your special project, so it may help to look like a respectable diplomat instead of one of the gardeners."
"Ah. Yes. He is a crown pincher when it comes to funds allocation, especially for projects that aren't his idea." Dabrowski faced the camera again. "Does that mean you've already made progress, Kenji?"
"Yes, my lord. Mari found the listing for her terraforming device and numerous other astroshaman trinkets—expensive trinkets—for sale on the Dark Comet Nexus."
"Good. Send the information, please. It'll help if I show it to him."
Kenji transmitted the data to Laser's comm, so it would show on the display for Dabrowski, then braced himself to say, "It looks like I need ten percent of two hundred and fifty thousand crowns."
"Actually, it looks like you need ten percent of two hundred and fifty thousand Union dollars," Dabrowski said dryly.
"Oh, hell." Kenji hadn't checked the exchange rate lately, but he knew Union dollars were worth substantially more than crowns.
"Is the terraforming device worth that much?" the queen asked skeptically.
Worried that his mission—his chance to get that pardon and avoid the asteroid penal mines—might be scrapped, Kenji looked for something to say that would convince them of its importance.
"It's worth a lot to keep it from going to someone who could use it as a weapon." Dabrowski sighed and tapped a control on their comm unit. "I'm seeing if we can get General Heim on the line. He enjoys being kept in the loop."
"He enjoys yelling at you about how diplomats aren't supposed to meddle in military affairs," the queen said.
"He enjoys it? That's not the impression I've gotten from the throbbing vein at his temple that comes out when we discuss that."
"Funny how many people show off that vein when they talk to you, El Mago," Laser said.
"Isn't it? It's why I was a natural fit for a diplomatic position."
The queen snorted.
"You sure there just weren't any other openings available?" Laser asked. "And that they had to stick you somewhere?"
"Somewhere we could keep an eye on him," the queen agreed and found another piece of grass to brush out of Dabrowski's hair. Since her eyes twinkled when she said that, Kenji assumed it wasn't heartfelt.
The display split in half, and a second face appeared, General Heim in a drab office with beige walls, a liquid whiteboard on the wall behind him. He was scowling.
"Two hundred and fifty thousand Union dollars?" were the first words out of his mouth.
"Kenji only needs twenty-five to set up the meeting and lure in the thief," Dabrowski said.
"Only twenty-five. An amount I'd be delighted to give to the son of a terrorist."
"We've already discussed why he's the perfect person to carry out our ruse."
"Or the perfect person to take the money and flee to another system," Heim growled, every bit as suspicious as Kenji had feared he would be.
"Even if we believed that was true, which we don't—" Dabrowski smiled and nodded at Kenji, "—Captain Laser and her fearsome crew would put a stop to it."
"Yes, the seventy-year-old freighter captain and her cat women," Heim said.
"I'm a bounty hunter, and I'm sitting right here." Laser didn't lower her voice much when she added, "Asshole."
Heim's jaw clenched.
"Her charming irreverence makes her perfect for dealing with thieves," Dabrowski hurried to inform the general.
"And abysmal at dealing with the military," Heim growled.
"Hence why the thieves won't suspect she's aligned with you. I'll arrange the transfer of the funds, Kenji."
Heim started to sputter a protest, but Dabrowski continued on.
"If at all possible, Kenji and his team will recover all of the stolen astroshaman devices. So we get our money's worth, eh? And I'll ask Mari to see if she can find a way to mark the thieves' ship so the Fleet can give chase after they leave the meeting area, even if they have a slydar hull."
"An astroshaman," Heim said. "Someone else I'm eager to put faith in."
"Together, they will achieve great things," Dabrowski assured him.
Heim did not appear convinced. Even Kenji was skeptical that he and Mari could achieve great things.
"We'll try," he felt compelled to say when the men looked at him.
Dabrowski waved. "Keep us updated."
"Yes, my lord."
Dabrowski closed his side of the comm down before the general, leaving Heim's glowering face filling the display.
Kenji waved his fingers toward Laser, hoping she would hang up on him.
But Heim had time to say, "If you screw us over, boy, my people will find you." He hung up first.
"Asshole," Laser repeated.
Kenji agreed.
"I never would have returned to this benighted system if Casmir and Oku hadn't ended up in charge," Laser said. "I bet they're counting the days until the gnarled fossils reigning over their military and senate keel over and die."
Kenji didn't point out that the gray-haired Laser might be older than General Heim.
"Was it not your osito who was the reason for your return, Bonita?" Viggo asked. "Such a shame that his duties precluded him from coming along on this little mission and keeping your toes warm."
"Yeah, yeah, he's a perk too. But if any black-market thief got a whiff of a knight, this deal would be off." Laser looked at Kenji. "You better buy that doohickey as soon as you get the money, kid. And pick a rendezvous spot that isn't all the way out by the wormhole gate. The sooner we can meet with these thieves, the less time they'll have to poke around and figure out you're lying to them and setting them up. They don't like that."
"I imagine not." Kenji wondered what the odds were of everything working out—and what they were of everything exploding in his face like the queen's compost pile.
|
Asylum - Lindsay Buroker.txt
| 16 |
After Kay left the lounge and Mari was done adding finishing touches to the account Kenji would use to make an offer on her terraformer, she rose from her pod to investigate the lounge. They had broken Odin's orbit, and she was alone in the room without a task to occupy her mind.
Curious about the captain and the crew, she poked into the cabinets. What did they do for mental stimulation while on prolonged travels? Did they read and research? Study astronomy from among the stars? Or—more likely from what she'd seen of them—train at combat maneuvers?
She wondered if any of them would have a birthday while they were on this mission. Birthday party was on her Human List. Her people did not celebrate such things, nor holidays of any kind, there being no logical reason for people to get together and consume cake and hurl confetti into the air, at least according to her mother and the other senior astroshamans. When Mari had asked for a party for her tenth birthday, after reading about such events in a book, her mother had dismissed the idea as wasteful frivolity and suggested she start a new science project if she felt the urge to do something recreational. As she recalled, she'd given sugar to yeast to create enough carbon dioxide to fill a balloon. It had been... somewhat festive.
Two large cubbies held treadmills that could be pulled out for exercise sessions. Mari was contemplating using one when the hatch opened, startling her.
She spun, feeling guilty at being caught snooping around. The captain had said, "Make yourself at home," but that might not have included peering into cabinets.
Qin and Tigress walked in, appearing nearly identical in their matching galaxy suits—and almost-matching faces. Tigress's features were a little softer, her cheeks a touch plumper, and she looked like she favored indulgences in life. They were both, however, in excellent physical shape, the galaxy suits fitted enough to show off muscular arms, backs, and legs.
"Hello, Mari," Qin said. "We came to pump you for information."
"I... am not familiar with that term." Mari closed the cabinet door. "Do you mean to interrogate me?"
"Yes, but without torture or any other implied nastiness. We could even bribe you. We know you like chocolate." Qin smiled.
"Who doesn't?" Tigress asked. "Though I prefer licking melted chocolate off a lover's warm flesh."
"That doesn't sound sanitary," Qin said.
"Men don't usually mind. They like being licked."
Qin crinkled her nose. "I should have brought Pounce along on this mission."
"You should have brought more men."
Mari didn't know what to think of the conversation. Having sex was on her Human List, but she didn't recall licking being discussed that often in the books she'd read.
"Maybe I'll lick your knight when we get back," Tigress said, eyeing Qin sidelong. It seemed more like teasing than a serious suggestion.
Since Mari had read novels and seen vids starring knights, she could understand the appeal. At one point, her list had said have sex with a knight. After later deeming that unrealistic and overly specific, she'd shortened it to simply have sex.
"If you put your tongue on Asger," Qin said, "I'll hurl you into the wall. Again."
"You're so singular, Squirt. Why don't you share your men? I'd happily share mine."
"You don't have a man currently."
"I might. Our new passenger has a nice ass. I'd have plastered him against a wall already, but with Kingdom men, you never know if they'll flip out over modded women." Tigress lifted a finger, a claw extended, and pointed it down her body.
"I think even progressive men might be alarmed by you plastering them against a wall," Qin said.
"Only those with a poor sense of adventure."
"Most," Qin mouthed to Mari.
"Do you find it difficult," Mari asked slowly, "to find mates who accept your differences from the human norm?"
That was something she'd long wondered, having read about the various prejudices and stereotypes common among humanity, and Kenji's comment that she would be cute if not for her implants sprang to mind. In some of the systems, cybernetic implants and genetic modifications were common, but she'd always gotten the feeling anything too different from the norm could lead to people being ostracized. They ended up in communities of like-minded—like-modded—individuals.
"You just have to know how to work your assets." Tigress wriggled her hips, then slapped her butt.
Qin rolled her eyes. "Yes. We find it difficult. Especially if you want a nice man who cares about you and doesn't just want to have sex with you to see what it's like to sleep with a freak."
Tigress lowered her arms, her expression growing a touch wistful. "There's some truth to that. I've had no trouble finding those types, and there's fun to be had with them, but I am a little envious of Squirt and her knight."
"His name is William Asger, and he's not my knight."
"I know." Tigress smiled at her, then nodded at Mari. "Do you have trouble? You're pretty and shapely and all, but you know." She waved at the implant on the side of her head. "Not everyone wants to sleep with a computer."
Mari combed her fingers through her hair, as she often did, to make the implant less noticeable.
Qin elbowed her sister. "Don't call her that. It's like someone calling us freaks."
"Is it? Computer doesn't seem as derogatory."
Mari shrugged, having expected such comments, and Tigress hadn't intended to be mean. She did wonder if she would have to cross kisses and sex off her Human List. They might be more difficult to obtain than chocolate and alcohol.
"I'm not sure yet if it's difficult to find someone," Mari said.
"You've got all of the rest of your people, right?" Tigress asked. "Astroshamans? I assume if someone is modded themselves, they're not as uppity about implants."
"They aren't, and it's traditional to choose implants that are blatantly computer-like rather than subtle and less noticeable, but our people aren't encouraged to seek out biological pleasures of the flesh."
Tigress looked blankly at her.
"Most of us don't have sex," Mari clarified. "My mother, I've heard from other elders, was somewhat libidinous before she came fully into the fold and became a high shaman, but she doesn't think her children should be that way. We're supposed to be perfect representations of astroshaman culture with the goal of one day leaving behind our human bodies and taking android bodies or simply uploading our consciousnesses into computer systems."
Qin's mouth formed an, "Oh," but she didn't say anything else. Was she repulsed?
"That would make sex difficult," Tigress said.
"Yes. It's why I left."
"To have sex?"
Mari blushed. "Not only that, but I wish to experience... what it is to be human. Mostly human." She waved at her implants. "What did you want to pump me about?"
"Oh," Qin said. "We wondered if you know anything about our mission. The captain has only said we're flying out to rendezvous with some thieves to get back something they stole. She said we'd probably have to be Kenji's protection."
Mari looked at their muscular arms. "You seem ideal for that."
"We are ideal." Tigress lifted her chin and smiled, flashing her fangs. "But we like to know what we're getting into."
Mari saw no reason to keep them in the dark and explained the terraforming device and the plan, as far as she knew it.
"So he's up in navigation with the captain pretending to buy some gizmo you made?" Tigress asked. "Can't you just make another one?"
"I could, but it would be easier for me to replicate the work if I had the prototype back." She didn't go into where her people were staying and how they no longer had easy access to some of the expensive and rare materials that had gone into the device.
"I need my powerful fighters up in navigation to look fierce," Captain Laser said over the comm. "We're about to make contact with the target."
"That's us." Qin headed for the hatch, Tigress right behind her.
Mari doubted she qualified as a powerful fighter, especially compared to those two, but curiosity prompted her to follow them. Maybe they were about to find out who'd stolen her device.
Digital currency wasn't as impressive as money piled up on a table or stashed away in a secret vault, but Kenji still admired the digits in the bank account that Military Intelligence had given him access to. A neat twenty-five thousand Union dollars were waiting to be transferred to the Nexus.
A part of him was dumbfounded that the Kingdom was trusting him to do it. If it had been up to that General Heim, Kenji knew he wouldn't have seen a single dollar. For whatever reason, Dabrowski had faith in him.
Even though he appreciated that faith, after so many years of being broke, he couldn't deny he was tempted to make another account, transfer the money into it, and figure out how to sneak away from Laser and her ship. Twenty-five thousand was five times as much as he'd been trying to save up, more than enough to get passage to another system and start over. In addition, he still had some of the money the astroshamans had given him as a down payment on Mari.
He felt guilty about that and worried they would hunt him down if he didn't bring Mari back to them, but that was something he no longer planned to do. It would be a good idea to figure out how to return their money to them.
But this twenty-five thousand from the military...
Kenji sighed. No, he couldn't make off with it either. The thought of disappointing the only person willing to trust him kept him from contemplating the theft further. It was silly, given that Kenji had never actually been his student—never even talked to him until this week—but he hated the idea of Dabrowski being yelled at by Heim. And of the important people who'd been in that meeting having a reason to tell Dabrowski I told you so.
Kenji muttered the commands to his glasses chip to transfer the money to the Nexus account so he could pay the deposit on the terraforming device. The display on his lenses showed the money whisking away. A soft ping of confirmation vibrated through the frame of his glasses as the Nexus accepted his offer. He leaned back in his pod.
"It's done?" Laser asked.
"Yes."
The hatch opened, and Tigress and Qin walked in, Qin moving to stand behind Laser's pod and Tigress standing behind Kenji's. Navigation wasn't that large, and the presence of the big women made it claustrophobic. Mari stopped in the hatchway, standing back a few feet, a hesitant expression on her face.
Laser hadn't called for her. Maybe she didn't know if she was welcome. Kenji waved for her to come in if she wanted.
"Is the mastermind putting things into place?" Tigress rested a hand on Kenji's head and eyed him over the back of his pod, a smile curving her lips.
"Is that me?" Normally, Kenji didn't mind interest from the opposite sex—he cheerfully invited it—but he found himself groping for a way to politely let her know that she wasn't his type. He supposed sex with a warrior woman with cat genes could be an intriguing and educational experience, but he didn't know if his ego could take sleeping with someone who had more muscle mass than he had. Furry muscle mass.
"You got it, cutie." Tigress patted his head, then rested her hand on the back of his pod.
He felt like a pet.
"I just put in the offer. Your intimidating presence in the background may be premature." Kenji waved at Qin and Tigress. "The seller may wait before comming to see if there are more and better offers. Or he may spend a few hours researching me."
No sooner had the words come out than another faint ping vibrated his glasses. His offer had been accepted.
"Or not," he said.
"Is it concerning that it happened so quickly?" Laser asked.
"I... don't know." This was Kenji's first time scheming against thieves.
"I manipulated the search data on the Nexus to make the listing for my terraformer less visible to bots and human viewers than it might otherwise be," Mari admitted. "I assumed the Kingdom coffers would prefer it if we not get into a bidding war."
"I know about the Nexus," Laser said. "It's supposed to be hacker proof. There are all kinds of security protocols so that unscrupulous types can't fiddle with things."
Kenji peered past Tigress to Mari.
She shrugged, looking more embarrassed than pleased with herself. "I'm used to sophisticated networks. It's what my people have. It wasn't that difficult to figure out how to get in or how to tinker without leaving signs."
Kenji remembered Dabrowski's comment about the abilities of astroshamans and how he hadn't been surprised that Mari had gotten the best of him—twice. He was beginning to realize how foolish he'd been to accept that bounty-hunting gig and felt lucky that Mari wasn't the vengeful sort. What if he'd gone after an astroshaman who thought nothing of slaying enemies that pestered her? Like the ones who'd led the raid to the Arctic Islands? A lot more Kingdom warships had been wrecked up there than astroshaman vessels.
"We've got someone comming us," Laser said. "An unfamiliar contact."
Nervous, Kenji nodded for her to put the message on the display. "Wait, we better hide you, Mari." He glanced back. "They're going to be suspicious about us wanting to buy astroshaman tech when we have our very own astroshaman."
"I understand." She started to back away.
He lifted a hand. "Is there room for you to duck down? It would be good to get your opinions on these people."
Qin stepped aside so Mari could squeeze into navigation. She hesitated, looked around, then crouched between the two pods so her head was below the console.
Kenji patted her on the shoulder. Sometime between her sharing encyclopedia entries on cinnamon and her offering to examine Kay for bugs, she'd stopped seeming so... weird. Maybe it was silly, since he'd been adding to her torment until recently, but he had the urge to include her and make her feel welcome.
"Getting cozy in here." Laser reached for the comm panel.
"Try to pinpoint where they're comming from, will you?" Kenji asked.
"I am already working on it," Viggo said.
"As am I," Mari said quietly.
The display came to life, showing someone sitting in a pod in a dimly lit cabin with computer instrumentation blinking in the background. A hood and heavy shadows obscured the person, offering only the hint of lumpy features, with a jaw jutting too far forward. Kenji resisted glancing at Qin and Tigress for comparison. Their jaws were fine. This person looked to have features more canine than human. It could be a mask, but they were likely dealing with another genetically modified individual.
"You're the son of the Kuchikukan?" The rough voice was hard to understand, the jaw mangling the formation of words, but he spoke slowly enough that Kenji could decipher them. "I wasn't expecting someone so young."
"My father started training me at eight. I'm a crack shooter, a fighter, and can thread a needle with any aircraft." He half-expected Laser, who hadn't seen him do any of those things, to make a snarky comment, but she was leaning out of the video pickup, staying silent and making it clear this was his mission.
Nerves fluttered in Kenji's belly. Even though Dabrowski hadn't said Laser would be in command, he hadn't quite realized he was in charge of the whole thing. Such strange trust to be given to an unproven operative who'd been in jail two days ago.
Mari looked up at him and gave him an encouraging nod. Nobody else did, so he appreciated it.
"I'm Lupus Zhor." The man pushed his hood back, revealing more canine features, including prodigious fangs and alert pointed and furred ears. "I can do all those things and tear your throat out with my teeth."
Laser rolled her eyes. It had to be killing her not to make snarky comments.
"Do you always threaten the people you sell your goods to?" Kenji asked.
"I just like them to know what they can expect if they betray me." Zhor looked at Tigress and Qin, who stood with their arms crossed, their muscles on display. "You'll bring some kitties to play with me when we meet? An unexpected treat in Kingdom space."
"They'll be with me when we make the trade," Kenji said. "I trust you'll leave them be if I bring the agreed-upon amount."
"As long as you don't cross me. If you do cross me, there'll be ramifications." Zhor smiled—inasmuch as someone with a canine snout could smile—and waved to someone off the camera.
No, six someones. Six hulking men, their torsos devoid of clothing but covered in fur, walked into view carrying pistols and cutlasses. They lined up behind Zhor's pod, making it easy to see how similar they all were. The same faces, fangs, and ears.
"I've got more puppies than you've got kitties," Zhor said, still smiling. Unlike Qin and Tigress, all of his teeth were pointed, not only the human canines.
"Since we're just making a trade, and presumably not battling each other, I fail to see how that matters," Kenji said. "Should things go smoothly, I'll be in the market to purchase more astroshaman tech in the future."
"Good. I trust you'll want to see a demonstration before the exchange to make sure it works."
Uh, that was a good idea, though he was surprised Zhor would volunteer. What if the device had broken and no longer worked? Would he be willing to let a buyer back out of a trade?
"I would like that, yes, but what are you going to do?" Kenji arched his brows. "Terraform a planet for me?"
Beside him, Mari lifted a hand and rested it on the console, careful not to move it into range of the vid pickup. She was gazing at the paneling ahead of her, a vacant expression on her face. Laser frowned, maybe thinking she was interfacing with her ship's computer—was she?—but didn't do or say anything with Zhor looking on.
"Perhaps a smaller environment," Zhor said. "I propose the asteroid base atop Sif's space elevator. There's a station with hollowed-out tunnels inside that we can use. I see that you and your rusty freighter are not overly far from my current position." Zhor's eyes narrowed. In suspicion?
"Rusty?" came a protest from Viggo. "This vessel is freshly painted and completely free of corrosion."
Laser glared at a speaker on the wall and raised a finger to her lips.
"As I'm sure you're aware," Zhor continued, ignoring the protest, "long-term terraforming efforts have been ongoing on the planet's surface for some centuries. Once you see how rapidly the astroshaman technology can work, you'll be eager to give me your money—and more."
"You've already tested it? Was your cabin in need of new soil and nutrients?"
"I know it will work. This isn't the first astroshaman technology I've acquired." There was that fanged smile again. Very similar to a wolf anticipating a meal.
Even though Mari couldn't see the smile from her spot, the words made her scowl. And why wouldn't they? He'd admitted to stealing—frequently—from her people.
"Good," Kenji made himself say. "It wouldn't be worth anything to us if it didn't work."
"We'll meet at the space elevator in two days at 1300 Odin Zamek time. If more ships than that one arrive, or if you step out of your airlock with an army, I'll assume you mean to betray me, and the deal will be off." Several of his canine bodyguards, or whatever they were, growled. "And you will be dead."
"I'm just looking for the device, not a fight."
"Excellent. We wouldn't want anything to happen to your kitties."
This time, Tigress growled.
Zhor cut the comm.
"Does anyone else want to tear his puppies limb from limb?" Tigress asked.
Qin lifted her chin. "I am not afraid to battle them."
"I'm a little concerned about it," Kenji muttered. "Especially since he picked the place, he's volunteering to demonstrate the tech, and he's got more people than we do."
"You should have picked a different place," Laser critiqued. "It sounds like he's setting a trap for you."
"I got that impression, too, but I don't know why he would. If he's a thief, he should want my money. Why would he betray me?"
"Because you immediately looked shifty to him, and he didn't think he could trust you?"
"I don't look shifty. He may have recognized your non-rusty freighter, despite its name change."
"I doubt it," Laser said. "He doesn't look like he's from this system. I don't know if you noticed this, but your Kingdom isn't very friendly to modded humans."
"I've noticed," Qin murmured.
Kenji thought of the way Qin and Tigress had been attacked at that rental shop, simply for showing an interest in opening up a business in the neighborhood.
Mari gazed sadly back at them before rising to her feet and removing her hand from the console. "I have acquired some information about Zhor and, by tracing his transmission through the comm network, about the location of his ship. He attempted to route his signal through relay stations to hide his position, but I was able to track it back to him. He's about six hours ahead of us and flying toward Sif."
"You want me to change course to meet him there?" Laser asked. "Or are we going to be smart and back away from this mission?"
"No," Mari said with soft determination.
"What information did you gather?" Kenji didn't point out that Mari wasn't in charge, because he didn't want to quit either, not when he'd already sent off General Heim's twenty-five thousand Union dollars. If the Kingdom didn't get something out of that, Kenji would definitely end up on a penal asteroid, working for the rest of his life to pay the money back.
"Zhor is a well-known thief originally from System Cerberus," Mari said. "He is an opportunist and works—steals—from people all over the Twelve Systems. He doesn't come to the Kingdom frequently, but he often steals from the astroshamans." Mari scowled. "Not only from wrecks but from my people who choose to live among humans and go back and forth between their communities and astroshaman bases. He's robbed their apartments and taken small items. It is likely the wreck of the Celestial Dart offered him an opportunity to gain more significant and recent tech. Though he did some other heists earlier in his career, acquiring astroshaman devices has been his specialty for the last five years. It's surprising my people haven't chosen to deal with him, but most of his thefts, at least from our point of view, have been petty. If the terraformer were not my personal project, one I intend to share with the Kingdom, nobody would have bothered going after him." Mari looked at Laser. "He's wanted by several planetary and station governments, and there are bounties out for him in numerous systems. If you could capture him, the Kingdom could recoup its twenty-five thousand and more."
"Or we—" Laser rested a hand on her chest, then pointed at Qin and Tigress, "—could keep it for ourselves, and the Kingdom could find another way to recoup its money. We ought to get a bonus for flying into a trap."
"Is it a trap?" Kenji asked. "Or are you still speculating?"
"Judging by the position that his communication came from," Mari said, "he was already en route to Sif. It's possible he planned to test the device there himself even before you put in an offer on it."
"Is a tunnel in an asteroid a legitimate place to test a terraforming gizmo?" Kenji asked.
"It could be. We originally tested it in enclosed domes, both because there's a limit to how much one device can terraform, and so our molecular modifications wouldn't escape and alter more than we wished. There's a chain-reaction effect that radiates outward from its deployment spot."
"That's why Dabrowski and the others are worried about it being used as a weapon," Kenji said. "If it was unleashed in the wild... or in a city..."
"Yes. It works by changing the molecular structure of what exists and shifting it into a more desirable matrix."
"Even if what exists is a city full of people?" Laser asked.
Mari hesitated. "Yes." She glanced at Kenji and Laser. "That was never our intent, of course. We were—we still are—planning to terraform planets in the new system our people will one day travel to, using it to alter a world that is devoid of life."
"You just accidentally made something that could also be used as a super weapon?" Laser arched her eyebrows.
"We would never do such a thing. We cannot be held responsible for thieves stealing our equipment."
"No? You sure?"
Mari grimaced, her face more concerned—even haunted—than indignant or defiant.
Kenji bristled, tempted to defend her from the unfair sarcasm, even if he also found the possible ramifications unsettling.
"I am certain," Mari said, though it sounded like she was trying to convince herself. "Pardon me. I was asked to find a way to remotely mark his ship so that the Kingdom Fleet can find it. I will work on that now." Mari nodded curtly and walked out of navigation.
"Think we offended her?" Qin asked.
"Given what she's made," Laser said, "I don't care."
"We once carried a terrible bioweapon around the system."
Laser scowled at her. "Not knowingly."
Qin opened her mouth, but Laser cut her off with a chop of her hand.
"Set a course, Viggo," Laser said. "And keep an eye out for other ships or anything suspicious. I've still got a niggling hunch this Zhor knows we're setting him up—and that he wants to set us up."
Kenji eyed the stars on the display ahead. He hoped that wasn't the case, but he worried she was right.
|
Asylum - Lindsay Buroker.txt
| 17 |
Mari sat cross-legged with her back to the wall in the cargo hold, the constant acceleration of the freighter keeping her in place as effectively as gravity. It wasn't quite the same as being on a large vessel that spun and created artificial gravity, but it was enough so that they didn't have to spend the whole trip locked in their pods or walking around with the magnetic soles of their galaxy-suit boots activated.
Voices drifted to her from the ladder well. Since Qin and Tigress had been in the lounge, Mari had come down here to work, to study the layout of the Sif space elevator station and to see if she could dig up more information on Zhor and his genetically modified army before their meeting. It sounded like her private spot was about to become less private. That was all right. She could have worked in her cabin if she'd truly wanted to be alone.
As strange as it was, given that she'd voluntarily left, she'd found herself missing her siblings and those among the astroshamans that she considered friends. In addition to her other research, she'd been checking the news back on Odin to see if her mother or any of her people had been mentioned.
"If I go onto the station with a bunch of firearms," came Kenji's voice, "they'll be suspicious that I don't intend to deal fairly."
"If you go onto the station without any firearms," Laser's voice followed, "they'll think you're an idiot."
"Maybe that'll be good. Maybe they'll underestimate me."
"Or maybe they like to shoot idiots on sight. Cleaning up the gene pool." Laser walked out of the short hallway and into the hold with Kenji coming after her. "Besides, I want to see if you can actually shoot, and if you'll have the girls' back, or if you're going to be a liability in there."
"I can shoot." Kenji noticed Mari and paused. "Hi."
"Hi," she said.
"Come on." Laser had also noticed Mari, but she kept walking across the hold and toward a small armory next to engineering. "No time for flirting."
Kenji stumbled. "How was that flirting?"
"You seem shy. I figured that's how you did it." Laser disappeared into the armory.
Mari decided it had been a joke, and she didn't need to point out that Kenji found her cute but weird, a feeling that would likely preclude flirting.
"We'll give you a pistol," Laser called out. "No thief is going to raise an eyebrow at a contact meeting him with a pistol. If you know what to do with a grenade, I can give you a couple of those too, as long as you promise not to blow your own balls off."
Kenji halted. "It's a good thing I'm not trying to flirt, because you assuming I'm inept and talking about my balls being blown off would not impress a woman." He looked over at Mari, his eyebrows up, as if to ask for confirmation.
"I am uncertain how much genitalia factor into relationship decisions for normal humans, but since my people produce offspring through the mingling and manipulation of DNA in a laboratory setting, with artificial wombs employed for gestation, damage to sexual organs would not affect reproduction and might not prompt a dismissal of a person as a potential mate."
"Look at that. There's someone for everyone." Laser walked back out with three armored hover targets and a pistol. "I put this on the lowest setting. I don't want you shooting holes in my walls."
"Thank you, Bonita," Viggo's voice came from a speaker. "I am still waiting for someone to repair the dents left by Qin and Tigress's vigorous battle practice."
"Yeah, yeah, Casmir can do it when we get back. He'll owe me for flying into a trap with a couple of rubes."
Kenji scowled and accepted the pistol. "The kind words you offer your passengers must ensure people line up to fly with you again."
As Laser stepped back, activating one of the spherical targets, Mari wondered if she should leave the area. Despite Laser's razzing, Mari doubted Kenji was inept with a weapon. He'd had no trouble stunning those police officers—and her, for that matter. She was, however, interested to see how this practice session would go. And if the pistol was on the lowest setting, she shouldn't feel more than a buzz of discomfort on the off chance that a stray bolt did hit her.
Laser tossed the sphere into the air, its hover jets keeping it aloft, and it started zipping around in a random pattern near the high ceiling of the hold. "All right, kid. I've programmed it so it won't fire back at first. Just try to hit the thing."
Kenji gave her an exasperated look, glanced at the sphere, and fired. The DEW-Tek bolt streaked up and nailed the target. It paused and dinged softly, acknowledging an acceptable hit, before darting away.
"Not bad." Laser tossed the other two targets in the air. "They'll start moving faster and getting harder to hit with every shot you land."
"I'm familiar with them."
"After ten successful hits, they'll start shooting back."
"Got it."
The first few shots didn't challenge Kenji, but as the spheres started zipping around faster and firing back, he took cover behind crates fastened to the deck and gave his full attention to the task. They beeped in warning a half second before firing, so if he was fast enough, he could hit them first and disrupt their shot. Kenji managed to do that often, though with three in the air, the devices working together to spread themselves apart and make it hard to focus on them all at once, he was challenged. Overall, he proved skilled, darting in and out from behind cover to keep from taking hits.
Since the targets, either through chance or Laser's programming, didn't fly near Mari, she stayed in her spot. As she watched the show, she kept up her research. Laser yelled insults about how slow and clumsy Kenji was, which wasn't even remotely true, but she nodded and looked pleased by his display, so Mari decided it was her way of encouraging him to greater heights.
On a whim, Mari looked up Assistant Professor Donadieu back on Odin. The last she'd heard, Minister Dabrowski hadn't figured out why he'd been using drones to steal from students on the university campus. It was unlikely it had anything to do with Zhor, beyond the fact that Zhor might have been the one who murdered him to steal the stolen technology himself, but it was also possible there was more of a tie-in than that, and that further information would be valuable in facing off against Zhor.
She did find a few articles that mentioned Donadieu, including one by an investigative journalist who'd dug up an off-planet bank account of his with more funds in it than a simple professor should have had. They'd also found a listing he'd put up on one of the black-market sites for a mysterious device of astroshaman origins. The time stamp meant he'd done it almost immediately after the drones had robbed Mari.
If Zhor had been in the area, perhaps investigating the military warehouses near Zamek City that contained astroshaman technology taken from the wreck, he could have gotten an alert for the posting. And, instead of paying what Donadieu asked, perhaps he'd decided to kill the man and take the device for free. Or maybe Donadieu had been home and had put up a fight, and that was why he'd been killed.
Either way, Mari didn't see that it would affect Kenji's upcoming confrontation with Zhor. Other than to suggest that Zhor didn't play fair. But she gathered that Kenji already suspected that. It concerned her that Zhor had more fighters to take to the meeting than Kenji, but Mari believed she could help out with that, not by fighting but with her skills at navigating secured systems.
She brought up the blueprints for the space elevator station again, as well as everything she could find on its computer systems.
Clangs and clunks came from the ladder well, and a minute later, Kay walked out of the corridor. "What a dreadful system for navigating a spaceship. Ladders. They are not robot friendly."
"The little vacuums seem to navigate them adequately," Mari said, though she had no trouble seeing why the bipedal robot had difficulties. A K-45 did not have the flexibility of a human or an android.
"They have suction systems that allow them to climb walls and stick to the ceiling. My maker did not see a need to outfit me with such."
"There weren't any... suction cups... in the junkyard... where I got... your parts," Kenji called between dodges and rolls and pants for breath. The three targets were moving so quickly now that an android would have been hard-pressed to keep up with them. "Laser, turn those... off. My robot... needs me."
"I do not need you," Kay said. "I merely came to ask if you have a role for me in the upcoming meeting."
"Hm, where'd I leave the remote?" Laser ambled toward the armory.
"Laser!" Kenji dove behind the crates, hitting the deck with a thump.
Mari could no longer see him from her spot, but two of the spheres sped behind the crates after him. Assuming he was exhausted after the lengthy workout and would appreciate a break, she located the targets on the ship's wireless network and deactivated them.
"Thank you," Kenji said. It came out as more of a groan.
"Huh?" Laser stepped out of the armory, waving the remote, but noticed the targets had settled to the deck. "How'd you turn them off?"
"I thought... you did." Kenji crawled out from behind the crates on hands and knees, looked warily at the targets, and pushed himself to his feet. His chest rose and fell with each deep breath, and sweat dampened his black hair.
"Nope. Let me guess." Laser frowned at Mari from across the hold.
"I believed that Kenji wished a break." Mari hadn't realized Laser might be upset.
"My network is secured."
"With a simple encryption. I can set you up something more difficult for outsiders to hack into."
"Or you can keep your nosy astroshaman self off it."
"Bonita," Viggo said in mild censure, "you do not object when Casmir hacks into your network."
"That's because I know him."
"I believe a double standard is in effect," Viggo said.
"Yeah," Laser said. "A double standard of knowing."
"I appreciate your intervention, Mari." Kenji had caught his breath enough to say it without gasping, and he managed a wave for her.
She smiled back at him.
"That's because you were on the deck in the fetal position being pummeled by DEW-Tek bolts," Laser said.
"That's precisely the reason, yes."
"Uh huh. Go rest and talk to your robot." Laser pointed at Mari. "Your turn, kid. Do you know what to do with a pistol, or have you spent your whole life plugged into computers? And strangers' networks?"
Mari blinked. "I cannot accompany Kenji, Tigress, and Qin to the meeting. Since I am obviously astroshaman, Zhor would immediately suspect treachery."
"He suspects that anyway, I'm sure, but I just want to know if you're an asset or a liability in a fight. Ships get boarded, you know."
"That is a valid point." Mari rose to her feet.
It would not take long to demonstrate that she was capable with a firearm, thanks to targeting software that integrated with her ocular implants and could also, with her permission, control her body's movements. Since astroshamans were not infrequently targeted by humans with malevolent intent, they also practiced self-defense with and without weapons. Not as much as Qin and Tigress, certainly, but enough to remain sufficiently fit and agile, so they were not injured when they allowed their chips to guide them.
"Good luck." Kenji handed her the pistol as he passed her on the way over to talk to Kay. "I'd suggest that you take that remote from her, but I guess you don't need it."
"I do not. Thank you."
"Are you going to cheat by reprogramming them?" Laser asked. "Because if they all lie down in a row on the deck at your feet, I'm going to start shooting you myself."
"No, it is advisable for me to practice and allow you to see that I should not be a liability."
"All right. Good." Laser clicked her remote, and the three spheres rose into the air again.
As the targets whirred to life, zipping in and out of view around the crates and streaking across near the ceiling, Mari let her software take over and guide her movements. The shooting was rhythmic and somewhat meditative, so she also returned to researching the space elevator station.
Only when the targets started firing back did the need to dodge, jump, and run make it difficult to multitask. Also, it was quite tiring. She soon found that the optimal way to handle the training was to shoot the targets before they fired at her, so she concentrated on doing that. That allowed her to simply stand in the hold with a wall at her back and move her upper body and arms.
She was aware of Kenji talking to Kay about how robots who struggled with ladders probably shouldn't come along to meetings that could turn into battles, while inviting suggestions on how he might gain the upper hand when facing off against Zhor. After a while, they fell silent. Watching Mari, she realized. All three of them were. That made her feel self-conscious, and she was glad that her chips and software were incapable of poor performance due to nervousness caused by fear of spectator judgment.
Even though she was able to perfect her system and didn't need to run and duck, she still found herself starting to breathe heavily and sweat after twenty minutes. She was debating turning off the targets via the network, but Laser clicked the remote first.
"Well, shit," she said.
Mari lowered her pistol, confused by the response. She believed she had performed adequately.
"Maybe we'll just send you over there by yourself," Laser added.
Oh. She had performed adequately. That was a relief.
"That was amazing," Kenji said, staring at her, what seemed like genuine reverence in his voice.
For some reason, Mari blushed.
"You're like an android." Laser's tone was less reverent, and Mari suspected it held the implication that she was a freak. A computer.
She grimaced and wiped her brow.
"A sweaty android," Laser added.
"Internal fans, heat sinks, and liquid immersion cooling keep androids from overheating, so they have no need to sweat. I am human."
"I guess."
"Don't pay attention to her." Kenji came over and patted Mari on the shoulder. "I don't know if you've noticed, but she's surly and grumpy as hell."
"I did notice," Mari said quietly.
"Well, at least you two are observant," Laser said. "Maybe that will keep snipers from taking you out. Viggo, see if Qin and Tigress want to come down and join me. I'm going to get some shooting practice in too, assuming Mari didn't overheat the hover targets with all that."
"They should have fans and heat sinks too," Mari offered.
"Good to know." Laser headed into the armory to get more targets.
"It is difficult to find acceptance among normal humans," Mari said.
"You shoot a few of her enemies, and I bet she'll warm up to you." Kenji smiled at her, then seemed to realize he still had a hand on her shoulder. He drew it back and stepped away. "I know I'd walk into battle with you at my back."
He was still smiling, so she wasn't positive that he wasn't joking. Even if he meant it, she reminded herself that she shouldn't lower her guard and let herself appreciate any praise coming from him. It was still possible that he was being nice as part of a ruse and that he would, if she let him, capture her to drag back to her family.
She wished that weren't a possibility. So few normal humans were accepting of her people—of her—that it would be nice to count him as one.
"And I'm starting to feel less bad about not having been able to capture you," he added. "The Kingdom would be pretty dumb not to give you asylum if that's what you want. Nobody would dare break into the laboratory where you're working."
Laser returned to the cargo hold with more weapons and more targets. Clangs on the ladder rungs announced Qin and Tigress coming down. Kenji took another step away from Mari and clasped his hands behind his back.
She didn't know how to interpret that. Did it mean he hadn't intended to get close or touch her? That it had been a mistake?
"I'm not any more capable than an android," Mari said quietly. "And I was easily captured by Minister Dabrowski's crusher."
"I think everyone is easily captured by those crushers. That's not a failing."
"I'm glad you think so."
Even if he didn't want to be close, he was being pleasant. It was nice.
"What's going on?" Qin asked, walking in with Tigress.
"Flirting." Laser waved at Mari and Kenji.
The women looked at them, and for some reason, Mari's cheeks flushed again.
"Are you sure?" Tigress asked. "They're stiff, awkward, five feet apart, and not even looking at each other."
"That's how they do it," Laser said. "They're shy."
Mari shook her head, and Kenji rolled his eyes.
Laser smirked and waved for Qin and Tigress to join her for target practice.
Kenji roamed the bottom level of the freighter, eyeing crates and poking into tool chests, seeking inspiration for his upcoming meeting with Zhor. He'd seen six fighters in the captain's navigation cabin; that probably meant the man would bring twelve or eighteen. If Kenji didn't come up with a way to gain an advantage, he wouldn't walk off that station alive.
But as he'd told Laser, he couldn't come out of the airlock riding a tank—even if he found one lurking in a corner of her cargo hold—or Zhor would know Kenji meant to deceive him straight away. Zhor wouldn't bring the terraforming device if he suspected betrayal, and if it remained locked away on his ship, Kenji would never be able to get it. It was a foregone conclusion that Laser's old freighter couldn't win in a firefight against a sleek new ship with a slydar hull and who knew how many weapons.
"Are you certain there is nothing I can do to be of assistance?" Kay was trailing him around, avoiding being smashed in the cargo hold. The target practice had turned into hand-to-hand combat between Tigress and Qin again.
"I don't think so, buddy, but thanks. You can stay on the ship and assist Mari with whatever hacking she has planned."
After seeing her shoot, Kenji was half tempted to suggest Mari come to the meeting with them. If she wore the helmet on her galaxy suit, their enemies might not be able to tell she was an astroshaman. But she could probably do more from the safety of the ship. Even if her chips let her do a bunch of things at once, Kenji had to assume that being shot at would make it hard to focus on infiltrating enemy networks.
"I am programmed for tutoring, not hacking," Kay said. "You should know this since you selected my operating system."
"You've never felt the urge to teach students how to slip seamlessly into secured databases?"
"My specialties are Old Earth history, mathematics, and string instruments."
"String instruments?" Kenji paused in front of a display in the wall of the compact engineering room. "Like musical instruments?"
"Indeed. I do not have lungs or lips, so wind instruments are difficult, but I am adept with lutes, harps, and zithers."
"Zithers? I had no idea. All this time, I could have made money by having you perform on Zamek's street corners." Kenji tapped the display. "Viggo? Are you able to hear me? If the captain recorded my message with Zhor, I'd like to watch the replay, please."
"Certainly," Viggo said. "And have no fear. Bonita is recording everything you do."
"I'll assume it's because I'm handsome and sexy, and she doesn't want to forget a moment of my passage, not because she's suspicious about my intentions."
"That is your prerogative, though I don't believe those are the adjectives she's used to describe you."
"Does she actually like anyone? Besides Qin and Tigress? And her knight boyfriend?" Kenji hadn't missed that Laser was giving Mari as hard a time as she was him, and her only crime was being an astroshaman.
Admittedly, that was enough for most people in the Kingdom. As it had been for him. He still regretted that he'd assumed the worst of her. His comment that he would gladly go into battle with her at his back had surprised him when it came out, but he decided it hadn't been inaccurate. Not only could she shoot like a targeting computer, but she'd been dead calm and completely unflustered as the hover targets fired back. If her mechanical bits kept her from panicking in scary situations, he was envious.
"A select few people," Viggo said. "She has been betrayed many times in her life and does not easily give trust to strangers."
"I get that."
The recording played, and Kenji gripped his chin as he watched and listened for something he could exploit, either with Zhor, his people, or the ship in the background. Thumps came from the nearby cargo hold as Qin and Tigress threw each other around.
Laser had done some target practice of her own—he'd been almost as impressed by her speed and accuracy as Mari's—before handing the area over to her girls, as she called them. Kenji was glad he had a couple of strong allies to go in with, but he feared Zhor's fighters with their canine attributes would be at least as fast and strong as Qin and Tigress. Kenji needed something else, something Zhor wouldn't see coming.
On this third time through the video, he noticed one of the guard's pointed canine ears rotating, presumably at some noise elsewhere in their ship. Kenji paused the playback, held a finger up to Kay, and stepped into the cargo hold again.
Mari, who'd resumed sitting on the deck by the wall, looked over at him. Laser was cleaning combat armor that presumably belonged to her—Qin and Tigress were wearing theirs. Kenji couldn't imagine that a seventy-year-old woman would go into battle with them, but she had mentioned wanting to be ready if her freighter was boarded.
"Qin? Tigress?" Kenji asked when they broke apart. "I have a quick question."
Tigress draped an elbow on Qin's shoulder and looked at him like she would say something libidinous—probably a demonstration of how she handled flirting—but Qin slapped a hand over her mouth.
"What is it, Kenji?" she asked.
"Is your hearing enhanced? Like much more sensitive than a normal human's?"
They both nodded.
"Hearing, eyesight, and scent," Qin said.
"Would a loud noise hurt your ears?"
"Yes. Crowds, loud music, and sirens are all things that I don't care for. Why do you ask?"
"Maybe it's goofy, but I noticed the dog ears of Zhor's people and thought... if I took some kind of whistle to blow, and it was loud enough, maybe it would make them falter a little if we have to fight them."
"It would make us falter too," Tigress pointed out.
Qin grimaced.
"Maybe we could give you cotton balls ahead of time," Kenji said.
"Very high tech and sophisticated. I do have ear plugs." Laser tilted her thumb toward engineering. "The thrusters whine like a cranky baby when Viggo is in need of a tune-up."
"Really, Bonita," Viggo said with impressive indignity.
"You know it's true. Look, kid. I don't think a dog whistle is going to stop your enemies in their tracks."
"Wait." Qin held up a hand. "I don't know about a whistle, especially since we should go onto the station with full armor and our helmets up, but we are sensitive to extremely loud noises. It can be genuinely painful, and I would find it difficult to fight in such circumstances. Perhaps some kind of sound generator?"
"With a few tools and some basic materials, I could help make something like that." Mari rose to her feet.
"Could it be small enough that it wouldn't draw attention?" Kenji asked.
"Easily. Captain, may I check your parts cabinet?"
"Take whatever you need," Laser said. "Just promise me that if it works, you'll record footage of Zhor's puppies rolling around on the floor and grabbing their ears."
"I gladly will," Kenji said.
"We better find those ear plugs," Tigress muttered to Qin.
"Thanks for the help," Kenji said as Mari joined him in engineering. "Let me know if I can get you anything."
"Just my terraformer."
"That's the plan."
"I know. Thanks."
|
Asylum - Lindsay Buroker.txt
| 18 |
Mari gazed out the porthole in the freighter's lounge as she tried to find sign of Zhor's ship on the route she'd earlier determined it was on. Thanks to what was likely a slydar hull, no scanners in the system could see it. When Zhor had been speaking to Kenji, she'd been able to locate his vessel through its comm signal, and she'd attempted to subtly mark it with a virtual tracker, but it had failed to stick. That was strange, since she'd done such things before, and she'd thought she had successfully done so again. It was possible Zhor, or his ship's computer, had found it and erased it. She had the uneasy suspicion that Zhor not only sold astroshaman technology but might have incorporated some of it into his ship.
A part of her was tempted to contact her people and ask if they cared one way or another if Zhor was captured. If they did, and if she assisted with the arrest, perhaps her mother would be more inclined to let her stay out here. Maybe Mari could help her people in ways that went beyond laboratory research and engineering, and they would appreciate her for it.
That was wishful thinking. Her mother and the other astroshaman leaders cared far more about their plans to leave for another system than petty thieves.
"Focus on one problem at a time," she murmured, though that was always hard, since she had the computing capacity to dwell on numerous problems simultaneously. A blessing and a curse. "First, we get the terraformer back."
She'd spent a couple of hours helping Kenji make a compact sound generator and hoped that would assist with their mission. Qin and Tigress had let them test it on them once and only once. They'd promised it was effective and had threatened dismemberment if Kenji pressed the button again.
It had hurt Mari's ears, as well, so she did not doubt that it would irritate their enemies. Whether it would be enough to keep them from firing, she didn't know. At the least, it could prove an opportune distraction. They'd designed it to hang on Kenji's belt and look like little more than a key fob.
She marveled a bit that Kenji genuinely seemed prepared to go out and confront Zhor and his people over Mari's device. Even though she knew that a pardon hung in the balance for him, she wouldn't have been surprised if he'd chosen not to risk his life over this. After all, the terraformer didn't mean anything to him.
It was possible that he intended to disappear on the station and leave Mari to deal with this with only Laser's crew for assistance, but if that were his plan, would he have bothered coming up with the sound generator?
For his sake, as well as hers, Mari hoped they made this work. She worried not only about the possibility of death but also what would happen if she and Kenji survived but failed, if they lost the terraformer and also the money the Kingdom had invested into this mission. She wouldn't receive asylum, and he might end up back in jail.
She thought of her Human List and how many items were left on it. Maybe she should have spent less time seeking the terraformer and put more effort into checking off items. By the time she returned to Odin, her mother might have learned where she was and be in the capital, waiting to drag her back.
The hatch opened, and Kenji stepped in.
"Hi," he said, waving at her.
"Hi." She remembered Laser's comments about flirting and smiled, even though it was silly.
He couldn't know what she was thinking about, but he smiled back. "What are you up to? Hacking networks?"
She thought about bringing up her concerns, but she didn't want to worry him.
"Trying unsuccessfully to locate Zhor's ship," she said, "and going over the items on my Human List."
"You mentioned that before. What's a Human List?"
"A list of items that I have wished for several years to experience. As I mentioned, I have led a secluded life, and many of the things that normal humans take for granted, I have not experienced. I have only read about them in books."
"Like cinnamon and chocolate?"
"Yes. Sweets were something I was eager to try. They did not disappoint."
"Astroshamans aren't allowed to have sweets?"
"My mother has not wanted me or my siblings to be influenced by the temptations of the biological body, as she calls them."
"So no potato chips, bacon, or ice cream, either?"
"In our ships and bases, we usually grow strains of algae and fungi that contain all the nutrients necessary for the human body and brain to thrive and interact optimally with our cybernetic upgrades. They are flavored and formed into various bars, patties, and loaves for variety."
"No wonder you left your people."
Mari wasn't sure if it was a joke, but she smiled in case it was. "They are not entirely unappealing, but I did wish to try other foods. I also wished to have a less rigid and structured life, at least for a time. I suspect that my mother will retrieve me eventually, even if you speak the truth and no longer plan to capture me, and then I'll have to go back."
Something flashed in his dark eyes—guilt? Maybe she shouldn't have mentioned his previous attempts to capture her. They had been getting along well on the voyage thus far.
"Well, you should try things now then. What's on your list that you haven't gotten to try yet? Maybe we can raid Laser's cupboards." He glanced toward the kitchen side of the lounge.
"I have not yet consumed alcohol. I also have not leaped from tall heights with artificial wings so that I can experience adrenaline and exhilaration and the sense of soaring like a bird."
"There probably won't be any hang-gliding on this mission." Kenji headed for the cabinets, probably to look for alcohol rather than artificial wings.
"I have also not experienced kissing or sex."
He tripped, though the deck was flat and should not have prompted such an action.
"You haven't had sex?" He gaped at her for a moment before recovering.
"Is that more typical an activity than hang-gliding?"
"I suppose it depends on the person. I just assumed—well, I guess you talked about test tubes and artificial wombs, so maybe it's not that shocking that your people don't have sex."
"We have no biological need to engage in coitus for procreation, but I find the notion of recreational sex fascinating."
"Yeah. That's what it is. Fascinating." Were Kenji's cheeks a touch pinker than usual? With his darker skin tone, it was difficult to tell.
"It is believed that all mammals descended from Old Earth stock have the physiological capacity for orgasm, but not all engage in mating activities outside of the breeding season."
His cheeks were definitely pink. Perhaps she had brought up a taboo subject. According to her reading, some human cultures were more comfortable speaking about sex than others. The Kingdom, as she recalled, was a bit stuffy and repressed.
Kenji took a long moment to investigate the contents of the kitchen cabinets before clearing his throat and speaking again. "Here we are. I think I'm only up to helping you with one item on your list, but hopefully, it'll live up to expectations."
Even before he pulled out two bottles of liquid, one amber and one a richer brown, Mari assumed he did not mean sex. Though it did make her ponder again whether she was physically appealing enough to attract a human mate. Or would her visible implants cause a response of repulsion from all unaltered men? She'd read about establishments where one could purchase sexual encounters but found the idea of such intimacy with a stranger unnerving. It would be better to engage in sex with someone who considered her cute. Perhaps not, however, cute but weird.
"Looks like Laser's options are tequila and Stellar Comfort." Kenji opened the bottle of darker liquid, sniffed it, and wrinkled his nose. "This is a traditional spacers' drink. As the label says, it tastes like stardust, moon regolith, and bad decisions."
"That doesn't sound that appealing."
"I agree. We'll try the tequila. But we better mix it with something if you don't want to get very drunk very quickly. I can imagine Laser taking shots, but she's not your typical lady."
"I am also not a typical lady. Should I consume shots?" Mari ran a quick search to make sure shots were what she thought they were and also to check the ingredients of tequila. Fermented cactus hearts? That seemed an odd base ingredient. Why would humans find fungi and algae strange when they drank liquids made from cactus?
"Probably not. We're meeting Zhor tomorrow. I assume you're still planning to stay on the ship for that, but you may not want to be smashed in case there's trouble."
"That's correct. I do not wish to be a liability to Laser or anyone else."
"Me either." Kenji pulled out a couple of tumblers, found lime fizzop in the refrigerator, and proceeded to mix alcohol with the carbonated beverage. "Under no circumstances would I want to be hung over when meeting someone who thinks nothing of calling Qin and Tigress kitties."
"I will remain on the freighter and attempt to hack into his ship's network, mark it so the Kingdom Fleet can find it, and ideally sabotage Zhor's systems so that he and his forces are distracted during a crucial time."
"I like that idea. Do you think you can do it?"
"Certainly." Even though Mari was struggling to find the thief ship now, she trusted she would be able to gain access once they were docked at the same asteroid. "I have also downloaded everything about the station. It is all automated, with robots unloading any cargo that arrives and sending it down to the planet where other robots set it up. It is likely I can get on the station's network and take over some of the automation and further cause distractions for Zhor's people."
"Good."
Mari shifted from her pod to one of the chairs around the lounge's dining table. "This may matter little for your meeting, but I've learned that Zhor, and likely his bodyguards, were made in a lab in Sayona Station in System Cerberus for the Miners' Union Prince Hawkstar some thirty-five years ago. Zhor served the prince for a time, then stole a ship, and escaped to live life as a free person."
"So the prince raised him to be a good little minion and kick his enemies' asses, but then he ran away?" Kenji's mouth twisted as he brought over the drinks. "That sounds familiar."
"Do you refer to your origins? Or mine?"
"That's my story, except insert my father for the prince. And my genes are just a normal mix of his and my mother's, but he did engage in some gene editing during a time when that was illegal in the Kingdom." He handed her one of the tumblers and sat across from her at the table. "It's always great to know you were birthed—or created—to further your parents' ambitions."
"Yes." As she eyed the drink, it occurred to her that he could have put a tranquilizer in it, with the plan of taking her gear and locking her up until they got back to Odin.
But she'd consumed that latte he'd given her and suffered no ill effects. And Kenji should want her help for this mission. As unlikely as it might be, he seemed committed to it.
She studied him, not noticing fidgeting, sweating, tension in his face, or any other signs of being nervous. He'd been more flustered by the orgasm discussion. Now he sat comfortably, as if they were simply friends having a drink together.
Her heart ached as she realized how badly she wanted that. Friends, drinking, normal human experiences.
"Your parents also made you to be a good little minion and kick enemy asses?" Kenji sipped from his tumbler, not pointing at hers or doing anything to suggest he cared one way or another if she took a drink.
She decided she could trust him, at least until their mission was over. Maybe... she could even trust him after that.
"I believe the father I do not remember may have wished for children for the usual reasons, but he was killed, and my mother, who took in my siblings and me, did indeed raise us to be good little minions. Ass-kicking was not required, though we learned rudimentary self-defense skills, but we were required to study engineering and science in order to create that which our people will need when we one day settle a new system."
"So the unintentionally deadly terraforming device was your mother's idea?"
"She chose my field of study when I was young." Mari couldn't lie and say she'd been forced to make that specific device—it had simply been the logical way to create what her people desired—but would she have become an agricultural engineer if she'd been free to choose her own path? She didn't know. When she'd been little, she'd enjoyed music and the arts and had dreamed of being able to create beautiful things for a living. But the astroshamans, while not opposed to aesthetically pleasing cultural creations, had little use for frivolity and would not encourage careers in such fields.
"Huh." Kenji grunted. "So, we're all kind of the same. You, me, and this Zhor guy."
Mari sniffed her beverage, the sweet lime soda a far more dominant scent than the fermented cactus liquid, and sipped from it. "Will that make you hesitate to shoot Zhor if it's required?"
"No." Kenji drank again from his tumbler.
It took a moment for her taste buds to register the harsher bite of what had to be the alcohol.
"I do regret that I tried to shoot you," Kenji said after a few moments. He gave her a sad lopsided smile.
"Because you do not believe I deserve to be dragged back against my will to my people? Or because you are imbibing an alcoholic beverage, and it is altering your usual neurochemical state?"
"I haven't had enough to have altered anything yet," he said. "But I figured out a while ago that you don't deserve to be dragged anywhere."
"How long a while ago?"
"When you were asking the policeman for a drink of his latte."
"You still attempted to apprehend me after that."
"I know. I'm not that smart of a guy." There was the sad half-smile again.
"Perhaps you should consider an implant with extra computing power."
He stared at her, then threw back his head and laughed.
It startled her, as she hadn't meant the comment as a joke, but she decided the laugh was nice. It was the first time he'd done it around her.
He wiped a tear from the corner of his eye. "I'll keep that suggestion in mind."
After a few more sips, Mari asked, "How much of this beverage do we need to consume before we experience mild euphoria, relaxation, decreased social inhibition, and joy?"
"Probably not much for you, especially if you never drink. As for the rest, I usually get mellow and melancholy."
"Increased verbosity is another side effect." Mari took a longer drink, the cool fizzy bubbles from the soda tickling the roof of her mouth.
"So I've heard."
"You are already speaking to me more than you have in the past." She took another sip.
"That's not because of the alcohol. That's because I've been—like I said—regretting blaming you for things that it doesn't sound like you had anything to do with—or any choice in even if you did."
"If you're speaking of the invasion, those who spearheaded and eventually took control of that mission did not survive. The rest of us are not without blame, but it is unlikely that any astroshamans who are hiding out on Odin will bother your people. I know that I may never be able to walk openly in your cities without being arrested and shunned, but..." Mari lifted a shoulder. Was she feeling melancholy? If the alcohol had that effect on her, it would be disappointing. She had looked forward to joy and euphoria.
"You're probably right," Kenji said. "Sorry about that. Another system might feel less irritated with astroshamans right now."
"Perhaps, but traveling from System Lion would mean leaving my family behind. While I have wanted to leave them and experiment, I am not certain I wish to irrevocably cut ties with them and move to another system. I have never lived on my own, and even though I am reasonably intelligent and capable of researching how to do most things via the network, I am intimidated by the idea of existing in solitude. That is what I envision happening, since my people have traditionally been ostracized. It is why those of like minds originally banded together and formed the astroshamans."
"Enforced solitude is unappealing." Kenji finished his drink. "That's why I built Kay."
Half of Mari's drink remained, and she was debating if she could feel effects of inebriation. Perhaps she was slightly more mellow? Could that be construed as euphoria? "Robots can be good company."
"Yes."
"I forgot to mention it earlier, but when I examined your unit, I was impressed."
"My... unit?" Kenji glanced down at his lap.
"The K-45 robot."
"Oh, of course." His cheeks grew pink again. What had he thought she meant? Perhaps he was feeling inebriated.
"Not at Minister Dabrowski's upgrades, though those were impeccable, but at the fact that you created your Kay from what appeared to be scrap parts. I assume you do not have a foundation in mechanical engineering?" She raised her eyebrows.
"No. My father wasn't interested in giving me that kind of education. Knowing how to fight and fly were what he considered important, but I worked as a mechanic and taught myself things."
"It was good work."
"Thanks." He shrugged and looked down at the table, as if the praise made him uncomfortable.
That was not her intent.
"I'm not sure I can remember anyone complimenting me," he said, dryness in his tone. And... bitterness? "Not since my mother died." He lowered his voice. "I miss her sometimes."
"I regret that I lost my father before I got to know him," she said. "I think I would have liked him."
"More than your mother?"
"I shouldn't admit that, but from what I've read about him... yes."
"Your mother sounds like a dick."
"A dick?"
"Yeah, it's like a unit." He winked and took his empty tumbler to the sink and sanitized it. "I think you're a good person, Mari. I'm glad I didn't succeed in either of my attempts to capture you."
He sounded sincere. Maybe she truly could trust him, even beyond the mission. If so, that was heartening, because she wouldn't need to worry about betrayal. They would just need to survive the mission itself. She hoped that was possible. If Kenji died because he'd been helping recover her terraformer, she would deeply regret that.
"I'm sorry you had to come on my retrieval mission." Mari lowered her gaze to the table as he returned. "It's my fault. I mentioned to Minister Dabrowski that you might be able to describe the thief's ship since you got a better look at it in the Arctic. I had no idea that would end with the government compelling you to travel to another planet and risk your life arranging a meeting with a thief and a murderer."
"Given that I was already in jail at the time, and that's the only reason I was offered a chance to get out, I think I have to thank you rather than blame you."
"I do not wish you to die because of me."
"Let's both do our best to live then." Instead of sitting in his chair, Kenji knelt on the deck beside hers and gazed at her. "How's the alcohol? Do you feel relaxed and euphoric yet?" His brows rose, and he smiled faintly. "Joyful?"
A strange urge to touch his face came over her, but she resisted it, doubting he would appreciate physical contact from her. From cute but weird.
"I feel a little warm and flushed. From what I've read, this may be due to the buildup of acetaldehyde as my body attempts to metabolize the alcohol. It's possible I have an aldehyde dehydrogenase 2 deficiency."
"Probably." His smile grew less faint, and his eyes crinkled at the corners. "See if this helps."
He leaned in and placed his mouth on her mouth. A kiss.
It startled her, and it took her a moment to remember that a response was required, at least if she wished to show sexual interest in him. Did she? She'd stopped thinking of him as an enemy, but was he a suitable romantic partner? That might not be what he wanted. Perhaps he was only helping her with her list.
As her mind whirred, debating the wisdom of responding to his kiss in a positive way, her body made the decision for her, and she found her lips mirroring what his did, exploring the sensation of touching him and being touched by him.
He drew back, making her wonder if that had been the correct response. He looked a little surprised, then recovered, and smiled again before patting her on the shoulder and standing up.
"Goodnight, Mari."
As he turned toward the hatch, she asked, "Kenji?"
"Yes?" He sounded wary.
She had done the wrong thing. She assumed his swift withdrawal indicated he was not interested in pursuing further physical intimacy. "Why did you kiss me?"
"It was on your list, wasn't it?"
Ah. That had been all it was.
"Yes," she said.
"There you go. You help me build a dog-ear-attacking sound generator, and I help you with your list." His smile was fleeting, and he hurried out of the lounge without looking back.
That was unfortunate. She had enjoyed the kiss, though her body was now even more flushed. Maybe the alcoholic experiment had not been wise. She clearly had an aldehyde dehydrogenase 2 deficiency.
|
Asylum - Lindsay Buroker.txt
| 19 |
The space elevator was a fancy name for a thick cable that rose up from Sif's anchor station on its rocky red surface to a base carved into a huge asteroid that acted as a counterweight at the top. Sif didn't have as much gravity as Odin, but it still required a great deal of fuel burn for ships taking off from its surface, so most that came to deliver equipment and raw materials for the terraforming project used the elevator to save energy.
Kenji had never been to Sif or the asteroid base and watched curiously from the hatchway into navigation as Laser guided the freighter closer. They would have to fly through a huge cave-like entrance to reach the station inside, including its docks, manufacturing facility, and the tunnels where Zhor supposedly would show off what the terraforming device could do. Kenji hoped they could make the exchange before that happened.
He slid into the empty copilot's pod beside Laser, hoping she wouldn't mind. From what he'd seen, Qin and Tigress were more likely to be sparring or exercising in the cargo hold than hanging out up here, and Mari never presumed to enter without an invitation.
Kenji hadn't seen her since the night before and couldn't decide if he was disappointed or relieved. Somehow, he'd gone from regretting treating her unfairly to feeling kinship to her to finding her Human List amusing to kissing her. That had not been his plan when he'd walked into the lounge. It hadn't even been his plan when he'd gotten up to wash out his tumbler.
But she'd looked miserable sitting there, apologizing to him for getting him stuck on this mission, and he'd wanted to let her know it wasn't her fault and to make her feel better. Why he'd thought he should do that with a kiss, he didn't know. Other than that her list had put it in his mind. He wasn't even attracted to her. At least, he hadn't thought he was, not with the weird chips and implants, but there was nothing unappealing about the rest of her body, and one could probably get used to the cybernetic stuff.
Not that he wanted to get used to it. He was looking to escape the Kingdom, not pick up a girlfriend. Especially not a girlfriend from a whacky cult that looked down their cybernetic noses at normal humans.
Of course, she didn't do that. She seemed more curious than judgmental about normal humans. There had even been wistfulness and longing on her face when she'd spoken of her list. And vulnerability. He hadn't expected that from the woman who'd knocked him on his ass not once but twice. He also hadn't expected her to kiss him back like a normal woman. Why, he didn't know—it wasn't like she was an android—but what he'd intended as something of a pity kiss had turned out to be far more... intriguing than he would have imagined.
But it had been a mistake. He hoped his impulsive move hadn't led her to expect more. He already had Tigress leering at him; he didn't need anyone else undressing him with her eyes.
"I'm not reading any ships inside," Laser said from her pod, oblivious to his thoughts. The tip of the navigation arm touched her temple as she piloted the freighter closer to the asteroid.
The yawning entrance appeared even larger now, wide enough for a fleet of ships to fly through together. It was dark inside, a contrast to the stark sunlight brightening the top of the asteroid and glinting off banks of solar panels. Sif orbited not much farther out than Odin, so days out here were almost as bright as back home.
"Not even any automated ones belonging to the station?" Kenji shifted from musings about kisses to mulling over the coming confrontation.
He didn't have another two hundred and twenty-five thousand Union dollars, but Laser had dug him up a case that looked like it could hold thousands in physical currency. The plan was to make Zhor believe it did, at least long enough to get close. At which point, Kenji, Qin, and Tigress would have to fight. Against at least seven men with enhancements. Maybe more. It would be foolish to assume Zhor had shown his entire hand during that comm call.
But Kenji's team hadn't shown all of its cards either. They had Mari. He didn't doubt that she could remotely take over some of the station's automation to distract the thieves, and maybe even their ship.
"There are ships at the anchor point on the planet's surface," Laser said, "but not up here. Looks like nobody is expecting a cargo today."
"Zhor's ship may already be inside. Hidden."
"That's what I'm thinking. Wish I could get one of those fancy new slydar detectors, but they're only for Kingdom Fleet ships."
"Had I known you desired such a device, Bonita," Viggo said, "I would have asked Casmir to install one."
"His people just started manufacturing them, and they're all going to their military ships. Trust me, I asked."
"You should have had me ask. I am, after all, closer to Casmir than you are."
"Is that so?"
"Certainly. I've shown him appreciation since he first came aboard, whereas you were short with him."
"He likes my shortness. It's endearing." Laser looked over at Kenji. "Right, kid?"
"I'm charmed."
"I thought so. So, what's the plan? All I'm supposed to do is give you a ride and lend you the use of my combat forces." Laser waved vaguely toward the cargo hold to indicate Qin and Tigress. "But I'm partial to my combat forces, and I want to make sure they survive this. You walking in there with nothing but hope and a pretend case of money doesn't inspire my faith in your success."
"Don't forget my sound generator."
"Right, the dog whistle is sure to turn the tide." She eyed the fob clipped to his belt.
"It might," he said, though he admitted it looked more like something one would use to open a garage door.
Still, they'd tested it, and it put out an ear-splitting wallop. He also intended to wear ear plugs for the incursion.
"The plan is to go out and face them while Mari diddles with their ship and whatever computers are on the station that can cause distractions." Kenji expected Laser to scoff at the idea of computer diddling as a plan, but she leaned back thoughtfully in her pod.
"Tell her to take over the station's robots instead of just the computers," Laser said. "That's what Casmir would do. Robots that can beat up enemies."
"I don't know if there are robots." Kenji smiled, wishing Kay were up here with them, for he would have commentary on robots beating up enemies. But Kay was struggling to climb up and down the old freighter's ladders. The lounge and the crew cabins were on the middle level of the ship, so he'd opted to stay there today.
"You better hope there are," Laser said. "Robots are deadlier than computers. Even if they don't have weapons, they can stomp on your foot, and if they're heavy, that hurts. A lot."
Mari stepped into the hatchway, raising her eyebrows as she heard the last couple of sentences.
"Captain Laser has suggestions for your infiltration of the station's network," Kenji told her, his gaze snagging on her lips, his mind flashing back to their kiss.
Hell. He turned away. His wayward mind had better knock that off.
"I've gained access to the station network already." Mari's face was hard to read, and she didn't hold his gaze for long or comment on the kiss.
The freighter flew deeper into the unlit interior of the cave, and the flat gray wall of the station with six airlock docks came into view ahead. Their running lights played across them and the uneven rock of the rest of the hollowed-out interior. Here and there, more caves—or were those the tunnels Zhor had mentioned?—opened up to the sides.
"I will look for robots," Mari added.
"Heavy robots," Laser said.
"Yes, Captain," Mari said politely.
Laser navigated toward one of the docks; they were all open. As Viggo had said, there didn't appear to be any other vessels there. They were getting close enough now that they should have been able to see even a slydar-hulled ship.
Kenji found it odd that the thieves hadn't arrived first to set up the meeting spot to their liking, with Zhor placing his combat troops where they would have the advantage.
A proximity alarm went off on the navigation panel.
"I was afraid of that." Laser peered at her scanner display.
"We are now detecting another ship docked here," Viggo said.
"No kidding."
As the freighter glided toward one of the docks, that other ship came into view on the display, seeming to materialize out of the shadows. It was the same black-winged ship that Kenji had seen in the Arctic Islands.
"It is not training weapons on us," Viggo said, "or otherwise making aggressive moves."
"It's hard to be aggressive when you're attached to a station via an airlock tube," Laser said.
"I presume its copious weapons would work fine even in such circumstances."
"True."
"What about people on the station?" Kenji wanted to know how many of Zhor's bodyguards were waiting for them. "If they're already set up and waiting for us, your scanners should be able to see them, right?"
"It is difficult to detect people in combat armor," Viggo said, "since most of it is designed to give off no heat or energy signature."
"Meaning there could be an army waiting for us." Kenji grimaced.
"An army in combat armor, yes."
"Better hope our astroshaman is really good at diddling things." Laser eyed Mari.
Mari didn't respond or even seem to notice. She was gazing toward the ceiling, probably so busy with her network probing that she didn't hear.
"I have faith in her abilities," Kenji said.
He hadn't thought she'd been paying attention, but that earned him a quick smile. Good. Even if he'd made a mistake the night before, he didn't want her irked or disappointed in him. Although, as he considered her profile, he realized that he believed she would do her best to keep him alive and protect him even if she was irked with him. Lucky for him, she didn't seem to have a vengeful nature. He hoped she believed that he truly had no interest in trying to capture her for that bounty anymore and that he would also do his best to protect her on this mission.
As the freighter eased closer to the docking spot, the chip in Kenji's glasses alerted him to a local network, that of the station, but it was secured, so he couldn't access anything. If the thieves' ship had a network of its own, he couldn't detect it. He would trust that Mari and her more sophisticated hardware would find a way in.
The comm dinged.
"I think that's for you, kid." Laser waved for Mari to get out of sight.
She crouched low, her head below the console again.
When Kenji answered, the hooded Zhor appeared on the display in the same dim navigation cabin as last time. His army might be waiting inside, but he wasn't. Maybe he was the kind of leader who sent his people in to do the fighting while he remained in his cushy captain's chair.
"I'm ready for the demonstration and handoff when you are, Chisaka," Zhor said without preamble. "Don't forget to bring the money."
"I won't," Kenji said.
"Meet us at Experiment Tunnel Number Three in twenty minutes." Zhor smiled, showing off his rows of sharp teeth, and closed the comm without waiting for a response.
"Still smelling like a trap to me," Laser said.
"What does a trap smell like?" Viggo asked.
"What do you care? You haven't got a nose anymore."
"I'm mildly curious," Mari said, still crouching.
"Guns, burning hair, and despair," Laser said.
"Unappealing," Viggo said.
"You got that right. You do what you need to do inside to get the gizmo, kid." Laser pointed at Kenji. "I'll be here with the engine on, but we're not a match for them, so if their ship starts firing at us, we're going to be in trouble."
Yes. He could see railguns, cannons, and were those sun destroyers? And that was only on the side of the ship that was visible to them.
"More than trouble," Viggo said. "Should we get in a firefight with them, they will obliterate us in seconds."
"I will attempt to disable their weapons remotely," Mari said.
Laser eyed her. "I'm not sure I've even seen Casmir do that."
Mari shrugged.
Kenji wished she'd proclaimed with confidence that it would be a simple matter. He had faith in her taking over the network of an automated space station with nobody home; hacking into the weapons system of an advanced enemy ship was another matter.
Qin and Tigress clomped into navigation in their full combat armor, including magnetic boots that kept them firmly affixed to the deck. Now that the freighter had entered Sif's orbit, weightlessness acted upon everything in the cabin, and Laser's gray braid floated behind her head. Qin and Tigress had rifles strapped to their backs, carried space-rated grenades in bandoliers, and Qin also cradled a Brockinger anti-tank gun lovingly in her arms.
"We're ready to protect you, Kenji," Qin said.
"Here's your pretend money case." Tigress handed him a black box with metal hinges and decorative metal trim. It had an electronic lock pad.
"Thank you." Kenji tapped the button to order his pod to release him, and Mari stepped back to make room for him, but she bumped into Tigress's armored chest. Kenji reached out a hand to steady her. "Uhm, Captain Laser? Can I borrow one of the pistols in your armory?"
She'd suggested he take weapons, but he didn't want to assume, and be accused of theft, especially since Viggo had bluntly said Laser was reporting back to Dabrowski or Military Intelligence or whomever on him. Kenji wished he could ask to borrow a full suit of combat armor too, but such gear was expensive, and it was unlikely Laser had extras. He already wore a galaxy suit he'd borrowed from her. At least the material was sturdy and would offer some protection in a firefight.
"Yes, of course. Help my girls if you can." Laser waved toward the hatch.
"I will, Captain."
Mari slid into Kenji's pod after he exited it. "The station's network is simple, as I believed it would be. I am working on getting into the ship's systems now." She tilted her head. "Interesting."
Kenji had been trailing Qin and Tigress out, but he paused in the hatchway to listen.
"They do not have a slydar hull," Mari said. "They are using astroshaman cloaking technology, which relies upon a generator and energy manipulation. It is not a paint application."
Kenji almost snorted at the idea of slydar simply being paint, as he'd seen the cost of outfitting ships with the special hull plating that fooled the eye as well as most scanner technology.
"I take it that's why they were able to sneak off Odin, even past their slydar detector?" Laser asked.
"Yes, and they have other technology from my people incorporated into their ship. I've thus far found it difficult to get into their network. I wasn't even able to verify its existence until a moment ago."
Kenji hesitated. "Meaning no diddling?"
"Not necessarily," Mari said, "but it could be more difficult than I anticipated."
Kenji blew out a slow breath, eyeing the other ship uneasily. Qin and Tigress had disappeared into the ladder well that led down to the cargo hold and the airlock hatch, and he had to follow, but this new revelation increased his unease. If Mari couldn't do anything to their ship and couldn't even the odds—or, ideally, tilt the odds in their favor—this could go very badly very quickly. Even if Zhor didn't mean to betray them, Kenji meant to betray him. As soon as the thief found out he didn't have the rest of the money for the device, this would turn into a firefight.
"I'll find a way to take that ship out of the equation." Mari looked back at him and must have interpreted his daunted expression correctly. She gave him a reassuring smile—or was that a determined smile? "Just because they have astroshaman technology doesn't mean they have an astroshaman."
"Yeah," Laser said. "I hear they're hard to pick up at seedy space bars."
"Unless you wander in with a bag of chocolates in hand," Kenji murmured.
The determined smile turned into more of a grin. "I cannot speak for the rest of my people, but that would indeed work to pick me up."
She said the words as if she was unfamiliar with the term, and Kenji found himself grinning too.
"I was wasting my time with a stunner," he said. "I should have dangled some Cosmos Crunchers at you when we first met."
"If those have chocolate, caramel, cinnamon, nougat, or nibs, it is possible you might have managed to kidnap me right then."
"Then we never could have come on this adventure together."
"How horrible that would have been." Laser made a shooing motion. "Get your ass over to that station before Zhor notices you're not showing up for his date and gets cranky."
"I suppose Cosmos Crunchers wouldn't work on him," Kenji said.
"Try a raw steak. And kid?" Laser looked back at him.
"Yes?"
"Don't screw this up."
Kenji's first thought was to give a snarky retort, but something in her eyes made him believe it was a sincere warning and that she maybe even cared. Because of the danger to her freighter? She'd probably only come along as a favor to a friend, not believing she'd be in any real trouble, but with the thief ship and all its weapons looming nearby, she had to be concerned. Possibly more concerned because this relied so much on him.
"I won't," he said seriously.
He nodded to Laser, nodded to Mari, and headed for the ladder.
Thank you, Kenji, Mari messaged him as he descended. I appreciate you taking this risk to help me.
He almost replied that he was only here for his pardon, but he realized that wasn't true, not anymore.
|
Asylum - Lindsay Buroker.txt
| 20 |
Mari sat in the copilot's pod, splitting her attention between locating resources on the station's network that she could take over and gaining access to the computer system on Zhor's ship. Not only was the ship's network well secured, but she had learned that a sentient intelligence controlled it, something similar to Viggo, but the astroshaman version. It blocked her every time she thought she'd found a way to burrow in. It was like playing chess with a master.
She clenched her jaw, irritated that this Zhor had been stealing from her people for a long time and was using her own technology against her. It might even go beyond theft. Some of the hardware and software now installed on his ship wouldn't have been easily acquired. He might have killed more than the Kingdom professor for it.
"I suppose some overly alert comm officer on that ship," Laser said, "would notice if we sent a message to the Kingdom Fleet and asked for help."
"When we're this close to the enemy craft, that is particularly likely," Viggo said.
"The Kingdom Fleet knows where we are," Mari said. "I told Minister Dabrowski our destination earlier, as soon as Zhor stated the meeting place. He said he would relay it to the knights that are stationed on Kingdom ships in the area. Some of them are waiting to help us, but they didn't want to spring their trap prematurely and scare off the thieves, so they've been keeping their distance."
"In the area?" Laser eyed her scanners. "I don't see any of their big warships closer than... eight hours away."
"Is that not in the area?"
"Not close enough to help when these guys could pummel us into space dust in seconds."
"I'm attempting to make sure they can't do that," Mari said.
"Is it working?"
"We'll see."
"I'm not reassured. Viggo, are you reassured?"
"I trust our astroshaman ally can navigate enemy networks at least as effectively as Casmir," Viggo said.
"I guess Viggo is reassured," Laser said.
"I'll try not to disappoint him." Mari took another stab at bypassing the other ship's security measures. The station's network was fully under her control now, but she needed to ensure Zhor couldn't fire upon their freighter.
Laser glanced at a display. "Our team is about to exit our airlock and head onto the station. The hatch leading into the arrival area is locked, so they're going to have to force it. I assume Zhor doesn't have a key and is doing the same thing right now. We're still not detecting any sign of people on the station."
"We can barely detect that there's a ship docked next to us, breathing its exhaust fumes all over my hull," Viggo pointed out. "I do detest astroshaman technology."
Mari smiled bleakly. She detested it when it was in the hands of people other than her own.
A message came in on her chip from Odin. Minister Dabrowski.
Greetings, Mari. Our stalwart knights asked me to check in on you, see if your team has acquired the terraforming device yet, and ask if you're ready for them to swoop in to pulverize Zhor's ship into stardust. I suspect not, since Captain Laser just sent me a message complaining about all the armament on said ship and pointing out that the Stellar Dragon, er, the Espada Ancha doesn't have shielding sufficient to defend against it. She attached close-up imagery of that armament, including some state-of-the-art astroshaman weapons that we weren't anticipating. I admit when I asked her to help out with this, I wasn't expecting a thief's ship to have more than a modest amount of firepower. Thieves aren't traditionally known for picking fights.
I was also not expecting it to have so much technology stolen from my people, Mari replied. So far, I'm having difficulty hacking into the ship's network and gaining access to its computer systems. I'd hoped to be able to nullify its weapons. I haven't given up hope of doing so yet, but it is proving challenging. As for the terraformer, we don't have it yet. The team is about to board the station and meet with Zhor.
There was a pause before Dabrowski's answer came in, reminding her that he was back on Odin. He was on Odin, and the Kingdom ships with the knights were eight hours away. When they'd been coming up with this plan, she'd imagined help being closer.
Mari bit her lip, tempted to ask him to give the order to send the Kingdom ships in immediately, but Zhor had to be aware of them. He would have someone at a scanner station keeping an eye on the space around the station, and if several warships abruptly headed this way at top speed...
Keep working on it, came Dabrowski's reply. If anyone can deal with astroshaman technology, it's you, right?
She was tempted to reply that she was an agronomist, not a computer-hacking specialist, but that wasn't entirely true. She had the knowledge and experience to do this. And she would do it. That is correct. I will find a way to deal with the ship, but please be prepared to send in the knights.
Excellent. They're ready. Just give the word.
As they'd been conversing, Mari had been inventorying what the station had that she could use now that she controlled its computer system. She noticed internal security cameras. If she could grab the feeds and display them in here, she and Laser could keep an eye on their team's progress—and they might be able to see what their freighter's scanners couldn't. Armored enemies lying in wait inside.
"May I take over your forward display?" Mari asked.
"Have at it," Laser said. "The view of fifty weapons pointing at us isn't that inspiring. Maybe you could replace it with tropical fish in an aquarium."
Mari replaced it with a grid of camera displays. Few lights were on in the station, and she could barely make out the open arrival area that all six airlock docks emptied into. Beyond it, cavernous bay after cavernous bay extended deeper into the asteroid. Most of those bays were filled with manufacturing equipment except for aisles wide enough for automated vehicles to drive down on tracks. Giant robotic arms worked in sync, building and wiring frames for solar panels for use on the planet below.
Beyond the bays, a corridor led to smaller laboratories and supply rooms, but none of the cameras showed views of them. Zhor's men might be hiding back there. Aside from the robots, she didn't see a sign of anyone moving in the bays.
"Wait." Mari pointed at huge metal double doors barely visible in the dim lighting. They were one of several sets of them along the walls in the bays. "I bet those are the experiment tunnels."
"Zhor said for our people to meet them at Tunnel Three," Laser said. "Is there a camera that shows what's behind those doors?"
Mari double-checked, but most of the cameras focused on the manufacturing bays and the arrival area. "No."
"What about Zhor's dock? See if there's a camera pointing at it and if his hatch is open."
"I am now detecting a small energy signature somewhere deep in the station," Viggo said as Mari cycled through the video feeds.
"Not a bomb, I hope," Laser grumbled.
"I do not believe so. One moment."
"Here." Mari zoomed in with one of the cameras in the arrival area. "That should be the airlock his ship is attached to."
"The hatch is open." Laser sighed. "I'm messaging Qin to warn them. His people are already inside."
"I have isolated the energy signature and will put it on the forward display." Viggo bumped one of the camera feeds off to show them the readout from his scan.
Mari pressed her lips together as she recognized the energy signature. "That's my terraformer."
Laser's eyebrows flew up. "They've activated it? The part of it that can destroy every living thing all around it?"
"No. That would be a much more significant signature. It's just on, not doing anything." Not yet, Mari amended silently.
The idea that her terraformer, a device designed to help create life where life could not otherwise exist, could be used as a weapon disturbed her greatly. It wasn't as if she hadn't known about the possibility when she'd been building it, but it hadn't concerned her when she'd believed nobody but her own people would have access to it. Her people would never use it as a weapon.
"But it could do something?" Laser asked.
"It could. But Zhor mentioned wanting to demonstrate it, right? It is possible he only intends to show that it could be used for its intended purpose. If his goal is to sell it and be paid for it, then that is all he should want to do."
"What happens when he finds out the kid doesn't have the money for it?" Laser grumbled.
"They will likely have to fight to acquire it and escape, but that was always the plan." Mari nodded to the camera feeds. "And I am prepared to assist them, thus to swing the odds in their favor."
She used the station's network to reach out to the terraformer. Earlier, when it had been off, she hadn't been able to do so or even locate it, but now she ought to be able to give it commands remotely. Assuming Zhor hadn't changed the passcode or figured out another way to lock her out.
"I hope so," Laser said. "I don't think the kid's dog whistle is going to cut it."
Mari wasn't so dismissive—she'd seen Tigress and Qin react to the sound generator by gasping and flinging their hands over their ears—and thought Kenji had come up with a good idea, but she agreed that he would need more help than that.
Fortunately, the robot arms building solar panels weren't the only robots inside. There were also numerous mobile security constructs. She surfed along the network, flicking power switches on.
Laser looked over at a smaller display that still showed the enemy ship—and all of its weaponry. "You figure out how to assist with that yet?"
Mari hesitated. "I'm still working on gaining access to their ship's computer."
"As soon as our team starts a fight with theirs, that ship is going to start blasting us."
"I'll get in," Mari said.
"I hope it's soon enough to matter."
"It will be."
Laser looked darkly at her—or did that expression convey skepticism that she could do what she'd promised?—but didn't speak further.
Mari could gain access to the ship, and she would do it in time to help.
It took plasma cutters to force open the locked hatch leading onto the station, an act of vandalism that made Kenji uneasy. Zhor, he had no doubt, wouldn't mind and was likely doing the same thing over in his airlock, but what if, after all this was done, Military Intelligence sent Kenji a bill for any damage his team did to the station during their mission?
"We're in," Qin said, her voice muted to Kenji's ears.
All three of them had put in ear plugs for this. They could still hear each other over their helmet comms, but hopefully, the noise from the sound generator wouldn't be as debilitating for them as for their enemies.
Qin traded the plasma cutters for her big gun and pushed open the hatch.
Kenji let her and Tigress go first, then stepped out of the airlock tube that attached their freighter to the station. Since they wore combat armor and had more weapons, letting them lead made sense, even if it felt cowardly. He'd grabbed a DEW-Tek pistol and a stunner from the armory, but he had to carry the money case and look like a businessman prepared to make a trade, not a supersoldier about to lay waste to the enemy.
Few lights were on in the station as they crept out, their helmets up and oxygen tanks secured. Viggo had detected a breathable atmosphere over here, no doubt for the sake of the human visitors who regularly brought cargo, but it didn't hurt to be safe. There was no gravity to speak of, so they had to step carefully, relying on the magnetic soles of their boots to keep them from floating off and getting stuck without anything within reach to grab.
As they walked into the spacious arrival area, high ceilings disappearing into shadow above, Kenji eyed the airlock where Zhor's ship was docked. The hatch was open. Interestingly, it didn't appear that it had been forced open. Maybe Zhor had an astroshaman lock-picking device.
"This room is all clear," Tigress said quietly.
"We've got rats in the station though." Qin pointed her Brockinger at the open hatch.
"I like rats." Tigress patted her rifle.
The women led the way into an attached bay filled with automated manufacturing equipment, robotic arms taller than Kenji assembling solar panels. He activated the night vision in his helmet so he could more effectively peer down the narrow aisles between the rows of equipment. There were a lot of places for people to hide. Tigress and Qin also looked left and right—and up—as they continued forward.
They reached a row of unmoving security robots on treads, each with two articulating arms with graspers and two arms that ended in cannons. They had boxy heads with the vague semblances of faces, power indicators glowing a soft red and reminding Kenji of eyes.
"The station's security forces," Qin said.
"I've fought robots like that before." Tigress pointed her weapons at them. "I'm surprised we haven't triggered them yet."
The robotic heads swiveled to track them as they passed. That made Kenji uneasy until a message came in from Mari.
I have control of the security robots. I will have them assist you if there is a fight. We are monitoring your progress and looking for the thieves with the station's cameras. If I spot them, I will try to warn you ahead of time.
Thank you.
"Mari says she's controlling those robots and that they'll help us if there's a fight," Kenji said.
"Just like Casmir," Qin said.
"What?" Tigress asked, not having been there for the robot-take-over discussion in navigation.
"By the end of our travels, he'd gotten good at hacking into enemy networks. And he was always good at taking over people's robots and making them his own. It's probably why the astroshamans wanted him."
Kenji blinked at the new information. "Wanted him... dead? Or wanted him for themselves?"
"High Shaman Moonrazor attempted to recruit him." Qin kept scanning their surroundings intently as she spoke. "He was in the middle of helping Tenebris Rache infiltrate her base at the time, so it might not have been the most sincere offer, but I heard she made it again later."
Kenji had a hard time imagining the affable—and extremely human—professor signing up for the cult, even if he enjoyed building and interacting with robots.
"I'm glad you're working with Mari," Qin said softly, glancing at Kenji. "And have been talking to her on the trip."
Not just talking, he thought, but he doubted Qin knew about the kiss.
"I was wary of her at first," Qin added, "because she's an astroshaman, and a lot of astroshamans have tried to kill me and my friends, but... I think she's more like us than them. And she seems lonely. I know how that feels. It's hard being different. I was fortunate to reunite with my sisters. Mari's siblings don't sound that great."
"Yeah." Kenji hadn't realized Qin had spoken to Mari that much during the trip. It made him wish he'd spent more time in the lounge with all of them. Especially since he agreed with Qin that Mari was different. And worth talking to. "They hired me to capture her."
"Oh." Qin looked over at him. "She didn't mention that."
He wouldn't have blamed Mari if she had. It seemed like the kind of thing that might come up during a girl chat. You know that guy riding along with us? He's a dick who's been trying to collect my bounty for the last week...
"I hope you're not planning to capture her anymore," Qin said.
"No."
Tigress was eyeing another manufacturing area, then turned abruptly, pointing her rifle toward shadows up ahead. Kenji hadn't seen any movement but tensed, his finger tight on the trigger of his pistol.
The outline of the first of several sets of double doors had come into view. They looked like they were made from solid metal and were tall enough that massive vehicles could drive through them.
"Checking something." Tigress prowled farther ahead of them. "For a second, I thought I caught something on my helmet's scanners."
Have you seen anything on the cameras yet? Kenji messaged Mari.
Not yet, she answered promptly, but they don't show what's behind those doors. Also, you should know that Viggo detected the energy signature of my terraforming device. It appears to be ahead of you and to your left.
That was the direction Tigress was heading.
Thanks. Kenji's palms were damp inside his gloves, his nerves kicking into overdrive as the moment he would meet Zhor, or at least his people, grew closer. He was glad Mari was watching over them and would find a way to help.
As he and Qin advanced together, trailing a dozen yards behind Tigress, they passed the first set of closed doors. The words Experiment Tunnel Number One were printed in large letters above them. More sets of doors were visible ahead, all on the left side of the linked bays they were walking through. The larger right side of the bays was reserved for manufacturing equipment.
Tigress paused at the second set of doors but only for a moment before continuing on.
"I think I detected movement at the ones up there." She pointed her rifle toward what had to be Tunnel Number Three, though Kenji couldn't yet read the lettering. What he could see was that, unlike the other doors, these were open.
"That's supposed to be our meeting place," Kenji whispered.
He and Qin quickened their pace as much as they could. Jogging in zero-g with nothing but magnetic soles to keep them on the floor was difficult.
Tigress crept up to the open doors and leaned around the corner, pointing her rifle inside as she examined a lightless room or—if the labels were to be believed—a tunnel.
"Your kitty is leering at us," came a gruff voice from inside. Zhor.
"He's in there with those six warriors," Tigress said quietly. "They're armed, and they're looking at me like I'm lunch, but I can handle them. A few of them anyway. I'll leave some for Qin."
"Generous," Kenji murmured.
"I enjoy a rousing battle," Qin said.
Kenji wouldn't mind skipping the battle, but he doubted that was an option. He glanced back the way they'd come.
We might need those robots soon, he messaged Mari.
This time, she didn't answer right away. Hopefully, she was only distracted for a moment and not by something as ominous as the enemy ship attacking their freighter.
"Do be a good boy and bring the money for the exchange," Zhor called.
"He's holding a metal sphere," Tigress added. "Is that what you're expecting? Or is it a bomb?"
"It should be the terraforming device." Kenji leaned past Tigress to peer inside.
The spacious tunnel went back farther than he could see, with no lights inside helping with visibility, but it looked like these doors might be the only way out. That made sense if the area was for experiments. It would be designed to be sealed off so whatever was unleashed in there couldn't escape.
As promised, Zhor stood inside, about twenty feet back from the doors, with his six fighters. He held up the sphere.
Kenji hadn't yet seen the terraforming device in person, but it matched the picture that had been on the Nexus site, as well as what Mari had described.
And Zhor had come with the exact number of guards who'd been with him when they made contact. Was it possible he didn't mean to betray Kenji?
It didn't matter, since the plan had always been for Kenji to betray him, but he would have preferred it if the thief were the one to go back on the deal first. Even though Zhor was wanted by numerous governments, and might be a murderer, Kenji had first encountered him doing exactly what Kenji had been trying to do—scavenging goods to make ends meet. That made it hard for him to condemn the man.
"Let's see the box, boy," Zhor said. "Throw it in here, and then I'll toss the device to you."
"I don't trust this guy," Tigress murmured.
"Nor do I," Qin said.
The warriors were shifting and flexing in their armor, eyes gleaming with eagerness while Zhor stood quietly among them. They were all armed with guns, grenades, smoke bombs, and other projectiles Kenji couldn't name on their bandoliers. It was probably only in his imagination that he could hear them growling and slavering behind their faceplates.
As Kenji lifted the case to show it to Zhor, he eyed the hinges on the doors, wondering if they could be operated manually. Maybe as soon as they did the trade, he could lock Zhor's people inside, and his team could retreat. How strange that Zhor had chosen this spot. Maybe it wasn't the dead end that it appeared.
"I'm tossing it in now." Kenji drew his arm back to propel the case inside.
"Excellent." Zhor's tone turned wry. "Your father would be so pleased."
Kenji had been about to let go, but he halted, his suspicions roused. "You know him?"
"We've crossed paths."
If Kenji hadn't truly been his father's son, he would have worried more, but even if Zhor had looked him up, all he should have found was the truth. Still, something about his tone made Kenji hesitate longer.
"Send in the money, boy," Zhor said coolly and hefted the sphere like a ball he meant to throw.
Reminded that there wasn't anything in the case for him to lose, Kenji pushed it inside. It floated through the air until it reached the men and one of Zhor's warriors lifted a hand to stop it.
Kenji was surprised when Zhor threw the terraformer before checking the contents of the case. It was a poor throw, and it sailed too high for Kenji to reach.
Qin crouched, as if she might spring up to catch it, but that would have meant releasing her anti-tank gun. She and Tigress let the sphere sail over their heads in favor of keeping their weapons trained on the men.
Afraid it would be damaged if it struck a wall or manufacturing equipment, Kenji spun and raced after the sphere as well as he could in zero-g. With the lack of gravity, the sphere didn't arc downward, instead continuing to sail through the bay. It outpaced Kenji, and he realized he couldn't catch up. He would have to hope it could take a hit.
Then he noticed a yellow indicator blinking on its spinning surface. Alarm flashed through him. What did that mean?
Abruptly worried that letting it hit something could be very bad, he redoubled his efforts to catch it. As he passed a manufacturing robot bolted to the floor, he used it to push off from with both feet and dove after the sphere.
Certain Zhor had thrown it over his head on purpose, Kenji hoped the women could protect his back as he flew across the bay, manufacturing equipment speeding by under his belly. He gained on the sphere, but he didn't know if it would be quickly enough, since the far wall was coming up fast. He wished he had jet boots.
As Kenji reached out toward the device, fingers stretching, someone opened fire behind him. Several someones.
Crimson and orange DEW-Tek bolts shot out of the tunnel.
Kenji caught the sphere scant feet before it struck the wall. He pulled it close to his chest, cradling it and twisting so his back hit first. The galaxy suit protected him from injury, but the jarring thud didn't feel good. An instant later, something like a lance slammed into his shoulder. He yelped in pain, almost losing his grip on the sphere. One of the DEW-Tek bolts had found him.
"Get behind the equipment," Qin ordered.
She and Tigress were holding their position and firing back at Zhor's people, using the doors for cover as much as they could. They growled with determination, not giving ground.
"No kidding." Kenji winced and glanced at his shoulder.
Again, the suit had protected him, but smoke wafted from the material, and he would have a grapefruit-sized bruise later.
Still gripping the sphere, he groped for a way to pull himself behind cover. He'd bounced off the wall and couldn't reach it. He patted at his belt for the sound generator but feared he was too far away for it to be as effective as he needed it to be.
While he hung becalmed, more energy bolts ricocheted through the bay, pinging off walls and equipment. To his side, a solar panel blew up, shards flying in dozens of directions. Kenji grunted as several struck him, though they were like the patter of rain against his suit compared to the DEW-Tek bolt.
While twisting and trying to protect himself, he spotted one of the robotic arms working below him, happily affixing silicon wafers to its panel and oblivious to the threats. Kenji hooked it with his boot and pulled himself down to the floor.
The yellow indicator light on the sphere was still flashing. Maybe it was his imagination, but it seemed to be flashing faster now.
Mari, what does this flashing light mean? Kenji messaged, though he still hadn't received a reply to the last message. Any chance you can turn this off remotely?
The firefight stopped, and that worried Kenji almost as much as when it had started. Unable to see Qin and Tigress through all the equipment, he hurried back through the maze of robotic arms and solar panels.
"That was unexpected," Tigress said, her voice puzzled.
Kenji finally made it back to them and found them looking at the doors—the closed doors.
Qin glanced back at him. "They shut themselves inside."
"They never even opened the case," Tigress said. "It was just hanging there while they opened fire on us."
"You mean Zhor doesn't know that we didn't bring him any more money?" Kenji crept closer, confused.
"Uh, is that supposed to be blinking like that?" Qin still had her rifle pointed at the doors, but she was staring at the device.
Kenji still had it in his arms, and it vibrated faintly against his chest.
"It's blinking faster and faster," Tigress said, alarm replacing her puzzlement.
"Like a bomb." Qin looked like she wanted to shoot it.
Zhor's voice sounded from a wall speaker. "Kenji Chisaka, perhaps you should have checked with your father before pretending to make a purchase on his behalf. Oh, and next time you intend to pull one over on an experienced businessman, don't come to the meeting in a ship known to be allied with the Kingdom government."
Horror thundered into Kenji as he realized exactly how he'd been set up.
"Shit!" Kenji gawked at the blinking indicator—it was flashing faster. All he could think was that it was counting down to destruction.
Or life, as the thing was meant to give. Life through destruction.
Mari, he messaged again. I really need you! How do I turn this thing off?
"Ah, but you won't get a next time, I'm afraid," Zhor continued on, supreme boredom lacing his voice. "If I read the specs correctly, that is now going to terraform the entire station—with you and your kitties in it."
"The hell it is." Kenji set it down and shouted, "Let's get out of here," to his allies.
He raced toward the arrival area as fast as he could, waving for the women to follow him.
The terraforming device? came Mari's reply. My apologies for the delay. I was deflecting an attack on my personal chips by the enemy ship's sentient computer. And now that sentience is on the station network with me. I will work through this. One moment.
We don't have a moment!
Before Kenji, Tigress, and Qin made it halfway back to the docks, a huge firewall door slammed down between one bay and the next. It landed right in front of them, blocking the route back to the arrival area.
They were trapped in the same part of the station as the sphere.
"Qin, your big gun!" Kenji pointed, having no idea if even an anti-tank weapon would work on the giant firewall door, and worried they didn't have enough time anyway.
Once that device started spitting out whatever technology scrambled molecules, would they be instantly killed? Or would it take hours for everything to unravel? If they hadn't already run through two bays and lost sight of it, he would have ordered her to shoot it.
"Stand back." Qin pointed her weapon at the firewall door.
Tigress grabbed Kenji, pulling him behind the nearest manufacturing equipment. Qin fired, and an explosion ripped through the bay, blinding light flashing. Kenji lifted an arm to shield his eyes as the tinkle of broken glass—broken solar panels—came from all around them.
Someone attempted to arm my terraforming device, Mari's reply scrolled across Kenji's glasses—he almost missed it.
Yeah, we noticed. Zhor did it, and then he threw it at us, and locked his people inside a tunnel. Has it gone off yet? How much time do we have?
"This is a heavy-duty door," Qin called. "It's going to take another round. Stay there."
I have deactivated it, Mari said. Please bring it to me, and—
And what? It won't turn us into dirt? It's safe to pick up?
It is safe. As I said, Zhor has stolen astroshaman technology, but you have an astroshaman.
Words he never in his life would have thought he would find comforting. But he did.
Thank you, he replied.
You are welcome, but be careful. For the moment, the enemy ship's sentience is on the station network with me. It also has access to the cameras. Zhor will soon know—
Another boom sounded, Qin firing again. The wrenching of metal echoed through the bay.
Kenji peered back the way they'd come. The doors to Tunnel Three were still closed, Zhor and his men hiding inside. But they would figure out soon that the sphere had been deactivated. Kenji had to get it now or risk losing it again.
"That should do it." Qin had successfully blown a hole in the door large enough for them to pull themselves through. "I do enjoy brute force now and then."
"Hang on." Kenji ran from his hiding spot and toward the sphere. "I'll be right back."
Something rocked the station, and he almost misstepped and ended up floating helplessly in the air again. Qin hadn't fired again. Who had?
Mari, did something new happen? I'm getting your device.
Distant clangs came from the direction of the docks. Something else was definitely going on.
Mari?
The device was where he'd left it and no longer flashing. Kenji bit his lip, swooped in, and picked it up.
Two more ships have arrived, Mari replied. They were also camouflaged, so we didn't see them until they were on top of us. They are identical to Zhor's ship, and they have us trapped.
Kenji swore and turned to run back toward the others, but the doors of Experiment Tunnel Three flew open. Zhor and all of his troops charged out, firing straight at him.
DEW-Tek bolts slammed into his torso, the galaxy suit not enough to keep pain from pummeling him. Kenji twisted, diving for the manufacturing equipment and reaching for the sound generator even as he tried to keep his attackers from blowing up Mari's device. Why the hell he worried about that right now, he didn't know.
"Need some help!" Kenji cried as solar panels and robotic arms blew into hundreds of pieces under the assault.
He scrambled behind equipment, his body throbbing with agony from at least four places where he'd been hit. With shaking fingers, he found the button on the fob. He pressed it and pointed the end in the direction of his foes. The high-pitched squeal blasted his eardrums even through the plugs, and it was all he could do not to drop it.
Alarmed shouts of rage and pain echoed from the walls, and Zhor's men stopped firing.
Kenji shifted the sound generator to his other hand and tucked Mari's device under his arm so he could draw his pistol. As he leaned out from behind the equipment to fire, a furious armored figure charged straight at him.
The other men were grabbing their helmets and writhing in the air, half having lost their footholds on the floor, but Zhor launched himself at Kenji. Behind his faceplate, his canine features were contorted with pain, but that didn't keep murder from blazing in his eyes.
Kenji fired, holding down a sustained blast as he targeted the seam between his enemy's helmet and torso plate. His aim was true, but his blast only burrowed into the spot for a second before Zhor reached him and tackled him, gauntleted hands scrabbling for the sound generator.
While Zhor was focused on that, Kenji grabbed the man's rifle. He tore it out of Zhor's grip, hurling it toward the ceiling. Unfortunately, Zhor latched onto the sound generator. He yanked it out of Kenji's hand and crushed it in his grip. Zhor roared as it broke, the squeal ending with a plaintive bleat.
Though agony assaulted his entire body, Kenji twisted and kicked out, slamming his boot into Zhor's armored hip. Pain and fear lent him strength, and the blow hurled his foe a dozen feet. Zhor crashed into a solar panel, knocking it from its mount.
Panting, Kenji fired, again holding down the trigger for a sustained blast. It was his only shot at getting through the armor and hurting the big man.
As Zhor struggled to right himself and find a way to push off toward him again, Kenji kept firing. This time, he aimed for the seam between arm and shoulder, tracking it even as Zhor whirled about, looking for his rifle. Zhor spotted it, but it floated far above them. Kenji's pistol fire bit through his seam, and Zhor yelled in pain, jerking around to hide the vulnerable spot from view. Kenji aimed at another seam.
Crashes and thumps came from the doors by the tunnel. Fearing the rest of Zhor's men would spring on him now that the noise had stopped, Kenji risked glancing in that direction.
But Tigress and Qin had come back to help him. Not only were they engaging the six fighters, but the station's security robots had come with them. They fired at and grabbed the men, trying to force them back into the tunnel.
Kenji was about to send a thank you to Mari, but Zhor got his feet behind him and shoved off one of the robotic arms. Once again, he arrowed toward Kenji with murder in his eyes.
Kenji fired, aiming at his faceplate, but there wasn't time for his blast to melt through. Zhor reached out, resorting to using his hands, but he didn't look like he would have any problem tearing Kenji's head from his neck.
Kenji ducked low and shoved off another piece of equipment to dive out of the way. Zhor lunged for him, but Kenji jerked away, and the gauntleted fingers missed him by inches. Bracing his back against the floor, Kenji kicked upward. He caught Zhor in the crotch—too bad it was as armored as everything else.
As Zhor flew upward, Kenji realized he'd made a mistake. The man's trajectory would take him close enough to his rifle to grab it.
But before he got close, something slammed into Zhor's chest.
"Duck, Kenji!" Qin yelled.
The round from her anti-tank weapon blew with a boom and a flash of light. The shockwave struck Kenji, knocking him back against the floor. He already hurt all over, so it hardly made a difference. Through the smoke, Kenji saw Zhor fly backward across the bay. Relief surged through him. He didn't know if that would kill Zhor, but at least it would take him time to get back into the fight.
Tigress clanked over to grab Kenji. "Come on. The rest of his team is locked inside again, but Laser said there are more ships, and that's going to mean more men.
"Right." Kenji hadn't forgotten.
Realizing he'd lost hold of Mari's device during the skirmish, he whirled and searched for it. If after all this, some inadvertent blow had destroyed it...
No, there it was. He pushed himself into the air and grabbed it.
Tigress caught him by the ankle and pulled him back down. "Your suit looks like hell," she said. "Are you all right?"
Throbbing pain pulsed through his body as Kenji shook his head. "No, but I can run."
He might collapse and die later, but he was determined to get the device back to Mari first.
"Good." Tigress pulled him back into the aisle, where Qin gave him a thumbs-up.
"Let's get out of here," she said.
As their little team maneuvered toward the hole in the firewall door as fast as they could, the station's security robots following on magnetic treads, another clank sounded. Kenji groaned, fearing some new obstacle, but as Qin had been about to crawl through the hole she'd made in the door, it rose back into the ceiling.
I am battling the enemy ship's sentience for control of the station's network, Mari messaged, but I have managed to command the firewall doors to release you. Unfortunately, we're in a bind. Captain Laser says to hurry back, so we can leave, but I fear these other ships might object to our freighter departing.
Kenji, his injuries making it hard to keep up with the others, waved Qin and Tigress to sprint back to the arrival area ahead of him. Just as the airlocks came into sight, the two hatches to either side of the freighter's dock flew open. Men—more of the canine troops—in combat armor rushed out, blocking the escape for Kenji and his team.
"Back, back," Kenji ordered.
He shot twice at Zhor's men, hoping to catch them before they were prepared to fight, but they returned fire promptly. Once again, Kenji dove for cover behind manufacturing equipment. They were outnumbered, so there was little more that he could do. Besides, he doubted his galaxy suit could take any more hits. A warning was flashing on his helmet's heads-up display, letting him know that it had lost integrity. No kidding.
Qin and Tigress swore as they opened fire, but they were also forced to run for cover as crimson blasts pinged off their armor. Even the hardened warrior women knew when they were outmatched.
Kenji opened his mouth to suggest they run back to one of the tunnels so they could fight where they could limit how many enemies came at them at once, but more clangs and a wrenching noise echoed from the other direction.
The doors to Experiment Tunnel Three opened again, and four of Zhor's men walked out. Their armor was dented and blackened, and one had a crack in his faceplate, but that didn't keep them from striding back into the station.
Kenji and his team were surrounded.
|
Asylum - Lindsay Buroker.txt
| 21 |
"La madre que te parió!" Laser swore, lunging to her feet.
Mari didn't know what that meant, but she agreed with the sentiment.
Kenji's team was in trouble, the freighter was now surrounded by three enemy vessels, and it was only a matter of time before they all opened fire. Mari was keeping Zhor's ship busy by fencing with the intelligent computer, but she still hadn't been able to get past it, and she worried the two newcomers would also have astroshaman technology.
She was in the middle of investigating their network defenses when Laser slapped her on the shoulder.
"We have to help them." Laser pointed at the camera feeds on the forward display, several showing the men streaming through the arrival area, firing on Kenji's little team. "Those are my girls over there."
Not waiting for an answer, Laser lunged out of navigation and raced to the ladder. Mari hesitated, thinking she could do more from there, but she ought to be able to watch Laser's back at the same time as she battled virtual enemies.
As she followed Laser, Mari sent a quick message to Minister Dabrowski to let him know Kenji had acquired her terraformer. If only the Kingdom ships weren't so far away. She and the others would have to get out of this mess by themselves.
As she descended toward the hold, Mari also rechecked the station's network. She had been on the verge of finally slipping into the enemy ship's computer when all the backup had arrived, distracting her. She scowled, aware of the intelligence over there spotting her and driving her away from its virtual borders again. For now, she had to focus on the station, on making sure she maintained control of the security robots and directing them to help their people.
When she reached the cargo hold, Laser was already halfway into her combat armor, growling and cursing as she donned the cumbersome gear. She tossed a rifle over to Mari.
Busy maneuvering the robots, and investigating the new ships, Mari almost missed catching it. "I've got ten of the station's robots circling our people and deflecting fire. Give me a second, and I'll get them shooting at their enemies."
"Good. We need a female El Mago right now." Laser headed for the airlock hatch, affixing her helmet as she went.
Mari didn't know what that meant either, but she nodded as she groped for more that she could do. Ah, the firewall doors. If she could lower another one, she might be able to cut the remains of Zhor's original team off from Kenji, Tigress, and Qin. Then they would only have to shoot their way past the newcomers to escape.
Since Kenji had the terraformer, all they had to do was get out of the station and figure out a way to escape the asteroid without being obliterated.
"Come on!" Laser ran through the airlock tube, fast and spry for someone Mari had assumed would be beyond her fighting years. She carried two rifles and a netted bag that held grenades.
With her new rifle in hand, Mari hurried after her. But the firewall door—she needed to drop that. She checked the cameras to make sure there was still time.
Watching the videos on her tiny lenses wasn't ideal, and she had to cycle through the feeds to find Zhor's men. They'd almost caught up with Kenji, Tigress, Qin, and the cluster of robots, all of whom were busy defending themselves, firing at enemies to both sides. There was one firewall door left between her allies and Zhor's team.
Mari flicked a software switch, and the door slammed down, almost squashing one of the dog men. Zhor's people would find a way through eventually, but Kenji's team ought to be able to make progress toward the airlock now that they had a reprieve from behind. And they did. Tigress and Qin led a charge toward the enemies in the arrival area.
Kenji followed more slowly, his gait uneven. Had he been wounded?
Mari commanded the robots to roll along at the team's sides, firing to help clear the way.
"Hah," she whispered as she trailed Laser into the airlock chamber on the station. She felt triumphant at their team's progress.
Laser glanced back at her.
"We're evening the odds," Mari promised, wanting the captain to know she was being useful.
"You keep doing that." Laser had reached the open hatch into the station but paused there.
Shouts echoed throughout the arrival area, and DEW-Tek bolts streaked about, bouncing off the walls. Shrapnel floating all over the place promised some of them had found more vulnerable targets. A robot head tumbled slowly through the air not ten feet from the hatch.
More than a dozen armored men were either in the arrival area or firing from the protection of their airlocks. Tigress, Qin, and Kenji came into view, the security robots helping deflect fire as they advanced, but the team was still more than fifty yards away. Too many people were firing at them, and the women's armor was charred and smoking. The heads and arms of several security robots had been blown off.
Fortunately, the firewall door that Mari had lowered was still intact, keeping Zhor's original team from firing at their backs. But booms and clangs echoed from it, promising they were trying to get through.
Qin fired her anti-tank gun, the round slamming into the armored torso of a man leading a charge toward them. It exploded, smoke clouding the area as he flew backward, crashing into two of his allies. That weapon had the necessary heft to do damage to armor, but how many rounds did Qin have left?
"These are not good odds, kid," Laser muttered.
She didn't run out into the bay, instead dropping to one knee with her rifle pressed into the crook of her shoulder as she took aim from the partial cover of the hatchway. Mari activated her targeting software and leaned out beside Laser. She fired at enemies in the arrival area as she focused the rest of her computing power on finishing her investigation of the two new ships. She hadn't yet detected sentient computers on them. Maybe, unlike Zhor's ship, they didn't have astroshaman technology. That would make them easier to hack.
As she worked on sneaking into their systems, Mari kept firing at enemies and guiding the robots that were helping Kenji's team. She was glad she had enough chips and power for the multitasking, because her allies needed all the assistance they could get.
Laser kept firing as well, trying to drive people out of the way and clear a route for their team to reach them. By using sustained blasts, she burrowed into seams in their enemies' armor. One man yelped, spun, and fired at them.
Laser calmly ducked back into the airlock as crimson bolts bounced off the hatch beside her. Mari was less experienced with firefights and sprang back into the airlock tube with a startled squawk, tripping over her own boots. One of the enemy bolts ricocheted back, missing her faceplate by inches.
"We've got their attention now." Laser leaned out and fired again, then grabbed one of her grenades to throw.
Mari had lost her focus on the robots, but she hurried to regain control. Their team was only twenty-five yards away now. She sent the robots ahead of them, their big cannon arms booming.
One of the robots bumped into one of Zhor's men, knocking his magnetic soles from the floor and sending him tumbling into the air. He could still shoot, but he struggled to control his body or find anything to hang on to.
Thanks for the help, a message came in from Kenji.
You're welcome, Mari distractedly sent back as she directed more robots to knock enemies from their feet. Though she was busy concentrating, she felt a burst of gratitude that Kenji had noticed and appreciated her help.
She managed to take control of the weapons systems on the two new vessels and clenched her fist. That had been much easier than with the other ship.
But she couldn't yet order them to open fire on their leader. Laser's freighter was in the way.
Mari needed to take command of their navigation computers and maneuver them all to one side of the docking area. "One step at a time," she breathed to herself.
The floor quaked as an explosive went off. It wasn't one of Laser's.
We're going to try to make a rush and reach you, Kenji messaged, but— Look out! Some men are coming your way.
Laser swore, threw another grenade, then backed into the airlock tube with Mari. "We might have to retreat into the cargo hold and make a stand there."
Several armored men stormed into view in front of the hatchway, one snatching a floating colleague out of the air and pulling him back down to the floor. They pointed rifles straight into the tube at Laser and Mari, barely noticing that Laser was firing at them, hitting their seams and faceplates with pinpoint accuracy.
Mari ordered several of the robots toward this new group of attackers, hoping to ram them so they couldn't rush into the airlock tube. But the men were too fast. Shots hit Mari and Laser, forcing them farther back.
A bolt struck like a hammer blow to Mari's galaxy suit. It wasn't as painful—or deadly—as it would have been had she only been wearing clothing, but it made her cry out and brought tears to her eyes. She scrambled back, wanting to get out of there.
One man lunged into their airlock tube, swinging his rifle at Laser, who wasn't retreating as quickly. She ducked and tried to ram into him. Her armor gave her extra strength, but he was young, enhanced, and fast. He had the advantage. When he grabbed Laser, and they grappled, her knee buckled. She swore with pain as he forced her down and tried to tear her rifle out of her hands.
Though Mari wanted to keep retreating, she rushed back in, drawing even with the fight. She braced herself on the side of the tube for support and side-kicked Laser's enemy in the hip.
It startled him and knocked him back, his boots coming off the bottom of the tube. Laser yanked her weapon back from him and fired at his faceplate, holding down the trigger. As he struggled to right himself in zero gravity, she kept firing. The sustained blast melted through his faceplate and burned into his skull.
He screamed and tried to whirl away, but it was too late for him. Laser shoved him out of the way and rushed forward to face the next challenge, but Kenji, Qin, and Tigress had reached their airlock and were clearing it of enemies.
As Mari was about to let out an elated cheer, Viggo spoke.
"Bonita," his voice came over their helmet speakers, "we have a problem."
"Another one?" Laser growled, waving their allies into the tube.
"Yes, a large one. More ships have arrived."
"We've got more company!" came Laser's warning over Kenji's helmet comm, and he couldn't stifle a groan.
He had the terraforming device, Qin and Tigress were still with him, and with the help of all those robots, they'd made it to the airlock. He'd started to believe they could actually get away, but now...
"More ships, Viggo says," Laser added. "That bastard must have brought an entire armada. Hurry inside. If there's any way we can get out of here, we'll take it."
Kenji had thought Qin's blast had put Zhor out of commission, if not killed him outright, but maybe he had survived. Maybe he was still back there giving orders to his legions of men.
"You go in first, Kenji," Qin said, standing shoulder to shoulder with Tigress and firing into the arrival area, keeping the remaining troops from getting close. They nudged him back into the airlock.
He hesitated, reluctant to leave them to fight while he ran.
"We'll be right behind you," Tigress said, glancing back.
"Okay." Kenji spun and rushed through the airlock tube, his hip, shoulder, and back pulsing with pain with every step.
Mari and Laser had already disappeared into the cargo hold. He hoped Laser could do something from navigation. He was sure Mari could. She seemed able to help from anywhere. He'd seen her firing at their enemies with the steady mechanical mien of an android even as she controlled a dozen security robots, directing them to fire as well.
When Kenji reached the cargo hold, he found Mari waiting inside, though she wore a distracted I'm-diddling-with-the-enemy's-networks expression, and he knew she wasn't simply standing there. Laser had already climbed up to navigation.
"I've got something for you." Kenji pressed the terraforming device into her hands, making sure she had it before letting go, then turned to check on the others.
"Thank you." Though clearly still distracted, Mari smiled at him.
Something struck the freighter, making the deck quake and her smile drop.
Kenji swore. He'd been afraid of that. The other ships had to be firing on them.
Tigress and Qin charged into the hold. They slammed the exterior and interior airlock hatches shut, and Qin pressed a button to retract the tube.
Qin shook her head. "There's a rip in the tube. The captain won't be happy about that."
"If the entire ship gets blown up," Tigress said, "I doubt the rip is going to bother her overmuch."
"Possibly true."
"Whoever has convinced Zhor's two ally ships to fire at his ship," came Laser's voice over a speaker, "I appreciate that."
Mari smiled tightly.
Before Kenji could ask about the newest arrivals, something else struck the freighter. A jolt almost knocked his boots off the deck. Mari might be helping with the battle, but they weren't out of trouble yet.
Qin and Tigress sprinted past him, hurrying toward the ladder.
"Are we going to have to fight more, Captain?" Qin called up. "Do you think they'll board us?"
Kenji didn't hear the answer, but he wanted to know what was going on, so he hurried after them. When he was halfway up the ladder, Mari laughed, startling him.
He peered down at her.
"The new ships belong to the Kingdom Fleet," Mari said, her voice light with relief. "They're not firing on Laser's freighter but on Zhor's three ships."
A clunk sounded as something else struck the hull.
"Are you sure?" Kenji asked.
"We're being hit with debris from Zhor's ships. I managed to maneuver them all to one side of the docking area, but we're still very close to them."
She'd managed to maneuver them? He would ask about that later.
"A big enough piece could damage us as much as weapons fire." Kenji, wanting to see the scanner display in navigation for himself, continued up the ladder. "How many Fleet ships are there?"
"Three warships." Mari climbed after him. "I believe... Yes, they have slydar hulls. That is a new development and why we didn't realize we had allies so close. When my people battled the Kingdom warships a few months ago, they did not have that technology themselves."
"Times change."
"Indeed."
Kenji and Mari squeezed into navigation behind Tigress. Laser and Qin had already taken the pods, Laser's fingers flying over the controls so they could leave—or at least get out of the way and take less damage as the Kingdom ships fired on the other three vessels.
"One of those is the Osprey," Qin said as the freighter eased away from the dock—and from the battle.
"I saw," Laser said. "Never thought I'd be so glad to see that pompous Captain Ishii. His big butt is making it crowded in here, but I'm going to forgive him, as long as he doesn't misfire and pulverize us."
Railgun and cannon blasts lit up the dark cave outside of the station, slamming into the hulls of the enemy ships. Interestingly, Zhor's two ally ships weren't firing back. Mari's doing? Zhor's ship, with all the advanced weaponry, was launching attacks, but the warships had excellent armor and shields. It didn't take long for the signs of battle to dwindle.
"I am monitoring the comms," Viggo said as the freighter headed for the asteroid's exit. "The warships have disabled Zhor's vessels and are demanding they surrender and prepare to be boarded. The Kingdom intends to take back all of the stolen goods they find and arrest the thieves."
"Good." Mari held her terraformer to her chest, as if she'd recovered a lost baby.
Kenji, who'd been positive the thing would kill him ten minutes earlier, had no desire to touch it ever again. He did touch her, resting a hand on her shoulder. "We would have been scragged without your help. Thanks, again."
She smiled warmly at him and inclined her head.
"We helped a little bit too." Tigress tapped a finger on her armored chest, dents and scorch marks covering it.
"Yes, you did." Kenji nodded at her and Qin. "Thank you too."
"No problem." Tigress thumped him on the shoulder.
Between her strength and her armor's enhancements, it almost sent him smashing against the wall. Thankfully, his galaxy suit offered some protection, but Kenji couldn't keep from gritting his teeth in pain from his earlier wounds. He hoped the freighter's sickbay had some powerful drugs.
"If you don't mind," Tigress added, "I'll take a testimonial from you for our new business."
"From me?" Who would want a testimonial from him?
"Yes. We helped you stay alive in there, right? Once we've satisfied a few clients, we'll have less trouble picking up new work. And we'll be reputable enough to be able to lease a location for our office anywhere in Zamek City." Tigress sniffed. "No need to deal with uptight business owners who don't want superior genetically engineered neighbors."
"Are you hoping to get more work like this?" Kenji looked toward the battered ships on the display and raised his brows; he couldn't imagine anyone voluntarily signing up for gigs like this. It had almost killed all three of them.
"Sure," Tigress said. "It's what we do."
"Challenging work is rewarding," Qin said.
Rewarding, right.
I am glad I'm not a bounty hunter, Mari messaged Kenji directly.
I'm glad that I've retired from the business, he replied.
A wise decision.
I thought so. After all, I failed to capture even one astroshaman woman.
Because you didn't bring the Cosmos Crunchers you spoke of.
That is obvious in hindsight.
As more things are. Mari rested a hand on his shoulder. Do you need help getting to sickbay?
Probably.
Do you want me to bring the tequila?
He managed a lopsided smile for her. Probably.
Mari sat in a pod in the freighter's small sickbay cabin, watching Kenji as he slept on the combination bed and exam table.
He'd taken several hits from DEW-Tek bolts during the battle, and despite Laser's promise that she had skills and expertise as a medic, Mari had been concerned ever since she'd learned how wounded he'd been. Qin and Tigress had also been injured through their armor, but they'd said they had genetic enhancements to ensure rapid healing and hadn't stayed in sickbay longer than it took to grab some painkillers.
Since then, they had been in and out to check on Kenji, but there were some lengthy comm messages going on between Laser and the knights on the warships, so they had mostly been up in navigation. His last visitor had been Kay, who'd stayed for an hour, until Viggo had suggested a robot with a mechanic's skills would be useful in assisting with repairs to the damage the freighter had received in the battle.
Mari was glad they hadn't taken a lot more damage. If the knights and other Kingdom leaders determined that she and Kenji had performed adequately and had done all that had been asked of them, she would consider the mission victorious. She hoped they wouldn't be held accountable for the destruction inside the station.
"I don't think they'll blame us for that," she murmured.
Kenji, his eyes still closed, did not respond.
Laser had injected him with strong painkillers, as well as several sets of nanites programmed to mend his injuries, and he'd been sleeping—or was he unconscious?—for several hours. Mari had brought the bottle of tequila as well as her dwindling bag of candy-coated chocolates to sickbay in case Kenji would like to enjoy either of them. A few days earlier, she hadn't had much interest in sharing the delicious chocolates with anyone, but she would gladly offer them to him now.
They had worked together—and trusted each other. Unfortunately, she had no idea if she would ever see him again once they returned to Odin.
Greetings, Mari, a message from Minister Dabrowski came in. I understand from Captain Ishii, Sir Asger, and Captain Laser that you successfully retrieved your terraformer, that Kenji worked with you all instead of against you, and that a great deal of astroshaman technology is currently being recovered from Zhor's ship.
Mari zeroed in on only one of those statements. You doubted that Kenji would help us?
I personally believed that he would help, but as my colleagues have pointed out numerous times, in addition to his upbringing being less than stellar, we basically coerced him into going on our mission. Even I was holding my breath to see what he would do after we sent the money to him. There's a reason I asked Laser to be the one to fly you out there.
Besides keeping an eye on him?
Because I knew she, Viggo, Qin, and Tigress would be able to thwart Kenji if he tried to take over the ship and sneak off to some nearby station to disappear.
He's an honorable ally. Mari leaned over and rested a hand on Kenji's arm. He would not have done that.
I'm pleased to hear that. Do you need anything else? We'll all have a thorough debriefing when you get back to Odin.
Mari thought about asking about her own status. She had little doubt that this had been a test for her as well as for Kenji. But maybe that was something that wouldn't be determined until the debriefing.
I am curious why you didn't tell us that camouflaged Kingdom warships were so close. We all would have been bolstered if we'd known. And less scared. Mari was fairly certain that even Laser hadn't known.
My apologies for withholding that information, but Captain Ishii insisted. By that point, we suspected Zhor had quite a bit of astroshaman technology, and Military Intelligence worried he might intercept and decrypt any communications going to the freighter.
I don't think he did. But I do wonder... Because she'd been on the station's network at the time, Mari had heard Zhor's words over the speakers. I don't think he ever fell for the ruse. At the least, he knew Kenji wasn't working as his father's representative.
No? One wonders why he came to the meeting then.
Zhor tried hard to kill Kenji.
I'll ask Military Intelligence to do some digging, Dabrowski said. It's possible Kuchikukan Chisaka is holding a grudge against his son for running away—or for some other reason.
You think he might want Kenji dead? That he might be willing to pay an acquaintance to kill him?
If so, we'll find out. And we'll let Kenji know.
Dabrowski said goodbye, and Mari leaned back in her pod. She didn't know what Kenji planned to do in the future, but if his father was gunning for him, he might have a hard time even if he moved to another system.
"How's our patient?" Laser stepped gingerly into sickbay, favoring one leg. She'd also grabbed painkillers earlier. Maybe she should have programmed some nanites for herself.
"He hasn't woken yet."
"Not even for candy and tequila? What a weird kid. You might have to wake him with a kiss."
Mari fumbled her bag of chocolates, and it fell on the deck. "What?"
"Like in Qin's fairy tales. The beautiful princess wakes the handsome prince from the sorceress's evil spell with a kiss. Though I've got to admit, you two aren't exactly prince and princess material." Laser eyed them both dubiously.
"My mother is a high shaman. And I believe Kenji's mother was a noble."
"Sorry, I don't think that would get you into anybody's fairy tales."
"It sounds like they suffer from a paucity of variety."
"That's not a lie." Laser stepped up to the side of the exam table to check on Kenji.
Mari, realizing Laser wasn't truly suggesting that she kiss him, picked up her bag of candy and scooped up several pieces that had fallen out. She debated whether the time spent on the deck would have contaminated them with germs.
"Go ahead and eat those. Viggo's vacuums keep this place better sterilized than a clean room. Has he had them demonstrate the new incineration mode for you yet?" After eyeing the medical scanner display, Laser swatted Kenji on the chest. "Wake up, kid. I've got news."
Mari stood up and would have protested Laser's treatment, but it proved effective. Kenji emitted a faint groan and opened his eyes, blinking blearily at them.
"I think he would have preferred being woken with a kiss," Mari muttered.
"You took too long."
"News?" Kenji mumbled, focusing on them.
"I thought you might like to know that Zhor is alive but that the knights captured him when they went in to mop up the station. He was pretty badly injured, but he was hiding out in some office in the back, hoping he wouldn't be noticed. They've got him in the brig of one of the warships now."
"I hope he ends up in a penal asteroid mine," Kenji said.
"That's a possibility. Or maybe they'll make him clean up the mess his people made here." Laser waved in the direction of the station. "Anyway, our work is done. We're heading back to Odin. I guess there's going to be a big meeting, and the government will figure out what to do with you two."
"Should we be worried?" Kenji asked Mari.
Mari thought of all the things still up in the air, such as whether her mother had found out yet where she was, and could only say, "I don't know."
"I was hoping for something more comforting."
Laser touched her chest. "I thought you did all right. Both of you. Now, give him some tequila." She swatted Kenji again before walking out.
"I think that was a compliment," Kenji said, "though her bedside manner is somewhat lacking."
"I noticed." Mari thought about mentioning the suggestion of a kiss but decided this wouldn't be the appropriate time, and she doubted Kenji wanted to do that again with her anyway. He'd only been helping her check an item off her list. "Chocolate?"
She offered him the ones from the bag, not the deck.
"Thank you." He accepted and nodded to the bottle. "Have you been testing your, ah, what deficiency was it you thought you had?"
"Aldehyde dehydrogenase 2."
"Yeah, that. Maybe we should share a drink together again and see how it goes. Scientists have to replicate their experiments before writing up papers on the outcome, don't they?"
"It's a good idea, yes."
"I thought so."
|
Asylum - Lindsay Buroker.txt
| 22 |
When Captain Laser's freighter came down once again onto the landing pad across from Drachen Castle, it was morning on Odin, and no fewer than twenty uniformed people waited outside.
From the copilot's pod in navigation, Kenji eyed them on the display, trying to tell if they were all Kingdom Guard and Fleet uniforms, or if local policemen were among them. He didn't see Minister Dabrowski, or any of the leaders who'd been at the late-night meeting at the police station, and he worried that didn't bode well.
He and Mari had done all Dabrowski asked, but they'd also been a part of completely trashing a Kingdom space station, and he had no idea if the military would be able to get that twenty-five thousand Union dollars back from Zhor. They'd captured him, but that didn't mean Zhor hadn't already whisked the funds off to who knew where in another system.
Grimacing, Kenji rose slowly from his pod. The nanites had done their job on the return trip, so he couldn't complain about his recovery, but he worried that the queen, or whoever would ultimately determine his fate, had decided he hadn't helped enough and that the mission hadn't been worth it. Or what if the Kingdom government had always intended to use him for this one mission, then dump him back in a jail cell?
He would like to think Dabrowski wouldn't do that, but it wasn't as if the robotics professor owed him anything. Kenji hadn't even been a legitimate student of his.
Kay and Mari were waiting in the cargo hold, prepared to depart. She held her terraforming device and her backpack and had changed from Laser's borrowed galaxy suit back into her regular clothing.
The hatch was already open with the ramp lowered, and some of the uniformed men were visible outside. Kenji was tempted to stay where he was until they came in to drag him out, but Laser had followed him down the ladder. Even though she hadn't insulted him as frequently on the return voyage, Kenji doubted she would offer him a spot among her crew.
"It is good to be back in the full gravity of my home world," Kay proclaimed. "And look at all of those armed men waiting outside to greet the returning victorious heroes."
Kenji arched his eyebrows. "Is that us?"
"I consider myself a victorious hero."
"All you did was hang out in my cabin while we battled the bad guys," Kenji said.
"I assisted the freighter's intelligence with repairs on the voyage home. Victoriously and heroically."
"In that case, maybe those troops are here to pin a medal to your chest."
"A pin would scratch my paneling. A magnet would be more appropriate."
"I'll be sure to put in a request."
Since Mari was already standing in the hatchway, Kenji took a bracing breath and joined her.
"Do you think all of those people are here for us?" Mari sounded a little trepidatious too.
That quiet uncertainty seemed odd coming from the powerful ally who'd saved all of their butts on that station. The memory of her fighting and holding her own against armored combat troops, all while controlling the station's robots and taking over the enemy ships, was... inspiring. If the Kingdom higher-ups weren't idiots, they would give her the asylum she sought. Promptly. In addition, they should put her on the payroll with fat bonuses every month.
Kenji wished he'd been even half as impressive out there. The fact that his father's name had once again been a bane rather than a boon didn't surprise him that much, but it made him wonder if he would ever escape that dreadful legacy.
"I assume they're here for me," Viggo said, "to honor my magnificent presence. And perhaps they'll buff and paint the copious dents and scratches in my hull that I received during this mission."
"Oh, I'm sure. That has to be what they're here for." Laser checked a display, indifferent to the uniformed guards waiting outside. "Your ride is here, kids."
A purple shuttle landed within sight of the ramp.
"That could be Queen Oku herself, Viggo," Laser added. "Do you think she enjoys buffing and painting freighters?"
A human-like sniff issued from Viggo's speakers. "I am able to detect your sarcasm, Bonita."
"Good."
"We'll go face them together," Kenji told Mari.
Before they could start down the ramp, thumps sounded behind them, Qin and Tigress jumping out of the ladder well. They trotted across the hold toward the hatch.
"Are you leaving the ship with us?" Mari asked them curiously.
"No," Qin said. "We just wanted to see you off and wish you luck in dealing with the Kingdom authorities. They can be... difficult, but it's much better than when their old king was in charge."
"Yup. It was good flying with you, even if we didn't get time to have sex." Tigress winked at Kenji.
"We?" Qin rolled her eyes. "We were never interested in that."
"You're so staid, sis."
Qin and Tigress waved and bid them good luck as two Kingdom guards walked up the ramp. They bowed to Laser, then gestured for Kenji and Mari to follow them to the purple shuttle. Kay ambled along after them.
"Sit inside," one man said. "It's just a short hop."
"Are we going to Royal Intelligence Headquarters?" Kenji guessed, glancing at Mari.
"I am not certain where the debriefing is," she said.
They could easily have walked to the headquarters building, but the guard pointed them to seats without comment.
Despite Laser's joke about the queen, nobody royal or more interesting than the castle guard and a pilot waited inside the shuttle. As soon as Kenji and Mari sat, with Kay grasping a hand grip for support, it took off. The pilot flew them over the intervening street, castle wall, and past guard towers to land on a small pad on Drachen Castle's grounds.
"Oh, how wonderful," Kay said. "As a student of history, I've read about Drachen Castle, but I've never been permitted inside. Do you think there will be a tour?"
"Hopefully not of the dungeon," Kenji muttered.
He didn't know if this was better or worse than Royal Intelligence Headquarters. Would they meet Queen Oku? And if so, why?
It had been unnerving enough talking to Minister Dabrowski when the queen had been with him in the background. If Kenji met her in person, he would feel the need to apologize for everything he'd ever done at his father's side, especially since she was probably aware of everything he'd ever done at his father's side. Though she wasn't much older than he, Kenji trusted her chief superintendent of Royal Intelligence had briefed her thoroughly on him.
More guards waited to lead them into the rambling castle, its stone walls originally laid nearly two thousand years earlier, shortly after humans had first colonized Odin. The interior had been remodeled to modern tastes, and amenities like force fields, wall displays, and robotic butlers were apparent as the group strode through several halls and up marble stairs to a large conference room that overlooked the ocean.
A guard who stood outside raised a hand to halt them and ran a scanner over Kenji and Mari.
"You will find that my parts are sublimely assembled and that there is no hidden monitoring equipment within me," Kay informed the guard.
"Uh huh. You'll have to wait outside anyway. This is a top-secret meeting, and you and your memory chip aren't cleared for recording."
Kenji expected Kay to protest.
Instead, he asked, "May I have a tour of the castle while I wait?"
"You can stand next to the door and study that wall over there." The guard pointed across the hallway at a plain stone wall decorated with a couple of bland landscape paintings.
"Is it historically significant?" Kay asked.
"Very."
"Hm."
"Maybe Minister Dabrowski will give you a tour after the meeting," Mari told Kay.
"Oh, yes. He knows how to treat robots well."
The guard rolled his eyes and waved for Kenji and Mari to go inside.
Queen Oku was indeed sitting at the table within, bodyguards lining the wall behind her, as well as two six-and-a-half-foot-tall black crushers. Oh, sure, they were cleared to watch the top-secret meeting.
A guard near the door cleared his throat, and Kenji remembered one was supposed to bow, if not grovel on the floor, before royalty. In the vid dramas, the knights always dropped to a knee with their heads lowered. Kenji opted for a deep bow. Mari paused uncertainly, then emulated him. He was fairly certain women were supposed to curtsy, but Oku smiled and didn't point that out.
General Heim and Chief Superintendent Van Dijk were also present. This time, there weren't any police officers in the room, and Kenji hoped that was promising.
He smiled encouragingly at Mari, but she was looking warily toward a glass door leading to a balcony outside the room. Someone in a brown cloak with the hood pulled up, the wind whipping at its hem, stood at the railing, her back toward them as she gazed at the sea.
Kenji supposed it could have been a man, but the figure wasn't large, and the pointed shoes were feminine.
Mari sighed, her shoulder bumping his as they were directed to seats. "I regret that I didn't get to do all the things on my list," she whispered.
"Oh?" He wondered why she was worried when things seemed to be looking up. "You should have come to my cabin on the freighter last night."
"Did you have a hang-gliding apparatus in the closet?"
He snorted, having forgotten that was also on her list. "Something like that."
Her face grew curious, as if she were piecing together what he'd meant. Kenji decided not to explain further. Besides, it had been a joke. He didn't truly think it would be a good idea for them to sleep together anytime soon. He didn't even know if she'd liked their kiss.
As they sat, Minister Dabrowski walked in, another crusher trailing after him. He wore a suit jacket over a T-shirt, the lapels not quite hiding the cartoon robot underneath, and carried a tool satchel, as if he'd hurried here after instructing students in a university lab. Most of the faces around the table were grave, or at least masked with practiced professionalism, but Dabrowski smiled and waved at Mari and Kenji. He plopped down next to Chief Van Dijk, his tools clattering.
Mari perched uneasily on the edge of her chair, glancing again at the balcony, though the woman hadn't turned around. Kenji sat next to her, feeling the protective urge to stay close.
"Good morning, Kenji and Mari," Queen Oku said. "We thank you for helping us to retrieve the astroshaman technology that had been stolen from Odin—admittedly, after it was stolen from your people." She nodded at Mari, who had rested the terraforming device on the table in front of her.
General Heim eyed it like it was a snake.
Kenji noticed Oku hadn't taken credit for ordering the military to collect astroshaman technology from the wreck; maybe she hadn't been the one to do it. Queen Oku had only been coronated a couple of months earlier.
"You're welcome, Your Majesty," Kenji murmured, though almost everyone was looking at Mari. His thought that he might end up in jail and that she was the jewel that they might put their efforts into claiming came to mind again.
"We are also pleased that you returned to us, Kenji," Oku told him, meeting his eyes. "Some people believed it a certainty." She glanced at Dabrowski. "But there were others who doubted." Her next glances went toward Heim and Van Dijk.
"You can hardly blame us, given his background, Your Majesty," Van Dijk said. "It's not as if he is an innocent boy who only happened to be born to a terrorist; he assisted his father for years. We couldn't be sure he isn't even now his father's servant."
Kenji curled a lip at that.
"Most of us couldn't." Van Dijk gave Dabrowski a puzzled frown. "I'm still not sure how Minister Dabrowski was so certain. The fact that Chisaka had crashed some of his lectures hardly seemed an unassailable endorsement."
"Only good people with a genuine love for learning come to my lectures." Dabrowski winked at Kenji. "And don't forget the DNA."
"Blood is hardly conclusive." Van Dijk lowered her voice and muttered, "We know who shares your DNA."
General Heim's bushy brows drew together, suggesting he didn't know. Kenji didn't know either, but he was far more interested in what in his own DNA had drawn their attention. All it should have proven was that he was his father's son and had been genetically enhanced. Unless his father had ordered the scientists to splice in something odd to give him his faster reflexes. He would snort if he ended up sharing some of Tigress's cat DNA—or Zhor's canine DNA.
That seemed unlikely though. All he had was an edge in a race or a fight with a normal person. He wasn't blatantly superior.
"Tell us about your mother, please, Kenji." Dabrowski extended a hand toward him. "I'm curious. I'm sure you know that you share your parents' genes, but do you know the rest?"
Mari looked curiously at him. Everyone in the room did.
"I... don't, Professor. Er, Minister."
"Casmir," Dabrowski offered. "Your mother was Johanna Wyss, correct? Of the nobility?"
"Yes. She raised me while my father was off doing—" Kenji curled his lip again to let them know he didn't approve, "—his terrorist things, but she died in an auto-flyer accident when I was eight. I... always hoped that was all it was. An accident. Later, I sometimes wondered if he'd arranged it. I remember them fighting about custody over me—by then, he was notorious, and she'd gotten a powerful security system to keep him away, but it didn't work. Once she was gone, he took me. I would have had nowhere else to go anyway."
"Took you and trained you, correct?" Van Dijk asked.
"To be useful to him, yes."
"Johanna Wyss is in your DNA, as is your father," Dabrowski said, "but they're only part of the mix."
"I know he did some enhancements."
"To make you stronger and faster than a normal human, yes. We saw evidence of that."
Kenji nodded. That part he knew, and he couldn't imagine why it would have shaped Dabrowski's opinion of him in any good way.
"But do you know about the pacifist-poet?" Dabrowski smiled.
"The what?"
"Lord Akito Okawa. A copy of his DNA was checked out from the Zamek Royal Seed Bank. You'd be surprised how many frozen bits of interesting living and dead people are in there." Dabrowski quirked his lips, the expression hard to read, and glanced at Oku. "The poet would have been a strange choice for a terrorist looking to raise a supersoldier to help him. I can't know what happened, of course, but your mother was the one to check out the DNA."
"She was a scientist." Kenji knew that much. "The one who mixed me up at my father's behest. I'd thought... Well, I thought I was mostly made from his DNA and that they'd been lovers, but that she was mostly my mother in name, not blood, that I was more of a clone of him with some other stuff added for, ah, improvement."
"Stuff being the scientific term," Oku murmured.
"There's a lot of your mother in you," Dabrowski said. "And quite a bit of Lord Okawa. Some of your father, but more like a quarter than a half."
"That's... not what he believed."
"I imagine it was your mother's little secret. Maybe she didn't want a terrorist for a son."
Her secret or her rebellion? Kenji stared at the table, floored by this revelation about his blood—about him. Was this why he'd never developed the taste for killing and violence and destruction that his father had possessed? That he'd tried so hard to inculcate in his son? Kenji had assumed it had been his mother's influence—her nurturing influence—rather than anything in his DNA. Could tendencies toward violence and aggression truly be all genetic? He didn't know.
Kenji lifted his head, meeting Dabrowski's friendly eyes. "That's why you had faith that I wouldn't take your money and run?"
Did Dabrowski have any idea how tempted he'd been? How much he'd wanted to get out of the Kingdom? And for that matter, how tempted he'd been to turn in Mari in the beginning? He looked at her, distressed to think about what might have happened if he'd succeeded at capturing her either time he'd tried.
"It was part of the equation," Dabrowski said.
"And why he succeeded in talking us into going along with this scheme," Van Dijk said, pointing her thumb at General Heim. "I wanted to send trained agents."
"I wanted to send the Fleet with slydar detectors to guard the gate," Heim grumbled.
"That might not have been sufficient since Zhor's ship had an astroshaman camouflage generator," Dabrowski said.
"At least we now have an astroshaman camouflage generator," Heim said.
Dabrowski glanced at Mari and then out to the balcony, where the cloaked woman was still looking toward the sea instead of paying attention to the meeting. "If the astroshamans let us keep them," he said.
Heim lifted his chin. "They are in no position to take them."
"I wouldn't bet on that," Dabrowski said.
"I sure wouldn't want to cross them," Kenji said, seeing a chance to put in a good word for Mari. "You should have seen Mari fight. While taking over three spaceships and the asteroid station. She flung a herd of manufacturing robots at our enemies."
"You defeated your enemies with robots?" Dabrowski beamed a smile at Mari, then told Oku, "I knew I liked her."
"And now we all see the reason why." Oku's smile was more wry.
"She's really good," Kenji said, aware of Mari blushing beside him, her eyes toward the table. She was too shy and polite to point out her own attributes. Someone had to do it for her. "You better give her asylum and hire her. And give her everything on her list."
"List?" Oku asked.
"That's not necessary," Mari murmured.
"I'm sure you can get hang-gliding lessons worked into a signing bonus," Kenji whispered to her.
"Pending the results of an upcoming private meeting," Oku said, looking at Mari, Dabrowski, and then the woman outside, "we are prepared to offer you work and the asylum you seek, Mari Moonrazor."
Mari lifted hopeful eyes. "Truly?"
"Yes." Oku nodded firmly, then looked to Heim and Van Dijk.
They sighed, and their nods were more grudging, but they did give them.
"We would value you as a scientist working for the crown," Oku said, "but you also seem to have some aptitude for... field work." She looked at Kenji. "If Royal Intelligence doesn't mind—"
Van Dijk groaned. "Your Majesty. Must you put them in my division?"
"Neither are soldiers, so it seems appropriate."
Them? Kenji looked back and forth between Oku and Van Dijk. They weren't including him in whatever this was... were they?
"Can't Dabrowski start a division of his own and find things for them to do?" Van Dijk asked.
Dabrowski blinked and touched his chest. "What kind of division would the Minister of External Affairs have? I'm only cleared to send diplomats around the Twelve Systems, and I don't think diplomacy is what anyone has in mind for these two."
"Please." Van Dijk's glare was exasperated. "You've got your fingers in everything. You shouldn't be involved in any of this other than to talk to her." She waved at the cloaked figure.
"I believe this is what the senate had in mind when they appointed him as my advisor," Oku said dryly, though the look she gave Dabrowski was more fond than exasperated.
"To the delight of all of us over fifty." Van Dijk shook her head.
"And over sixty," Heim said, though he didn't sound exasperated. He'd folded his hands on the table and looked quite pleased. Because Mari—and Kenji?—wasn't being assigned to his division?
"Uhm." Kenji lifted a finger, hoping for clarification about his role.
Oku met his eyes and nodded. "If you're willing, we would like to have you work with Mari as a special agent. We will pardon you for the crimes you committed as a juvenile, and it is possible that at some future date, we would consider having your family name and your mother's lands returned to you."
Kenji opened his mouth, but he was too stunned to speak. The best he'd thought he could hope for was not to be thrown in jail.
For so long, he'd planned to leave the Kingdom, but if he could stay here and work with Mari, did he truly want to flee to another system? Another system where his father might be waiting to hunt him down? He'd chatted with Mari on the way back about that possibility, and it chilled him and made him a lot less interested in venturing out.
"I accept, Your Majesty," Kenji said.
"Excellent." Oku looked to Mari. "And are you willing to work with Kenji?"
Kenji watched her, afraid she might object, given how their relationship had begun. He also worried she might hold that kiss against him. What if she'd considered it unprofessional and had doubts about teaming up with him because of it?
"Kenji is agreeable to work with, and to trade my services for asylum is what I hoped for when I came here. But..." Again, Mari looked to the balcony. "I'm not sure if it'll be permitted."
The woman finally turned around, the wind having knocked her hood down around her shoulders. It revealed short white hair, milky white-blue eyes, and a vague alienness that suggested she was an astroshaman. Was this... Mari's mother? The high shaman who'd forbidden her to leave her people?
Dabrowski stood up and gestured toward the door. "Let's go find out, shall we, Mari?"
Judging by her glum expression, Mari had no wish to speak with her mother or find out anything. Maybe she already knew what the answer would be.
Kenji patted her hand, hoping the gesture reassured her. She only looked sadly at him before walking outside with Dabrowski.
Kenji would have watched the encounter, trying to read lips, but Van Dijk came over to speak with him.
"We'll get you quarters in the high-security building where many of our agents stay," Van Dijk said. "It's more for your safety than because we don't trust you, but I'll admit some of us trust you less than others."
She didn't have to look at Dabrowski. Kenji already knew Dabrowski had been responsible for all of this and was the only reason he wasn't moldering in a jail cell. Kenji hoped he could prove himself worthy of that faith and that Dabrowski never had a reason to regret his decisions.
"You'll be watched these first years of your new career," Van Dijk continued, "but you're not a prisoner. You'll have pay commensurate with your position as a new agent, and there will be mission-completion bonuses."
"Thank you, ma'am." Kenji stood up and bowed to her. He had a feeling they were mostly offering him the job because they thought they could use him to get to his father one day, but he would cross that bridge when he came to it. He hadn't envisioned a future for himself in the Kingdom, but the promise of a regular paycheck, a full belly, and not having to hide his identity and live off the grid any longer was appealing. "Is there any chance my quarters will have a window?"
Her description of a safe, high-security building had him envisioning something similar to a jail cell—or a dungeon.
"I believe the apartments there have three or four," Van Dijk said.
"Oh? That sounds posh."
"I hope it'll suit you." She waved to the door. "Come along. I'll have one of my people get you settled in and issue you gear."
"What about Mari?" Kenji didn't mind the idea of being an agent, since it would be a significant upgrade to his old life, but he really liked the idea of being an agent who teamed up with Mari.
"If things work out, she might get an apartment in the same building."
"And... if things don't work out?" he asked.
Van Dijk hitched a shoulder. "She'll be back living with her people. Maybe you two can be pen pals."
Kenji couldn't manage a smile. She'd wanted asylum from the beginning. It wouldn't be fair if he got it, and she didn't.
Mari took a bracing breath before walking out onto the balcony, the gray sky thick with mist. Seagulls squawked over the waves far below.
She'd known right away who waited for her out here, and was glad that Minister Dabrowski was coming out with her. Though maybe she shouldn't be. Had he been the one to alert her mother to her presence here?
Maybe it had been foolish from the beginning to seek him out. Mari had known they knew each other—after all, Mother's crusher had been a gift, or something thrown into a negotiation, from Dabrowski. Technically, it had been Scholar Sato whom Mari had sought out, but she'd read the novel, and she'd known Sato and Dabrowski were friends. Admittedly, she hadn't known they were roommates and that she wouldn't be able to find one without the other.
Mother turned to face them, and her mouth twisted with familiar wryness, perhaps because they were coming out together. Allies facing a threat.
No, Mother wasn't a threat, neither to the Kingdom nor to Mari. Not physically. Just... emotionally.
"Hello, Mother. I hope you're well and that your projects and research have continued without hitches in my absence."
"Not the terraforming research."
"Will you be needing that soon?" Dabrowski put in with a bright smile. "I trust your current focus is on building a wormhole gate. How's that going? Did you have time to study the ancient one sufficiently before the AI ship came and slurped up all the pieces?"
Mother shifted her gaze to him. "Slurped? I don't believe advanced machine civilizations imbue their physical representatives with the parotid, submandibular, and sublingual salivary glands necessary to produce saliva and slurp."
Mari barely resisted the urge to groan at this precision.
Unfazed, Dabrowski said, "You're right. It was figurative slurping. As I recall, there was grinding as the pieces were dragged across the ice."
"Our studies are progressing," Mother told him. "Some of them."
"Perhaps after a break of a few years, Mari will be ready to return to her portion of them. She requested asylum from us, though I assure you, we wouldn't be so foolish as to attempt to keep you from one of your own people."
Mari winced. It wasn't that she'd expected the Kingdom to go to war to protect her from being kidnapped by her own kind, but she'd hoped... She wasn't sure what. That they were a formidable enough people that her mother wouldn't want to irk them, especially now that they were neighbors.
"But what it sounds like she really wants," Dabrowski continued, "is a sabbatical. A little break to explore the delightful quirks and foibles of humanity at large."
"She wants to eat blood-sugar-spiking foods devoid of nutritional value and have sex with panting young knights excreting pheromones."
Mari rocked back, horrified that Mother was bringing up the Human List with Minister Dabrowski. A crude and derogatory version of it. Mari couldn't even remember sharing that second desire with her mother; her sisters must have tattled on her.
"As many young women do." Dabrowski smiled easily. "I can personally attest to the delight of blood-sugar-spiking foods devoid of nutritional value. I'm less moved by panting knights, but I can see their appeal for others. Isn't it wonderful that Mari is interested in citizens of the Kingdom? That means she'll stay in the area during her sabbatical, and it'll be easy for her to visit you and vice versa. Just imagine if she wanted to have sex with pirates in System Cerberus or mercenaries in System Hind. It would take you weeks to visit each other. And those pirates are dangerous, unscrupulous, and terribly flagitious. You wouldn't want such partners for your daughter, would you?"
"I see what you're doing," Mother said.
"Oh?" Dabrowski raised his eyebrows in innocent inquiry. "Is it working?"
Mari raised her own eyebrows, skeptical but hopeful. She felt that she should be saying more on her own behalf, but was it possible a stranger could accomplish what she hadn't been able to with her mother? No, not a stranger, she supposed. A neutral third party. A diplomat.
"Better than arguments that she's a grown woman and not owned by the astroshamans, even though we raised her, cared for her, and educated her." Mother turned a flat look on Mari, who'd made precisely those arguments. Numerous times.
"Such as all parents do with their children." Dabrowski extended an open palm. "Until the time comes to set them free to choose their own destiny."
"You just want her because she's trying to win her asylum with astroshaman technology—more astroshaman technology—that your people want."
Dabrowski smiled at her. "I would be happy to offer refuge to any person or robot willing to work and provide value to our community, whether they come with technology or not."
"Even the flagitious types?"
"Certainly. I have such an acquaintance right now who is working for the good of the Kingdom and seeking atonement for past wrongs."
"What if I said she wouldn't be permitted to share any existing technology or proprietary astroshaman secrets?" Mother walked up and took the terraformer from Mari's hands, though she was talking to Dabrowski. "While I doubt you would chain her in a laboratory and force her to use her knowledge to make dangerous weapons, you are not your entire government. Your King Jager may be dead now, but he left a bad taste in all of our mouths, and the fact that you still have a monarchy with one of his children in charge doesn't inspire trust and adoration in us."
"I have no objection to that stipulation," Dabrowski said, not commenting on the rest. "Your daughter has many talents and abilities useful in their own right, as she demonstrated by assisting us with our mission." Dabrowski surprised Mari by bowing to her.
"I thought your people were assisting her." Mother held up the terraformer.
Mari was tempted to snatch it back, but if it was what she needed to trade for her freedom...
"We mutually assisted each other," Dabrowski said. "She got her device back, we retrieved others that had been stolen, and we captured numerous thieves who had been plaguing not only our system but others. The Kingdom will likely never have the reach it once did, but we wish to make the Twelve Systems a better place whenever possible. It is not only people who sometimes need to seek atonement for past wrongs."
Mother snorted. "At one point, I thought you might end up in charge of this morass of a government, but I see now that they picked the perfect job for you."
"Diplomacy?"
"Sucking up to people and making promises that they want to hear."
"Yes, diplomacy." Dabrowski nodded firmly and smirked. "The Chief Superintendent of Royal Intelligence has offered to pay Mari and give her an apartment in the city, so you needn't worry about her having trouble thriving in our society. And I'll be happy to arrange accommodations for you if you wish to enjoy the rest of the day here with your daughter and spend the night before returning. My roommate loves when we have guests stay over."
Mari almost choked on that, remembering Scholar Sato's comment to the opposite, but Mari was positive her mother had no interest in sleeping on some former enemy's sofa.
"I will return today," Mother said, "and I suppose I will thank you for letting me know my wayward charge was in your city, since she failed to inform me of her plans. Though I noticed you only mentioned it after I asked you if you'd seen her."
"You're welcome," Dabrowski said. "I'll leave you two alone so you can have a private chat if you wish. Enjoy the balcony and the view, though you may want to watch out for that squall at sea that's threatening to roll in. Also stray seagulls dropping, er, droppings. They do not respect the sanctity of ancient architecture." He waved cheerfully to Mother, gave Mari a thumbs-up, and walked inside.
Mari didn't feel as cheerful or optimistic when she was left alone with her mother. Despite Dabrowski burbling on as if Mother were agreeing to everything he said, she hadn't truly agreed to any of it.
"I'm sorry I didn't tell you where I was going," Mari said, "but then you would have caught up with me sooner and dragged me back. As it was, I had to tinker with our base's security system so it wouldn't take note of me leaving."
"I noticed."
"Are you going to let me stay? For a while?" Mari had originally planned to leave forever if need be, but she realized that suggesting she would return might help Mother loosen her grip. And it was possible that Mari would eventually check off all the items on her list and decide that normal human life wasn't for her. At which point, it would be nice to have the option to return.
Mother sighed. "I suppose. As Diplomat Dabrowski pointed out, you're more accessible here than if you felt compelled to flee to another system."
Mari didn't know if she wanted to be accessible to her people, but since it sounded like she would be permitted to stay without further struggle, she wouldn't object. "Thank you, Mother." She forced herself to make an overture of kinship. "Do you wish to obtain something to eat together?"
"Do you believe there's a place where we could eat without being shunned, mocked, and possibly shot at?"
"I don't know the city that well yet."
Mother shook her head. "I can't believe you want to live among these people."
Undaunted, Mari offered, "Perhaps Qin could recommend something. I understand that she and her sisters have similar problems fitting in with the locals."
"Wonderful."
Though Mother was as sarcastic and dry as ever, and had claimed Mari's hard-won terraformer for herself, Mari smiled as they walked out together. She would be allowed to stay for a time. It was enough.
Epilogue
The apartment had not three, not four, but five windows. It was late, but Kenji couldn't stop walking from window to window, looking out on the city lights. The highest towers of Drachen Castle were visible over the stone wall that surrounded the sprawling structure, with the unwalled but more ominous Royal Intelligence Headquarters beside it. In the other direction, the skyscrapers of downtown rose up, the magtracks snaking between them, and auto flyers and shuttles banking around them on their way across the city.
The apartment featured two bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room, a kitchen, and a dining room. An entire dining room, not just a corner of another room with a table in it.
Given that Kenji had been born into the nobility and had lived the first eight years of his life on a sprawling estate on the Southern Continent, it shouldn't have felt so strange—so luxurious—to have so much room to himself, but it had been a long time since he'd had a place of his own. One that he had the right to inhabit and wasn't some temporary and illegal shelter.
His temple throbbed, and he touched it before he caught himself. A small bandage was the only outward sign that he'd had a chip surgically implanted and linked to his brain so he could communicate directly with it. All he had to do was think commands, and he could read the results on a contact display that took the place of the glasses he'd always worn, glasses that could be removed and tossed aside if someone was trying to track him.
Supposedly, the government didn't care about tracking people through their chips—and it was forbidden for corporations to do it via software—but his father had always warned him that wasn't the case. If one didn't want to be found, one couldn't ever get chipped.
Kenji lowered his hand. If this didn't work out, he could get it removed later. For now, he'd spent the last few hours tinkering with the novelty of it, and it had given him a headache. Or maybe that was from the surgery. Or poking himself in the eye countless times trying to figure out how to put in the contact. At least, since his vision was fine without correction, he'd only had to get one.
"This apartment is quite lovely," Kay said. "It has a fabulous view. Even my limited optical receptors find it agreeable."
"I'm glad. You can have your own bedroom."
"I do not require sleep, but I usually power down to recharge in a quiet corner or, as you know, occasionally a closet."
"Well, now you can use the closet in your very own bedroom."
"Sublime. Will you take me on your new secret-agent missions?"
"Did you enjoy going to an asteroid station where we were horribly outnumbered and threatened from all sides by angry dog men?"
"Since I did not leave the ship, the dog men did not trouble me."
"Lucky you."
The control panel by the door chimed. Mari?
When he'd left the castle, she'd still been out on the balcony with Dabrowski and her mother. Negotiating her fate. For all he knew, Mari might already have been dragged back to wherever her people lived.
Since Chief Van Dijk had promised the building was secure, Kenji didn't take the new stunner or DEW-Tek pistol he'd been issued with him to the door. Hoping it was Mari, he opened it without checking to see who it was.
Then sprang back in shock, trying to slam the door shut on the man in full black combat armor standing in the hallway. A black gauntleted hand caught the door before it shut, but the man didn't storm inside the apartment as Kenji expected.
Though surprised he had the time, he grabbed the DEW-Tek pistol off the table and pointed it at the apartment entrance. Was this the damn Main Event again? Kenji hadn't looked long enough to see the letters ME emblazoned on his helmet, but who else stalked around Zamek City in black combat armor and a mask?
The man pushed the door open, but he remained on the threshold. Kenji pointed the pistol at his chest, though it was only symbolic. The firepower wouldn't be sufficient to damage that armor and reach the man underneath.
"Look," Kenji said. "I'm here legally. I mean, I got a job. I have to be in the city. I'm working for Royal Intelligence now."
"So I heard," came the dry response.
"How did you get in here?"
Did Chief Van Dijk know that random thugs in armor could breach her supposedly secure building?
"I go where I wish. I came to inform you that since you have been pardoned and will presumably not commit further crimes in my city, you need not hide behind counters or potted plants when I am in the area."
Hell, that meant he'd known Kenji was in that rental shop all along. Why hadn't he grabbed Kenji to turn him in? Or rough him up? Whatever the self-proclaimed superhero did?
"I'm relieved," Kenji said warily, expecting him to threaten to tell Royal Intelligence about his heinous crime at the park. But surely, Chief Van Dijk knew all about everything Kenji had been up to in his life—and more.
"I thought you might be. Stay out of trouble, Chisaka." The man turned and disappeared into the hallway.
Kenji swallowed. That was his father's surname, not the name he'd gone by for the last eight years. How could the Main Event know about it? And who could he know in Royal Intelligence who'd blabbed about Kenji and his new assignment?
"Perhaps shutting the door would be wise," Kay, who'd watched the exchange from the window, said.
"Uh, yeah. Good idea."
First, Kenji stuck his head into the hallway, looking in both directions. The Main Event was gone.
He was about to close—and bolt—the door, but he spotted someone else stepping out of the elevator. His heart lifted.
"Mari!" he blurted, waving at her.
Given that it had only been hours since he'd seen her and not days or weeks, the wave was possibly more vigorous than convention dictated, but he didn't care. He'd been afraid her mother would drag her back to her people.
Mari smiled when she met his eyes, though he couldn't tell from her expression if she was only coming to say goodbye or if she would be allowed to stay.
"Hello, Kenji." She stepped into the apartment with him. "This is your new home?"
"Yes, included with the job, I understand. Are you... getting one yourself?"
Maybe he shouldn't have jumped right to that question, but he had to know.
Mari took a deep breath, and he braced himself, expecting the worst.
"Yes. I'm being allowed to stay for a while and work as an agent alongside you. I'll also be permitted to do some scientific research and experiments, but Minister Dabrowski and my mother came to an arrangement regarding that. I'm not allowed to work on building new terraforming devices or share any of our advanced technology with your people. I do hope I'll be able to be useful without that."
"You will. Trust me. And that's great that you can stay. You're an adult woman. You should be able to choose your life and where you lead it."
"I agree. I have something for you."
Mari withdrew two Royal Intelligence identification cards, one with his picture on it and one with hers. There was a brown smudge that might have been chocolate on one of her fingers, but he only smiled and didn't point it out.
"There will be versions that get linked to our chips, too, but we can show these if we're ever stuck in trouble somewhere with people who don't have chip scanners. In addition, I'll be receiving a diplomatic passport." Mari smiled wryly as she handed him his ident card. "I'm also thinking of purchasing clothing that proclaims that I heart the Kingdom."
Kenji could imagine idiots in Zamek City making trouble for her simply because she was an astroshaman. Hopefully, the ident card would convince people to back off. In general, nobody wanted to garner the attention of Royal Intelligence.
"That might not be a bad idea, but I'm pretty sure we'll be issued uniforms. You could wear that on the weekends." Kenji lifted his card. "I wonder when they got the pictures." He eyed his, guessing it had been taken as he'd walked into the conference room. "I'm an I-1," he said, reading his pay rating, description, and name—they'd gone with Backer instead of Chisaka. "Entry level. Given my complete lack of experience in this field, I suppose that makes sense."
Whatever I-1s made, it would be a lot more than he'd made scrounging odd jobs as an off-the-grid mechanic, though he was a tiny bit wistful that he wouldn't see twenty-five thousand Union dollars again anytime soon.
"I assume that with the satisfactory completion of assignments, one gains in pay and rank over time," Mari said.
"Let's hope." Kenji checked out her card, expecting she had been given the same rank, since she didn't have experience in the field either, but he ended up gawking. "You're an I-4?"
"It does say that. I am unfamiliar with the scale. Is that a lesser or greater rank?"
"Greater. You probably get six windows." Kenji didn't resent that—not exactly—but he found it puzzling, since they were the same age and they were starting the job at the same time.
"Windows?" She tilted her head.
"Never mind." He pointed at her card. "It means you're my boss and get better pay."
"Oh. Odd."
He was tempted to agree, but he supposed she was being given credit for however many years of experience she had as a scientist—or maybe the fact that she could hack her way into systems that were supposed to be unhackable. Grudgingly, he admitted that she had a lot more useful expertise than he did.
"It also means I should kiss your ass on a regular basis." Kenji found a smile, or maybe a wry smirk, though a hint of sadness touched him as he realized... "But probably not other things."
"My ass?" Mari touched said ass and looked down. "That is not on my list."
"Having your ass kissed isn't on the Human List? You should add it. It's quite a delightful experience, or so I've heard." He waved his ident card. "I'm going to have to work hard for a long time to get to the point where people feel compelled to kiss my ass."
Strangely, he found that he didn't mind the idea. He'd worked hard for a long time just to stay alive and not be noticed. It would be nice to work toward becoming a more capable, more respected person. Maybe he could even sign up for one of Minister Dabrowski's lectures. Legitimately this time.
"I shall consider your advice," Mari said. "I understand that you are likely a wiser and more contemplative and sensitive soul than I'd realized."
Was that a reference to his poetical genes? "Yes. I'm sure my DNA imparts wisdom and sensitivity, along with the ability to rhyme on the fly."
"I am not surprised. You didn't seem to have the heart of a bounty hunter."
"Because I failed to capture you?"
"Because you opened with I want to talk to you instead of simply shooting me."
"Which denotes wisdom and sensitivity rather than incompetence? I guess I'm pleased."
"Good." Mari smiled, lifted a hand as if she might grip his arm—or touch his cheek?—then dropped it in favor of a Kingdom bow. Maybe she'd also gotten the gist that if they were going to work together, and she was going to be his boss, they should keep their relationship professional. "I will see you in the morning for work."
"Yes." He returned her smile a little sadly as she walked back toward the elevator. "Goodnight, Mari."
|
Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 2 |
"Daisy! It's that warehouse!" Palette shouted, head sticking out of the pochette hanging from Daisy's waist.
The warehouse the creature pointed at was noticeably shorter and older than the surrounding structures, and rather mysterious. But Magical Daisy, who knew what was going on inside, could find it only grotesque.
She ran, weaving between the buildings, kicking off one to launch herself onto another and bound away again, leaping and springing along. Today, there would be a drug deal inside this storehouse on the outskirts of the downtown area. The Magical Kingdom had ordered Daisy to raid the storehouse, apprehend the perpetrators, and then report back. Daisy leaped off the side of another edifice and did a half spin in midair, the wind between the buildings battering her cheeks and furiously ruffling her hair, skirt, and accessories. Upside down in the air, she pointed her finger at the storehouse.
"Let's do this! Daisy Beam!"
Magical girls were a type of mage: people granted power by the Magical Kingdom who used their gifts for the good of the world and for humanity—and for themselves, just a little bit. Their physical abilities exceeded biological limits, and the mystic phenomena at their fingertips defied the laws of nature.
Through the ages, many systems of power had relied on magic or miracles: churches, heresy, alchemy, devil worship, folk beliefs, and others. The Magical Kingdom, a utopia of dreams and fantasy, had always cooperated with these organizations in an effort to bring about world peace. In the modern day, they had created the revolutionary subculture that is magical girls. Kind, lovely, beautiful, and strong of heart, these guardians never gave up their mission to protect people. The notion spread far and wide, and more and more girls, boys—and in some cases, even adults—came to idolize magical girls, creating a breeding ground for cultivating potential and actual allies of the Magical Kingdom.
These heroines never revealed themselves. They surreptitiously took root in society and daily life, their activities hardly ever rising to the surface—though the use of the term "hardly ever" naturally meant that it did happen, albeit rarely. There were occasional incidents, but the Magical Kingdom took care of them quietly, altering the memories of those involved, as well as falsifying any government records to make it seem as if nothing had ever happened.
Aside from the "accidents," there was also publicity. The activities of some magical girls were dramatized, altered, and then distributed as anime and manga. A surprising number of people had either received the blessings of the Magical Kingdom or were its citizens working in this world, and they had considerable sway over production companies and television stations. Normal viewers enjoyed the creative content, never realizing the stories were based on true events. As for the girls, the true heroines, their hearts filled with pride.
Magical Daisy, a television anime that had originally aired years earlier, was one such production. In the show, a magical princess from the World of Flowers transfers to a school in modern-day Japan and causes quite a stir. While normally, she appears to be the kind of middle school student one would find anywhere, when trouble occurs, she transforms into Magical Daisy. Daisy and her sidekick, Palette, are allies of justice, beating the bad guys and helping those in need. However, no one could ever know her true identity, because if that happened, she'd be forced to return to the World of Flowers.
The anime Magical Daisy was based off the activities of a real magical girl. Her being a princess and transferring to a Japanese school was fiction, but the rest generally stuck closely to the source.
Somewhere, a dog was howling.
A drunk lay passed out spread-eagle in the middle of the alley. When Magical Daisy picked him up, the stench of alcohol stung her nose. He muttered nasty things to her, like "You got a problem with me?" and "You piece of shit!" but he was basically talking in his sleep. He wasn't aware of himself.
She searched through the leather bag that she presumed was his and pulled his license out of his wallet. She checked his address, hoisted him over her shoulder, and dashed off toward his home. Once there, she laid him at the front door and rang the doorbell.
A middle-aged woman, probably his wife, shouted from inside, "Where the hell were you?!"
Now Magical Daisy's mission was complete, but she'd only managed to help one person. She hadn't completed her quota for the night. Next, she would head downtown and patrol. After scouring the area to make sure there was no trouble, no disputes, she would finally head home.
She hopped on the train from her university, and in fifteen minutes, she was in the downtown district under her care. From there, it was four stations and hardly a five-minute walk to her cheap, one-story apartment building—basically a town house—in her quiet, residential neighborhood. In one of these rooms was Kiku Yakumo's home.
Her ceiling, barely thicker than plywood, was sand-textured plaster that would break with a single strike. Her bathroom had a traditional squat toilet, and if she wanted to wash, she went to the neighborhood bathhouse. But worst of all, her landlord was a jerk—a judgmental, gossipy nag. Kiku lived there only because the rent was cheap.
"I'm home."
Habits formed over many years didn't change overnight, and her voice echoed in the empty room. The walls were as thin as you could get, so the other tenants around her had probably heard. Maybe her neighbors thought she was lonely.
She couldn't argue with that assessment.
Taking two pieces of chewing gum from the plastic case on the low table, she popped them in her mouth and started chewing. She tossed her school tote bag onto her folded-up futon, sat next to it, and sighed. Feeling about ready to collapse, she leaned back on her arms.
Back in middle school, during her heyday as Magical Daisy, she'd always had so much fun. In high school, she'd resolved every major case, and eventually, her sidekick, Palette, had returned to the Magical Kingdom. The two of them must have shed nearly a gallon's worth of tears the day they parted ways. Kiku wouldn't have denied being lonely, but she'd still been able to text Palette with her magical phone, and Magical Daisy was being adapted into an anime. Daisy had no idea what kind of connections the Magical Kingdom had in her world, but the story in the anime had reflected reality quite closely. Despite its relatively average popularity, the show had received decent reviews and continued in a second season, released as an OVA. While she was working hard on her patrols, Kiku had also often gleefully posted on the Magical Daisy forums online and checked sales data on tracking sites.
Then she'd started university.
Kiku had ended up in a very average university. She might have been able to aim for a better one if she'd studied harder, but prioritizing her magical-girl activities hadn't left much time for schoolwork. As a defender of justice, she couldn't skip out on training, patrolling, and beating bad guys.
She'd stopped talking to her friends from middle and high school, and there was no one at her university she might call a friend. It wasn't uncommon for her to leave the house and come back without having uttered a single word.
Her living situation was terrible. Her magical-girl activities took up most of her time, meaning she couldn't work a part-time job. Her family ran a small workshop in town, and because of the recession, they were just barely scraping by. Kiku was grateful to even receive an allowance. Her clothes all came from big wholesalers, though lately she hadn't bought any. She didn't know the first thing about makeup. She had no qualifications. She didn't even have a driver's license. These were all things she'd considered unnecessary as a magical girl, and she was fine with that. In private, she suffered, but out in the world, she kept up with her supernatural responsibilities. To Kiku, that was what it meant to be a hero.
But lately, she was starting to question the role. The life of her alter ego didn't have that same glow it'd had in middle school—this secretive heroism where she had to carefully avoid showing herself to anyone. Apparently, there had been some experimental trials that used curated sites and the like to publicize the existence of magical girls a little more, but thanks to a certain series of events, the project had fizzled out. Kiku continued her low-key activities, evading the public eye, sneaking, hiding, never receiving any praise or thanks from the people she helped.
If only she'd studied a little more. Goofed off a little more. Worn fancy clothes, gotten boys to talk to her. Kiku had never even done karaoke before. She wanted to try bowling, too. Where was her future headed? How long would she be a magical girl? Doubts filled her mind as she helped people in need.
It was starting to rain, and she could hear the droplets splashing against the corrugated roof. She hated that sound; it represented exactly how tough her life had become. As she heaved another deep sigh, her magical phone began playing the opening theme to Magical Daisy to alert her to a new message.
Was it a whiny text from Palette? Or possibly an emergency message from the Magical Kingdom? She shuffled across the tatami mats on her knees, grabbed the magical phone, and opened her inbox.
"Magical Girl...Raising Project?" That sounded familiar. Kiku could've sworn she'd heard of a similar mobile game before. Was it an advertisement for the game, then? Or some kind of prank? She decided it was best to delete it and tapped the button to do so.
"...Huh?" But she couldn't. She tried pressing harder, thinking the touch screen might be screwy, but nothing happened. The words scrolled smoothly down, ignoring her input. After a few blocks of explanatory text, the final line of the e-mail hit the screen.
The game will now begin.
Kiku squinted as the plain serif typeface suddenly radiated with all the colors of the rainbow.
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Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 3 |
[ POV: Pechka ]
During her work as a magical girl, she'd been spotted a few times. The rule of thumb was to keep hidden and act in secret, but if a very young child—someone who wouldn't see them as an oddity—happened to catch a glimpse, there was an unspoken understanding that there was nothing much to be done about it, though it was frowned upon.
Summer was at its peak. In the early afternoon at the park, the asphalt was practically softening in the heat. Cicadas hummed hoarsely, and mothers buzzed merrily with the latest gossip.
A girl of about kindergarten age, possibly waiting for her mother, was squatting in the shade, out of the harsh sunlight. In her right hand, she held a thin white string connected to a floating red balloon with a drugstore logo imprinted on it. The light filtering through the trees produced a mottled pattern on the rubber as it bobbed lazily in the air.
Suddenly, the wind picked up. The girl covered her eyes with her right hand—the one holding her balloon. The gust jerked the string from her grip, and with an "Oh!" she looked up to see her prize rising straight into the blue sky. The girl's look of surprise disappeared, replaced by welling tears.
Then, as if from nowhere, a magical girl dashed forward, leaped high into the air, and snatched the lost balloon. She handed it to the little girl with a smile and a "Here you go." The magical girl would have been more careful had she been helping an adult, but she figured it was fine to give a child an extra smile.
"Thank you!" the child shouted excitedly, a big smile on her face. "Miss...you're so pretty." She was entranced.
The magical girl, Pechka, responded with a sloppy grin and then quickly hid herself to make sure none of the mothers nearby spotted her. A magical girl's outfit stuck out like a sore thumb, making it especially harrowing to work while the sun was up. "Swift and nimble" was the creed in daytime.
Yes, for Chika Tatehara, the ability to transform into a beautiful girl was more important than any added magic or physical prowess. It was fair to say that her appearance accounted for 70 percent of the reason she was in this business.
Chika was not a fan of her natural looks. She had moles all over, and she was certain her nose pointed too far upward. Her right and left breasts didn't match in size or shape. Her fingertips were thick and round. She was so bowlegged that her legs never touched. No matter how much milk she drank, she was still short. And her eyes could stand to be bigger. No one had ever called her ugly, but neither could she recall ever hearing the words "cute" or "pretty" applied to her. She had a feeling that people purposefully avoided talking about her appearance. Perhaps that was something of a victim complex on her part, but maybe it wasn't just her imagination after all.
In middle school, Chika had avoided anything that drew attention, trying to be as average as possible. Even if no one ever praised her, at least no one ever put her down, either. She'd spent her whole life thus far maneuvering in this way.
She'd never considered it a bad thing. Relative obscurity had its own joys, after all. She could play games and use the cute photo booths at the arcades that school rules forbade students from visiting, or she could read and share naughty books with a book club. Sure, it wasn't what those girls with gobs of mascara did, but she could still get up to no good.
But there were some things Chika couldn't do.
Ninomiya, number four on the baseball team, was outstandingly talented—their star player and cleanup batter, who had pro scouts all over him and a career in the major leagues all but in the bag. He had a calm and carefree personality, and he enjoyed baseball, eating, and sleeping. On first glance, his height and weight would suggest he was much older than middle school, and most people found him frightening upon first meeting, but he was pleasant and all smiles in conversation. His quick grins and talent for baseball attracted girls not just from his own school but from nearby middle schools, high schools, and even universities. They all came running to cheer him on not only for games but even for practices.
As a huge fan of Ninomiya, Chika was no exception. She often made excuses about it, telling herself that she was different from those other superficial fans. She just loved baseball and watching him play. His slider pitches in particular were on another level, like magic.
After matches and practice, girls would rush over carrying offerings for him: towels, candied lemons, kettles of cold water, and so on. Due to an unspoken rule, the girls would line up in order of attractiveness. If Chika were to push others aside on the approach, the next day, they'd be talking behind her back and spreading rumors to make her an outcast. It would have painted the rest of her middle school days black.
But what would life be like if she were pretty? What if she were as beautiful as a pop idol or a model? Then no one would object. No one would be able to object. She wished so badly to get close to Ninomiya, for him to eat a homemade lunch she'd put her heart into, that she wanted to become someone else. The offer of magical girlhood was a godsend for someone with such a desperate desire to be beautiful. She did her damnedest to pass the selection test and become the magical girl Pechka.
And now, looking at herself in the mirror, Chika breathed a sigh. Not her usual sigh, though. Her nose was high bridged, and her complexion was smooth and free of the moles she was so self-conscious about. Her eyes were big and her irises strong. The curve of her eyebrows was beautiful, without so much as a hair out of place. Her fingers were thin, the tips narrow and shapely. No longer were her breasts uneven; in size, shape, and bounce, they were close to the ideal Chika had envisioned, and her crooked legs were straight and slender now, too. She smiled, spun, and struck a pose. Every move she made was angelic.
Her one complaint would be that her clothes were a bit garish. They were appropriate as a magical-girl costume, but everything about the attire was aggressively unique. Pechka's body was no less distinctive in its impact, but the clothes left too strong an impression for day-to-day wear.
Chika transformed into Pechka and stripped off her clothes and accessories. Then she slipped into a white dress, worthy of a rich lady visiting a summer resort. She'd bought it because she wanted it, even though it didn't suit her, but without the confidence to wear it, she'd left it to rot in her dresser.
Careful not to alert her family, she sneaked out of the house.
It had been a year and a half since she first became a magical girl back in her second year of middle school, but she was in her third year already. Her days of simply gazing at herself in the mirror were over. For so long she'd let helping people take up all her free time, always coming up with some excuse to postpone this day, but she couldn't put it off any longer. Now was the time to act.
She'd had no time to make a nice boxed lunch by hand, so while she was out, she used Pechka's magical ability to create a delicious meal. It appeared a bit boring but tasted delectable. She packed it into a lunch box and quickly wrapped it. With that, her gift was complete.
She walked onto the baseball field. For a year and a half, she'd worried that maybe Pechka wasn't actually pretty, that she was just the same old Chika, and she would get snubbed. But the shock, envy, and jealousy from the other girls blew all her worries away. The whispering sea of fans parted before Pechka. Looks determined your place here, so Pechka took priority over those mascara-covered girls. She strode forward boldly. Somehow, she managed to walk like a model on the runway, something she never could have pulled off as her normal self.
Beyond the sea of fans was Ninomiya himself, chatting and laughing. His friends, upon spotting Pechka, began poking the boy's arm and pointing at her in astonishment. Then he looked at her. She had no idea what his expression was—she couldn't bring herself to meet his eyes. Staring at the tips of his muddy spiked shoes, she quickly blurted, "I'm a big fan. Good luck out there," and shoved the wrapped lunch at him. Ninomiya may have said something, but she didn't hear it—right after throwing the gift at him, she ran away.
Just as they had done upon her arrival, the sea of fans parted, and Pechka headed home. She sneaked past her family to her room, dispelled her transformation, and flopped onto the bed. There she writhed, moaning and groaning unintelligibly.
Her magical phone chirped with the text-alert tune, but she was in no state to check it. One moment she fidgeted atop her bed, and in the next she suddenly hit the ground hard without warning, writhing not in love but in physical pain. Dirt and pebbles filled her mouth, and her nose and forehead stung like they'd been scraped across something. Her soft, clean bed had transformed into a hard and deadly weapon.
She flipped over to try to check what was going on, but a blinding light kept her from opening her eyes. The insides of her eyelids were a searing white. Slowly, she acclimated to the light, until she could finally take in her strange, abnormal surroundings.
The sun was intensely bright—blazing hot and radiant. Patches of weeds dotted a wasteland stretching into the horizon. She could see tall constructs that looked like skyscrapers, three in total, but they were all crumbled. This was when Chika realized something: Her vision had become much, much better than when she was human. Without even realizing it, she had transformed into Pechka.
She patted her hands, feet, upper body, and lower body, examining herself closely. She had definitely transformed into Pechka. As a test, she hopped a little and flew straight up ten feet, then stuck the landing. Yup, she'd definitely transformed—though that had never happened involuntarily before.
"Where am I? Why am I here?"
Where indeed? It didn't resemble anywhere in Japan. She'd heard you could find vast stretches of land like this in Hokkaido, but she doubted they came with broken-down buildings. Maybe she was in some foreign country that was embroiled in civil war or had been invaded by another nation. That would explain the high-rise building, and this desolate landscape would match the blood-soaked circumstances. It would also explain why there were no people.
But why was she here? Pechka didn't understand at all. She'd been on her bed moments earlier, squirming with joy. Maybe she'd just been too happy, so the bad stuff had come for her to balance it out. Or perhaps this was her punishment for using her powers for something other than good deeds.
Oh yeah. Pechka recalled that just before she'd been transferred here, her magical phone had rung. Maybe that had something to do with this.
She took out the little device. Besides the apps of a regular smartphone, it had an amazing portability function that enabled the user to materialize things out of thin air. It was also shaped like a heart—exactly the sort of style appropriate to a magical girl. But such an oddly shaped screen would be unpopular on a normal phone because it was impractical and hard to read.
Displayed on the screen in simple serif typeface were the words TUTORIAL MODE. Pechka cocked her head in confusion. She'd never seen this before. She tried to start her messaging app, but for some reason, the phone wouldn't respond. The message started to scroll of its own accord.
In this tutorial mode, you will personally experience battle in Magical Girl Raising Project. Defeat your enemies to gain magical candy.
Magical Girl Raising Project? Battling? Enemies? Magical candy?
Then Pechka noticed the ground rumbling around her—but it wasn't an earthquake. Only a specific section of the ground was moving, not the entire earth—rumbling, swelling, and bursting from within its depths to create a hole. A white arm reached out from it, followed by its owner. Teeth rattling, bones popping, it slowly rose up. Darkness obscured its eye sockets, hiding them from view. But even if she had seen them, there would surely be nothing inside. Altogether, there were five animated skeletons, reminiscent of gods of death. She was surrounded.
Five skeletons have appeared.
The message appeared on her phone's screen. Pechka swallowed the scream rising in her throat and steeled her buckling legs. Gritting her teeth, she held her weapon, a spatula, at the ready. Still confused as to what was going on, she smacked away the skeletal hand reaching for her. She kicked the bony figure that rushed at her, then she drew back again, dodging the skeletons grabbing at her from either side. Then she froze. The first one, the one she'd kicked, was lying facedown on the ground and holding her leg.
The touch of the skeleton's hand was cold and repulsive, bringing her to a halt. Her magical strength normally would have allowed her to easily brush it off and crush it underfoot. But Pechka was at her limits, emotionally speaking, and she was on the verge of panicking. For all her magical enhancements, Pechka's special ability was just food preparation. When it came to fighting, her own body was all she could rely on. She had no other choice but to hit and be hit, kick and be kicked. This wasn't something a middle school girl with an average, peaceful life could handle.
The four other skeletons closed in on her as if in slow motion. But just before they reached her, they were sliced in half from skull to pelvis, clattering to the floor.
"...Huh?!"
At her feet, the skeleton that had been holding her was now cut cleanly into three vertical slices. The deep gouges in the ground from the expert cuts were evidence of how much force had been behind each strike. Flustered, Pechka shook her leg, and the bony fingers clasping her fell off.
What happened? What happened? As far as she could tell, she hadn't awoken to any new power or unlocked something sealed inside her. This wasn't Pechka's handiwork. Looking all around, she spotted a figure beyond the dust storm with her magically enhanced vision. It was too small to be an adult male...
It was a girl. In her right hand dangled a katana. She must have been her rescuer. Over a mile of distance separated the two, but ruined buildings and weeds were the only other things around, and compared with them, the girl seemed a more likely suspect.
That the girl had saved her meant she was friendly—she had to be. To Pechka, who had suddenly been thrown into a confusing landscape and forced to fight terrifying monsters, she was a savior. The rescued girl sprinted over, and in a flash she had covered the mile distance and was vigorously bowing her head. "Thank you very much!"
Pechka gently lifted her head to look at her protector, who really was a girl. She was garbed in samurai-like clothing, but it was dramatically stylized, as was her long ponytail, bound into a unique accessory that resembled a blooming flower at the end. Her garb looked less like a samurai's attire and more like something else—like a magical girl's costume. Not to mention that no one but Pechka's fellows would be capable of attacking an enemy from over a mile away with a katana.
"Are you...a magical girl?" asked Pechka.
No response.
"Um, my name's Pechka. I'm a magical girl, too."
No response. The girl merely stared.
Sensing that this was a sign to hurry, Pechka went on. "I wonder where we are. Would you happen to know? I just randomly ended up here, and I really didn't know what's going on, and then I got scared when those skeletons appeared, and I'm really in a mess."
"Must I do this again? Is it not over?"
"Huh?"
"I don't like it. It's...not right." The girl's eyes were focused on one point, yet she didn't appear to be seeing anything. Her gaze was aimed at Pechka, but she was looking off somewhere else entirely. The girl reached out her hand and wrapped her fingers around Pechka's throat.
Unable to move, Pechka didn't resist, letting her do as she would. The girl's fingers felt cold. Pechka swallowed audibly. The grip around her throat tightened. Muscle and flesh contracted. The katana in the girl's right hand edged slowly closer to her captive's throat. Something was chattering—Pechka's own teeth.
"Is it not over?" the girl murmured. "Come on, Musician."
"I—I don't know anything," stammered Pechka. "I—I don't know what's going on, either. I blinked, and then I was here."
The samurai stared at her with those unseeing eyes. Her grip weakened, and her katana dropped to dangle at her side again. She let go of Pechka's throat and pushed her away. Unable to stand her ground, Pechka fell on her bottom and peered up at the other girl. Her teeth were still chattering, hard.
"It seems you are not the Musician. That person is more...like..." The girl turned her back to Pechka and began to stagger unsteadily away, her dragging katana carving a trail as she went. She was muttering something under her breath, but Pechka couldn't quite hear.
Still sitting on the ground, Pechka watched her go. After all that, she still didn't know where she was or how she ended up there. But she had no urge to go after the other girl.
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Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 4 |
[ POV: Magical Daisy ]
The skeletons had proven surprisingly fragile—about as strong as human bones, perhaps. They broke from Magical Daisy's kicks and shattered under her punches. This sort of violence stirred a visceral disgust within her, but she was what you'd call a veteran. She would have quit long ago if this were enough to break her.
"Daisy Punch!"
It was just a normal punch.
"Daisy Kick!"
It was just a regular kick.
Yet Magical Daisy felt that naming her moves made them stronger, so she'd named her ordinary punches and kicks as if they were special attacks. She believed that there had to be power, or something, in saying it out loud.
"Daisy Beam!"
It was just a normal beam—well, obviously not.
The Daisy Beam was her killer move—and not in the figurative sense. This move was literally guaranteed to kill. In addition to supernaturally enhanced physical strength, girls chosen by the Magical Kingdom were each given a unique magical ability. This was what made them "magical" girls. Daisy's ability was the Daisy Beam. By pointing her finger, she could shoot a light ray around four inches in diameter. It instantly vaporized anything it touched, though she didn't understand how it worked. Palette had explained that it disassembled the target on a molecular level, causing it to quickly disintegrate and disperse into the air. She could, of course, vary the beam. If she spread her hand wide, it would shoot a light ray about a foot and a half in diameter, a much wider attack area.
She had never used this move to kill anyone. It was for eliminating waste and obstacles. She'd once suggested to the Magical Kingdom that it might be helpful to the world to use her beam to clear industrial or atomic waste, but she'd received the notice that magical girls were not permitted to influence trade or industry in the human world. It felt like they'd warned her, Keep the showboating to a minimum! as if they'd seen a narcissism in her that she didn't realize she had. This hadn't done her self-esteem any favors.
On a personal level, Daisy considered using the beam on living things to be the deepest of taboos, and the Magical Kingdom and its mascots also heavily restricted its use. But when assaulted by monsters that were clearly not alive—and thanks to the video game–like message Five skeletons have appeared—she'd fired in the moment, without hesitation. One shot of her beam had blown the skeletons away, along with her pent-up stress. But at the same time, it gave her second thoughts. She'd gotten carried away.
"So, uh, where am I?" As usual, she was talking to herself, but she really meant it this time. She'd read that the game had begun, and a second later, she'd been transformed into her magical-girl form and transported into the middle of this wasteland, all alone. Then the skeletons had attacked her.
The land was flat in every direction as far as Magical Daisy could see. She'd never been to Mexico or Africa, but she imagined the sun here was just as hot. She'd probably be suffering some burns if not for her enhanced skin. The only other thing in her field of vision besides the sun and wasteland were some dilapidated buildings. Daisy checked her magical phone. She couldn't access her profile page anymore, and there was a message on her screen. It read:
The tutorial has ended.
You earned 5 magical candies.
Magical candy. That reminded Daisy—the phone had said something about that, right before the skeletons had appeared. She also felt like she'd heard that phrase before somewhere. Where had it been?
Please head to town.
Town? She saw only wasteland around her. But maybe if she traveled higher, she might be able to see around a little more. Daisy dashed over to the high-rise buildings. Up close, she could see the full extent of their dilapidation, their walls stained brown from the dust clouds. The amount of chips, cracks, and general signs of erosion led her to believe that these buildings had been there for a long time, not just a few years. One building was leaning to the side, with everything above the tenth floor entirely crumpled. It was about as tall as the other buildings.
Taking care not to cause the whole thing to collapse, Daisy quickly scaled the building. With her magically enhanced strength, running up the wall was nothing. Upon reaching the top, she surveyed her surroundings. The wind gusted harder up here, so she held her skirt down. Even the sun seemed to be stronger here, possibly because she was closer to it. As she'd expected, though, the view was much clearer. Her left hand to her forehead to block out the light, she looked off into the distance. Her abnormally powerful eyes meant she could see farther than any other living creature.
"Hmm... Is that it?" In the distance, she could see a cluster of buildings. It was the only thing in view that could pass for anything like a town. The rest of the wasteland was dotted with more ruins like the one she was currently standing on. She examined everything around her, checking each and every one of the buildings. They were all exactly the same, right down to the angle of their tilt and the patterns of broken glass in the windows, just like in a video game. One building in particular caught her eye—atop it was a figure.
Daisy jumped back as soon as she caught sight of the figure in the distance. A crack had appeared in the building's roof right under where she'd been standing—and it was no natural fissure. Something extremely sharp had sliced through the concrete like butter. She looked at the faraway shape again. Did the attack come from over there?
They were holding some sort of pole. At this distance, it was too far for even Daisy's superpowered eyes to make out exactly what it was.
Just then, the figure moved, seeming to raise the pole, and the sunlight glittered off it, sparkling. It was metal... A blade? Daisy flung herself to the ground. The edge of the roof fractured, slid, then fell to the ground and shook the earth. Even from way up high, Daisy could see the dust cloud that ensued.
There was no mistaking it: The damage had occurred right after the figure's movement. She thought they might be hurling slices of wind at her, but there was zero delay between the figure's actions and the destruction that followed. It wasn't quite like a projectile.
Still on the ground, Magical Daisy stuck her arms out in front of her, facing the figure, and thought. Daisy had been hit yet had taken no damage. Could it have been a warning, or maybe a ruse? The move had caused her to jump back and drop down, but she wasn't quite sure if she'd still have been unhurt if she hadn't taken defensive action.
If the figure had missed deliberately—and even if it hadn't—it seemed different from those lifeless and mindless skeletons. Regardless of how the figured had attacked, they seemed humanlike. And Magical Daisy couldn't use her beam on a human...or any living creature, whatever it was.
After a moment's hesitation, she looked at the giant split in the side of the building and decided she couldn't ignore the enemy anymore. She aimed her outstretched arm a little lower and then shot her Daisy Beam. It scored a direct hit on the base of the building, causing the nearly toppled structure to lean even farther to the side. After one more shot, down came the building in a plume of smoke.
The figure jumped from the collapsing building and landed on the ground. Meanwhile, Daisy jumped from her own vantage point and rushed to close the distance between them. The stranger did the same. Still running, they slashed once, twice, swinging downward and striking upward.
Daisy dodged every attack. The effects were basically the same as if the figure were swinging a katana at close range. The cuts followed the blade's trajectory, so as long as Magical Daisy moved herself out of the way, she could dodge. They were all highly telegraphed.
"Daisy Beam! Daisy Beam! Daisy...Beeeam!"
She unleashed shot after shot, never aiming directly at her opponent. She directed each attack toward the ground, vaporizing the dirt and kicking up dust to block her foe's vision. Then she dashed forward into the thick clouds of dust that billowed in the air.
She could sense a presence. It was sticky and thick, not even trying to hide itself. A strike at her feet slithered along the ground. Back-stepping, she dodged and kicked low, but her attacker was pressed to the ground. Daisy meant to hit their temple with her toes, but instead, she scored a hit on their forehead—or rather, their forehead had blocked her kick. Her foot went numb. The figure then thrust a blade from below, aiming for her throat. Magical Daisy barely dodged, the blade cutting into her shoulder. She was too far away, and her opponent's katana prevented her from getting close.
Daisy dropped down and slid ahead, trying to take out their legs. Once the opponent fell, the two became entangled. The katana was knocked aside as the pair grabbed at each other's arms and legs, each grappling with an unseen enemy.
As she touched her opponent, she understood: This was a magical girl's body, and a toned one, at that. It belonged to someone who, like Daisy, had punished herself in training so that she would be able to fight someone and win.
Daisy grabbed the girl's sleeve and threw her. Just before the girl hit the ground, Daisy felt her legs being swept out from under her, and the pair collapsed in a heap.
"Ha-ha!" Her opponent barked out a laugh. Daisy bit one back.
Daisy struck with her elbows and fists and was paid back in kind with a strike to her knees. As her opponent's arm snaked around her neck, she kicked away to distance herself. All right, what's she going to do? And what's my next move? Heat coursed through her entire body. Slowly, the dust cloud faded, and then a sudden gust blew in, wafting the rest of it away. When the debris settled, only Magical Daisy remained.
"...Huh?" Had her opponent run away? Well, if they had, that was the best outcome. But still, Daisy was upset—or maybe just let down. She couldn't deny that she was unsatisfied. She'd enjoyed scuffling blind with a strange opponent, and she was sure they had as well.
"You're not the Musician."
Daisy spun around at a voice, but no one was there. She still had no clue what that fight was about. Most likely, she had faced another magical girl, but she couldn't be sure.
As her body released the intense heat of the fight, her mind cooled as well. Remembering her original objective, she looked toward the town.
Now a cloud of dust had whipped up in front of it. She could see silhouettes, and not just one or two. They moved furiously. There was a lone figure, surrounded by a hoard of white...skeletons. Someone was being forced to battle skeletons, just like Daisy. She reached out with her right hand and was just about to fire a killer Daisy Beam when she realized with a start what she was doing. Her target was quite far away. If she missed, it could be really bad.
"Augh! This sucks! Damn it!" she shouted, and she charged in.
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Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 5 |
[ POV: Pechka ]
The high-rise building was completely empty on the inside. Pechka could see no traces of it having been used as retail space or an office building, and no sign that it had been lived in as an apartment, either. There was truly nothing. There were only floors and rooms with broken glass windows that let the wind blow through.
She searched for clues as to where in the world she could be, but by the third building, she was disheartened. By the fifth building, she was distraught. And on the eighth building, she finally broke down. She was well aware of this, too. Pechka was not a strong-hearted girl. Clearing away the dust on the ground, she sat and leaned against a wall. All that would come out of her was a sigh.
She had no idea where she was. Monsters had attacked her, and the magical girl who had fought them off for her had almost killed her. And to top it off, her magical phone was totally broken. Her e-mail app wouldn't open, and she couldn't even make calls to notify the outside world of her distress.
Right now, the baffling message Magical candy: 0 was displayed on her screen. What was that? It certainly had a magical-girl ring to it. But she'd never heard the term before.
Pechka thought of Ninomiya. This was just an attempt to escape the real world. She couldn't even be sure this was reality, anyway, so she'd rather be thinking about Ninomiya. Had he eaten the boxed lunch she had given him? The food she created with her magic was really delicious. But maybe it hadn't been to his preference. Despite how reliably good her creations were, not everyone had the same sense of taste. And besides, he might have thrown it out without even trying it. Some people might think it would be dumb of him to eat a boxed lunch he received from some fan he'd never met before, not knowing what was inside. If Pechka were in Ninomiya's shoes, she wouldn't have wanted to eat it.
Oh, this is no use. Even thinking about Ninomiya caused her to spiral into negativity, even though he should have been her greatest source of happiness.
Pechka broke out into tears, sobbing soundlessly. She was worried that if she made any noise, those skeleton-like monsters might attack her again, so she allowed only her tears to come out. The droplets ran down her cheeks to her chin, where they splashed onto the arms that hugged her legs. When she wasn't transformed, plain Chika was a crybaby, but Pechka had never cried once. Still, now she cried and cried and cried until she was exhausted enough to nod off to sleep—until a tremor against her back jolted her awake again.
She opened her eyes and immediately pressed her right ear against the wall. There were footsteps. And the sound of...hooves? And talking. More than one person. There were others in here. Pechka removed her ear from the wall and started to make her way toward the sounds' origin, trying to keep as quiet as possible. Maybe this time she'd meet someone normal. Maybe they'd explain the situation and tell her what to do. Maybe they'd save her.
Of course, it was possible that wouldn't be the case. In fact, it was more than likely. Since Pechka had been brought to this place, she had yet to encounter anyone she could even have a proper conversation with, never mind determine whether they were friendly or not. If these people seemed normal, she'd try to chat with them. Otherwise, she'd run away before they found her. With that in mind, she crept silently toward the source of the footsteps. After every step, she waited thirty seconds before taking another. Sweat ran down her chin now where the tears had been before.
"I told you, didn't I?" That was Japanese. The intonation was a little weird in places, but Pechka could understand what the person was saying. At the very least, it seemed like someone she could communicate with. "I told you if we climbed a building, we could get a better view. Alors, Rionetta, you said—"
"Are you still cross I made that comment about twits and high places? Feeling miffed about that?"
"Oh, you think that made me angry? Non!"
"You two, stop fighting," came a third voice.
Pechka carefully peered through the doorway. The room she observed was missing the ceiling, making it the de facto roof. In it stood three figures. Not three people—three figures. Pechka had decided to talk to them if they seemed normal, but she halted right outside.
"This isn't a fight, non! It's a legitimate objection!" The girl with the strange intonation seemed fairly ordinary. She was wearing a costume based on a shrine maiden's outfit. Most likely, she was a magical girl just like Pechka. While her distinctly Japanese fashion didn't match her manner of speech, at the very least, she didn't look weird.
"This isn't a fight at all. Fighting is the sort of behavior done among equals."
That voice belonged to another individual, one who also appeared as a regular girl, though a little on the large side. Her Lolita fashion, with the bonnet and bloomers and all, might have passed for what a regular hobbyist would wear if it weren't a magical girl's costume. Her face was cute, but it seemed somehow fake. When Pechka noticed the girl's exposed armpits and wrists, her breath caught in her throat. The girl's skin was textured just like that of a human's, but her joints were all ball joints. It wasn't a human, but a doll. And it was talking.
And the third girl was even more shocking than the doll. She was also lovely, her clothes mostly purple and adorned with feather-like decorations and a big ribbon to add some flair. But then there was her lower half: a horse. Not that she was riding a horse—oh, no. It was as if someone had taken a horse, removed its head, and replaced it with the upper body of a human girl, just like the mythical centaur, or whatever it was called.
Were these figures monsters like the skeletons, or were they magical girls? Pechka couldn't decide, and that meant it was best to avoid them. Slowly, carefully, she began backing away. She had to leave before they noticed her. But after three steps back, their magical phones started ringing. The three girls took out their devices, which indicated to her that they were, in fact, magical girls, but at the same time, Pechka's phone rang. Startled, all three girls turned to her.
Pechka took off without sparing so much as a glance behind her.
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Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 6 |
[ POV: Magical Daisy ]
The maid Daisy had saved introduced herself as Nokko. She was dressed like a traditional maid, her platinum-blond hair tied up on both sides with ribbons, and she even had a mop in hand, decorated with the same ribbon. Age-wise, she appeared about ten years old and stood a head shorter than Daisy.
According to her, she became the magical girl Nokko at age four. At the time, her judgment had been severely underdeveloped, so when creating her magical-girl name, she'd thought they were asking for her real name and so answered cheerfully, "Nokko!" And thus she'd ended up stuck with that name. She had later submitted thirty requests for a name change, but every one was rejected. The Magical Kingdom's ruling was that, once decided, a magical girl's name could not be changed, barring extreme circumstances—even if the name was created by a four-year-old barely capable of making a sound decision.
Nokko seemed embarrassed as she told Daisy the origin of her name. As she related her story, with a mix of self-deprecation and complaint, she repeatedly played with the ribbons in her hair as she spoke. It was adorably innocent.
Daisy asked her, "Do you know where we are? Why we were brought here?"
"I have no idea," Nokko replied. "I was looking at my bank book, and then suddenly, I came here."
Daisy was curious as to why she would be reviewing her transactions in the middle of the night, but that was probably irrelevant. Confirming the date with Nokko, they found they were on the same page time-wise. Each of their incidents had occurred at the same time on the same day.
"Um...," Nokko began.
"Yes?"
"Are you the Magical Daisy?"
"Huh? Yeah, I am."
"Wow! You're just like on TV! Were the episodes based on real life?"
"Oh yeah. Some of it was exaggerated, though."
Nokko seemed to be a fan of Magical Daisy...or rather, magical girls in general. As her excitement rose, she started squealing. The most common reason anyone joined the ranks of magical girls was that they loved the anime and manga. In that sense, Daisy was the same. Her love had led her to this path herself. So she didn't find it surprising or suspicious that Nokko was a magical-girl fan.
But it made Daisy happy to meet a fan of the show in real life, and it made her even happier to see Nokko so overjoyed. Watching the young girl talk excitedly about what she remembered, the parts that had made her cry, her most hated villains, and the episodes she'd watched with sweaty hands clenched, she thought, I have to protect her.
"I was so excited for the reruns every week!" Nokko exclaimed.
"I was still in middle school during the original airing... Just how old was I when the rerun started?"
Was this how pop idols felt about their fans? Though Daisy was more like a retired pop idol now that the anime was over, but seeing Nokko's enthusiasm tugged at her heartstrings and gave her strength.
The two of them chatted excitedly for a while about their memories of Magical Daisy until the sound of their magical phones ringing brought them back to reality. They were in a strange, unknown land with skeletal remains scattered all about. On the screen was the message:
Please head to town.
They just never let up! Daisy grumbled in her head, but it looked like they had no choice but to obey. So she told Nokko about the apparent town she'd spotted from atop the building and suggested they head there in hopes that it might shed some light on their situation.
"I'll do my best to not get in the way," Nokko replied, blushing. Seeing her flushed face lifted Daisy's spirits.
It was quite a ways to the town, but with their magical-girl legs, it wasn't too much effort. Based on that battle with the skeletons, Daisy assumed Nokko wasn't much of a runner, or possibly not very confident in her physical abilities, so she refrained from going too fast, but even with that, they covered the twelve-odd miles to their destination in only about ten minutes.
The "town" was just what she'd seen from a distance: a town in name only, with none of the things necessary for an actual settlement. The buildings were in better shape than the dilapidated ones out in the wasteland, but the road showed no signs of maintenance. Clouds of dust floated through the empty streets. From their vantage point on the outside, there was no pedestrian traffic. After Daisy warned Nokko to stay close, they walked in together.
Upon entering the town, they encountered a wide-open area. It looked like the town square. In the center was an indentation carved out of stone with a mermaid statue sitting in it. It must have once been some kind of fountain, though the water was all dried up. In its place sat piles of sand, which spoke to the length of time it had gone without water. There were two people in the square.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" a strange voice shouted. One of the girls, her face red with excitement, pointed their way. "Are you for real? Are you the actual Magical Daisy?"
"Uh, yeah, I guess I am," Daisy replied.
"Wow! You're really the real deal? Cool!"
This had to be another magical girl. She was wearing quite the outlandish outfit: a helmet with a visor and a near-future-style full-body suit that clung to her frame. A gun sat in the holster at her waist, but it looked more like a toy ray gun than a real weapon. The entire costume screamed Defense force battling to protect Earth from monsters and aliens! Daisy had always loved to watch summer reruns of that stuff, and while she hadn't grown up during the first airings of those types of shows, it was familiar enough to instill a sense of nostalgia in her.
"Oh, I may not look it," said the girl, "but I'm sorta the nerdy otaku type. I watched Magical Daisy as it aired, and of course, I collected all the DVD sets, too. Oh, I'm so stoked! So pumped! I can't believe Magical Daisy is real!"
"May not look it"? Please. Everything about her screams "obsessed," thought Daisy. But that aside, it made her honestly happy to see a fan overjoyed.
"Meow-Meow! Meow-Meooow! Come here!" Apparently, the nerdy girl wasn't just imitating a cat. She was calling someone's name.
Cautiously, a girl in a costume resembling a cheongsam dress walked forward, her hair tied up in two buns. She looked like a Chinese stereotype, complete with an accent. "She you friend, Yumenoshima?" It was so cliché. But from her rear was growing a thick, monstrous, reptilian tail, giving her style an unbalanced sort of punch.
"Wait, Meow-Meow," said the first girl, "you don't know who Magical Daisy is? You must live under a rock."
"Oh, she famous? Pardon me, then."
"This isn't something I can pardon you for! This is common knowledge!"
The defense army–esque girl introduced herself as Genopsyko Yumenoshima, and the girl in Chinese fashion as @Meow-Meow. Those are both crazy names, Daisy thought, but she kept that to herself so as not to be rude. But...
"Those names are pretty weird," Nokko blurted.
"People say all the time," @Meow-Meow said.
"I was going for a strong impression," Genopsyko added. They both laughed, causing Daisy and Nokko to start giggling, too. Daisy considered scolding Nokko and telling her that it didn't matter what their names were, but the urge dissipated with one look at the younger girl.
Next, Nokko introduced herself and the story behind her name, which only elicited more laughter. Maybe the origin of her name and how she'd tried to change it afterward was just a funny story she told everyone.
The four of them sat in a circle on the lip of the mermaid-statue fountain.
It turned out that Genopsyko and @Meow-Meow were not longtime friends but had met after arriving here, just like Daisy and Nokko. They had experienced much the same thing: They both received a text in the middle of the night, and then suddenly they were in a wasteland, skeletons closing in.
"Oh yeah, and we also meet other magical girls," said @Meow-Meow. "Seems they in same boat." She explained that a group of girls had already passed through town.
"Where did they go?" asked Daisy.
"They finish business here, then go."
"They wouldn't tell us what they were here for," added Genopsyko. "Pretty shady. Magical girls play as dirty as you'd expect."
"I said no good to be separated. But they have own plans, so they leave fast."
According to @Meow-Meow, there had been four magical girls in total: one who looked like a doll, another like a shrine maiden, one with the lower body of a horse, and an unconscious fourth tied to her back with loops of clear string.
"Huh?" said Daisy. "Shouldn't you have done something?"
Genopsyko explained, "They said she was tied up to prevent her from crying, going berserk, or running away and getting into trouble."
"We talk to them, and they no seem like bad people."
Daisy was in no position to worry about others, but this still concerned her. There was no guarantee their strange circumstances wouldn't cause someone to panic and end up hurting another... She'd nearly done the same earlier.
"They said there more magical girls here," said @Meow-Meow.
"Apparently, they also came here, finished their business, and left, but I have no idea what's going on... Huh?" Before Genopsyko could finish her sentence, she froze, mouth still agape. She stared at the screen of the device in her right hand, the light reflecting off her visor. "We got a message! Everyone, hurry up and turn on your phones!"
The message that had been on the screen before, Please head to town, was gone. Now their phones read Support commands added.
"Support commands?" Daisy wondered. The word Support was clickable. She tapped it with her fingertip.
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Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 7 |
[ MASTER SIDE #1 ]
The classroom was wreathed in flames.
The ancient wooden building didn't have any fire sprinklers installed, as it should have, and there was more than enough fuel. Fire spread from desks to chairs, bookcases to wallpaper, as window frames and glass melted and ran in the heat. The red of the flames illuminated everything, poisonous black smoke filling the air.
In the middle of it all stood two girls, their presence clashing with the hellish scene. They stared each other down.
One girl was red. Her hair was crimson, her dress the same color as the flames, and her expression one of blazing rage and passion, distorting her fundamentally statuesque face into something beastly. The girl held both fists in front of her, lightly clenched, crouching and ready in a low stance.
The other girl was white. She wore a snowy sailor blouse and skirt, resembling a school uniform, and an old cloth bag hung from her waist. Her hands held a naginata-like pole arm at the ready. In contrast to the all-out fury surrounding the red girl, the white girl's face was completely impassive.
The red girl moved first. Crouching even deeper into her low stance, she appeared to glide across the ground as she stepped forward to kick low from just outside the naginata's range. The strike was probably a feint, a fake, or a distraction. The white girl blocked it with the handle of her weapon as if she'd known exactly what was coming.
The red girl followed up with a second, then a third strike, but she couldn't even break into the weapon's range. On her fourth strike, the naginata grazed her, cutting open her foot, which spurted out blood. The red girl let out a sharp cry and then spewed flame from her mouth. This attack was supposed to have shocked the white girl, but she remained emotionless as she spun her blade, extinguishing the human-sized fireball in one swing. Her thin, feminine arms easily wielded the three-foot-long, heavy-looking pole arm like it was a part of her body.
The red girl shouted something and threw herself backward into the flames, then disappeared. A moment later, the fire behind the white girl grew, transforming into the red girl. But the second before she could unleash a devastating roundhouse kick to the back of her opponent's defenseless head, the white girl ducked without so much as a glance—as if she knew exactly what was coming. A whiplike crack echoed as the fiery girl's leg tore through empty air. The red girl quickly withdrew into the flames, as if melting into them.
The white girl's expression hadn't changed once since the fight's beginning. Holding the blade in one hand, she flipped it around and then stabbed it into the classroom floor. She reached inside the bag hanging from her waist and removed an object. The light of the flames illuminated the gray body of a commercial fire extinguisher, an object much larger than the bag she'd produced it from. She removed the pin and aimed the nozzle at the flames spreading across the ceiling—at about a forty-five degree angle right above the teacher's desk—and unleashed the coolant fluid.
Something fell from the ceiling, screaming silently, holding its head as it writhed in agony. That something was the crimson girl. Her red clothes, her fiery hair—everything was covered in white foam. Saliva and tears streamed down her face while she writhed in pain.
The white girl calmly approached, raised the big fire extinguisher, and then struck her opponent with it. Five more times she pummeled her, until the red girl moved no more. The victor tossed the fire extinguisher to the side and looked down at her foe. The white girl's expression was just as it had been the moment the battle ended—blank.
The video ended there.
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Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 8 |
She moved the cursor, closing the video player and browser with a few clicks, then shut down the computer. With the computer off, the one source of light in the room was gone, leaving only darkness, the smell of mold, and the voices.
"And so the villain was apprehended... Man, Snow White's sooo cool," came a satisfied-sounding female voice. She sounded like she was in her midteens. "Flame Flamey was a real powerful fighter, too, but up against Snow White, she was like a liiittle kid. The way Snow White moved, it was like she knew exaaactly where that girl was going! Nghhh!" The noise resembled a sob, but her voice was full of joy. "She's reeeally cool! She's totally merciless about hunting evil magical girls! Flamey deserved that for manipulating them into killing each other based on her twisted belief that only the strong deserve those powers! Snow White is strong, kind, and righteous! Hiyah! Hah!"
There was the sound of something clattering to the floor. "But, like, don't you think it's weird to require magical girls to be strong?" the girl went on. "Magical girls are supposed to, y'know, be kind and lovely, and care about things like compassion, friendship, and sincerity and stuff like that!"
"Yes. Perhaps, pon. Nothing wrong with being strong, though." The voice that replied to the girl was high-pitched and childlike, yet its tone was flat and calm.
"I know, right? My teacher said the same thing! Strength isn't all that makes you a magical girl. We don't need people who just want power. It's unacceptable for them to be inciting battle royals, and we can't have magical girls chosen by those deadly competitions, either." She spoke feverishly.
"That's why I'm gonna help Snow White!" she concluded.
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Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 9 |
[ POV: Magical Daisy ]
A flourish of trumpets rang out from Genopsyko's magical phone as its screen glowed with all the colors of the rainbow. She dropped the phone, and it skittered across the base of the fountain to smack into the mermaid statue, where it stopped, screen side up. A band of light expanded out of the screen and condensed to form an image: a symmetrical spheroid, its right half black, the left half white. It floated lightly in the air, a butterfly-like wing sprouting from one side. The translucent orb hovered there, illuminating the billowing cloud of sand with its light. It was a hologram.
"Hello, good day, and good evening to all you magical girls! This is Fal, appointed mascot of Magical Girl Raising Project, pon!" The high-pitched, synthetic voice was childlike, and yet mysteriously sickening. Daisy's expression soured. Genopsyko, @Meow-Meow, and Nokko all watched her.
Fighting the urge to throw up, Daisy addressed the hologram that had introduced itself as Fal. "What is this? What is going on?"
"Magical Girl Raising Project is a next-gen social network game used as a training simulator for magical girls on active duty, and also for testing candidates, pon. The experience you gain here in this virtual space will be directly relayed to your physical bodies, pon. You were all selected through impartial lottery to be test players, pon."
"Virtual space? This isn't the real world?" asked Daisy.
"Exactly! The Magical Trace System–based controls feel just like reality! Plus, there's the gorgeous, hyperrealistic graphics. Those are the two big draws of Magical Girl Raising Project, pon."
"Is this really a game?"
"It is, pon. Fal wouldn't lie, pon."
"It's not magic?"
"It's a game created by magic, pon."
Magical Daisy tried to act calm, but inside, she was shaken. Though Fal had explicitly claimed that this was a game, everything seemed so real, despite the strangeness of the scenery. The smell of dust and mold in the dilapidated buildings, the unrelenting sunlight, the sensation of impact when she'd hit the skeletons, the solid feeling of the ground she was standing on—it all screamed "real." But only in a game could skeletons rise from the ground, and only in a game could there exist an endless desert dotted with identical crumbling buildings standing at uniform intervals.
"I didn't hear anything about this!" yelled Genopsyko. "No one even asked if I wanted to participate! Don't you dare give me that, you furry creep!"
"This sort of causes problems for us...," said Nokko. The two of them drew closer to the magical phone. Unfortunately, they were still speaking to a hologram, so they couldn't even grab it by the collar. Not that it had a collar to grab.
But their anger was understandable. You couldn't just spirit someone away without their consent, force them to fight skeletons, then order them to find some town and expect them to accept all of it without grumbling.
"Now, now. Please calm down and listen, pon." Despite the advancing hostility, the mascot, as it had introduced himself, was calm. Its expression hadn't changed—rather, there had been none to begin with.
Daisy's old partner, Palette, had been a small, boisterous fairy with a wide range of emotions.
They're so different, even though they're both mascots, thought Daisy.
"Time is compressed here, so this won't cause difficulty in your day-to-day lives," said Fal. "At this point, we'd like you to spend three straight days participating in the game. But that will only be a moment in the real world, pon. You might have already realized this, but you can all use your magic here, just like in reality, pon. And none of this is dangerous in the least, pon. There are no healing spells, extra lives, or save points, so if you get a game over, you're done, but there will be no damage to your real body, so it's completely safe, pon."
"I get how it works," said Daisy, "but why were we forced to participate? We weren't even asked."
"Well, I'm sure you're all familiar with how unreasonable the Magical Kingdom can be, pon. Or perhaps the reason is that magic itself is the embodiment of irrationality. It's possible that nonconsenting participation is the trigger or key or something, pon."
Whether it knew their thoughts on the matter or not, Fal continued. "Ultimately, this is an official test from the Magical Kingdom, so there's absolutely nothing to worry about, pon. The rewards for completion are very generous, and even the participation awards are pretty great. If you can be our test players and help us figure out the bugs, future candidates will owe you a great debt, pon. This game is still a secret, though, so talking about it to anyone but your fellow players is forbidden, pon... But keeping secrets is part and parcel of being a magical girl, so it'll be easy for you, pon. And so, will you participate, pon? Everyone else has already started, pon."
Fal was looking at Magical Daisy. Genopsyko, @Meow-Meow, and Nokko all had their eyes on her, too. Daisy glanced at Nokko, feeling she had to keep her safe.
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Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 10 |
[ POV: Pechka ]
Pechka was still confused, but she was locked into playing the game. She personally had a ton of things she'd rather do than train or pave the way for future candidates, and she didn't find the reasons she'd been brought to this game in the first place to be particularly convincing. She wanted to apologize and bow out, but the other three had different plans.
"I don't appreciate such forceful measures," said the doll girl, "but if it's the Magical Kingdom's work, then I suppose there's nothing to be done. It seems interesting, at least, so I shall accept."
"It would be magnifique if this reward is real!" enthused the shrine maiden.
"Yeah," the half-animal one agreed.
"The reward does sound quite splendid," agreed the doll girl, "but this doesn't really feel like something the Magical Kingdom would do."
"But it's so fantastique! With ten billion yen cash, you could live the magical-girl vie luxe!"
"What a narrow-minded plan for your life."
With the others like this, Pechka didn't want to be the only one to stand up and say she wouldn't participate. Just like any other plain, introverted middle school girl, she was good at reading the social situation. So she laughed a little and nodded, a vague smile on her lips.
"Now then," said Fal, "you need to form a party, pon. You can have up to four people, pon. Forming a party will allow you to use items that afford all kinds of benefits, pon. Once you install the map app, it will display the locations of your members, and you only need to carry one copy of the items you use as a party, pon."
The four of them exchanged looks, and after a few moments, all eyes ended up on Pechka. Somehow or other, she knew what was on their minds. They were likely thinking, I don't wanna party up with a weak-looking, clearly useless chicken.
"If you don't mind, would it be possible for you to tell us your magical ability?" the doll girl asked her.
"Yeah, I am très curieuse about that."
They weren't just thinking she was no good. They'd gone and said it.
"Uh, I can make delicious food...if I have just five minutes..."
The other girls exchanged looks. Pechka knew what that meant, and it hurt. She could sense the silent messages passing between them, right over her head: What do we do with that? She's clearly useless. Maybe we should just leave her here.
"Err...it is possible to change party members during the game, pon. You can add, drop, and swap to suit the situation, pon."
The three girls' eyes locked. The centaur girl nodded. And that was how the four of them became a party. Pechka was fed up with how obviously they were flaunting their opinions.
Two hours passed. In the end, the three girls treated Pechka like any classroom outcast. She was just an extra body to be tossed aside once an actually useful magical girl came along. She sat on the sidelines like a child exempt from gym class as they battled the skeletons. Neither her cooking magic nor her cowardly personality were made for fighting.
The magical shrine maiden was named Nonako Miyokata. The yin-yang ornaments in her hair, deep-slitted red hakama pants, and ancient Japanese-style name made her motif obvious, but something about her personality clashed with her pure Japanese aesthetic. It was a little fishy.
"Girls magiques are cool! Cute! Strong! This is common knowledge, in my country." From the words she used and her intonation, the sort you'd never hear from a native speaker, Pechka guessed she was a foreigner, perhaps one attempting to be more Japanese than even a native.
She'd proudly told them of her ability to control familiars, but her ability was limited to living creatures. Unable to befriend the skeletons, she kicked and punched them instead.
The doll girl's name was Rionetta. She wasn't like a doll, or resembling a doll—she actually was a doll. Her long ribbons dancing in the wind, the ends of her skirt flipping about, her bonnet fluttering with every move as she fought, she seemed to be the picture of a Lolita warrior. But upon closer observation, Pechka could tell that her movements, joints, and expressions were all fake.
She and Nonako Miyokata seemed to be on bad terms and would often butt heads. Her manner of speech was generally refined, but she had a sharp tongue. She was full of jabs and sarcasm. Pechka didn't like her type.
Her magical ability gave her control over dolls, but none of those were around, so she was always in hand-to-hand combat, just like Nonako Miyokata. Her ball joints allowed her to attack at angles impossible for a human, striking sharp and deep from her opponents' blind spots...though whether skeletons had blind spots at all was a mystery.
The centaur girl was named Clantail. She wasn't exactly a centaur, though—more accurately, she could replace her lower body with that of any beast. She'd transform into an alligator and smash the skeletons with her tail, or turn into a horse and grind them to dust with her hooves, choosing the best form for any given situation. Most often, she would revert to a pony, deer, or some other kind of relatively small four-legged animal.
Clantail was also a lot kinder than Pechka had first assumed. It had barely been a day since they'd met in the game, but Clantail had clearly settled in as leader of the three. Watching her break up all of Nonako Miyokata and Rionetta's disputes, Pechka thought, That looks tough. Clantail never complained and rarely spoke at all, which added to such an impression.
The three girls fought with some space between them so as not to get in one another's way, striking down skeleton after skeleton. Muscles straining, hair dancing in the wind, white skin flashing from beneath their costumes, there was an ephemerality to them, as if they would disappear if someone touched them. Yet there was also a sensuality within them that made you want to do it anyway. Just watching was enough to make Pechka sigh. Their faces were diverse, but they were all perfectly arranged, with perfect features.
Pechka hugged her legs tighter. What she had wanted more than anything was the beauty of a magical girl. She'd believed that if she could be cute and beautiful, her world would change. She could even give Ninomiya a homemade lunch. And Chika really had changed after becoming a magical girl. Where before, she'd been intensely introverted, now, when she was Pechka—and even when she wasn't—she had been able to act more assertively. But that boldness was born from a sense of superiority and the belief that she was beautiful and special.
But here, she was just another magical girl. Among these others, her looks were average. With her ego popped, all the assertiveness had spilled out of her. Who she was at the core hadn't changed at all. She felt like she'd returned to being the girl who hid in the corner of her middle school classroom. Without anything to hold her up, all that was left was her timid nature. She couldn't fight or object to participating in the game and merely sat in a sort of limbo, watching as the others fought.
While Pechka had been busy picking at her own flaws, tormenting herself over her powerlessness, and otherwise generally moping, the fight had ended. The many dozens of skeleton bodies burst into white dust and faded into the wind.
"It seems my hunch was correct. There are lots of skeletons ici."
"Are you trying to take the credit?" demanded Rionetta.
"Ha-ha-ha-ha! Credit certainly doesn't go to la personne who couldn't think of it."
"How much candy do we have?" Clantail's interruption brought their argument to a temporary halt. Nonako and Rionetta took out their phones to check.
"J'ai seventeen."
"I've got fifteen."
"And I have twenty-eight. How about you, Pechka?" Clantail asked her.
They all turned to her, and Pechka instinctively shrank back. Nearly dropping her phone as she took it out, she somehow managed to bring up the status screen. "Still zero..." The number displaying the magical candy in her possession hadn't changed.
"I wonder what this means?" asked Nonako.
"It would seem that we do receive candy for defeating monsters," said Rionetta, "but there's quite a lot of variation in amount. Apparently, we don't all receive the same amount for being in a party."
At the bottom of the status screen for the party were three names: Clantail, Nonako Miyokata, and Rionetta.
Clantail seemed to be thinking. "Maybe only the person who strikes the finishing blow receives the candy."
"Yeah, it looks that way from the numbers, t'sais?"
"So she who doesn't work shall not eat, then?" Rionetta glanced at Pechka, and she shrank back again.
Clantail put a hand to her chin and pondered some more. "The phones have a transfer function. We should redistribute the candy after each battle."
"Whatever for?" Rionetta protested. "Those who work should get more, should they not? That gives value to the work. Marxism is a relic of the past."
"Maybe that's best when we're fighting hordes of small fry like these," said Clantail. "But when there's fewer enemies, nobody will benefit if we fight among ourselves over the kill."
Rionetta scowled. Pechka could understand Clantail's logic. In RPGs, when big, strong enemies appeared, they would either be solo or in a small party. If they fought over who would strike the finishing blow, the strength of the enemy could turn it into more than a mere hassle.
"Mademoiselle Greedy just needs to watch herself."
"You be silent."
"Um...I was just...watching, so I don't need..." Pechka trailed off.
"In that case, fight next time," said Clantail.
Pechka shrank back even farther. She wished she could just disappear.
Fal had told them that for now, they would be logged in to the game for three days in game time, one moment in the real world. Then they would spend three days in real-world time before logging in again. This cycle would continue until someone completed the game. In other words, their situation would continue for at least three days. A dull ache settled in Pechka's stomach.
"Rionetta, are you fine with this?" asked Clantail.
Rionetta seemed quite reluctant, but she nodded. "Good grief. I'm not going to be saving up any candy like this. I need to find a hunting ground."
A hunting ground. That wasn't a phrase you heard every day. Pechka assumed she was talking about a place where monsters spawned or something. A beep came from Rionetta's magical phone as the image of a black-and-white sphere rose from its screen. She must have pressed the HELP button.
"Is something the matter, pon?" Fal asked.
"Do these monsters respawn?" Rionetta asked. "It's a pain to go looking for a new hunting ground."
"The monsters will respawn every morning, pon."
"I see. Another question, then. How much candy must we save until the next level? Isn't that typically something one sees in RPGs?"
"Level?" Fal's expression was as blank as always, but the tone communicated the message clearly. The creature seemed to be thinking, Why are you asking me that? "There are no levels in this game, pon."
"Huh?"
"Candy is an item you use at the shop, pon. It is the currency of this world, pon. Well, you may need it for things besides the shop, but for now it's meant for the shop, pon. Oh, and using real money is strictly forbidden, pon."
"A shop? I don't see..."
"Huh? It's in the middle of town. You haven't noticed it, pon?"
Pechka, Nonako, Rionetta, and Clantail all exchanged glances.
"There are lots of useful items for sale," Fal explained, "so do please be sure to use it, pon. Oh, and the grasslands area is now unlocked. Feel free to progress forward, pon."
"An area has been unlocked? Whatever does that mean?" asked Rionetta.
"It means other players have completed the quest needed to unlock the gate to the next area, pon. But there are still rewards for those quests, so you should definitely try to complete them—" Fal's voice cut out. Rionetta had closed the HELP menu.
So the other players were making progress. They, on the other hand, hadn't even figured out that there was a shop in town or that magical candy was the accepted currency there. Never mind Pechka and her reluctance—now the other three were seeming anxious, too.
"For now, let's go back to town. We'll check the location of that shop and then head for the grasslands," Clantail said, and they all nodded.
|
Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 11 |
[ POV: Shadow Gale ]
The nurse in black, Shadow Gale, twirled the wrench in her right hand and the scissors in her left before dropping them both into the holsters at her waist. She couldn't help but laugh at herself for doing something so cliché, even in such a strange situation. She put a hand to her chin to wipe away the sweat, but there wasn't any.
The battle has ended.
The physical abilities of magical girls surpassed those of any other living thing. Those who couldn't use their magic in battle, like Shadow Gale, were still capable of putting up a good fight. But she'd still never had any opportunities to use her enhanced physical abilities in real life, so it was shocking to her that just now, she had been able to fight without freezing up or even trembling. Shadow Gale knew better than anyone that she had no real fighting experience. Perhaps it was only the monstrosity of her enemies that enabled her to smash and slice them without mercy. Strange red human bones lay all around her.
"In the end, skeletons are just skeletons... A new color doesn't make them any stronger. They're no worthy foes for the superheroine Masked Wonder," a masked magical girl murmured with her right arm raised, left arm bent in front of her chest, and legs braced wide in a victory pose.
Shadow Gale had accompanied Masked Wonder since they'd first met at the start of the game, but she still didn't know what those victory poses of hers meant. "Um...are you all right?" she asked worriedly. There was a big bump on the back of Masked Wonder's head as she posed crisply. It glowed bright red and looked terribly painful.
"The Masked Wonder would never fall to such measly wounds! ...It does kinda hurt, though."
"But I never saw anything hit you. Do you know how you got that bump?" The question came from a girl in a wheelchair—but her expression didn't seem concerned at all. The girl's head and arms were covered in so many bandages, it begged the question of what had happened to her.
"I was throwing a rock at one of the skeletons when one hit me like bam! I didn't think any of them were behind me, though..."
"That may be due to some special ability. We should consider purchasing the monster encyclopedia in the grasslands shop, though it's quite expensive. We should have the funds soon with these monsters around," the girl in the wheelchair said, and then she urged them to check their phones.
When Shadow Gale took out her phone, she saw she had fifty-six pieces.
"Eighty-seven?!" Masked Wonder shouted with surprise. Somehow, despite (possibly) handicapping herself by striking a pose after every downed enemy, she'd defeated more than Shadow Gale. "This should be enough to buy a whole lot at the shop!"
"Wow," said Shadow Gale. "That's way more than the white ones give, isn't it?"
"And this is only after shifting from the wasteland to the grasslands. The enemies here aren't even that much stronger. We're definitely going to have to prioritize opening up new areas," Pfle, the girl in the wheelchair, muttered as if to herself and then nodded. "Bring out the map. We're going back to the grasslands town." She set off on her wheelchair, not even bothering to say "Follow me" or "Let's go together." Shadow Gale and Masked Wonder hurried to catch up.
Pfle was strong-willed. She hadn't changed one bit since she and Shadow Gale had paired up in the real world. She was the kind of self-centered person who believed her own ideas would benefit others, so naturally, they should obey her. She was arrogant and did whatever she wanted.
And wherever Kanoe Hitokouji was, you'd find Mamori Totoyama. That was still true even now that they were magical girls. Ever since Mamori Totoyama had become Shadow Gale and Kanoe Hitokouji had become Pfle, Shadow Gale had continued to follow the girl and guard her back.
But Mamori would swear on her honor that she did not respect, love, or depend on her.
Kanoe took it for granted that she was above everyone else, toyed sadistically with her prey before finishing it, and thought anyone outside of her own family was no better than cattle, slaves, protozoa, or algae. In spite of this, she sincerely believed herself to be graceful, kind, and deserving of others' love. And in her mind, others did love her.
Mamori was closer to Kanoe than anyone else, and even she thought, Wow, she's such a jerk. Mamori was sick of it. But even so, she had to stick by Kanoe's side.
The Hitokouji family was a long and unbroken lineage of the ultrarich. For generations, they had amassed, consumed, fattened, and bloated themselves like a clan of monsters. They'd spent more money on their rock garden than the average office worker made in a lifetime. Their mansion was the size of an entire town, and so the area as a whole was named Hitokouji. Even the train stations and bus stops were labeled HITOKOUJI ESTATE. Once, a naughty kid had thrown a rock at Kanoe. The next day, his family had moved far, far away.
And the Totoyama family had served the Hitokoujis for generations. Mamori's parents had even told her that they'd named her Mamori, meaning "protection" in Japanese, so as to ensure she would be able to protect the young mistress. Her very existence was defined by this, and she'd stood behind Kanoe as her servant since before she could remember. If Mamori kicked up a fuss, the adults would get angry at her.
Standing behind Kanoe, Mamori was forced to hear all the praise aimed at her charge. About 60 percent of this was flattery and sycophancy from people attempting to curry favor with the Hitokouji family, while about 40 percent was legitimate. Even among her peers at the rich girls' school she attended, Kanoe dominated both academically and athletically. However, she bored easily, so she never stuck with one sport for long. The proportions of her body were nearly perfect, and her looks were so eye-catching, eight out of ten people would turn around to stare. And through kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, and high school, Kanoe had been the center of everything.
This had made Mamori uncooperative and rebellious at times. But she'd been instructed from a very young age that it was natural for her to serve the Hitokouji family. As she learned more about the world, her view of her parents and herself had become quite cynical.
None of this changed when they became magical girls. Pfle would give orders and Shadow Gale would obey with a tired sigh and a muffled "Yeah, yeah."
Upon getting sucked into the game, Pfle's first order was for Shadow Gale to wrap bandages around her. As Shadow Gale's costume motif was a nurse's outfit, she did carry bandages on her person.
"There are two sorts of magical girls: those who fight and those who don't," said Pfle, looking like she'd been severely injured, even though she wasn't hurt at all. Obviously, the wheelchair, a part of her magical-girl motif, helped in this role. "Those who fight are suited to dirty work. I want people like that near me in case anything happens, since neither of us has the skills for violence."
"So what does that have to do with the bandages?" asked Shadow Gale.
"These girls have an instinctual need to protect the weak. So naturally, they'll feel empathy for the injured, sick, children, elderly, and pregnant women."
Shadow Gale had been completely confused when the skeletons attacked, but Pfle, in comparison, had apparently already considered their future needs. Maybe that was just because defeating monsters, collecting items, and heading to town was such basic RPG fare. Pfle had been using her magic phone earlier, and she'd investigated a lot back at those broken-down buildings, so maybe there had been some hint back there.
Wasn't this a game? Assuming it was, that meant there were other players here, too, right? And if so, then wouldn't they also be magical girls? So wouldn't that suggest the other players weren't opponents to fight? Most likely, that was why Pfle had wanted to be wrapped in bandages and play injured. She was hoping to lure in the magical girls who would fight for such lofty ideals as protecting the weak.
But this was just Shadow Gale's post hoc analysis of events. Pfle wasn't the considerate type who explained her ideas and actions in thorough detail. The theory was largely guesswork, but it was based on years of knowing the girl and understanding her total willingness to take advantage of others' goodwill.
And her plan had already landed one sucker.
Masked Wonder looked like she jumped straight out of an American superhero comic, from her skintight suit and purple cape to the black mask that revealed only her blue eyes and golden hair sparkling in the sun. Her boisterous voice, voluptuous body, and most of all, her penchant for flashy entrances screamed "American," too.
"I am the avatar of justice, here to punish evil! Be you friend or foe?!"
Shadow Gale had been pushing Pfle's wheelchair, as ordered, when they heard the shout from atop a building. Looking up, they saw someone jump down and land, knees bent and raising dust from the impact. Then she lifted her right arm, bent her left across her chest, braced her legs wide, and shouted, "I am the Masked Wonder! A magical girl, the embodiment of justice!"
Shadow Gale didn't even realize it had been a self-introduction until Pfle greeted Masked Wonder in return as if it were nothing at all. "I'm Pfle, and this is Shadow Gale. It's good to meet you, Masked Wonder."
"You seem to be hurt," said Masked Wonder. "Did the skeletons get you?"
"Is that why you called out to us? My, how kind. Thank you very much."
"No need to thank me. A superheroine always helps people in need." Masked Wonder, with her natural urge to offer aid, had come forth to provide her protection, fulfilling Pfle's first objective.
The world just makes things so easy for the evil, mused Shadow Gale.
Later, once they made it to the town, they formed a party, completed the quest, unlocked the gate to the next area, and progressed to the grasslands. There, thanks to Pfle, they managed to quickly complete the quite possibly deliberately obnoxious quest of exploring the vast grasslands from corner to corner. As became apparent, Pfle's power lay in her magical wheelchair. Thanks to it, she could travel fast enough to create shock waves and sonic booms. This cut down massively on the time they needed for the exploration quest, allowing her to complete in only twenty minutes a journey that would have normally taken hours.
While Pfle was busy doing that, Shadow Gale and Masked Wonder had traversed the wasteland to grind some magical candy. Shadow Gale could only speculate as to what Masked Wonder might think, seeing the supposedly injured Pfle rocket away, leaving only a cloud of dust in her wake.
"Wonderful to see her with so much energy," Masked Wonder simply commented. Apparently, she saw it as a good thing.
|
Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 12 |
[ POV: Magical Daisy ]
Magical candy functioned as currency in this game, and it was obtained by defeating monsters. In other words, this reward was the whole point of going out to try to beat monsters. So for now, if nothing else, they should be trying to collect more candy, because that was guaranteed to be useful to them. That was how Fal had explained it.
Nokko had echoed Daisy's feeling that the term "magical candy" sounded familiar. When they asked Fal about that, too, Fal had replied, "It's from another testing ground, pon. During that test, magical girls would receive candy by performing their duties to help people. They'd receive more or less depending on the scale of the deed and the amount of gratitude felt. Basically, it was a measurement of their efforts. A numerical representation of their good deeds, pon."
Fal went on to tell them that it had been a robotic, calculating system, devoid of any feelings or community spirit, and it was only thanks to the vehement opposition of certain influential figures that it had been rejected in the testing phase. Only the name was back in its new incarnation.
After that explanation, Magical Daisy thought the story did sound familiar.
The shop in town was empty, just like the rest of the game world. All that was displayed within was a menu listing various recovery items and rations. Daisy pressed the HELP button to call for Fal. "What is this special pass?" she asked. "It says they're selling it for five magical candies."
"You'll need that to cross into other areas, pon," Fal told them. "You only need one per party, pon. The effects of one pass last until morning the next day, pon."
"So I'll buy one, then... Everyone okay with that?" The other three nodded, and Daisy pointed at the menu. "All right, one pass and...rations?"
"Hunger levels are one of the hidden parameters in this game, pon. Even magical girls need to eat, pon. So please, be sure to eat enough not to starve, pon."
That reminded her how hungry she was. It must have been hours since she'd first entered the game realm. The lack of a clock and the unnatural, unchanging temperature threw off her sense of time.
"And what is this R?" Daisy asked. Most of the items had prosaic names, such as Great Recovery Potion, Small Recovery Potion, or Ration—names that made it obvious from a glance what the item's effects were. But among them was an anomaly simply labeled R. The mysterious name wasn't the only oddity—it was way more expensive than all the other items. The rations were one candy each, and the great recovery potions were twenty, but this item cost one hundred candy.
"Selecting this will grant you a random item, pon. You could even get a crazy rare item, pon."
"Oh!" Someone made a funny squeal. Daisy looked over to see it was Genopsyko. "I knew it. In games like this, you've gotta have a random element!"
"That something to be so happy about?" asked @Meow-Meow.
"Just imagine!" Genopsyko gushed. "Rolling the dice over and over, never getting the item you want, and before you know it, you're living the dream: debt! And then soon enough, the collectors are even calling your workplace..."
"That no sound good at all."
"You just don't get it, do you? That's what makes it so great! Oh, my collector's soul is on fire!"
"But...we don't have enough candy," said Nokko. And she was right—they didn't have nearly enough. All four of them together had a total of twenty candies, eighty short of purchasing R.
"Hmm, that's too bad," said Genopsyko. "But this sort of thing is what makes games so fun."
"There's currently a grand opening sale, pon. The first roll is only ten pieces, pon."
Daisy could swear she saw a glimmer beneath Genopsyko's dark visor. "Let's do it! Let's do it! We gotta do it! C'mon do it, do it now!"
"But it better to buy potion and ration, yes?" said @Meow-Meow.
"We can just buy it with what we have left! It's ninety percent off! We're clearly gonna lose out if we don't do this now!"
Eventually succumbing to Genopsyko's insistence, they bought one R and ended up rolling a map. This was an application that modified a magical phone's map to display the area's towns, its owner's current location, and even party member locations if you registered them. Genopsyko proudly puffed out her chest and said, "See? We got a useful item. Good thing we took the gamble, right?"
@Meow-Meow offered the cautious suggestion that they gather more information. Genopsyko boldly exclaimed that she wanted to explore the new area. And Nokko would blindly follow anything Daisy said. Ultimately, Magical Daisy concluded that they should check out the grasslands.
Now that it was settled that they were all participating, Daisy had somehow ended up as the acting leader of their group. She didn't mind having people rely on her, but it'd been a while since people had depended on her. Perhaps she was more excited about this than she had initially realized. She felt they should be careful as they progressed, but there was no guarantee that staying in the wasteland would be beneficial to them. Now that Magical Daisy was in this game and leading a party, she'd like to win, if they could, which meant they needed to catch up to the others who had come by earlier.
Along the road, they fended off sporadic skeleton attacks, using the map in their phones to progress. Eventually, they found their way blocked by an ancient wooden gate, similar in construction to an Edo-period-style checkpoint, sitting between steep peaks. Once they passed through, the wasteland transformed into grasslands. Ankle-high grass rustled and swayed in the wind. The bright field of green stretched out all the way to the horizon, much easier on the eyes than the endless buildings and dirt of the wasteland. The sunshine seemed considerably gentler, too. They were no longer burning up.
"I guess vast open spaces is the common theme." Genopsyko bent forward, put a hand to her visor, and surveyed the land around them. It was all flat, save for the gate behind her. This area had a more pleasant view, but it could get boring, too, if they were stuck there for a long time.
"I wonder if there's another town like before..." Nokko brought up the map on her magical phone.
"A town would be nice, but in games like this, what we really need is a spot to farm candy." Genopsyko threw out a couple of quick jabs, as if she was shadowboxing.
"They say we have to complete quest for area gate to open. What we do about that? Fal say quest give candy, too." @Meow-Meow bent down, seemingly observing the grass.
They were all good ideas, which gave Daisy pause. A place to farm was important. Magical Daisy had essentially banned herself from any violence, so the skeletons were the perfect target to unleash her pent-up frustrations on, even if they were pretty weak enemies. The nice part about games was that you could use lethal force with no ethical repercussions.
The main quest was important, too. They'd need to progress into more areas in order to fight stronger enemies, and of course, to complete the game first, they needed to progress the fastest. That was generally how things worked in video games. Thus, the question Daisy asked herself boiled down to whether they should fight or not.
Fighting's fun, after all... In a game, you didn't have to feel any reservations about doing things that would otherwise be taboo. And she wanted to do those things.
"All right, let's head for the town first," said Daisy. "If we go there, we might be able to dig up some information or hints on the area quest, or even something about a good place to farm."
As they progressed through new areas, the parts they'd already covered appeared on the map, allowing them to head straight to town. I see! How convenient, Daisy mused. Genopsyko's insistence had been worth it, then. All right, let's cross the grasslands and head to the town.
They started walking, but within five minutes, a hindrance appeared.
"Whoa, they're red!" said Genopsyko.
"Eugh." Nokko grimaced. "Kinda creepy."
They must have hit a spawn area. Hordes of skeletons were crawling up out of the ground. What's more, unlike the pure white ones from the wasteland, these were covered in brilliant red.
"Skeleton mark two, huh?" said @Meow-Meow.
"So they're just doing a palette-swap to cut down on the work, huh?" Genopsyko griped. "That's a pretty cheap technique for a magical game."
"Everyone, stay alert," said Daisy. "We're in a new area, so the enemies may have gotten stronger. Don't judge a book by its cover. Fight with all you have!"
Genopsyko dropped her visor, @Meow-Meow raised her leg and struck a kung fu pose, and Nokko lifted her ribbon-adorned mop. They'd already discussed their strategy for these monsters.
Visor lowered, Genopsyko charged in first. Her magic lay in her special suit. According to her, it could protect her from even a supernova or the Big Bang itself. As long as her visor was down, no attack could get through. Daisy wondered if it would even stop her Daisy Beam, but she never said it out loud. She was the adult here, so she had to act like one and not mess with the other girl.
Genopsyko rushed in, kicking, punching, and pummeling everything within reach. The gun at her hip was just a decoration to help sell the theme, so she left it there and opted for hand-to-hand combat. She investigated thoroughly to see how the enemy would attack and how hard they would hit. "Hey, looks like there's no need to worry! These things aren't much different from the white versions!" she reported.
Next, @Meow-Meow hit a skeleton with a flying kick, while Nokko spun her mop, destroying a crimson skull. Naturally, Daisy wasn't just standing there, either. She hit the monsters with everything she'd practiced, from elbow strikes to roundhouse kicks, palm strikes, and front kicks. In the blink of an eye, the enemies had scattered, and only one remained.
"Everyone, spread out! I'm gonna finish this!" Making sure everyone was out of the way, Magical Daisy pointed at the skeleton and shouted. She could have just attacked, but her fans were here. It would be a discredit to her name not to end things with her finishing move and a little fan service.
"Daisy Beam!" The yellow ray struck the skeleton right in the torso. She'd imagined its spine vaporizing, ribs flying as red bones clattered to the ground, but the thing continued on undamaged. @Meow-Meow jumped in, delivering kicks to the heel, hips, and neck in quick succession and destroying it entirely.
Genopsyko was pointing at Magical Daisy and shouting something. For some reason, Daisy couldn't hear. Something welled up inside her throat, then forced its way out. Warm liquid. She could see the sky. It was pure blue, not a single cloud there. Something hit her back. As she fell, she caught a glimpse of her stomach. It was stained bright red, blood pouring out of it with no sign of stopping.
Finally, her heart gave one last big pulse, and her consciousness faded.
|
Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 13 |
[ POV: Pechka ]
With the town as their base, the party hunted for monsters on the grasslands and built up their candy stash. They also simultaneously explored to gain information on the area quest or other useful hints for completing the game. It was risky to break up the party, but with the map they'd rolled from R, they could keep track of one another's positions, so they ended up splitting into two teams. When it was decided that they'd split into a fighting pair and a scouting pair, Pechka breathed a deep sigh of relief.
She wasn't brave enough to fight or thick-skinned enough to withstand the condemning stares for her lack of contribution. Rionetta had even commented in a stage whisper, likely so Pechka would overhear, "Perhaps it would be more efficient if we only had three in our party."
If Pechka had been brave enough, she would have spat back, "I don't remember asking to join, stupid," and then things wouldn't have turned out like this.
There wasn't much she could do, so she didn't really do anything. Time went on by anyway. She wanted to hurry up and finish the game, but it didn't feel like they were making any progress. The only change she really felt was her rising frustration. When it would finally bubble over, even Pechka didn't know.
She volunteered herself for the scouting party.
"Ha-ha-ha! I will get so much useful information, even the doll will be surprise!" Nonako Miyokata wasn't all that intimidating compared with Rionetta and her sharp tongue or Clantail and her silent pressure. Nonako looked human, at least, compared with the two monster girls.
"The grasslands are so agréable! Let's never go back to that wasteland!"
"Um, could you try to be a little quieter...?" Pechka trailed off.
"I hope there will be living creatures here, t'sais? I'm gonna adopt them!"
"Um..."
"Pechka, how did you become a girl magique? I received an e-mail."
"Like I said..."
"This is so cute! Cuteness is la justice!"
"Hey, please don't pull..."
She was so loud. As they explored, Nonako Miyokata never shut her mouth, oblivious to Pechka and her ever-present anxiety that the extra noise would attract monsters. When the scenery changed, Nonako would instantly start babbling. When the wind blew, she laughed. And even when absolutely nothing was happening, she continued to ramble on about herself. Apparently, she had a very cute friend named Tama, but she had been unable to bring it with her into the game. According to Fal, all they were allowed to bring in was their weapons and costumes.
All this was more exhausting than the walking. Her fatigue made the rations taste much better, but Pechka wasn't happy about that.
"So then they should send more than just skeletons!" They were eating the dry and tasteless rations atop some rocks when—bam! Nonako smacked the stone beneath her. Pechka was so startled she dropped her food. She quickly scooped it up and blew on it before resuming her meal.
"With only these skeletons, I can't use my magique! If I could make a friend, I could finally be useful to this ensemble. No one needs a magical girl who can't use her ability!"
What must she think of Pechka, then, whose ability to create good food was of no real use to the party? She was too scared to ask.
"That's why I am searching for new monstres during this investigation," Nonako proclaimed, clenching a fist. Her eyes shone. "Pechka, if you find one, then please let moi take it. As thanks, I will defend you if the others try to kick you out."
"Oh...sure. Thanks."
Nonako grabbed her hand and shook it. Pechka guessed that was her attempt to cheer her up. But she was going about it rather oddly, and Pechka didn't feel very encouraged.
This place seemed to have more potential to host living things than the wasteland did. But despite Nonako's enthusiastic babbling about how there had to be animal-type monsters, they never saw anything other than red skeletons—not even an ant.
"Putain! This game is conneries!" Nonako muttered, and Pechka nodded. No animal-type monsters appeared—fortunately for Pechka, who was scared of them, but unfortunately for Nonako, who wanted some companions. But they were able to meet other players.
Pfle, the magical girl in a wheelchair they'd met in town, said she was in the middle of completing the quest to unlock the next area. The other members of her party were out collecting candy.
Pfle looked so evanescent, like she'd disappear under the lightest touch, and so helpless, like she'd break under a caress. Pechka wondered if it was okay to let her attempt the quest by herself, but Pfle's strong voice belied her appearance. She's a magical girl, too, after all, thought Pechka.
"It seems a few parties have already formed, and there's one girl out on her own as well," Pfle had informed them.
Out on her own. Just thinking about being forced to fight the skeletons all by herself sent a chill up Pechka's spine. That was the last thing she wanted.
"One group is hunting to the east of town, and another is doing the same to the south," Pfle added. "Oddly enough, no one's staking claim to territories yet. We're all naturally keeping our distances. Oh, and there are red skeletons in these grasslands. Be careful of them."
"But they are weaklings. No différent from the white ones!"
"Unlike the white ones, they have the ability to reflect projectiles," said Pfle. She held out her magical phone to show them an illustration depicting a red skeleton. The impressive image of the skeleton poised to attack looked stronger than the real ones that just broke apart.
Name: Powered Skeleton. Magical candy: 8–12. Spawn area: Grasslands. Group numbers: 5–20. Elemental weakness: Fire. Can reflect any long-range attack. Use close-quarters combat to defeat them.
The entry went on and on.
"One of our party members threw a rock at them," explained Pfle. "She now has a big lump on her head."
"What is this? Data de les monstres?"
"A monster encyclopedia. It's an app for sale in the shop. You might need it if we're going to start encountering abilities like Attack Reflection. It wouldn't be pretty if one of your attacks bounced back at you."
Pechka and Nonako immediately messaged Clantail, notifying her of the red skeleton's ability to reflect projectiles. Their party had long ago exchanged numbers. The e-mail app still seemed to be broken, but for some reason it could still send messages to other people inside the game just fine.
"You should check out the grasslands shop. There are a lot of items for sale. Weapons and armor and such, too. The material and make of them are rather plain for magical-girl equipment, though. A bit lacking, I suppose."
Pechka jotted down what Pfle had said in her phone's notepad, and they bid good-bye to the other girl. Their information exchange had been entirely one-sided, since Pfle had already known everything they had to share in return, but Pfle still smiled and waved good-bye at them.
"She was très nice!" said Nonako.
"Yes, I'm so glad we ran into such a good person," Pechka agreed.
Pfle was the only magical girl they met on their scouting mission. Perhaps the others were all busy killing monsters on their hunting grounds. The bounty the grasslands offered compared to the wasteland made it easy to assume the others would also want to farm candy for a bit.
Messages filled the town. There were no signs of life, only haphazardly arranged buildings, but posters and little notes doled out hints everywhere. There was a variety of messages—not just ones like This is the grasslands town, but also things like Monsters appear in X area, so be careful and Each town's shop sells different items. Pechka recorded each and every one.
"I do not like this."
"Huh? Why?" asked Pechka.
"There are no dressers or treasure chests in les maisons! Fishing through others' things with no consequences is the privilege only for un héros!"
"I'm not sure about that..."
Despite Nonako's complaints, Pechka figured they had basically done all right. They picked up a letter in one of the houses and followed the instructions inside, bringing it to a building in the wasteland town. They were awarded with one hundred pieces of magical candy.
"La mission was a big success!" Nonako clapped.
It's less that she's loud. More like she's just very emotive, Pechka thought.
Night fell, so they met up with the combat party at their predetermined meeting spot in front of the grasslands town. There they sat in a circle, exchanging the information they'd gathered and discussing the candy haul. Conventionally, a party would sit around a campfire, but magical girls had excellent night vision, and they didn't need to scare off animals or worry about warmth, so their little ring was empty.
Rionetta seemed very tired. Her expression was less than lively, and she hardly said a word. Clantail's silence was normal for her, but her tiny deer tail was drooping weakly, and she looked exhausted, too.
Pechka had assumed that fighting had sapped their energy, but apparently, that was not the case.
"We were hardly able to earn a thing," said Rionetta.
"Oh?" said Nonako. "Who was going on about those who don't work?"
"It wasn't that we weren't making an effort. We simply couldn't." Every time they found a new hunting ground, some other magical girl was already there and chased them off.
"What nasty people, oui."
"Indeed. Almost as nasty as you."
Before Nonako could retort, Clantail stomped her hoof against the ground. Halfway to her feet, Nonako sat back down. Rionetta closed her mouth.
Pechka munched on her meal, quaking in her boots. No matter how hungry she was, the food was so flavorless that she couldn't enjoy it. Still, Pechka thought, Rionetta's stubborn, and Clantail isn't the type to let such a crazy demand slide. If someone told them to go away, would they actually just do it? Seeing how tired they both were, it was possible something else had happened.
As Pechka chewed and thought, her magical phone rang. And not just hers—the others' devices went off, too. On the screen were instructions:
A game event is now beginning. All players will be transported to the square of the wasteland town in five minutes.
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Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 14 |
[ POV: Shadow Gale ]
Just like when they'd first started the game, the scenery changed instantaneously. The sudden change made Shadow Gale's feet unsteady, so she grabbed on to the back of the wheelchair to keep from falling. This was that forcible transportation, all right.
Magical girls filled the square. It was quite a spectacle to see so many magical girls in one place, even in a game. A shrine maiden–looking girl was facing one who resembled a samurai and shouting a strange string of words like "Geisha! Hara-kiri! Divine redistribution!" But the samurai girl was ignoring her.
Three girls—one dressed like a maid, one in battle-force style, and the other in a Chinese dress—were sitting in a corner, apparently discussing something. Maybe it was just Shadow Gale's imagination, but they all seemed ragged and pale. Chatting with them was a girl with a deerstalker cap and cape...rather resembling a certain famous detective.
A girl with the lower half of a deer was flicking her tail back and forth. Perhaps she was excited. On the other hand, her companion, a cook or pastry chef of some sort, appeared uneasy.
Shadow Gale observed them all, somewhat fascinated. One girl caught her eye. She gave Pfle's sleeve a couple of tugs and whispered, "That's it. That's her."
The girl she was eyeing was encased in a fluffy, fuzzy plush hamster suit and munching on a giant sunflower seed. Another girl with a huge bow slung over her back was standing next to her and talking at her, but it was hard to tell if the hamster girl was listening.
"Yes, there's no doubt. Different size, though." Masked Wonder seconded Shadow Gale's statement.
While Pfle was busy gathering information, Shadow Gale and Masked Wonder had been grinding for candy—in other words, hunting down monsters and fighting them nonstop. Even in a game, the constructs of capitalist and laborer, white collar and blue collar, user and used, remained.
They ran around the endless field of grass from end to end, exploring all corners of the area until they encountered the steep cliffs acting as boundaries, defeating every red skeleton they met along the way. They were taking a break to eat when it happened.
Masked Wonder noticed it first. "...What is that?"
Shadow Gale followed her gaze. Masked Wonder placed her palm on the ground, watching it closely. Shadow Gale did the same. It wasn't obvious at first, but eventually, she could feel the slowly swelling tremors. A tremendous, rhythmic thumping shook the ground, growing gradually larger and larger.
"Look over there," Masked Wonder prompted, and Shadow Gale followed the other girl's gaze. Something was advancing from the horizon toward them. It looked like a monster—but also like a magical girl.
Shadow Gale rubbed her eyes and did a double take. "Uh...is something weird going on with perspective, here?"
"It seems right to me."
It was big—leagues wider and taller than Masked Wonder, Pfle, and Shadow Gale. They could feel the tremors getting stronger, shaking the ground hard enough to lift Shadow Gale's bottom clear off the ground. How many creatures on the planet were capable of creating minor earthquakes just by running?
It came to a point about a hundred yards away from them and then stopped. But even that far away, they had to crane their necks to see the top. The creature—no, the monolith—had to be over thirty yards tall. "You're not allowed to hunt here!" it yelled. Its voice was big, too. The grass around them trembled with every word. Shadow Gale felt like she was about to be blown away herself and instinctively lowered her center of gravity.
"Cherna's group found this place first, so it's our territory. So stay out!" the giant yelled. It was insisting they leave the hunting grounds. In other words, it wasn't a monster, but a magical girl.
"There's nothing in this game's rules that says you can blame us for that!" Masked Wonder shouted. She wasn't about to bow to this giant.
And she didn't have to bow, but Shadow Gale wished she would just back off. Shadow Gale's legs were shaking, and tears were welling in her eyes. While she agreed that this nonsense about territories was unfair and Masked Wonder was simply saying out loud what Shadow Gale was thinking, she also knew full well that being in the right did not mean you would win. What was she doing picking a fight with a ninety-foot colossus?
"If you don't leave, you'll make Cherna angry!" As a demonstration of that fury, she stomped her foot, and the ground shook.
Shadow Gale toppled onto the grass. "We can't. We can't take her." She shuffled along on her knees to cling to Masked Wonder's cape, tugging on it. "That's not something we can fight. Let's run away. Nobody's going to pat your back for fighting, and there's no point. Please, let's just run."
Masked Wonder brushed her hand off and adopted a battle stance. "Might does not make right. But justice without strength is meaningless."
"I'm telling you, it's hopeless!"
"I am the Masked Wonder! A magical girl, the embodiment of justice and strength!" she shouted, jumping up. And up. And up and up... Shadow Gale's eyes went wide with surprise. She still hadn't come back down. The launch itself had seemed light enough, but the distance and speed defied the laws of physics as she hurtled the one hundred yards to her target, landing a kick on the giant magical girl's chest. Frozen in the face of that sudden, massive leap, the giant just stood there and took the kick—though it looked less like a kick and more like a light touch. But it sent the giantess flying like a feather until she landed on her knees thirty yards back.
Such an enormous object hitting the ground after a ninety-yard flight should have caused a quake far greater than her steps had, but the giant hardly made a sound as she floated down. She seemed confused, too. She cocked her head to the side, patting herself down. "What did you do? Is this your magic?"
"We will not bend to your threats!"
Shadow Gale didn't mind being part of this "we," but more than that, she was impressed with how amazingly Masked Wonder had fought. She dazedly stared at the battle between the titan and the superheroine.
"So threats aren't enough, huh?" The giant stood up and swiftly spun her right arm to create a gust. Shadow Gale threw herself down on the ground and clung to the grass, but it felt like the roots were about to give way.
"Just try it. If you think you can beat me, that is." Masked Wonder readied herself.
The tension in the air was thick, the situation inches from an explosion, when someone yelled, "Wait!"
That wasn't Masked Wonder's voice, and neither was it the goliath's bellow. Shadow Gale was too rattled to have said anything. That was when she first noticed. Someone was standing on the giantess's shoulder—and they dropped something from above.
Thinking it was an attack, Shadow Gale backed away and watched the object fall. It was a blue gem about the size of a baby's fist. Not a raw gem, either, but carefully cut so that every angle shined. If it was real, how much was it worth? It had to be a fake.
"Hup!" A girl wearing a blue dress and a cape of white fur, with a black-and-white-striped tail growing from her behind—clearly a magical girl—was standing where there had been nothing before. Shadow Gale retreated even farther.
Pinkie and index finger extended on each hand, the newcomer crossed her arms in front of her face, bent her right knee, and stretched out her left leg. The pose looked strenuous. "The blue flash descends on the battlefield! Lapis Lazuline!"
Masked Wonder strode toward her, raised her right arm, bent her left in front of her chest, braced her legs in a wide stance, and struck her "victory pose." "I am the Masked Wonder! A magical girl, the embodiment of powerful justice!"
They stared at each other for a few seconds. Then they relaxed at the same time, extended their right hands, and shook. Shadow Gale didn't really get it, but the two seemed to have come to an understanding.
The girl who had introduced herself as Lapis Lazuline scooped up the gem and turned back to the giant. "Hey! Ya can head back, Cherny! No need to fight these people!" Her tone was quite flippant, despite her dramatic entrance.
"But, but Melville said to guard the hunting ground!" the enormous girl protested.
"Nay." That was another voice.
Looking toward the sound, Shadow Gale could see a faded figure melting into the grasslands. Little by little, the image patched together, and the green faded, revealing a magical girl. In her right hand was a longbow that looked out of place in her thin arms, and in her left hand she clasped an equally out of place rustic harpoon. Contrasting with her heavy weapons were a light gray cape, supple legs extending from her short skirt, vines with blooming purple roses winding through her reddish-brown hair, and pointed elf ears. All of these made it clear she was a magical girl.
Is making dramatic entrances a requirement to be part of this magical-girl party? Shadow Gale wondered.
"Th' strong rule in th' mountains, lest ye be eten. None but th' most stout o' hairt are free to hunt 'ere in this land. If ye nae be strong, ye cannae be permi'ed."
Shadow Gale frowned. Looking at this girl filled her with unease. Was it just her strong accent? Or was it her oddly calm voice? The fact that she'd appeared out of nowhere? Shadow Gale glanced to Masked Wonder—she was perfectly calm. Unperturbed, she crossed her arms. This had the side effect of emphasizing her large breasts.
"Melvy's sayin' ya can use this place, since you're strong," Lapis Lazuline translated.
In response, the girl Lapis Lazuline had called Melvy nodded with a grunt. "Godspeed." The girl's body turned green again, faded into the grass, and eventually vanished.
Lapis Lazuline scaled her way up the giantess, grabbing hold of her shoulder again. "Well, see ya 'round. Bye!"
The giantess sprinted off, her footsteps shaking the ground, just like when she'd come. From her shoulder, Lapis Lazuline waved. The pair grew smaller and smaller, until eventually they disappeared beyond the horizon. Shadow Gale looked at Masked Wonder and saw that she was waving back.
Shadow Gale finished recounting the events of the previous day, and Pfle gave a light nod in response. Though it had already been three days since the game had started, Pfle's levelheaded attitude showed no signs of flagging.
"She's small now, which means she must use magic to grow," said Pfle. "That would be difficult to use in the real world due to how much attention it would attract. But in a game world, she can blow herself up as big as she wants without worrying that people will see."
"It was quite shocking! No match for me, though," said Masked Wonder.
"And the disappearing girl," Pfle went on. "That sounds like optical camouflage rather than invisibility. Being able to change her color would fit that."
"That seems pretty useful! Of course, no match for me, though."
"Exactly. You're as strong as I knew you would be. That's the strength you need as an enforcer of justice. I'm not just talking about muscular or magical strength, either. You have a strong heart."
Masked Wonder's cheeks flushed red, and the tip of her nose seemed to rise by half an inch. Pfle knew exactly how to butter her up.
And that was right when a magical girl walked over to them. Pinkie and index finger extended on both hands, she crossed them in front of her face, bent her right knee, and extended her left leg. "The blue flash descends on the battlefield! Lapis Lazuline!"
Matching her, Masked Wonder raised her right arm, crooked her left arm in front of her chest, and spread her legs wide in her "victory pose." "I am the Masked Wonder! A magical girl, the embodiment of powerful justice!"
They stared at each other for a few seconds before relaxing at the same time, smiling as they shook hands. Were they planning to do this every single time they ran into each other? Shadow Gale wished they would at least show a little restraint when they were in front of so many people.
"Well, well, well! Thank you all so very much for coming, pon." A voice came from her magical phone. Shadow Gale only knew one person—creature...thing?—that said "pon," and in that cheerful tone.
Shadow Gale took out her phone and pointed it upward to see a hologram rise from the screen. The black-and-white sphere floated lightly in the air. Similar images stood above the others' phones. They were all saying the same thing.
"Today is logout day, pon. You will all be logged out at exactly sunset. We plan to spend three days of real-world time doing maintenance before you may log in again, pon. Going forward, we will be keeping to this same schedule as you play the game, pon." Fal twirled around, scattering gold scales into the air. "Usually, there will be a special event on logout days. These range from very lucky to very unlucky events. One will be chosen at random, pon. Today...ho-ho! My, my, my. A very lucky draw indeed, pon. There's a very kind message in the grasslands settlement with the name of the town on it. Have you all seen it, pon? I want you to all go to where that message is right now, pon. The first one to reach it will receive a special, rare item from Fal—"
Not waiting for Fal to finish, Pfle shot off like a rocket, leaving dust clouds in her wake. A second later, the rest of the girls followed after her like a stampede. Shadow Gale and the remaining few watched them go.
No one could beat Pfle's speed, and she'd even gotten a head start on them, so the event ended with a crushing victory for her. She'd taken a lead of more than a thousand lengths.
After the event was over, Shadow Gale was relieved that no one seemed angry about Pfle jumping the gun. The next time a similar event came up, however, many were sure to cheat in the same way, which disheartened her. People like Pfle seemed to always be setting bad precedents.
The rare item she received for winning was a coin. On the front was a girl holding up an obviously magical stick—a staff. The back was engraved with a star. Gleaming golden, it was about the same size as a five-hundred-yen coin, albeit much heavier. Suspecting it might be pure gold, Shadow Gale inspected it, but she had no skill for appraisal. She didn't feel like biting it like someone out of a period piece, either. That probably wouldn't tell her anything, anyway.
"That's the Miracle Coin, pon," Fal informed them. "If you carry that, enemy drop rates will increase slightly, pon."
"Drop rates?" asked Pfle. "You mean we'll get more candy?"
"No, no. Certain enemies can drop items other than candy, pon. Some enemies even drop super-rare items on super -rare occasions, pon. That coin will surely come in handy when trying to collect those, pon. To give you a hard number, it will bump up the drop rate by about five times, pon."
Pfle transferred her prize from her phone to Masked Wonder's. Now the Miracle Coin was inside her phone's item bank. Just like the map, potions, and passes, it had to go inside a phone before it could be used. Apparently, that was the standard in this game. She could withdraw it by selecting it from the inventory.
"I'll have Masked Wonder use the coin. I take it you're fine with that?" said Pfle.
Not that she'd care if I said I wasn't, Shadow Gale thought. But honestly, she had no complaints. More often than not, Masked Wonder was the one with the chance to land the finishing blow on enemies.
"I won't waste this rare item you've granted me. You can count on me!" As Masked Wonder struck her victory pose, her breasts jiggled.
|
Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 15 |
[ MASTER SIDE #2 ]
"What's the meaning of this, pon? Did Fal perhaps mishear something?"
Countless monitors filled the room in systematic lines, displaying countless areas from within Magical Girl Raising Project, such as the wasteland, the grasslands, the interior of the towns, and other yet-undiscovered areas, as if it were all being recorded through security cameras. Monitors were embedded into each wall and buried in the floor and ceiling, covering every surface to light the room.
"You didn't mishear aaanything," the girl said, in the middle of solving a Rubik's Cube. Forgoing the normal method of solving it with one's hands, she had precariously balanced a corner of the cube on her index finger. As she stared at it, the cube moved at a steady pace, piecing patterns together by itself.
On the desk was a pair of glasses, next to which was a magical phone propped up against a monitor. Above it, a hologram of Fal floated at an angle. The dust drifting in the air, illuminated by the hologram, spoke volumes about the hygienic state of the area.
The hologram shuddered wildly. It twisted, bent, and returned to its original form, though not without some static. "This isn't what we talked about, pon. No one was supposed to die, pon. You said there'd be no feedback from damage going to their real bodies."
"Nothing about the concept has changed."
"If people knew it was that kind of game, they would never participate, pon."
"But they don't have a choice, duh. They can't do aaanything to stop it. I'm not gonna let them."
"The Magical Kingdom won't just sit quietly and let this happen, pon!" Fal howled. The timbre of its synthetic voice deepened to sound more like an adult male's.
Unperturbed, the girl's eyes remained fixed on the Rubik's Cube. "I'm not gonna report it, siiilly. And you're not allowed to tell the players, either. You're just a mascot. You don't have the capabilities to disobey your master, so you can't report it. Nope, nooope!"
"What are you thinking, pon? Is this some sick joke, pon? Save your humor for someone else, pon."
"I'm nooot joking around. The real joke here is the Magical Kingdom, ignoring their children."
"Fal understands your concerns, master. The children may be dangerous, pon. Yet the Magical Kingdom has covered their ears and won't listen. So we have to make sure ourselves. Fal understands, pon. Fal gets it, pon. That's exactly why this is—"
"The children just have to prove to us that they're real magical girls."
The only sound that followed her remarks was the clicking of the Rubik's Cube.
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Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 16 |
[ POV: Detec Bell ]
Detec Bell was a detective.
Equipped with her deerstalker cap, prop pipe, and magnifying glass, she looked just like a female Holmes. But she wasn't merely a magical girl with a detective-themed costume. She was a detective, because Shinobu Hioka, when she wasn't transformed into Detec Bell, actually worked as one.
Shinobu had a brother who was four years her elder. When she had been in kindergarten, she'd followed him everywhere, much to his displeasure, but follow him eagerly she did. She even tagged along during his bus trip with the local children's club. The club was supposed to be for elementary school kids, but she'd thrown a fit, screaming and crying and wailing that it was unfair and mean that only her brother got to go. Her force of will overwhelmed her father, who ended up negotiating with the head of the neighborhood association on her behalf.
The excursion was to a farm in a neighboring town. It was spring, and the bright sun was warm and perfect for children to frolic in. They bubbled at the sight of cows, shouted when watching the horses, fed the sheep and rabbits, got to try milking cows, and then clambered onto the bus to head back home. That was when Shinobu encountered her destiny.
Shinobu was watching a rerun of some anime on the on-board TV while the other kids slept, exhausted. The night before, she had been so excited for the excursion, she'd gone straight to sleep after dinner and then slept like a log right up until they left for the trip, so she still had plenty of energy left even after all the excitement of the farm.
On-screen, a child detective was solving a locked-room mystery. To Shinobu at the time, they might as well have been reciting a list of technical vocabulary. She didn't understand what the characters were saying, but she saw a child her age dismantling the plots of adults and getting praise, even respect, from them and the older detectives around him. As for his weapons, he had a few secret tools, reliable allies, and above all, his brilliant mind.
To a kindergarten-aged child, the term "murderer" was more exciting than "world domination" or "the extinction of humanity." The kid on-screen was a hero for fighting criminals like murderers. Swept up in the emotions of the story, Shinobu's hands balled into fists amid the snores inside the bus.
Shinobu became a huge fan of that boy detective and got her brother to borrow the original manga from his friends. She read every volume. Luckily, it came with pronunciation guides, so even when she couldn't read the words, at least she could sound it out. "Alibi," "plot twist," "locked-room mystery"—the many fascinating phrases captured her imagination. She stopped following her brother around. He claimed it was a relief, but he also looked a bit disappointed...or maybe that was just what Shinobu wanted to believe.
She asked her father to rent the DVDs, and once she'd seen every single episode and movie, her interests moved to the mystery genre in general. That was when she started on her father's personal collection. His bookshelf, created from cheap colored shelves on a Sunday afternoon, was filled with mystery series. But when he found her reading his books, he confiscated them with an admonishment that they were for adults. So she turned to reading them in secret. There were no pronunciation guides in these, so she had to learn as she went. The words she couldn't understand she assumed from context, and while the other children were glued to anime and shows with flashy special effects, she was hiding alone and reading her mystery novels.
Her favorites were the ones with kid detectives. In the anime she'd first fallen in love with, the detective was never wrong—a perfect jack-of-all-trades. Throughout elementary and middle school, she read detective novels day and night, and in high school she founded a mystery fan club. One investigator solved locked-room mysteries with a superior brain and intellect, always finding the killer. In another, the hero struggled against a powerful organization for no reward in order to save a helpless girl. The adventures of these tough, cool detectives made her heart race.
For the high school culture festival, her club put on a dramatic adaptation of the famous detective novel Village of Eight Gravestones and covered the gym in gore. The PE teacher chewed them out for that one, but the over-the-top production was a success, and the audience really had a good time. Oh, the enthusiastic storm of applause for Shinobu as she played Kosuke Kindaichi! Just remembering it gave her a shot of euphoria.
This was what it was like to be a detective. No—being a real gumshoe had to be even more amazing. Maybe this should have steered Shinobu toward the path of an actress, but it only strengthened her resolve to work as an investigator herself.
Ignoring her parents' objections, Shinobu got a job at a detective agency straight out of junior college. That was three years ago. Soon after, she happened to receive a message inviting her to take part in the magical-girl selection test. She made it through the trials and finally got her powers. Shinobu was sure that her newfound status would help her solve mysteries. First and foremost, she was a detective.
She still remembered vividly the first time she had transformed into a magical girl.
She was beautiful. Shinobu wasn't really the type to long for looks or beauty, but it still left a big impression on her. Just looking in the mirror was enough to set her heart racing. She stretched a little in an attempt to distract herself and found that her every movement left a fruity, sweet, and pleasant fragrance in the air.
The message hadn't been a joke or prank. She pinched her cheek to see if she was dreaming or hallucinating, but the pain said otherwise. This was clearly impossible, scientifically speaking. But Shinobu had become a real, true, authentic, genuine magical girl.
Detec Bell's costume was more subdued than those of the other magical girls, which allowed her to blend in with the regular people in town and do her job. Her physical abilities, however, far surpassed any other living creature's, and her enhanced endurance allowed her to work for days without rest. Her night vision was excellent, too—she could see as well at night as she could during the day. These were all great skills for tracking clues.
Every magical girl possessed a unique ability, and Shinobu's was perfect for her detective work. With her magic, she could solve any locked-room mystery and any seemingly impossible crime. No criminal could escape her.
Unfortunately, none of her detective work involved locked-room mysteries or grand capers. She'd worked at the agency for three years. She was perfect at tailing and stakeouts, thanks to her magic. Her clients loved her, and some even offered to fund her to go independent. But she was also learning the reality of being a detective.
Shinobu would have been fine with just investigating cheating spouses and searching for runaways, but new recruits like her were stuck on filing and phone duty. Her superiors constantly demanded she clean and serve tea. And on top of more miscellaneous tasks, she was also forced to watch pets, assist in house cleaning, and even carry boxes for people when they moved. Her superiors worked her to the bone. Her boss was a kind-looking old man who would tell her things like "This'll be good for you" and "This is the first step to becoming a first-class detective" while ordering her to do petty tasks. The juxtaposition of his looks and his unconvincing remarks made him a particularly nasty boss to have.
But Shinobu still knew who she was. She knew the true experience of being a detective, but she hadn't abandoned her dream. She would always aspire to solve mysteries, and she liked herself for taking the steps to make it reality.
Magical Daisy ended up failing out of the game.
She had tried to show off by shooting a monster with her Daisy Beam, but it ended up ricocheting right back at her due to the ability of the "powered skeleton" to reflect projectile attacks. One shot had finished her.
After interviewing her party members, investigating the scene, and analyzing the body, Shinobu had determined this story to be true. All the evidence pointed to an accidental death, and there was no possibility of it being premeditated murder.
But the fact that it was unintentional wasn't the issue. The real problem lay elsewhere.
Immediately after logging out of the game, Shinobu requested some time off. Her boss yelled at her over the phone. "You think we can afford to give you three days off when we're so busy?"
Shinobu gave him some flimsy "Yes, sir, of course, sir" lines and then turned off her flip phone's power. Unfortunately for him, her day job was not her highest priority.
First, she searched the Internet for "Magical Kingdom" and how to contact them on her special phone. She had a ton of questions for them, but for some reason, all her messages bounced back. After a lot of trying and failing, she gave up on that angle and focused on scouring the web.
She typed "Magical Daisy," added a space and a few search keywords, and pressed ENTER. One site caught her attention with an article discussing how the background in the Magical Daisy anime resembled a certain train station. This complemented the information Shinobu had gotten from Genopsyko Yumenoshima.
After compiling her search results, she learned which location the show's setting was based on. Apparently, among the more hard-core fans, it was celebrated as a holy land. Even years after its original airing, Magical Daisy was still relatively popular in the early-morning Sunday kids' anime slot, but these days, no one was raving about the holy land anymore.
Closing her magical phone, Shinobu transformed. She pulled her cap low over her head so as to appear inconspicuous, threw her wallet and other necessities into her work bag, and left her apartment complex.
She rode the bullet train headed for Tohoku, transferred to a regular train, then switched again to private rail and rode three stops down to an empty station. After dropping her ticket into the turnstile, she stepped out into B City, B Prefecture. Checking her surroundings to be sure no one was looking, she lightly kissed the station wall. A caricature of a human visage appeared on the cracked and dirty surface. It resembled a shabby middle-aged man, more like something from anime or manga than real life. The face her magic summoned differed from object to object.
Huh, so this is the one you get from an old, empty station like this, she thought.
The eyes of the three-foot-wide cartoon goggled as they landed on Detec Bell. "What do you want?" It was mumbling. Every object was different in this regard.
"Have you heard of Magical Daisy?"
"No."
"It's this girl." Using her phone, Detec Bell showed the face a picture of Magical Daisy.
"Oh, I know her. She's helped out some people in this station."
"Okay, thanks." She gave the face another kiss, this time on the tip of its nose, and it melted back into the wall. This was Detec Bell's magical ability: conversing with buildings. There were some conditions. For one, it required a kiss to both activate and stop, and for another, objects would never incriminate their owners, but still, it was quite valuable in her detective work.
Incidentally, when she had tried using her magic on the dilapidated buildings within the game, they had replied coldly to her, "I am master's property. I cannot speak on topics against master's will. Please search for hints on completing the game through regular means." She'd used her magic on the other buildings, too, but while they all spoke in different tones, they offered basically the same explanation. She was disappointed she couldn't use her magic to get some easy hints.
After leaving the station, Shinobu stopped by a nearby convenience store and bought a local newspaper. In the sticks, these kinds of shops sat on huge plots of land with similarly large parking lots. Leaning against a cement barrier, she opened the newspaper.
Shinobu had learned from Nokko that Daisy had been in middle school while the Magical Daisy anime was on air. This meant Shinobu could reverse-calculate her age. Being in middle school, there was no way she could have done her magical girl work far away from home. She had to have been active in her local neighborhood. As long as they hadn't moved, her family would still be here.
Magical girls also needed a place to transform without being seen. They were cautious about human witnesses, but nobody ever thought about the buildings. There had to be one in the area that had witnessed Magical Daisy transform. Asking structure after structure, Shinobu traced the path Daisy had gone as her magical-girl self. Eventually, she would reach her home. If the person in question wasn't there, Shinobu would pursue the possibility that the family had moved. If they had, a building had to have seen it—and the brick and concrete never forgot.
The purpose of this investigation was to ascertain whether Magical Daisy was alive or dead in this world. Personally, Shinobu hoped she was alive. Fal had insisted that feedback from in-game damage wouldn't affect their real bodies. That was the whole reason she'd agreed to participate in the game in the first place. This was ultimately just to assuage her doubts, just to make sure that no mistakes had cropped up anywhere. All that pushed her along was an uneasy feeling. She had no basis for her doubts, and she was fully aware of that.
Detec Bell folded up the newspaper and threw it into her bag. She had three days.
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Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 17 |
[ POV: Pechka ]
Just like before, Pechka changed clothes and went to give Ninomiya her homemade lunch. When she cut in line, no one complained. She could only hear them whispering "It's that girl again" and "Who is she?" The first time, it had made her proud and happy and excited, though with a pain deep in her heart, and later, she'd floundered on her bed. Now, the second time, she didn't feel any of those things.
The autumn sun set early. Darkness was quickly setting in, and the public playground was empty of children. The only one there was Pechka, sitting on the swings.
Just thinking about the game dampened her mood. Just as Fal had explained, upon hearing the logout announcement, she was instantly on her bed again. A look at the clock showed that the minute hand hadn't even made one full rotation. But that didn't make all of this okay.
She should have declined, but she hadn't been able to. Apparently, one girl had already dropped out of the running. She recalled how depressed that girl's party members had looked. They had been told that in-game damage wouldn't affect them in the real world, but Pechka still didn't like it. The game involved some exploration, of course, but ultimately, it was mainly about fighting, and Pechka wasn't cut out for that.
She sighed.
Maybe it's not too late to back out, she thought, but she was afraid of that, too. The other girls would surely be disappointed in her for dropping out without having contributed. They might badmouth her—maybe even hit or kick her. She knew the damage wouldn't affect her in real life, but pain was still pain. Pinching her cheek hurt just as much in a game as in the real world. Dying in the game had to hurt like real death. Just imagining it upset her. Did the other magical girls just have no imagination?
The concept of a game based around killing enemies or whatever didn't seem fitting for heroines like them. Their job was to help people. Maybe helping people required violence sometimes. But those acts relied on the enhanced strength and magical abilities that they had been granted in order to help people. Maybe it was okay that there were some fringe cases of fighting for the sake of others, but killing enemies to collect candy was not something a magical girl had any business doing.
But even if Pechka were to shout this at the top of her lungs, they would just take it as a weakling's attempts to escape from reality. Nobody would listen to what she had to say. She breathed another sigh.
Maybe she should just focus on the reward. Completing the game would earn her ten million yen. That was so much money, like winning dozens of jumbo lotteries. Her party had agreed that if one of them landed the final blow on the Evil King, they would split the rewards equally among the whole party. In other words, someone like Pechka who didn't want to fight had a chance, but...still, the number didn't seem real to her.
If pushed to say, Pechka might be more glad about the hundred-thousand-yen participation award. Before going out, she'd checked her bank account, and sure enough, the money was there. She could already think of ways to use it. Food she could produce and prepare herself, so that left clothes and accessories such as rings, necklaces, earrings...no, she was a little scared to get pierced, so maybe just clip-ons. Shoes. Bags. Expensive, famous brands that celebrities wore, and the kinds of outfits you saw on models in fashion shows. If the hundred thousand yen wasn't enough, she could always add in some from her new year's gift and her personal savings. Fancy clothes might not look good on Chika, but on Pechka, they did.
Pechka was so consumed by her near-escapist fantasies, she didn't even notice when the sun set.
The shadow she cast under the lamppost's light was stretched long and came to a point. Hearing the tapping of approaching footsteps, she looked up to see a pair of baseball spikes at the edge of her shadow. In those shoes was someone wearing a baseball uniform.
Raising her head, Pechka nearly stopped breathing. It was Ninomiya. His black baseball club bag was hanging off his shoulder. His toned torso, clearly defined even under the uniform, heaved up and down. He must have been running. There was sweat on his forehead, and he was looking at Pechka. "Um...," he said, drawing closer.
Pechka gripped the swing chain tighter. It was covered in thick plastic, but she could still feel the coldness of the metal beneath. She realized her temperature was rising.
"You're the girl who brought me lunch, right?" he asked.
She shot up like a spring and nodded repeatedly. All the muscles on her face were as strained as they could be. Her free hand felt awkwardly empty, so she clenched the skirt of her dress.
"Um, this might sound a bit shameless, but..." He was right in front of her. He was close enough to touch, close enough that she could even feel his breath, and she could smell the sweat he'd built up by running to catch up to her. Ninomiya, the star she'd been convinced she'd never reach, the boy she'd admired for so long. She'd never been able to speak to him at school; she'd always just watched him from afar. Now he was right in front of her.
She was sweating. Her body was on fire. Her heart was racing. She felt dizzy. Who was it who had said love felt just like the flu?
Ninomiya put a hand behind his head, looking apologetic as he hesitantly asked, "Would you mind making lunch for me again?"
Pechka nodded over and over. Her tied-up hair bounced up and down.
"It was really good, man. Seriously, like, amazing. Like, I'd do anything you asked if I could eat that every day. It was crazy good." The food Pechka's magic created was magically delicious. Ninomiya did his best to explain just how excellent it had been, this time adding gestures. "I really wanted to tell you this, but no one on the team knew who you were. I had to run all over the neighborhood to find you. Also...could I ask you a favor?" He put his hands together and bowed his head.
Suddenly, Pechka found herself looking down at the back of his head. As was typical for baseball club members, he was forced to keep his hair buzzed short. His head was well shaped, and instead of the usual amusement a buzz cut might elicit, her first thoughts were of how clean it was. It had to be pleasantly fuzzy to the touch. Pechka's right hand moved.
"My teammates liked your food so much that they kept 'sampling' it. I didn't even get to eat the whole thing," he said. Head still low, he chanced a glance up at her. Their eyes met.
Panicking, Pechka pulled her right hand back, but her pulse was rising, her breathing rough as her body attempted to keep up with the demand for oxygen. Ninomiya was looking at her. She'd watched him before, but now he was looking at her as she looked at him, and they were staring into each other's eyes.
"In fact," he continued, "there was only scraps by the time I got to it. But still, it was to die for! So I know you might think I'm greedy for asking this, but is there any chance you could give me another? Sometime when no one's looking? I mean, I tried to stop the guys, but they wouldn't listen and basically took everything. I'm serious."
Pechka was so dizzy she was about to faint, but she managed a nod. "Okay." She was so nervous, it came out a bit monotone.
"Really? Seriously? Yes! Thank you so much!" Ninomiya grabbed her hand and shook it, thanking her over and over. Blankly, Pechka stared at him. She was just as dazed when she agreed to meet him in the park again to deliver the lunch. She watched as he scampered off, humming to himself.
Unable to stand anymore, she collapsed back onto the swing set. Her bottom was wet and cold, and she realized how much she'd been sweating. Slowly, the rhythm of her heart calmed, and her burning excitement cooled. She gradually settled down, but even so, the embers still burned deep inside.
Her magic, which she'd only ever considered a bonus, had turned out to be useful. She'd made Ninomiya happy, and he'd complimented her cooking. He'd even said he would do anything she asked if he could eat it every day.
That was it. Cooking. A path had opened up before her.
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Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 18 |
[ POV: Shadow Gale ]
Until a few years ago, Kanoe's grandfather was the one in charge of the Hitokouji estate. Chronic disease had taken his legs and his sight, and he had needed a special wheelchair to get around, but his mind was healthy as could be. When it came to finance, human resources, investments, contracts, conferences, and a range of other things, his instructions were detailed and precise. There were even rumors that he'd conceived an illegitimate child in his eighties. Considering that the gossip had reached Mamori, it might actually have been true. He had continued to be the brains of the operation until his stroke, and even after his passing, some attributed the stability of the Hitokouji family to his hard work.
Even Kanoe, who was arrogant beyond belief, had been attached to her grandfather. One could see this in the way her manner of speech mirrored his more and more each year. Her parents, her brother, and the other adults in her life let her do it because they found it funny, but for a high school girl, she really talked too much like an old man.
Once Kanoe became a magical girl, her grandfather's presence was clear in her magical-girl costume. The obvious influence was the wheelchair, but its lavish gold construction and fine detail also brought to mind an elderly king on his throne, reigning from the summit of his clan. Her eye patch seemed to represent his diseased eye, and the little birds carved in wood on the wheelchair's fenders looked just like the decorations on the trusty walking stick her grandfather had relied on before losing the use of his legs.
Kanoe's way of life also echoed her grandfather's, Mamori thought. Never hesitating, never deliberating. Or, no—she did mull over things, but she never let anyone see it. She always appeared to instantly know the right answer, which only made people sing her praises ever louder.
But now, Kanoe was dazedly staring out the window of the cooking prep room. It was lunch break, so she was alone. She was clearly lost in thought. Normally, she'd be up to something, like chatting with her classmates in the classroom or speed-reading through books in the library, all the while thinking about something else at a million miles an hour. She never openly worried about anything.
After what had happened the day before, this behavior meant she had to be thinking about the game. And if Kanoe was so invested that she was worrying about it, then that meant Mamori was sure to get dragged in even deeper this time. Mamori was bound to lose weight just thinking about it.
"Trouble builds character. But I think you'll like what I have to say," said Kanoe.
"...Are you a mind reader?" Mamori asked.
"How long do you think I've known you? I can tell that much."
It felt like she was accusing her of being shallow. Mamori was not amused.
Outside the window, some students in their gym clothes were happily chasing a soccer ball. This was a school for rich girls, and there were many different types. It was autumn, but still warm enough that Mamori was impressed they were running around. Watching them made her feel hot, too, so she loosened her scarf.
"It's about the game," said Kanoe.
So Mamori had been right.
"I know you don't like such things," Kanoe continued. "Fighting enemies, grinding for currency, and buying items. With your magic, you don't need to do anything so tedious. You could just use your little cheat to win, but if that's always in the back of your mind, then you'll never enjoy yourself."
"If you want to play the game, miss, then I can't just leave you."
"It's your fault I got dragged into this," she seemed to say with every bit of sarcasm in her body, but Kanoe didn't seem to care about that. Her eyes still on the students running around outside, she pulled a foot up onto the chair. Her skirt slid to the side, exposing her thighs.
"That's improper, miss," said Mamori.
"There are two types of magical girls."
"Those who fight and those who don't, was it?"
"That game is for those who fight. But that doesn't mean all the participants have to be fighters. There were girls besides you and me who don't fight. So why are they participating?"
"Maybe the reward lured them in."
"Speaking of rewards, we opened up a new area when we were in the game. The prize for that was deposited into one of the accounts I use for foreign trading. I don't know how they found my information, but it was just dropped in there anonymously. Two areas makes two million yen."
"Two million yen! Seriously?"
"It was deposited along with the participation fee. You should check your bank account. And learn to appreciate things other than material rewards."
About five times a month, Mamori found herself wondering how good it would feel to punch Kanoe.
"According to Fal," said Kanoe, "none of the magical girls chosen as test players declined the invite."
"None of them?" That was surprising. It would be natural for at least one or two to reject it after the way they'd been forced into the game. Anyone who would become a magical girl had to have a stubborn will.
"Strange, isn't it? So many players made to participate in such a forceful manner, yet not a single one of them declined. Some of them have to be self-interested types or those who would rather care for flowers than fight. So why didn't anyone decline?"
"You didn't, miss."
"I'm just at that age. I'm aware that I'm unusual."
"Yes, that's for certain."
"It was all just like reality: the smells, the sensations, the sights, the tastes, the sounds. In other words, punches hurt, too. No matter how convincingly they explained that there would be no damage to your real body, surely that would be reason enough for the nonfighters to balk. So why did they agree to participate?" Kanoe raised her knee higher, and her skirt slid some more. Such careless habits had made her some strange fans here, even though it was a girls' school. "It's ominous."
"I see," Mamori spat out indifferently and turned away. She ended up face-to-face with a skull, but unlike the skeletons in the game, this anatomic model would not be attacking. I bet she enjoys herself more when things get "ominous," she added to herself.
"My magical phone is acting oddly," said Kanoe. "I can't contact the Magical Kingdom."
"Well, my magic can't fix the phones." The devices were magically guarded to protect the information within. When Kanoe had ordered Shadow Gale to use her magic on one before, she'd ended up breaking it entirely. Shadow Gale had managed to lie about the reason for its destruction and receive a replacement—by herself, of course, even though it was originally Kanoe's fault. Just remembering that ticked her off.
"Something doesn't feel right." Kanoe's foot fell from the chair and slapped against the floor, returning her skirt to its original position. Mamori breathed a sigh of relief.
Outside on the field, it seemed things were getting intense. Someone had kicked the ball into the corner of the goal, and all her teammates were high-fiving her. One of the girls noticed them, and her mouth opened in an ah! Kanoe smiled back thinly and waved. The students' screech of delight was audible all the way up in the classroom. Mamori scowled.
Three days later, they returned to the game world the same way they'd first traveled there. Seeing the fake brown buildings and wasteland and smelling the dirt as it filled her nose, it truly felt like Shadow Gale had returned to the same place. Opening the map, she noted the locations of her party members and made to meet up with Kanoe first.
"Well, you certainly kept me waiting," said Pfle. "Come to me faster next time."
"Yes, yes," Shadow Gale replied. "I'll run to you as fast as I can."
Masked Wonder seemed to be trapped in an area a little ways away. She was a real weirdo, but still, she wasn't two-faced like Pfle, and she kind of felt easier to hang out with. The icon displaying Masked Wonder's location was stuck on one spot. They'd agreed to meet up with one another once they were back in the game, but Masked Wonder seemed to be waiting for them to come to her.
Pfle, who had needled Shadow Gale for being late, didn't say a thing about Masked Wonder just standing there. But thanks to her observation of the Hitokouji family for over ten years, Mamori understood why. Investors were lenient with talented personnel. They always got priority treatment when it came to pay, care, and hours. The less talented, on the other hand, got the short end of the stick.
With great effort, Shadow Gale pushed Pfle's wheelchair until they arrived in front of the building where Masked Wonder was waiting for them. Shadow Gale stretched her back and felt a slight chill there. She was sweating.
Was Masked Wonder preparing to do her stupid "victory pose" again? Irritated, Shadow Gale pushed open the door and saw her lying there. Her arms were stretched in front of her, as if reaching out for something. She was on her stomach, facedown, dark-red fluid staining her purple cape. The red-black wasn't just dirtying the cape—it was spread out all over the floor, too. The flow originated from the back of Masked Wonder's head, mercilessly crushed underneath a large rock.
Pfle rolled her wheelchair through the puddle of blood toward the dead girl, bent over, and scooped up her magical phone. She turned it on.
"Hmm...shoot. All her items and candy were taken." Pfle spoke as if she were discussing how she'd guessed an answer on a test and gotten it wrong.
Shadow Gale listened in a daze, but nausea threatened to surface like a memory.
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Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 19 |
[ POV: Pechka ]
She'd gotten herself a pot.
The shop stocks varied by town: The wasteland shop carried recovery items, while the mountain shop had encyclopedias. Each shop also provided weapons and armor that were more powerful than those in the previous area. The wasteland store sold plain weapon and shield equipment, the grasslands shop had "weapon +1" and "shield +1" items, and at the mountain shop, there were +2 items. After installing a purchase, you could summon it, and each upgrade was more durable and looked more refined than the last. The weapons also varied depending on which magical girl summoned it, so putting one in Pechka's phone produced a spatula, but Rionetta's produced claws. The naming scheme "weapon +X" was bland, but flexible.
The only items a party could share were the random results of R and the special passes. R had been extremely popular at the beginning of the game. The first item Pechka's party had gotten from it, the map, was so useful that the price of one hundred candy was totally worth it if all the drops were of the same caliber—or so they believed. But reality is never so kind, even in a game.
The second time they bought an R, they rolled another map. The third time, a map. The fourth time, a map. They'd been laughing it off up until the third one. The fourth made their smiles vanish. The fifth incited anger and suspicion. What the hell was up with this R item? Did it only drop maps?
"R generates items of differing rarities, and the probability of receiving any given item varies, pon." Upon being summoned via the HELP button, Fal responded dispassionately and unflinchingly to their barrage of anger.
"We've only ever received maps, though." Rionetta's voice was shaking, and the corners of her lips were drawn tight.
But Fal was the same as ever. "The map is an extremely common item, pon. It's normal for it to drop four or even five times in a row. But please just shake it off and roll again and again to try for a super-rare item, pon."
Brandishing the map with beautiful and experienced form, Rionetta flung it against the wall. A message appeared:
This item sells for 3 candy.
After that, their party leader forbade them from purchasing any more R. The goblins that populated the mountain area dropped lots of candy, and the items in the shop were generally cheap anyway, so their candy stores grew and grew.
But Nonako Miyokata pestered them with "I want to buy an R, I want to buy an R" until eventually Clantail allowed it. The other three didn't want any weapons, so Clantail had been using their candy to purchase armaments for herself. Now she wielded a long assault spear in her right hand and a large shield in her left. Perhaps she felt she shouldn't be so stingy now, and that was why she couldn't refuse Nonako's request.
Rionetta still had reservations but ultimately agreed, so they spent one thousand candy on ten R and ended up with eight maps, one shovel, and one pot. The shovel was as ordinary as could be, about three feet long. The cookware, too, was a normal stockpot. Neither had any magical properties or unique effects.
At this point, Rionetta was furious. She wailed and called Nonako an idiot for spending a thousand candy on junk. Nonako snapped back at her for the insult. This turned into an argument, which Clantail attempted to break up, but neither of them listened to her, and their unproductive squabble continued until the fighting and scouting parties each went their separate ways.
Nonako Miyokata's bad mood soon abated. As they explored, she mowed down every enemy they crossed, while Pechka ran away, avoiding them. Nonako purified a goblin and made it into her familiar, squealing over how cute it was. She even tied a bow around its neck. Back when it had been attacking them, it had seemed so creepy, but now that it was attached to Nonako...well, it could pass for cute, even if it looked exactly the same. Seeing them together was kind of heartwarming.
Rionetta's mood, on the other hand, only worsened.
At night, they met back up with the combat party, but neither Clantail nor Rionetta would speak. They were so quiet, the sound of Clantail's hooves clopping on the ground was deafening by comparison. Any eye contact with her elicited a screech of "What in the hell was that about?!" that made her anger clear. "What is that giant rat constantly blocking our path?!"
That "giant rat" had chased them away once before with a warning to stay away from their group's hunting ground. Apparently, she'd done it again once Clantail and Rionetta had moved on to the mountain area.
Rionetta was so angry she snapped at everything in sight. When she spotted Nonako Miyokata's tamed goblin, her eyes went narrow, and she shrieked, "Don't you dare allow that thing near me! I don't want its dirty smell on me!" and that sparked another shouting match until Clantail intervened.
Then Rionetta's eyes rested on Pechka. "What are you doing?" she asked.
"Um...the pot..."
"I was already quite cross that we squandered so much candy on that thing. I'd really rather you not force me to look at it any longer. Just remembering how we spent a thousand candy to get that and a spade will keep me awake at night." Hunger was part of the game mechanics, but sleep wasn't. In other words, her complaints of insomnia were complete nonsense.
"What's with that queer pose, anyway? And why are you sticking your hands in the pot—huh?" Rionetta's nose twitched. She sniffed and looked at the pot.
A stiff smile spread across Pechka's face as she timidly fumbled to explain. "My magic, it's, um... As I explained before...I can make nice meals. So, since we have a pot now...maybe we wouldn't have to rely on rations... And I'm not using my candy... I can make food...without any ingredients at all...so, well...I think... I think it should taste...better than the rations..."
"Well, aren't you confident in yourself?" said Rionetta.
"Not really... Um, we don't have any utensils, so... I'm sorry, but you'll have to make do with leaves..."
"Leaves! What a wonderfully rustic utensil!"
"If you're going to complain about it, you don't have to eat it, je crois." Nonako Miyokata laughed, and her goblin chuckled and hopped about. Rionetta clicked her tongue, thoroughly irked, and plopped down on a nearby rock, where she purposefully kicked up dirt.
If Pechka put her mind to it, she could make the fanciest dish in the world. But if she were to serve a fancy dish outdoors on big leaves, she'd just be inviting a pile of complaints. "It's too hard to dish out! It's too hard to eat!" they'd say. So instead, she had come up with a simple, easy-to-eat meal that would place emphasis on the good taste of fresh food.
"Rice balls? After all that prating, you give us rice balls?" Rionetta insulted Pechka's cooking on sight. "Why should I eat this peasant food? I'd rather eat rations," she spat. Then she took a bite. Her brows came together.
Clantail and Nonako watched her with some suspicion. Ignoring their gaze, Rionetta took a second bite, then a third. She devoured the whole thing. Then she grabbed another without comment and chowed down on it.
Cautiously, Nonako took a bite of a rice ball. "Oh..." She voiced her surprise quietly, and then she began devouring the food, just like Rionetta. The goblin, seeing its master so excited, gobbled one down, too. Clantail was the only one who ate with even an ounce of poise, but her tail was wagging from side to side.
For now, everyone seemed to be enjoying the food. Pechka breathed a sigh of relief and began eating a rice ball.
She'd done the same thing once, long ago. She couldn't remember very well, but she was sure something like this had happened before. Pechka had cooked a meal with her magic in an attempt to get a group of people to get along. But it couldn't have been that long ago. It had happened once she'd become a magical girl, so there should be no reason she wouldn't remember. Why couldn't she recall it?
Rionetta, Nonako, and Clantail were all focused on stuffing their cheeks with rice balls. Only moments ago, they'd been so angry at being body-blocked out of a hunting ground, but now they were entirely focused on eating. Her magic, which Pechka had only ever considered secondary to her looks, had allowed her to approach Ninomiya and had even cheered up her party members. Maybe cooking is worth something, she thought.
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Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 20 |
[ POV: Nokko ]
Fourth year, class two at Manabegawa Elementary No. 3 was a "good class."
On sports day and during cultural festivals, the whole class worked together as a group—but when people screwed up during these events, they were never scorned or belittled. If they did well, the whole class shared in the joy, and even if they didn't, they were still all able to smile about it.
The class didn't have any of the common social problems, like conflict between the boys and the girls, bullying of the weak, or nasty rumors going around.
Their teacher was Mr. Noguchi, who had taught sixth grade up until the previous year. He was famously short-tempered, quick to yell at students, and he had been nicknamed "the Square Teakettle" for the shape of his face. But this Mr. Noguchi, ever since transferring to class 4-2, had transformed into an entirely different person: the brightest, most fun teacher ever. He'd never yelled at a single child all year.
Why was class 4-2 such a pleasant place? Only Noriko Nonohara knew the answer.
If someone was upset, she would crank up their joy. If someone was sad, she would turn down their emotional fragility. Anger, jealousy, nastiness—everything unnecessary for a good class, she suppressed, manipulating the students to create a fun and bright class. By using her magical ability to transmit her emotions to those around her, the magical girl Nokko could unify her class from the shadows.
Noriko Nonohara was a hard-core magical girl. How so? Because from birth to the present day, the time she'd spent as a magical girl far exceeded her time spent as a normal person. She'd become Nokko at age four and was now ten, so that was six years of magical-girl experience. She was a veteran among veterans.
The question of how to live as a magical girl was a matter of philosophy, and Nokko knew the easiest shortcuts. Though "easiest shortcuts" didn't simply mean skipping out on school or shirking responsibilities. She knew shortcuts that brand-new magical girls couldn't possibly be aware of.
The Magical Kingdom was incapable of adapting. It was stubborn and bullheaded, and it never backed down on its decisions. Perhaps that made it rather similar to human governments. Everything Nokko had told Magical Daisy about how Noriko had become Nokko was true.
But for all the Magical Kingdom's stubbornness, it was comparatively lax with security. The region Nokko was charged with was managed through an experimental system whereby a leader-like magical girl kept watch over a number of other magical girls, reporting to the Magical Kingdom and acting as an intermediary. The Magical Kingdom didn't observe or direct the magical girls' activities directly, so they had to rely heavily on the supervisor's discretion to enforce rules. If she was lazy, stupid, unruly, selfish, an anomaly, or didn't care about obeying the rules, then she would be unlikely to report others for their lack of diligence.
The leader of Nokko's group was the type not to report them no matter what they did, so Nokko was never admonished for using her abilities to improve her own life instead of helping others. Maintaining a low profile, she used her magic to solve problems on the sly. After school, she would visit her mother in the hospital and help ease her depression. Then she would go home and spend all her time doing chores.
Nokko's magic didn't allow her to control others' emotions at will. She could only transmit her own emotions to them. If she wanted to make someone excited, she needed to focus hard on something she had once found exciting and then remember, remember, remember, until her magic finally worked.
As a result, she became an expert in fooling herself by the young age of ten. Since her mother was in the hospital, Noriko was in charge of housework. This was exhausting. She had no time to go out and use her magic to make the world a better place. Her hands were already full taking care of herself. But even so, she'd managed. At least, so far.
Six months earlier, Nokko's superior—the leader magical girl—had been permanently expelled. Some unforgivable acts she'd committed had come to light. The Magical Kingdom had immediately dispatched a replacement, not wanting to believe that a magical girl, the symbol of hopes and dreams, could be a rotten apple. After that, the new girl served her role as leader with great enthusiasm. But the fact that she was picking up after someone who had been dismissed due to scandal meant that she was overly serious and inflexible, like a manifestation of the Magical Kingdom itself.
So on top of everything else, Noriko found herself required to complete her magical-girl duty of helping others. There was a real possibility of that stick-up-her-butt leader delivering a report: She only ever thinks of herself! She isn't actually doing her job! At worst, it might even lead to her losing her status as a magical girl.
So Noriko now had to shepherd her class, help people in town, do chores, and participate in the game. She had no interest in the game itself and didn't have time to help future magical girls, but the participation and completion rewards were mighty attractive. If she could get her hands on ten million yen, a sum she'd never even seen before, then she'd put in some effort to complete the virtual tasks.
Noriko looked at her bank account again. For more than six months, it hadn't seen a single deposit. Now there was a hundred thousand yen sitting in it. And if she could open up a new area, that was another million yen.
Genopsyko's helmet bubbled up to the lava's surface. Then her visor, neck, and hands appeared, and a small key was in her grasp. @Meow-Meow, who had been holding her breath next to Nokko, let out a big sigh of relief.
"Found it!" announced Genopsyko. "There was an altar thing at the bottom, just like the ancient text described! It was right inside that! Man, I had to feel around for the thing, and it took a hell of a long time."
"Yumenoshima, I thought you melt," said @Meow-Meow.
"Nah, I'm not gonna melt. I told ya, this suit could take even the Big Bang!" Genopsyko grabbed hold of the cliff and hauled herself onto land. Just as she'd said, her suit wasn't melted or burned at all. Genopsyko herself didn't seem to be hurt, either. Scraping off the lava clinging to her, she lifted her visor and flashed a smile. "Gate key and one million yen, in the bag! Now we can head to the next area!" The area following the grasslands, the mountain area, was already unlocked when they'd logged back in. Some party had apparently done it right before logging out the last time.
The hordes of goblins, equipped with short spears, daggers, short bows, javelins, small shields, and leather armor, had slightly more brute strength and tactical organization than the skeletons. Some of the goblins wore dirty robes and wielded crooked staffs, and they would mutter mysterious chants to summon and launch fireballs the size of human heads. Goblins double the size of normal ones also accompanied these hordes, swinging clubs with all their might—a might which rivaled even a magical girl's.
Even so, these goblins were no match for them, mostly with regard to speed and ability to take a hit. For every one movement a goblin made, a magical girl could make ten. And the monsters' attacks hurt, but that was all. Similar attacks from the girls would leave their enemies with fatal wounds. Unlike the skeletons, though, the goblins bled, and this encounter with their biology was revolting. Seeing their jaws full of crooked teeth being crushed, white enamel and blood flying through the air, made Nokko feel sick. Smashing a skeleton's skull was nowhere near as visceral as smashing a goblin's skull with her mop. She really felt like she was taking a life. The corpses would disappear after two hours, but the sensation remained. There was such a thing as being too real.
On top of all this, Nokko still wasn't over the shock of Magical Daisy's death. But she couldn't play this game if she was going to feel such disgust over killing every single monster. So Nokko focused entirely on distracting herself, filling her mind with happy, fun thoughts to support Genopsyko and @Meow-Meow.
Magical Daisy's death had been an accident. No one was responsible. Nokko knew that if she started thinking about what-ifs, like what if Daisy had been more careful when confronting an unknown enemy, or what if they'd bought a monster encyclopedia before going out to battle, she'd never stop. Still, she couldn't forget the brutal image of Daisy bleeding out from the gaping hole in her body. Most likely, it would never leave her memory. Nor would she forget digging a hole and burying Daisy's body in it, then setting a stone on it in place of a grave marker as the three of them cried and hugged each other.
But that was an accident. Genopsyko liked to mention that Daisy wasn't dead in the real world or anything, as if trying to convince herself that was true. And Nokko wanted her to think like that. That was how she should be thinking. And Nokko could help her party with that.
They couldn't stay sad forever. Even if the game wasn't real, the players needed to forget their sadness and focus on completing it. Nokko also threw her whole self into the task.
Upon entering the mountain area, they had come across a run-down shack. Inside, they discovered a book labeled ANCIENT TEXT. The title was no lie. From annotations to postscript, it was all written in a mysterious language.
So they purchased the app Translator Buddy in the mountain shop and deciphered the document. They had to obtain the staff of the mountain people and use that to perform their community's ritual in their temple, granting them the mark of the mountain people. With it, they would proceed to the lake of lava and perform their folk dance, causing the altar to appear. Within it lay the key of the mountain people, which would let them access the next area. Also, as an addendum: They would learn the dance by placing the hookah of the mountain people upon the scales in the village, which would then unlock the instructions in their phones. The hookah itself would be assembled from three pieces, each of which could only be found by discovering the corresponding clues to their locations.
Once they were done reading about that long, tedious process, Genopsyko's right arm shot into the air. "If it's just lava, that's easy!" she announced, and dropping her helmet's visor and sweeping aside nervous hands from Nokko and @Meow-Meow, she dove into the lake of lava. She took her time reaching the bottom and grabbed the key.
"Man, Genopsyko, you're practically cheating!" Genopsyko praised herself. "God-level skills, man, seriously god-level. A million yen! I'm so stoked! Why don't we meet up offline after and spend some of this on a party?"
"Oh, a party sounds nice."
"Yeah, how many time you get to drink one million yen for free?"
"Whoa, whoa, whoa! @Meow-Meow, you're gonna blow it all on booze? At least save some! Money's precious!"
Suddenly, the sulfuric stink and burning heat of a molten lake they'd rather have escaped as soon as possible belonged to the site of a wondrous memory. Chatting and hugging, the three of them laughed for the first time since Magical Daisy's passing. Nokko transmitted the joy she was feeling into the others.
"Now we can move on to next area. Unlock area mean candy reward."
"Oh, you're right! We just got five hundred more candy!! Woohoo!" cheered Genopsyko.
"Then first," said Nokko, "we should return to the mountain town..."
Then all their phones sounded the text-alert noise. When they checked, they found the HELP buttons on their phones were flashing.
"This is an emergency summons, pon. Everyone, please gather in the square in the wasteland town, pon."
Genopsyko tapped her helmet with a fingertip, then hurriedly snatched it away. Nokko assumed she had tried to scratch her head but the helmet got in the way. "You caught us right when we were having a good time, though," Genopsyko said.
"This is very urgent, pon. You will all be teleported here in one minute, pon. Thank you, and see you soon, pon." The black-and-white sphere, having delivered its message, disappeared. With no one to protest against, the girls had no choice but to obey.
"Well, looks like something's happened," said Nokko. "Let's go and see."
"That furry creep shows up at the worst times," moaned Genopsyko.
"I hope it nothing bad."
@Meow-Meow looked worried, and Genopsyko was clearly irritated. Nokko's only choice was to think fun and happy thoughts.
|
Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 21 |
[ POV: Pechka ]
"All right, Fal has a few corrections and announcements to make, pon."
The square was once again full of magical girls, just as it had been the other day. Some were sitting on the fountain edge, while others leaned against the walls of buildings. It was quite the spectacle, even though Pechka had already seen it once before.
The atmosphere among their party had changed considerably since Fal's message around noon. It had been about a day since Pechka had first cooked for the others, and since then, she'd also created two more meals. With her magic, she could make the fanciest dish in only five minutes. Making a full-course meal took no longer than heating a microwavable snack. And no matter what she made, they loved it.
Nonako Miyokata and Rionetta would praise her endlessly, each trying to outdo the other, and while Clantail's mouth stayed taciturnly shut, her tail wagged happily from side to side.
"Délicieux! Pechka, this is amazing!" said Nonako.
"Exquisite flavor," Rionetta agreed. "I would even accept you as my personal chef."
Their change in attitude persisted even outside of mealtimes. They offered to do physical labor for her, prioritized her when distributing items, and did all sorts of other kindnesses. No one had further complaints about Pechka avoiding fights, not even Rionetta, who'd been so sarcastic about it.
"Just imagine if something were to happen, and your hands were injured in battle. You wouldn't be able to create food anymore! That would be a loss not only for our party, but for the entire world." Rionetta laid on the praise, eyes brimming with emotion as she clasped Pechka's hands gently.
Now Pechka could be confident. She wasn't useless anymore. They all needed her.
The other parties seemed fairly content as well, aside from one. The girl in the black nurse outfit was shaking, her face pale. She must be suffering, too, Pechka thought, concerned for her, though they'd never exchanged words.
"Let's start with the corrections," Fal began. Sand filled center of the fountain, and there was a magical phone fixed there from which Fal's hologram was projected. The air in this place hung heavy with dust, of which the hologram illuminated every tiny speck.
"There was a difference of opinion between Fal and Fal's master regarding damage feedback, pon. In terms of basic damage, your bodies will not be affected. Cut flesh and broken bones won't reflect on your real body. But if you happen to die, your heart will receive a significant shock, pon. This is the unavoidable effect of a realistic experience of something as traumatic to a living creature as death—even though it's a virtual world, pon. I hope you will please forgive us, pon. In addition, this is a very secret game, pon. If you talk to any outsiders about it, you will receive a punishment tantamount to in-game death, so please be careful, pon. And that's all the additional information I have for today, pon."
All sounds in the square disappeared except for the wind carrying the sand and dust. Everyone was staring at Fal, considering the meaning of what it had just said in silence. They were all speechless.
The first to speak up was a magical girl who was covered in blue. "Is this a joke?"
"No," Fal replied. "From now on, I'll only tell you the truth, pon. If you want to survive, please work to complete the game, pon. Even if you do perish, you can rest assured that your promised reward will be deposited into your account."
"That's bullshit!"
"What the hell are you saying?"
"You think we'll accept that?"
Angry shouts flew around incessantly.
Fal, emotionless as ever, took it all without flinching. "This is essentially a selection test, pon. You are being tested on whether you deserve to be magical girls, pon. If you do, you can complete the game. If you want to survive this, work to complete the game, pon. As long as you can finish the game, you will survive, pon," he repeated. "That is the message from Fal's master." Fal finished by informing them this was a decision from someone on high and was not up for discussion.
Pechka was shivering. She wanted to run, but she had nowhere to go. The blood was draining from her head. Her legs felt weak, like she could fall over at any moment. But she didn't.
The girls yelled, screamed, punched walls, and tried to grab Fal, but they only ended up swiping at the air. Static noise filled the hologram, but they couldn't touch the mascot.
"I have a few questions, if I may?" That was the girl in the wheelchair, Pfle. She was as calm as Pechka remembered her being during their last meeting, back in the grasslands town. Her steady voice carried through the chaos, silencing the yelling and screaming. Everyone looked at her.
Pfle addressed Fal. "About how you said we'd receive a significant shock to our hearts—is it possible to survive this?"
"No, pon. Certainly not as a human, and not even transforming into a magical girl would help."
"What would happen if there was an attempt to resuscitate?"
"It wouldn't work, pon."
"You could at least have left us one way out... Well then, if you know the reason our phones are malfunctioning, I'd like to hear it. You're the ones preventing us from contacting the Magical Kingdom, aren't you?"
A murmur ran through the crowd. It was true: They hadn't been able to contact the Magical Kingdom. Pechka had tried to contact them concerning the game, but no matter how many messages she sent, they had all bounced back. She should have found it strange, but she'd just figured that this sort of thing happened sometimes. It couldn't have been solely because her head was full of thoughts of Ninomiya.
Fal blinked. "You're not allowed to tell anyone about this game, so I think it's actually a good thing that you can't contact the Magical Kingdom, pon."
"A good thing, huh?" Pfle murmured. Then she spread her arms wide and spoke loudly. Maintaining the projection, pitch, and beauty of her voice, she sermonized in a resounding tone that dispelled all the clamoring in the square. "It seems our overlords want us to continue this game whether we like it or not. As we can see from their ability to teleport us at will, they have the power to do anything they want with us."
"We're not gonna give in to someone like that!" the girl in the hamster suit yelled loudly, interrupting Pfle.
Pfle glanced over at her. "We're in this situation precisely because giving in is all we can do." Then she added, "Let's continue the game."
There were many protests to this. "So we just have to accept our enemy's plan?"
"Just bow down?"
"There's no point in playing this game!"
"Shouldn't we be trying to defeat this new enemy?"
Pfle nodded at each objection but remained steadfast. "I know you all probably hate the idea of playing a game you don't understand and doing whatever this master wants you to do while being completely cut off from the Magical Kingdom. But the fact that this individual can force a bunch of magical girls to play along means they're easily capable of much more. We may want to defeat this enemy, but as long as we are in the palm of their hand, it shouldn't be our goal. For now, let's just do what we're told."
"But even if we do complete the game, there's no real guarantee we'll be released, is there?" That was Rionetta. Naturally, she was angry.
"It sounds crazy, I'm aware, but we have no choice but to trust this 'master.' I received a reward deposited into my account the other day. I'm sure others among you have confirmed your own deposits. So it seems they at least are intent on paying us. Though it's just a conciliatory amount."
"I'll admit that the reward is attractive," said Rionetta. "But didn't we all agree to play this game on the basis that dying would cause us no harm?"
"Regarding that," Fal interjected, drawing all eyes. Everyone was glaring daggers at the mascot. "There will be no lies or trickery from here on out, pon. Fal's words are the master's words. It's all true, pon."
"And I'm asking how we can be sure of that," said Rionetta.
"Fal can only tell you to please have faith, pon."
"They don't need proof. If they tell us to do something, we have no choice but to obey. We're birds in a cage." Pfle's choice of words seemed almost defeatist, but Pechka couldn't detect any resignation in her tone. Her expression was so alive, it was eerie.
"May I ask something as well?" Another girl stood up, raising her right hand. She was wearing a deerstalker cap along with a cape and a coat, like a private eye. "I'm Detec Bell. I may not look it, but I'm actually a detective." She clearly did look the part, so perhaps that was a joke meant to try to ease the tension. Maybe. But no one was laughing, and no one even attempted to point out the discrepancy.
Detec Bell continued. "The other day, immediately after being released from the game, I spent some time investigating the whereabouts of a certain individual. Their situation is extremely pertinent to what's going on here."
"Bell, you're really primin' for a dramatic reveal, here. Who're you talkin' about?" the blue magical girl asked.
Detec Bell closed her eyes. "I'm talking about Magical Daisy. I've been investigating her in the real world." Opening her eyes, she continued. "Some of you may know about her. Her past exploits as a magical girl were the basis for a TV anime. So I set out to the neighborhood the anime was set in, using my magic to uncover the facts. Magical Daisy did, in fact, operate there at one time. So I investigated further, using my magic to track down her current location. I discovered her family's home, then headed to her apartment from there. The building was surrounded by police cars, an ambulance, and a crowd. I asked around, and her time of death was during the time in the game world...which was just an instant in the real world, wasn't it? It was essentially that very instant."
Magical Daisy was dead. This backed up Fal's statement that an in-game demise meant real-world death as well.
"Magical Daisy was quite famous," Detec Bell went on. "Her sudden death could tip off the Magical Kingdom that something strange is going on. So perhaps now that they're exposed, they can't continue to hide the fact that in-game deaths will be linked to the real world as they force us to play." Detec Bell looked at Fal, who bobbed in the air.
"You may interpret it that way, pon."
Detec Bell nodded in satisfaction. "That's all from me."
She returned to her original position and sat down. The blue magical girl was clamoring, "Bell, that was amazing! You really are a super detective!"
But Pechka had to wonder if she truly grasped the situation. Those who did all seemed disturbed. Clantail was tapping her hooves, her tail between her legs. Nonako Miyokata's face was half-angry, half-crying as she fiddled with her yin-yang ornaments.
Rionetta was clearly furious. "Oh, for crying out loud! Just what have we gotten into?"
"Je can't believe this...," Nonako muttered. They were all, in their own ways, reacting to the terrible news.
But it all seemed so empty to Pechka. Did they really understand the gravity of the situation? They'd all probably been sort of thinking that things might turn out like this. Every word out of their mouths sounded to her like lines read from a script. It seemed like she'd heard it all before.
"Mais Detec Bell said it, too...," said Nonako. "Magical Daisy has clearly died in the real world."
"She could be a spy sent by the master simply to support Fal's story," Rionetta suggested.
"Maaais, it just doesn't seem like—"
"I'm trying to tell you that we can't trust anyone!"
"May I add one more thing?" It was Pfle again. She'd changed places with Detec Bell and was sitting alone next to the mermaid statue. "This may not be something I should really be saying at a time like this...but if we don't take care of this now, it could get much worse." Her eyes met Pechka's, and for some reason, she smiled. Pechka jerked her gaze away. What must be going on in her head right now for her to manage a smile?
"I propose we work together!" Pfle announced, her voice loud and clear. All eyes gathered on her. She continued, decisive. "After we logged back in, in the few moments before our party could find one another again, someone killed one of ours, Masked Wonder! If death in reality and this realm are linked, then this means she really is dead." Her final words were like a whisper. "All of her items and candy, including the item we earned from the event before we logged out last time, were stolen! I ask that the criminal name themselves!"
"No way!" the blue magical girl shouted. "Comrade Wonder was super-strong! There's no way she'd get killed that easy!"
"In a game full of magical girls, mere strength is no guarantee of survival," Pfle stated.
Unable to refute that, the blue-clad girl's face twisted, and her head drooped. Balling her fists tight, she quaked quietly. Detec Bell put a hand on her shoulder and said something to her. Probably comforting her, Pechka thought.
The crowd buzzed. It was only natural. Not only had Fal dropped a bomb on them, but here came another one out of nowhere amid all the chaos.
"So it wasn't a monster that killed her?" Rionetta expressed her doubts, and Pechka sympathized entirely. Even without bringing up Magical Daisy's fate, it was natural to assume that it would be the game's enemies doing players harm.
"The only monsters we encountered in the wasteland were regular skeletons," said Pfle. "I assure you personally, she was not the sort to be done in by such weaklings. Also...are there any here who were partied with Magical Daisy?"
A girl in a maid outfit who appeared to be about ten years old shakily raised her hand.
Pfle turned to her. "What happened to Magical Daisy's items and candy?"
"Um...well...uh...some of it, we spent on the funeral. The rest...well...we, uh, discussed it, and decided to share it..." She spoke hesitantly, as if it were difficult to say. Of course—anyone would find that awkward to confess. Some people might certainly interpret their actions in the nastiest light and judge them to be grave robbers. After answering, the small girl made herself even smaller and hid behind the girl in the cheongsam.
"Did you hear that?" Pfle turned her right palm upward and traced an arc with her hand. "Dying to the monsters doesn't make your items or candy disappear from your magical phones! But Masked Wonder's phone was devoid of both! Is this not the ultimate proof that they were stolen?"
Rionetta, Clantail, Nonako Miyokata, and Pechka all looked at each other. They'd been teleported into the game with no say in the matter, so everyone had to have appeared at the same time. Their party had met up as soon as possible without stopping to do any side quests. Had there even been time for someone to commit murder and steal the victim's items? Obviously, Pechka hadn't done it, and she doubted the other three would have had the time to do so, either. At the very least, it seemed the murderer wasn't among their party.
"I ask that the murderer be honest and name themselves!" Pfle continued. "Right after logging in, you couldn't have known that in-game deaths would be lethal in the real world! Masked Wonder died because of this game! I will not blame you for it! Just come forth!"
Nobody moved. Whispers filled the air.
Pfle took out her magical phone. "Then show me proof. The murderer will have Masked Wonder's Miracle Coin in their phone."
More whispering. At length, Clantail sighed and stepped forward. "What's the point in looking now? Are you trying to start a witch hunt?"
"I suppose 'witch' is not an inaccurate term for us. Clever."
Clantail glared daggers at her for the crack.
Pfle cleared her throat and changed the subject. "It's no great concern if some magical girl who's usually a paragon of good conduct indulges in something naughty in a game, like this player kill. If she names herself and comes forth, we can just call it an unfortunate episode...but I do want the Miracle Coin back. If no one confesses, then I have reason to worry."
"About what?" Clantail demanded.
"That there may be a wolf in sheep's clothing among us. We can't rule out the possibility that one of the magical girls here is carrying out the master's will."
Clantail said nothing.
Pfle took it even further. "She might not even be a spy. The mastermind could be among us. Did I get that right?" she asked Fal, but the mascot said nothing. It just floated there in silence. "Fal says he will speak only the truth, and now it seems he doesn't want to reply. That just makes me all the more anxious to dispel our worries. So, first of all, is anyone willing to step forth?"
Every one of them kept their mouths shut.
"Then show me your magical phones," Pfle ordered. "If you're just a victim, merely one of the poor magical girls forced into this game, then you should have no problem showing us your item bank."
Clantail spat on the ground and glared at Pfle. The flash in her eyes would have started Pechka crying instantly, but Pfle met her gaze head-on, her expression relaxed. Clantail flung her phone at her, and Pfle caught it with one hand.
The crowd hushed as everyone watched the pair's exchange.
"Thank you. I appreciate this." Pfle checked the phone. "Nope, no problem here. No Miracle Coin in your bank. Just to be safe, will you check my phone as well?" She handed Clantail's phone back while also offering her own.
Silently, Clantail took it. "...Nothing suspicious." She practically shoved it back into Pfle's hands.
"Now, if everyone else would please cooperate. The only person who has reason to worry is the murderer. If you're innocent, you shouldn't have any reason to hesitate."
A number of people complained, "Why are we under investigation?" and "Is she even telling the truth?" But it seemed everyone—including Pechka—arrived at the conclusion that it was better than being suspected. They lined up to have Pfle check their phones. From the moment she offered her phone until she got it back, Pechka was incredibly nervous, even though she couldn't possibly be the murderer.
As Clantail had checked Pfle's phone, she had also inspected the one belonging to Pfle's companion, the nurse. Why would someone want to check the phones of those in Masked Wonder's party, too? Pechka wondered, but then she quickly realized either of the two could have snatched all of Masked Wonder's items while nonchalantly declaring that they had been stolen. It chilled Pechka to realize she was thinking like this.
Now that each phone had been searched, the line in front of Pfle dispersed. Everyone returned to their original positions, and Pfle called out to a certain corner of the square, "All right. I've checked everyone but you. If you aren't the murderer, then I ask that you cooperate with us."
Pechka looked to see who it was and was startled. It was a girl in a samurai-esque outfit, a naked Japanese blade dangling from her right hand. She remembered that girl. There was no way she could forget. She was the one Pechka had encountered at the beginning of the game. She'd wiped out the skeletons and proceeded to nearly strangle Pechka to death.
"Come," Pfle pressed her, but the samurai girl didn't move. She at least appeared to have heard, since her eyes were locked on the girl in the wheelchair. The sword at her side swayed.
"Hurry up, now. Everyone's waiting."
Pechka could have sworn she could hear the air creaking with the pressure. She swallowed. It was possible everyone was thinking the same thing she was. They had checked every other magical phone but this one, and the stolen item hadn't been in any of them. In other words, the last person remaining had to have it, right?
Pfle kept her hand outstretched, but the girl refused to move. Everyone else watched with bated breath. They didn't want to stare down some possibly unstable person with a drawn blade hanging at her side.
"Hey, hey! You there!"
To Pechka's shock, someone did step forward. She wore a helmet on her head with little protrusions on the sides that looked like cat ears. The semitransparent visor was down, hiding her face. Her near-future-style skintight suit called to mind a costume from the reruns of a special-effects-heavy show Pechka had once seen about transforming superheroes.
"Being difficult is only gonna make people more suspicious. Just accept it and show us your phone, boss." Her attitude was so confident, you wouldn't think she was addressing a questionable individual with a naked blade. The girl in the power suit reached out to place her hand on the samurai girl's shoulder, but she was swatted away.
The samurai narrowed one eye, studying the other girl. Her gaze was unrelenting. "...Are you the Musician?"
"Sorry?"
"Are you the Musician?"
"Oh, yeah, you could say I'm a musician. I actually sometimes use Vocaloids to make songs and upload them—"
The Japanese sword swung through empty air, followed by a soft slap like the sound of a wet rag. The inside of the suited girl's visor splattered with red, and she crumpled to the ground.
Someone screamed.
|
Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 22 |
[ POV: Nokko ]
"Now, calm down." Pfle, her hand still outstretched, addressed the girl with the sword. Not a speck of blood stained the blade. It shone like silver under the intense light of the sun.
Nokko was doing her best to restrain @Meow-Meow from running over to Genopsyko. "Yumenoshima hurt! We have to...we have to help her!" @Meow-Meow cried.
"Calm down... Just calm down..."
Now was not the time to be rash. Nokko understood that @Meow-Meow was upset, but it was still a bad idea. The murderer would strike again if provoked. If anyone moved, someone was sure to die, and it would be the one who provoked her. Calming herself, Nokko transferred her serenity to @Meow-Meow. But even so, she avoided looking at Genopsyko.
"Why don't you put down that blade first? We can talk this out once you abandon the weapon." Pfle was smiling like she hadn't just witnessed a death. Evenly, she pressed for surrender, as simultaneously, a ray of light shot out and then split in two. The dark-clad nurse flew forward, tackling Pfle. A giant slice appeared in the ground where Pfle had been just moments ago.
Nokko was a veteran. She'd seen plenty of fights between magical girls, so she had a certain amount of skill in analyzing confusing fights like this.
Pfle had taken the initiative, firing a ray of light from the little bird decoration on her wheelchair, and the samurai girl had cut it in half with a swing of her sword. She followed it up with a counterattack, but the dark-clad nurse at Pfle's side had jumped in and saved her comrade.
As Nokko analyzed what had happened to this point, she was hiding in the shadow of a building. The other magical girls had also slipped behind walls and into the enemy's blind spots. Some were also striking back, while others were just trying to get away.
Several large harpoons shot through the air, but the samurai girl cut down every last one. They were sliced, split, and smacked down. Vertically, horizontally, diagonally—all of them thudded to the ground before they hit their target.
The girl with the katana hadn't moved from her original position, yet she'd still managed to destroy all those spears. When giant sunflower seeds flew at her, they too were cleaved in half, and when rocks hurtled her way, they all shattered before they fell.
Her power had to be a long-range slicing attack. Genopsyko, in her invincible suit, had been cut behind her visor. Her suit itself was undamaged, but the girl inside was bleeding profusely. In other words, this girl could probably cut anything within her field of vision. So since she'd been able to see Genopsyko's face through the translucent covering, she must have been able to cut her face. Nokko could puzzle that much out, but there was nothing she could do about it. Basically, if she stepped out of hiding, she'd be struck down.
The girl behind the building with her was hugging her knees and shivering, her white hat about to fall from her head. Nokko probably couldn't expect anything from her. There had to be other girls taking cover nearby, too, but Nokko couldn't see them from her position.
Sounds of fighting ceased from both sides, and a few minutes passed—though Nokko was judging by her internal clock, so it might actually have been less. The square was silent, and nobody moved a muscle.
Then came a great grinding sound like stone and concrete rubbing together. Slowly, it grew louder. Nokko abruptly raised her head to see that the building protecting her was about to topple on her. Not the whole structure, though—just the top half. The twenty-yard-square mass had been severed at a diagonal angle, and the upper slice was sliding down toward them. Not even a magical girl could survive unscathed if crushed under that. Nokko kicked the other girl out of the way, using the recoil to propel herself in the other direction. This should get her away from the falling concrete and also help the other girl escape—probably.
The upper half of the building slammed into the ground. Crash after crash assaulted her eardrums. The impact was so strong, the surrounding buildings visibly wobbled, and she couldn't keep on her feet. Both hands and feet on the ground, she looked through the billowing dirt clouds to see in them a girl shouldering a Japanese sword, standing there calmly.
"Are you the Musician?" The last syllable came out with a rush of air as the samurai girl raised her sword up. Nokko was just over ten yards away. Still, the assailant swung down.
In one strike, a massive rock ten feet high was sliced into two.
"Huh?" said the samurai. The way had been clear before she'd raised her sword. Just bringing the blade down should have cleanly bisected Nokko. But the moment the samurai girl's arm moved, something had intervened. A giant boulder had fallen between Nokko and the samurai, and the stone had been sliced instead of Nokko.
"Not on my watch!" @Meow-Meow stood in front of Nokko. A total of eight slips of paper gripped between her fingers, she did the same kung fu pose she'd done before.
The two stared each other down. @Meow-Meow slid forward, letting out a deep breath. Across from her, the other girl slowly raised the tip of her katana skyward.
The moment samurai girl brought down her blade, a talisman flew. It disappeared with a small explosion, leaving behind a large boulder that fell in two pieces atop of the rubble already strewn on the ground. @Meow-Meow threw seal after seal, each branded with an @ mark. They all exploded, transforming into boulders.
The samurai girl let out a strange cry, drawing her wakizashi short sword with her left hand. Supporting it in a light grip using only her index and middle fingers and thumb, she twirled both blades so fast it was difficult for the eye to follow. Slicing, splitting, and smashing, the samurai girl carved every single rock into dust. Motes of broken stone flew through the air, the fine shavings forming a white mist that obscured everything in sight.
A gust of wind blew, scattering the dust and revealing two figures facing off amid a pile of mangled lumps of rock. One was the samurai girl wielding both of her swords. The other was Nokko, mop in hand.
Nokko was standing at the ready, but that didn't mean she stood a chance. At ten yards away, she had no means of attacking, and the samurai girl had to know that, based on their exchange thus far. The samurai girl's cheeks warped, flashing white teeth. She was smiling. She knew Nokko would go down without a fight; she was mocking her. The sudden shadow over the sun, the fact that @Meow-Meow was gone—none of it registered to the samurai girl. None of the details mattered. She was simply driven by her urge to cut down every enemy in sight. Her twisted smile never disappeared until the abandoned building crushed her.
Nokko looked up to the roof of the building that had come flying from the sky. There stood @Meow-Meow, her face distorted with tears, in perfect opposition to the expression of the samurai girl, which had lasted until her demise.
If @Meow-Meow hadn't been there, Nokko would have died. @Meow-Meow had protected her with those boulders. She'd scattered her talismans, summoning barrier after barrier, all the while scaling a nearby building and leaping off the roof to summon one of the dilapidated office buildings from the wasteland. That had saved Nokko's life. She wanted to thank her protector, but the sobbing @Meow-Meow wasn't in the right state for that.
This reminded Nokko that Genopsyko had been hurt. Nokko looked to where she'd collapsed after being cut down, but she was gone. Nothing but her magical phone lay there.
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Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 23 |
[ MASTER SIDE #3 ]
"Sooo, how'd it go?"
"Oh, it was just awful, pon. Everyone was crying and screaming. They tried to kill Fal, pon. Could have been turned to giblets and mincemeat if Fal hadn't been a hologram, pon."
"I see, I see." The girl's cheeks relaxed into a slight smile. Putting her left index finger to the frame of her glasses, she adjusted their position. "Still, they've somewhat accepted it, right? I think they must have known things might turn out like this, but they participated in the game anyway. No one refused; no one dragged their heels. They were just sucked into the game and accepted it." She seemed ready to make a long-winded speech, but Fal cut her off with a cough. The girl blinked twice, then looked at Fal. "What?"
"Fal has a suggestion, pon."
"Well? Go on."
"It's not too late yet, don't you think, pon?"
"Not too late for what?"
"If you turn yourself in without a struggle, maybe the Magical Kingdom will reduce your penalty, pon?"
"I doubt that."
"If you turn yourself in, at least they won't execute you, pon."
"My life isn't important. What is important is for a magical girl to live like one." The conversation paused there. Neither Fal nor the girl spoke for a moment.
"Fal has an idea, pon."
"What kind of idea?" The girl twirled her bangs around her fingertip. Her hair, while mostly short, had a bit of a cowlick, and she seemed particularly sensitive about how it stuck up.
"You can say Fal threatened or tricked you, pon. Or that you didn't realize Fal was acting crazy until it was too late, pon. Just blame it on Fal, pon."
"And then?"
"You turn us in, declaring that Fal was the criminal. Tell the Magical Kingdom that your sidekick decided to round up a bunch of magical girls and make them fight to the death, pon."
"Hey..." The girl turned a half circle in her revolving chair to face Fal. The momentum caused her glasses to slip down, so she once again stuck out her left middle finger to readjust them. "Do you see me as some little weakling who's trembling in fear of all she's done, a girl who simply feels she can't go back? Do I come off that boring to you? If your impression of me is that I'm the kind of person who would be glad to hear 'I'll take all the blame, so you go beg forgiveness'...that's worse than disgusting. The looowest of the low."
"You could still—"
"You shut your mouth." The girl let go of her bangs, then immediately spun back to her original position. "Don't you throw cold water on my moral code, sidekick. Only real magical girls should be doing what we do. What's so wrong with that? Nothing. If you're gonna tell me that the unworthy can be magical girls, too, then the system, the tests, the Magical Kingdom, and everything else are to blame for that. And in particular, the one with the most blame to shoulder is her. So perhaps the second-most would be the children, right?"
The girl smiled at Fal. "I will follow my master's teachings. That's the right way to be a magical girl."
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Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 24 |
[ POV: Shadow Gale ]
"Player deaths don't make items disappear," said Pfle. "So then what happens when a magical phone is destroyed? What about the items inside?"
"When a magical phone is destroyed, the items inside return to their original locations, pon. If there's an event item, that event will reactivate. Items sold in shops will be available for sale again, pon."
"Is it possible to carry around an item without installing it?"
"All items are just data and can only be materialized once installed in a magical phone, pon. All items must be installed first, whether you're looking to equip weapons and armor or use pots and cooking utensils, pon."
Since Fal had announced that death in the game equaled death in real life, making it clear that this game was illegal and unsanctioned by the Magical Kingdom, the mascot had been getting more hate than a tick or a cockroach. But Pfle had pressed the HELP button anyway and was tossing questions at the mascot as if this were the obvious course of action.
But she wasn't asking questions like "Why are you doing all this?" or "Do you resent us for some reason?" All her queries were positive in nature, those of a player looking to complete the game.
Shadow Gale was once again struck by what an abnormal human being she was. Though Masked Wonder had only worked with them for three days, she'd been their ally as they moved through the game, and her death had been brutal. To make it worse, now they knew she wasn't dead in the game alone. But Pfle showed no sign at all of shock or grieving.
The girls had offered a variety of opinions: Some had discussed how they might communicate what was going on to the Magical Kingdom, while others suggested that other magical girls could save them. None of this went anywhere, and ultimately, these proposals may not have been constructive. But wasn't it still better than dancing to the tune of the master who had forced them into this game?
Someone had suggested that the various parties should all work together, so the four leaders had had a discussion in the square. But Pfle had ended it early and gone back to Shadow Gale.
Currently, Pfle was speaking to Shadow Gale across a desk in one of the buildings on the first floor of the mountain town. This building was larger than the other houses, and Pfle could maneuver around it easily, even on her wheelchair. Also, like all the other buildings, it was empty, so no one would complain if they hung around indefinitely.
"That's all of my questions. Thank you, Fal." Pfle even included a polite expression of gratitude as she closed the HELP menu on her magical phone. The window disappeared, leaving the item confirmation screen on display. "There is one thing that's odd."
"You still haven't told me how your discussion went, though," said Shadow Gale. "What happened?"
"If I'm going to talk about that, there's something else that has to come first."
"What do you mean?"
Earlier, Fal had gathered everyone in the wasteland town square, and there, it had announced something unthinkable. Then, while all the others were restlessly worrying over what they should do, Pfle had dropped another bomb: Masked Wonder had been murdered, and all her items and candy had been stolen. Pfle had then asked the culprit to come forth.
Just recalling the vicious manner of Masked Wonder's death made Shadow Gale sick. Masked Wonder had been a weirdo, and sometimes rather pushy, but she'd still been a good person, and softhearted enough for Pfle to hook with her bandages trick. She'd been a righteous magical girl of justice who fought to protect the weak. There was no reason she had to die like that.
Pfle had told them that Masked Wonder had been mugged, meaning that whoever had the Miracle Coin had to be the culprit. Come on, she'd said, rushing them along. Cooperate with me in searching for the culprit. Let me check all your magical phones, please.
But then they'd gotten stuck on the last girl. The samurai girl had refused to show her phone, and when the suited girl had criticized her for that, the samurai had cut her up. The samurai must not have killed her—the victim had disappeared afterward. The two girls from her party were apparently looking for her, but no one had called to inform them of her location or say that they'd found her body anywhere.
The samurai had rampaged as violently as a typhoon, cutting everything in sight. She sliced and sliced and sliced to kill, even cleaving a building in two. Pfle would have died if Shadow Gale hadn't saved her. Pfle must have taken it for granted that her companion would do so, as she didn't voice a single word of gratitude. Maybe Shadow Gale should have kicked her to safety instead, if that would have worked.
Ultimately, the ruined building became the villain's tombstone. The samurai had been fighting with the girl in the Chinese dress, and then, right when she was about to kill the maid girl in front of her, a building sundered by the samurai herself had dropped on her from above to crush her. It was horrifying to know that there were so many magical girls in the world who could pull off such terrifying stunts.
The Chinese-style girl had then sealed the destroyed edifice away once more inside one of her talismans. Left in the center of the earthen pit was...the samurai girl. Shadow Gale didn't really want to recall what she'd looked like, exactly. Her magical phone had been completely unusable, the protective case broken and the LCD screen shattered, so they hadn't been able to check and see if the stolen items were on it. But since the samurai girl had refused to present her magical phone and had attacked so suddenly, and no one else had the Miracle Coin, they all just figured she must have been the culprit. So their search for the killer ended there.
After that, they all offered their opinions on what to do next and prepared for the party leaders to have a discussion. As the others occupied themselves with suggestions like "We should do this" or "We should do that," Shadow Gale became lost in her troubles, her mind hazy.
How could all of them be so quick to get over this? Three people had died—and furthermore, they were being forced to play this game with their lives on the line. Far, far more of them should have been crying and wailing and losing their minds. Wasn't it messed up that they were all having a composed discussion about how to best deal with the situation?
All of them are trying to trick me, she thought.
When Pfle left the conversation early and came back, Shadow Gale very emphatically tried to communicate the thoughts boiling in her head.
Pfle responded, "They're not all necessarily as calm as you think they are, Mamori. Though I am."
"I know you're not bothered, miss—"
"But yes, now that you mention it, perhaps they're all relaxed about this. Look, do you remember that examiner from back when we became magical girls? Well, no matter. You know what she said. When you become a magical girl, you don't only become stronger physically—you become strong of mind as well. Your sense of fear diminishes."
"I don't feel any less scared."
"I'm talking about the kind of ideal magical girl that the Magical Kingdom wants. The kind of saint who won't hesitate to sacrifice herself when push comes to shove. No one with a regular mentality could do that." Pfle was making sense and speaking rationally, but whether or not that would convince Shadow Gale was another issue entirely. "There's an app being sold at the shop in this town called the Item Encyclopedia. It's the item version of the monster encyclopedia that was sold at the grasslands shop." Pfle handed Shadow Gale her phone as if to say, "Go on, take a look." Displayed there was a long list of names. "These are the names of all the items. You can see a graphic, too, if you click on them. When you see question marks rather than an item name, it means no one has acquired the item yet. Sliding to the right, it lists how to acquire the item, how much it costs at shops, and then its use."
"What are these numbers?" asked Shadow Gale. She stared at some large numbers beside some smaller numbers in brackets. For example, to the side of the travel pass, the text read 10,000. Its meaning was indecipherable from a glance.
"Good on you to have noticed that. That's important. The larger number is the upper limit for that item. The smaller one indicates how many are presently circulating in the game. With that in mind, look at this." Pfle's finger pointed to where the Miracle Coin was listed. Her finger moved to the right and then stopped at the spot where the upper limit figure and the amount in circulation were listed. There, it read 1.
"So what? What does that...huh?" Shadow Gale tilted her head, confused. "The number in circulation is...one of one?"
"That's right. Strange, isn't it?" Pfle's voice held a note of enthusiasm. From the look on her face, she seemed to be enjoying herself. "When a magical phone is broken, the items within return to their original source. Any event items in there will cause the event to reactivate—that's what Fal said. If that hooligan swinging around that katana had stolen Masked Wonder's items, then when her phone was crushed by the building, the number of Miracle Coins in circulation would have turned to zero, and the event would have activated again."
"Maybe she was just carrying it around and never installed it in her phone," suggested Shadow Gale. "Or she hid it somewhere."
"That can't be done. You can't materialize an item without installing it first. I've already confirmed that fact with Fal."
"How do you know Fal isn't just lying again?"
"Fal won't lie. He's said that he'll only tell the truth from now on."
"How can you trust such a chronic liar?"
"Listen..." The enthusiasm in Pfle's voice was heating up. Her hands had been resting on the wheels of her wheelchair—but at some point, she had begun gripping the rims tight. The rubber warped, and with nowhere to go, the air within bulged out like it was about to pop. "I'm no ace detective like Detec Bell. When I seek out a culprit, I don't gather evidence or tear down alibis—though I do make inquiries, at least."
"What are you trying to say, here?"
"Fal is missing many things useful to judging his character: vocal timbre, physical appearance, clothing, gesture, body odor, and tone of voice, as well as the volume of secretions such as saliva and sweat. But really, even without such things, it's simple enough to get a grasp of his character. He resents his master, he's dissatisfied with this game, and he's on the players' side."
"Weren't you just saying you're not an ace detective?"
"I'm saying that when searching for a culprit, I pick them out based on their character. I don't need evidence or alibis—because if I believe they're the culprit, they most certainly are. There is only one condition that needs to be fulfilled for an autocracy to surpass the rule of law, and that is to have a sovereign who never errs. I never misjudge a person. Fal wants to cooperate with the players." Pfle released the wheels of her chair. Her elegant, white palms were dirtied black. She extended her hands to Shadow Gale, who pulled out her handkerchief to wipe them.
"Fal told us the truth," said Pfle, "and the coin is still in circulation. In other words, this has to mean that the one who killed Masked Wonder and stole her items is alive." Once her hands were clean of dirt, the ardor that had filled Pfle's words suddenly cooled. She was back to normal. "Genopsyko Yumenoshima's disappearance is connected to this, too. Someone is up to something."
"So does the lady sovereign who never errs know who that someone is?" Shadow Gale had meant to say that sarcastically, but Pfle's expression was unconcerned as she shrugged.
"I don't know yet. And that's exactly why we should refrain from cooperating with other parties. We can't open our arms and get chummy with someone who might be the enemy, now, can we?"
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Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 25 |
[ POV: Detec Bell ]
Presenting the results of her investigation into Magical Daisy in front of the whole crowd had felt good. Detec Bell had really felt like an ace detective. Even though her life had been in danger then, too, she'd been terribly proud and gotten really into it.
The problems came afterward, once they'd subdued that rioter swinging around the katana.
The leaders' discussion reached no conclusions; it didn't even come close, and then it had ended without going anywhere. They had broken the meeting up early because Nokko wanted to go search for the vanished Genopsyko Yumenoshima. Pfle had said, "Talk to me once you have an objective," and then left, as if this had nothing to do with her. Detec Bell had attempted to win over Clantail, saying that even if it was just the two of them, they should still cooperate, but Clantail's sullen silence had made it hard for Detec Bell to figure out what was on her mind.
Clantail had the lower body of a horse, so when the two faced each other, Clantail ended up looking down on Detec Bell even when they were both sitting down. Plus, the centaur had a tremendous force of presence. Clantail did basically give her a nod at the end, so maybe that meant Detec Bell had gotten her understanding. But since they never decided on anything concrete, that understanding was pointless.
Disappointed and exhausted, Detec Bell returned to the shop in the wasteland town where her party was—and where another draining, disheartening incident awaited.
"She was there! For serious!" Lapis Lazuline was freaking out. Her shoulder-length black hair and kind, pale-brown eyes made her look like a reserved sort of person, but she was always, always noisy.
"Who was here?" asked Detec Bell.
"Genopsyko Yumenoshima," said Melville. She, by contrast, was loud only in looks. Her hairstyle—the quintessence of loud, with curled orange locks dotted with purple flowers—contrasted with the person herself, who was quiet and spoke falteringly. "Genopsyko Yumenoshima, th' lass wha' fell in the waestlan' taun, she 'os watchin' us from 'round yon corner." Melville pointed behind a building.
"No way, I mean, Genopsyko Yumenoshima was—" Detec Bell had been about to say, "killed in the wasteland town," but her lips snapped shut there. Nokko and @Meow-Meow were still searching for her, since it was basically unknown whether she was alive or dead. Detec Bell figured that someone had hidden the body, but since some people still believed that Genopsyko was alive and were looking for her, Detec Bell hesitated to voice her opinion that there was no way a dead person was going to show up.
"She had a real bad stab wound in her face, goin' through her cheek into her mouth and right to the end of her jaw. That was probably where she got cut," said Lazuline, and Melville nodded. "But that wound was stitched up like Frankenstein!" Lazuline cried with a ghoulish expression, and Melville nodded.
"So then what happened?" asked Detec Bell. "Did you call out to her? Did she say anything to you?"
"Well, she wouldn't have been able to talk, anyway. Even her mouth was sewn shut. We were so busy screamin' and freakin' out, I couldn't even begin to try talkin' to her."
It had to have been just Lazuline and Cherna Mouse freaking out. It was difficult to imagine Melville screaming and causing a fuss.
"Anyway, where's Cherna?" Detec Bell asked.
"Genopsyko scampered off somewhere, so Cherna's chasin' her down," Lazuline explained. "Once Cherna brings her back, you'll know we've been tellin' the truth."
"I'm not accusing you of lying."
"Aren't ya? I can almost smell the skepticism rollin' off ya."
They wouldn't lie—but they might have misunderstood what they saw. Lazuline was thoughtless, and Cherna was careless; however, Melville had been with them, too, so that meant Cherna and Lazuline had not just been imagining things. So Genopsyko Yumenoshima really had been there.
The stitches meant either she'd sewn herself up or someone else had. Why would she have done that rather than use recovery medicine? It also didn't make sense that she was going off on her own without letting the others in her party know she was safe. There was no reason for her to do that.
Detec Bell turned her gaze away from Lazuline, who was grabbing her collar and leaning into her, and instead turned to Melville.
The orange-haired girl nodded and, with a jerk of her jaw, indicated just past the shop. " 'Ere, she's returned."
A creature leaped out from between two buildings, running on all fours. Right before it was about to collide with Melville, it braked suddenly to a stop. It had left a track on the ground in its wake, and clouds of dust whirled into the air. Ignoring the coughs from Detec Bell and Lapis Lazuline, the figure—Cherna Mouse—lifted her right arm to report, "She wasn't there!"
"Who wasn't there?" asked Detec Bell. "You mean Genopsyko?"
"She just wasn't there—you'd be amazed! Cherna figures she's got to be super-fast. And, and, and what was really amazing was that she had no smell at all!"
"Maybe you guys were all just imagining things."
"We weren't! This really happened!" Cherna Mouse shook her sleeve, and something lightly rolled out of it. There were pockets inside her sleeves, and she typically stored giant sunflower seeds in there.
Melville, Lazuline, and Detec Bell all looked at each other, and then at the thing that had fallen. It was a rock wrapped in a crumpled piece of paper. As the parcel traveled across the ground, the paper unfolded, and they saw inside. Written on the paper in a script that resembled an earthworm wriggling around was a message: Watch out for the traitor.
"What's it say?" Cherna asked, unperturbed, but nobody replied.
Melville kicked the rock. Now without its weight, the paper was caught in a gust of wind and flew away.
"Ahh! It's flying away!" Cherna Mouse cried, running after it.
"An' yer meetin'?" Melville asked Detec Bell.
"Oh yeah. We decided we're all going to cooperate."
"Nay, Ah shan't." Melville's eyes never left the rock at their feet. "Some blackguard is schemin', an' we've no inkling who. Cubbe one o' ye in 'is pairty. 'Tis chancy, it is, and we cannae proceed hence."
"But if we all split up at a time like this—"
"Ah'd prefir't to this." Melville said, brooking no argument. Detec Bell couldn't say anything to that.
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Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 26 |
[ POV: Nokko ]
Nokko walked around visiting people, but she didn't find Genopsyko. Detec Bell's party claimed to have seen her, so she had to be alive. But Genopsyko never showed herself to Nokko or @Meow-Meow.
Nokko activated the map application, figuring perhaps she could use it in her hunt for Genopsyko, but the location displayed there was the same as @Meow-Meow's. It seemed the map didn't display where the person's position was, but rather her magical phone's. It was entirely useless.
If she's alive, she could at least come see us, Nokko thought—but she never voiced that. @Meow-Meow had hardly said a word since that battle in the town square, and Nokko kept finding her zoning out and staring off into the distance. Nokko tried as hard as she could to transmit fun and happy feelings to her, but she didn't know if it was really working. They had been forced into this life-and-death game, they didn't know where Genopsyko was, and at the end of her battle with that samurai girl, @Meow-Meow had killed her. Even if that girl had been a murderer and a thief, Nokko figured this had to be weighing down on @Meow-Meow along with everything else.
Nokko couldn't say, "Genopsyko could at least come see us" or "I never knew you were that strong, @Meow-Meow!" or "Let's all work together to make it out of this alive." Any of that would dredge up painful memories, and remembering them would just make her even more depressed.
"Not magical girl anymore," @Meow-Meow said suddenly during their meal that day.
Nokko was startled. They were sitting facing each other and ingesting a lifeless meal of preserved rations. @Meow-Meow was silent, and so was Nokko, and their wordless act held no more meaning than reducing their hunger meters. But then @Meow-Meow had suddenly spoken, breaking that silence. Nokko felt like it had been a very long time since she'd last heard the other girl's voice.
"What do you mean, 'not magical girl anymore'?" asked Nokko.
"I mean just what I say. Retired as magical girl."
"Who's retired?"
"Me."
"Huh? You retired from being a magical girl, @Meow-Meow? But you were made to participate in the game anyway?"
"That what happened."
Nokko was about to comfort her, but then she hesitated. It didn't seem like @Meow-Meow had brought this up because of a desire for sympathy, and neither did it seem like just complaining. It was all words coming from her mouth intermittently. Her face still had this dazed look.
"Something really bad happen. So after, I stop being magical girl."
"Something bad—" Nokko started to say and then stopped. Remembering that would only make @Meow-Meow upset.
"I no remember it at all. It must have been bad enough for me to quit being a magical girl, but I can't remember at all what happened..." With just her front teeth, @Meow-Meow nibbled her nutrition bar, chewing it slowly. "Something awful happened... I quit being a magical girl...but then I participated in this game...like it was totally natural... I didn't think it was strange, either..." She seemed obsessed—possessed, even. Whatever it was, she didn't seem right. She just kept on whispering and muttering. "On top of that building, I was crying. Tears were falling. I was sad. Because I killed someone. Someone I couldn't hold back with. I know that...but..."
She raised her head. There were no clouds in the sky, no stars, no moon. Nothing. There was only sprawling black, and @Meow-Meow's eyes reflected that same darkness. "It was the...the second time? It was the second time, so I thought I could do better..."
There was motion in the thicket, the sound of leaves against leaves. Nokko moved to get up, but @Meow-Meow restrained her with a hand. "Who there?" she asked. There was focus in her eyes and awareness in her voice. The fact that @Meow-Meow was acting normal again was more surprising to Nokko than the fact that someone was there.
"It's me." The magical girl in the wheelchair—and the nurse girl pushing it. Nokko was pretty sure the one in the wheelchair was Pfle. She'd been in a party with Masked Wonder, the murdered girl. The nurse in black was... What was her name again? She was the one who attended Pfle and had leaped in from the side to save her life when she had nearly been killed... Nokko couldn't remember her name.
"I would hope you remember? I'm Pfle, and this is Shadow Gale."
Right. Pfle and Shadow Gale.
"I've come because I have a request," said Pfle. "Would you lend us your ears?"
"I thought we already talk about cooperating with other party," said @Meow-Meow. "If your request help us survive this, we have to listen."
Nokko looked over at @Meow-Meow. There was strength and determination in her eyes. She was thankful that @Meow-Meow had pulled it together, but such a sudden, inexplicable change made Nokko anxious.
"It seems that Detec Bell's team still continues to claim ownership over their territory," said Pfle. "I'm told that those who approach their hunting grounds are threatened by a one-hundred-foot Cherna Mouse."
Magical candy was a necessity for everything here. So of course, you had to gather a lot if you were aiming to complete the game. But stealing from one another would only drive them all farther from completion. The players' solidarity was falling apart. And who would benefit from that? That had to be...
"What they thinking?! This no time to be fighting each other!" Nokko could hear @Meow-Meow's teeth grinding. "We stop them. Having priority on hunting ground don't matter for just finishing game."
"Yes, indeed," Pfle replied. "But I doubt that lot will listen if you try to use words to stop them."
"But I no want us kill each other over it."
"We won't be doing that. I wouldn't want that, either. That's exactly why we need your help."
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Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 27 |
[ POV: Shadow Gale ]
The newest unlocked region was now the city area. But despite its title, it was of course not the kind of city you'd see people living in now. It was more of a cyberpunk-style sci-fi area. The aesthetic consisted of jumbled-up cables and wires, and the level design was even more of a mess. It was smaller than the wasteland, the grasslands, and the mountain area had been, but it was like a maze that took some time getting used to.
The shop sold both armor and weapons. They were higher level than the equipment sold at previous shops, too, at +5 power. Shadow Gale bought a +5 weapon and installed it. When she summoned it, she got a wrench and gave it a test swing. It felt incredibly right. These weapons were clearly made with the players in mind. The feeling of the tool rolling in her hand lingered.
The monsters that appeared in this area were robot soldiers that called to mind the androids found in robot anime. According to the encyclopedia, there were four types: attacker, defender, gunner, and general. They attacked with lighting strikes, mini-missiles, body blows, etc., and they were quite a bit stronger than the goblins and skeletons had been.
They were formidable, so they dropped more candy and, what's more, rare items at a rate of about one in a hundred. The shop would buy these arm parts, leg parts, body parts, head parts, etc. at high prices. These items were just vendor trash with no gameplay purpose—for any player other than Shadow Gale, that is.
Shadow Gale's magical ability was modification. Using her wrench and scissors, she could bang away at things to improve them. She'd always used her magic for tasks that were simple but nonetheless made people happy, like improving TV picture quality, upping the gas mileage of a car, or increasing disk storage on a computer.
Right now, Shadow Gale's hands were whipping about, using parts of every type to modify Pfle's wheelchair. They'd requested the other parties gather the materials. When they had declared they would duel with Cherna Mouse, the others had all gladly cooperated. Shadow Gale understood quite well just how much everyone hated that party. Pfle had also asked @Meow-Meow to deliver the things they needed as well as help gather them. All this intensive modification had made the wheelchair dramatically less mobile and decreased how long it would work, so it helped a lot to be moving around less.
They accumulated more and more parts. No matter how Shadow Gale used them up, they never disappeared. She could see no end to the grind.
Pfle was using her magical phone. She seemed to be reading something.
"Um...," Shadow Gale began.
"What is it, Mamori?"
"How long should I keep doing this...?"
"Until it's satisfactory," Pfle answered.
Who was Shadow Gale supposed to satisfy, and how? She got the feeling that asking those questions wouldn't get her any answers. "Could I ask one thing...?"
"What is it?"
"While working on this, I've been thinking about a lot of things."
"That's some pretty impressive multitasking, for you."
"I've been thinking about who killed Masked Wonder."
"Oh?"
"I think it could be @Meow-Meow." Shadow Gale thought that was a pretty outrageous thing to have said. But contrary to her expectations, Pfle just kept fiddling with her phone with no apparent concern. Shadow Gale sullenly went back to her task. She continued on with that for a few more minutes, until Pfle broke the silence.
"Mamori...when you suspect someone, you feel a need to have some sort of basis for your suspicions, don't you? You're a different sort from me."
Most human beings were a different sort from Pfle. It took talent to become that arrogant. "Yes, more or less," Shadow Gale replied.
"Tell me your reasoning for why you believe @Meow-Meow to be the culprit. I'll listen."
"When she fought the samurai in the square, she attacked by summoning boulders."
"Oh, yes. Seems like quite the convenient magic to have," Pfle remarked.
@Meow-Meow had pulled rocks and buildings from those slips of paper, and then afterward, she'd sucked that building she'd summoned right back into the paper, too. Both of the things she used to fight had been everywhere in this game so far. It seemed @Meow-Meow's power was to seal things inside her talismans.
Shadow Gale continued, "And Masked Wonder's head was crushed by a boulder, right?"
"...That's your basis? Because @Meow-Meow was using boulders? That's all?"
"Of course that's not all. It's ultimately just one of many elements that make her suspicious."
"Oh? So then what's the main reason you suspect her?"
"The coin." Shadow Gale spun the wrench and cut with the shears. Her power of modification wasn't based on any reason or principle, so she didn't really understand the point of each of her individual actions as she worked. "@Meow-Meow put that massive slice of building inside her talisman," Shadow Gale explained. "If she can pull off something that extreme, then she might have an even higher-level technique for storing data itself inside her talismans without going through the magical phone. She may be capable of carrying the coin around with her without installing it." Magical girls' powers ignored rules and principles. It was just like how Shadow Gale could use the robot soldiers' rare drops for a purpose other than sale. "If the culprit is someone else, I don't know how they would be carrying the coin around without a magical phone. So, to summarize, that's why I think she might be the culprit." Shadow Gale finished off her explanation like an elementary school child would close an essay.
When she glanced toward Pfle, the other girl's eyes had not left her phone. "Your deductions aren't bad."
"Right?"
"Perhaps I've misjudged you."
Exactly what kind of person had Kanoe thought her to be?
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Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 28 |
[ Detec Bell ]
Becoming a magical girl offered many opportunities to observe many strange things, starting with the girl herself. But still, not many of them would see something as unreal as this.
It had to be a mile or two away, but even so, the feeling that the brutal conflict might spill all the way over to them kept Detec Bell on edge. Even their slightest motions created intense dust clouds and noise. The one-hundred-foot Cherna Mouse and the one-hundred-foot... What would you call it? At a glance, it resembled a crab. Of course, it wasn't really a crustacean. It was entirely mechanical. Pfle had called it a ten-legged tank, hadn't she?
The ground rumbled and dust billowed up as Cherna Mouse ran to make a grab at the tank, which it blocked. Detec Bell could sense the sound and impact of their struggle all the way where she was.
Two of the machine's legs grappled with Cherna's arms, while one of the other eight legs took the opportunity to strike her side, causing her to lose her balance and fall over. Clouds of dust obscured her from Detec Bell's vision, but still, Cherna Mouse rolled away from the tank, knocking over the high-rises in her way, cracking them underneath her massive frame, crushing them to the point where it hurt just to look at them.
Cherna Mouse withdrew, but the tank didn't give chase. It stood firm. Then a protrusion where a crab's eyes would be flashed, and something exploded a ways ahead of the tank. The tank had fired its lasers. It launched Cherna Mouse back and sent her rolling along the ground. Three buildings were destroyed in the exchange, but they were behind the tank now, and Detec Bell couldn't see them from where she stood.
Even from atop a distant high-rise, Detec Bell could grasp the massive scale of this destruction. Melville was squinting her right eye a bit. Every time Cherna Mouse was attacked, Lapis Lazuline yipped, which was highly annoying.
Detec Bell could see where this battle was headed. The ten-legged tank was overwhelming Cherna. It had more methods of attack available to it, it moved fast, and it was also equipped with projectile weapons. Detec Bell never would have imagined that any magical girl could beat Cherna Mouse, but at this rate, she would go down.
It seemed like Melville and Lazuline didn't want her to lose, but Detec Bell wouldn't really mind. Maybe it would be better if she did.
That morning, they'd received a request.
"I would like to propose a nonlethal duel."
The visitors came to Detec Bell's party while they were eating breakfast. It was the magical girl in the wheelchair and the nurse in the black outfit...the Pfle and Shadow Gale pair. The very first thing out of Pfle's mouth was an invitation to duel, creating a lot of question marks in their heads. But what Pfle said next clarified her intentions.
"If we win, we want you to stop monopolizing hunting grounds. You use the threat of force to back your actions. If we demonstrate our superior strength, then you wouldn't mind stepping down, I take it? I believe Miss Melville over there has said that the strong rule."
Promising they would give their answer later, Detec Bell had Pfle and Shadow Gale leave. She had the sense not to quarrel in front of another party.
"Is it true that you're blocking the others from our hunting grounds?" Detec Bell asked Cherna Mouse.
"Yep." Cherna Mouse didn't seem in the least bit shy about it.
"Why would you do something like that? I thought we said that we all have to cooperate."
"Cherna doesn't care about that stuff," she replied.
In order to unlock the gate to the next area, they had to get into the office in front of the city area's defense headquarters, and for that, they needed a password. Detec Bell had tried to discuss this with the other parties, but their response hadn't been positive. They'd hardly managed to have a conversation. Now Detec Bell knew why.
"Don't give me that," she said. "It's not too late. Go and apologize. You can bring a gift for them, too, if you like."
"No. Cherna hasn't done anything wrong. If we're gonna have a duel, Cherna'll beat 'em up."
This wasn't going anywhere. She was not the kind of person who could be compelled to obey.
"Fightin's never good, y'know?" Lazuline said, nodding with folded arms and a smug expression. She would be no help.
Detec Bell turned to Melville. "Make her stop."
"Ah shan't." Melville's gaze flicked downward. Her eyelashes stirred in the wind.
That was it. Cherna Mouse wouldn't just go off on her own and do whatever she wanted. She always listened to what Melville said.
"Did Ah no' tell ye? 'Ere be a vill'n among's. To discuss't'd be fer naught. Ye cannae unnerstan'."
"Melvy's sayin' we can't cooperate with people, since one of them might be a bad guy," Lazuline translated.
"But if you're going to be like that, then—" If Melville was going to bring that up, then there was also no guarantee that the bad guy wasn't one of their own party... But that remark caught in Detec Bell's throat. She just couldn't say it. She bit her lip and tasted a little blood.
Cherna Mouse's magic was simple: She could make herself bigger. It was simple but powerful. If a large enemy hit you, it hurt, but hitting a large enemy in return wasn't really effective. Cherna had demonstrated her immense strength to them in their battles with monsters. Frankly, all they really needed in their party was this one giant monster—er, Cherna Mouse.
What's more, their opponent had picked the wasteland as the duel's location. It was a wide-open area, the kind of space where Cherna Mouse was at her greatest advantage. It was a sprawling plain with only high-rises dotted here and there. Those wouldn't get in the way.
Cherna had ignored Detec Bell's attempt to hold her back and had accepted the duel. One hour later, the hamster girl was already enormous, ready and waiting for her opponent. Detec Bell, Melville, and Lazuline observed from the roof of a distant building.
With the wasteland as their battleground, who would even be able to oppose this monster? Detec Bell was wondering, when @Meow-Meow trudged her way to the duel site. Is she going to be the one fighting? She's strong, for sure, but it'd be a pretty tough fight for her.
But that wasn't what was going on. @Meow-Meow tossed out a talisman and ran away. The slip of paper fluttered downward to explode with a boof! When the smoke cleared, a massive mechanical crab was standing there.
Its abdominal section was round. The glowing parts where a crab's eyes would have been had to be sensors or something. From what Detec Bell could see of the layer edges, a number of armored plates had been sheeted over one another. The thickness of that armor made the tank seem like it would be slow, but the ten legs extending from its torso maneuvered with quick little movements. Each leg had two joints and a sharp point at the end. The limbs were covered in thick, metallic, armor-like plates on the front side, whirring, rattling, and clicking mechanically with every movement. The whole thing shone a metallic black, and the tank had no square parts. It was rounded in every way. Unlike a real crab, it had nothing resembling pincers, so it resembled a spider, aside from its number of legs. It was about the same size as Cherna Mouse and perhaps heavier. Basically, it was huge.
With Pfle on her back, Shadow Gale ran up one of the crab's legs, opened up the lid on its torso, and literally kicked her in before she closed the lid and scrambled back down.
"Shall we begin the duel, then?" The voice was loud, probably amplified by speakers, but it was definitely Pfle's.
Cherna Mouse was surprised, but she didn't back away. She approached to grapple with the machine, and the duel began.
Cherna Mouse was at a disadvantage. It was looking bad for her—she'd never be able to win at this rate. And to be honest, Detec Bell wanted her to lose. She'd made them into real hypocrites by being so uncooperative with other parties. If Cherna lost this, that would satisfy everyone else, and it would probably make working with them easier.
Cherna Mouse's whole body was trembling like she was ill as she crouched down, crossing her arms over her eyes. She appeared to be protecting herself from attacks. Seeing her misery under the barrage of blows hurt to watch.
"We should make her stop. Cherna's already lost," Detec Bell said, looking over toward Melville, who was facing the battleground with a calm expression. "At this rate, worst-case scenario—Cherna gets killed. They said this would be bloodless, but sometimes people get impulses."
"Shield yer ears," was all Melville replied.
Cherna braced her legs wide on the ground, crouching down. Knees bent, arms spread wide, she opened her mouth so big it covered a third of her face, and her throat vibrated in a howl. The heavy-looking tank reeled, staggered, bowed backward, and then dug its claws into the ground to withstand the roar. Nearby buildings crumbled and collapsed. Clouds of dust blew away.
An instant before, Detec Bell had plugged her ears, opened her mouth, and thrown herself to the ground. The booming noise made everything shiver and shake as Cherna screamed and raged. This had never happened before. The giant magical girl extended her arms in front of her, leaning forward as she turned to face the ten-legged tank.
Detec Bell rubbed her eyes. Something was odd. She'd thought Cherna Mouse was stationary, but it looked like she was approaching them.
The crab's eyes flashed, and another beam hit its mark. But this explosion was far smaller than the previous ones had been. Cherna Mouse's hamster suit was already black with soot, and the explosion was so small, it only added one more black soot spot on her. She didn't even wobble.
Then Detec Bell realized—Cherna Mouse wasn't getting closer. The explosions weren't shrinking. Cherna Mouse was growing. She was already twice...two and a half times...three times larger than the crab, and she was still expanding.
A black sphere about two yards in diameter fired from the hull of the crab into the distance before it landed and rolled away. But before Detec Bell had the time to wonder what it was, Cherna Mouse had taken half a step forward, closing the distance between her and the crab, and stomped it flat.
Detec Bell looked up at the sky.
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Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 29 |
[ POV: Pechka ]
They'd been deceived. If they died in the game, they would die in real life, too. But they couldn't escape now. They had to keep playing the game. There was no other choice.
Next after the city area came the subterranean level. After passing through the gates, they emerged in a little room, removed the lid on the floor there, and descended through it to find an underground world. It wasn't like a man-made dungeon, but more a natural cave, like a limestone hollow. It was all damp and slippery, floor included. Pechka raised her right foot up too high and fell, and when Nonako tried to catch her, they both went down together. Pechka hit her waist hard and felt ready to cry.
It was a cave, but not small at all. In fact, it was huge, about four times Pechka's height to the ceiling. The width of the path varied a lot depending on location as it progressed, but it was generally pretty big.
Still, because it was a cave, it was chilly and damp and not at all a comfortable place to be.
Pfle and Cherna Mouse's giant monster one-on-one had ended in Cherna Mouse's victory. Pfle's escape pod had saved her life. If not for that, she certainly would have died. Pechka had been so frightened, she'd stopped watching halfway through, so she had learned the whole story from Nonako Miyokata's and Rionetta's recaps.
Pechka thought that Pfle had done well. No other magical girl would have been able to stand against Cherna Mouse—she would have chased them off, and that would have been the end of it. They had gone to a lot of trouble to gather up all those parts, but still, none of them blamed Pfle for her loss. They expressed their appreciation with "You did well" or "You did your best," and then they left. Pfle had failed to stop Detec Bell's party, but Pechka figured that at least counted as firing a strike back.
The next day, the subterranean area was unlocked. They said that Pfle had been the one to decipher the cryptography quest in the city area that would unlock the next region. Pfle had simultaneously been preparing for the match against Cherna Mouse and finishing off that unlock quest. No one was offering gratitude now.
The scouters, Pechka and Nonako, ended up working together with the combat team, though not because the exploration team was useless. They hadn't completed any of the area unlock quests, but they had done some side quests to earn items and candy. No, it was simply because the game had become too difficult to be splitting up their forces. The enemies in the subterranean area were strong. The Rionetta and Clantail team aside, it was a real struggle for Nonako to fight while managing a burden—Pechka. The weapons they'd bought in the city area were sturdy and easy to wield, but that didn't mean they could somehow muddle through on strength of weapons alone.
Rionetta had really been the one to push for this plan. Reasonably, they would need the cooperation of every player to beat this game. But some of the players were refusing to work together. In that case, they should at least work on their own party's sense of unity. Rionetta spoke passionately, and she had Clantail nodding. Then Rionetta had scooted over to Pechka and whispered in her ear. "You needn't worry. I'll keep you safe, Pechka."
Nonako Miyokata decided to complain about this. "What are you getting all cozy with her for?"
"It's none of your business."
"Pechka and I were on the exploration team together! We are les sœurs now! Basically sisters!"
"And which fine nation does that logic originate from?"
As usual, they were at each other's throats. Knowing they could die put everyone on edge, and they were frustrated because they didn't want to play this stupid game that they were forced to participate in.
Still, things seemed to have improved, and that might have been because now, they had accepted Pechka. Thrice daily, during their mealtimes, she was the star of the show. Even outside of mealtimes, they continued to respect her, due to her mealtime celebrity. With each spoonful, Rionetta would put a hand to her cheek, and Nonako Miyokata would praise her to bits with random French thrown in. Their joy in her creations was what made Pechka eager to cook.
Walking down the underground passage, very occasionally, they would emerge in dome-shaped open areas. There, dragons would appear. But though they were called "dragons," they were only about two yards long, with a wingspan of four, and were a lot smaller than what one might generally imagine dragons to be, if asked to do so for a fantasy story. But even so, they weren't easy enemies to fight.
A translucent thread shot from Clantail's rear, tangling up a dragon's wing. The creature screeched an uncanny, birdlike screech and tried to fly away, dragging her along as it flailed about. Using all eight of her spider legs, Clantail clung to a boulder, bracing herself and refusing to let go. The two strained against each other, and then Rionetta calculated just the right moment to jump in, when both of them were locked in place, and reached out far with her right arm to swipe the dragon with her claws. She ripped open the dragon's neck, hard scales and all. Its blue armor fluttered to the ground, and then red blood followed, gushing like the water of a dramatic fountain.
Ever since they'd begun fighting in the subterranean area, Clantail had spent more time with her lower body transformed into a massive spider. Her poisonous-looking yellow-and-black pattern, the rustling noises her legs made as they moved, and the massive size of her abdomen were so frightening, they made every hair on Pechka's body stand on end. Just getting near Clantail made her feel faint. I wish she'd do her usual cute deer or pony, she thought, but it seemed that a spider had better grip underground. A hoofed animal would slip more easily.
The dragon fell from the sky, the impact of its face-first plunge sending a tremor through the earth. Now that Rionetta and Clantail had finished their dragon, they changed their equipment and faced the one Nonako Miyokata had been fending off. This time, all three of them ganged up on it. There was one more dragon engaged in an aerial battle with another of its kind, but when all three magical girls turned to face it, they overwhelmed their enemy and took it down before long.
Aside from Pechka, who hadn't been participating in the battle, they were all wounded in some way. They made use of the recovery items stored with Pechka to heal their injuries. The one most heavily hurt was Nonako's familiar, the dragon.
That goblin Nonako had cooed over so much had been relieved of its post the moment they had defeated a dragon. Now the dragon was the one decorated with a ribbon. When she had dismissed the goblin, it had tried to flee, but the dragon had killed it with a strike from behind. Upon witnessing that, Nonako had cried, "Oh là là! Strong! Powerful! Cute!" She was elated. Apparently, she was not at all attached to the goblin she'd been coddling not so long before. Was this what they called "continental rationalism"? Pechka really had no idea.
They walked in search of dragons, and whenever they found a place that seemed good, Cherna Mouse would drive them away. So they'd go somewhere else to find dragons, beat them, gather up the candy and rare drops, and then use that candy to buy recovery items and other things. The shop in the subterranean town sold protection charms, such as the red charm that would guard against fire elemental enemies. Some fine technique was required to employ the different charms depending on the type of dragon.
The party had given up on exploration. If they were all going to be in one group, then it was more effective to focus on grinding rather than searching around. Their approach was to just leave it to the others, since some other party would just unlock areas anyway. Nobody said that out loud, but they had to be thinking it. At least, Pechka was. They left game progression to the others, and since the good hunting grounds were occupied, they didn't really feel like they should be cooperating. So they just ground for candy with the pessimistic rationale of "Well, this is better than doing nothing."
And if anyone was going to be categorized as "doing nothing," it was Pechka. She was only ever useful as a mule for their items. But no one complained. Far from it—she was cordially welcomed. The entire party looked forward to eating, and when mealtime was near, her food gave them all a boost of energy. They'd acquired some utensils from R, so now she could make a greater variety of dishes. The others were overjoyed, telling her how delicious and wonderful it all was.
It's fine this way, thought Pechka. If things go on like this and nothing more happens, it'll be fine. It'll be...
That was when their magical phones rang, informing them that it was time for their pre-logout forced transport.
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Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 30 |
[ POV: Nokko ]
Three days had passed, and the magical girls had gathered once again in the wasteland town. The atmosphere in the square was dour. Cherna Mouse had beaten Pfle, and Detec Bell's party was celebrating the height of their fortunes...or not, apparently. Detec Bell was by herself, a significant distance away from the other two. Maybe things weren't going well among them.
Pfle had lost her wheelchair. Nokko had heard that the ten-legged tank had just been her wheelchair with modifications. And the tank had been smashed up—so in other words, her wheelchair was gone. But she seemed cheerful regardless. Shadow Gale carried her piggyback as the two of them discussed something. Pfle had also been the one to unlock the subterranean area. That she had the shrewdness required to both unlock an area and prepare that weapon concurrently made Nokko vaguely fearful.
As for Clantail's party...Nonako Miyokata and Rionetta were squabbling. Nokko couldn't hear what it was about, but just seeing them inches from grabbing each other, Nokko could easily imagine the kind of foul language they had to be abusing each other with. Clantail and Pechka weren't even watching, acting as if nothing was happening at all.
It seemed @Meow-Meow had cheered up a little since all that had happened. Genopsyko still hadn't shown up, but just the fact that she was apparently still alive was reason enough to be grateful. The information from Detec Bell's party about how they had witnessed Genopsyko Yumenoshima was ambiguous and uncertain, but it was something to cling to. "I'm sure Yumenoshima have her reasons," @Meow-Meow had said, and she seemed to have more energy now. She wasn't lost in her anguish like before.
The monsters in the subterranean area were strong. Nokko had an attack elemental modification charm and was equipped with a Mop +5, but even then, it was a real struggle. Still, @Meow-Meow crushed the monsters with her summons and her martial arts, and somehow they had made it through to this point with a party of two.
Then Nokko had an idea. Two and two. If they could meet up with Pfle and Shadow Gale and form a single party... Once her train of thought reached that point, she remembered Genopsyko and promptly dropped that idea. Genopsyko was alive. Even if she wasn't with them now, they couldn't act like she'd never been there. Remove her from their party? Never. @Meow-Meow had been so stubborn about her. She would never agree.
In the fountain that occupied the center of the square, someone's magical phone lay faceup. This was a familiar sight now—though Nokko didn't want it to be. After a little waiting, the phone turned on and a hologram appeared, floating in the air. "I'd like to thank you all very much for gathering here, pon."
The last time, they'd welcomed Fal with harsh jeers. But he was just as he was before, merely floating there, seemingly emotionless, as if all of that had been a dream. None of them would bother to rail anymore. It wasn't constructive. It would be difficult to call it proactive. And it wouldn't solve anything. But most of all, Nokko just felt like they'd all become apathetic.
"Today is group logout day, pon. At sunset, you will all log out together. As with last time, we plan to have you log in again after three days in the real world have passed for maintenance purposes, pon." Fal twirled on a horizontal axis, scattering gold scales. "Just like before, there will now be a random special event. This time, the event is..." Fal's voice cut off. They were all waiting for it to continue, but it was silent, frozen. Pfle had beaten them all by a wide margin during the previous event. What would this one be?
The image of Fal shrank and then stretched. Noise ran across it, distorting the picture. Fal was expressionless but, mysteriously, still appeared abnormal. "...Everyone, please check the amount of magical candy on your phones, pon."
Nokko checked her phone. Total candy: 2,651. Being a party of two, they didn't have to split the candy up as many ways. But they were surely less effective at monster extermination than a party of four would be. She and @Meow-Meow had only purchased a minimal amount of items: recovery medicine, the monster encyclopedia, attack elemental modification charms, travel passes, weapons for each of them, and a teleporter. But still, their candy stores had to be low compared to those of the other parties.
"Fifteen minutes from now," said Fal, "the player who holds the smallest amount of candy will die, pon."
The square went dead silent. After a few seconds, the square was filled with hissing and fierce roars of anger.
Once again, Nonako Miyokata and Rionetta were quarreling. "This is exactly why I told you not to squander all that candy on R!" accused Rionetta.
"Mon dieu, and who was it scarfing down all that food? You were like, 'It's so good, it's so good!'"
The other members of their party made no move to stop them, and the other groups were too busy raging at Fal to even consider intervening.
The little spheroid just repeated the same message. "It can't be changed now, pon. Your understanding, please, pon. I will repeat it one more time, pon. Fifteen minutes from now, the player who holds the smallest amount of candy will die, pon. The player who holds the smallest amount of candy will die, pon."
Nokko was thinking. You could transfer candy to someone else. And likewise, you could receive it, too. In other words, you could steal it. This whole "fifteen minutes" thing—that was just giving the stronger girls some extra time to steal candy from the weak, wasn't it? She glanced around. They were all in discussions with only their own party members, more or less, including the ones who were yelling at one another. So then if it did turn into a scramble, they'd probably steal from other parties. That left Nokko and @Meow-Meow's smaller team in a bad position.
Nokko was horrified—then she panicked and erased that feeling. She didn't squeeze her eyes shut and optimistically reassure herself that that sort of thing would never happen. What she did was make sure that her feelings of horror wouldn't be transmitted around.
Many of them had to have realized the unspoken reality here: This was an endorsement for them to steal from one another. Nokko considered that perhaps she should do something before anyone else figured it out. Pfle and Shadow Gale were a party of two as well, and Pfle was weaponless to boot, being carried around by Shadow Gale. But when Nokko looked over to that party, she saw Pfle was facing Fal.
"Fal." Even among the chaotic squabbling, her voice carried. Nokko, far away as she was, could hear her question to the mascot. "You said the player who holds the smallest sum of candy. So what happens if it's not a player, but players? Will one be chosen at random? Or will multiple people die at once?"
Fal paused a moment. "In the case that there is more than one person who has the smallest amount of candy, then no one will be chosen, pon. The event would end with zero deaths, pon."
Hearing that, Pfle wore a nasty smile. "Are you relieved to have someone notice that 'player, singular' part?"
Fal ignored Pfle and repeated the announcement. "I repeat, pon. In the case that there is more than one person with the smallest amount of candy, no one will be chosen, pon. The event will end with zero deaths, pon."
There was something of a commotion.
"In other word," said @Meow-Meow, "we should just temporary make everyone's candy same number, right?"
"What? Cherna doesn't wanna give up candy," Cherna Mouse protested.
Detec Bell countered, "We just have to return everyone's original amount once the event is over. That'd be allowed, right?"
"Of course, pon. Once the event is over, the amount of candy in your possession will no longer have any meaning, pon."
"Maybe it'd be easiest to understand if we just made everyone's candy zero," said Lapis Lazuline.
Rionetta scoffed. "So we would buy items to zero our balance? Or discard all our magical candy? I decline either."
"How about gathering it all on one person's phone magique?" suggested Nonako Miyokata.
"What if she absconds wi' the whole lot? I'll be trustin' no lass here with our candy."
Lazuline interpreted for everyone. "Melvy is sayin', we'd all be in trouble if they just took everythin', right? Right now, there's no one here we can trust with everybody's candy. So...how 'bout takin' it all out of our phones?"
"Um, magical candy is ultimately just a number, pon. You can't take it out, so please be careful, pon."
"Well then, how about we calculate the average of the group and set all our candy at that number?" suggested Rionetta.
"Let's go with that," said Pfle. "Everyone, report the number of candy you hold. Don't over- or underreport it. Be honest and inform us as to the amount you have. And don't forget to check your neighbors' phones, too."
When Pfle added "And don't forget to check your neighbors' phones, too" like an afterthought, Nokko sensed that some hidden malice was surfacing. But still, she was relieved that they wouldn't have to steal from one another.
The curses, wails, and cries of anger disappeared, and they all quietly set into action. Nokko didn't even have to influence their emotions. Magical girls were realistic and practical, and that still held true when they were using fantastical magic and being forced to play a kill-or-be-killed game. Wherever, whenever, whoever the magical girl, if shown a good way to go about things, she would cooperate and take that option.
They all reported the amounts of candy they held, and Pfle calculated the average in her head. There was a remainder of three, but it was decided that Pfle would take the extras. It would work just fine as long as there were multiple people holding the smallest amount in the end.
What was surprising was that @Meow-Meow and Nokko's candy reserves were actually higher than average. They hadn't been proactively grinding like the other parties competing for hunting grounds, and the only other thing you could spend candy on was R. Was there some quest or other that required candy?
@Meow-Meow pulled out Genopsyko's phone, too. The amount of candy on it hadn't changed. It had been at the same number since they finished that unlock quest, so now that the monsters were dropping more candy, her stores were comparatively low. Nokko helped manage Genopsyko's phone, adding and subtracting candy from the other magical girls.
The only sounds in the square were the beeps of their magical phones. They all surrounded the fountain in a circle as they exchanged candy, monitoring one another for any strange behavior. Before long, the numbers on their phones had evened out, and all of them, aside from Pfle, ended up with the lowest number. Three more minutes to go until the time limit Fal had announced. Pfle, carried by Shadow Gale, walked to each girl and her magical phone, checking to see that there were no errors.
She gave the thumbs-up. "It's okay!"
The beeping of the phones stopped, and some of the girls began chatting with the others nearby. Pfle told them all to "Keep your eyes on the phones of your neighbors!" But even so, the atmosphere had relaxed. Nokko looked at @Meow-Meow beside her. Their eyes met.
"Is relief, huh?" said @Meow-Meow.
"...Yeah. It is," Nokko replied.
All of their phones rang. The time had come. Fal announced, "Holding the smallest amount of candy is...huh?"
A magical phone bounced on the ground with a clatter, and its owner followed, landing on her back. For some reason, she fell slowly, sleeves fluttering, hair flowing. The moment she collapsed, her sunflower seeds scattered around her. The device hit the girl's body and fell over, coming to a stop by her head. The light from it illuminated the girl's profile. Her expression was vacant, not understanding what had happened.
"The one holding the smallest amount...was...Cherna Mouse...pon."
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Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 31 |
[ MASTER SIDE #4 ]
"I can't take this anymore, pon. People are dying, pon. I can't let you keep doing this, pon." The strain in Fal's voice escalated further.
"Why not? Things are just getting started now, right?" The girl seemed more relaxed. Her right hand left her glasses so she could snap her fingers, and the noise changed the images in the monitors.
Magical girls appeared on every one of the screens covering the floor, walls, and ceiling. The fallen Cherna Mouse. Akane, crushed by the building. Masked Wonder, her head smashed in, then a rock dropped on her once she was down. Magical Daisy and her blown-out torso. The rows of monitors, large and small, displayed the brutal images of the magical girls' bodies.
With its beady little red-and-black eyes, Fal glared at each of the monitors in turn and then lowered its gaze. Its holographic body blurred, noise running through it. "Fal's ha...enough...don't kill an...ore people..." It wasn't just its image that was warping. Its voice was distorted with grating static, too, as its pitch randomly shifted between high and low.
The girl smiled. "How awful of you to say that. When exactly did I kill anyone? What happened with Magical Daisy was an unfortunate accident. After that, they started killing one another on their own. I only set the stage. Whether they get along or go for one another's throats is up to them."
The noise in Fal's hologram cleared, and its eyes lifted toward the girl. "That's just your excuse! Master is the one who incited them to start killing one another, and master is the one who created the arena, pon!"
"But, like, that's just how this sort of test works. The proper way for magical girls to act in this situation would be to band together and attempt to escape, not to hurt each other. Riiight?"
"But even Magical Daisy at the start—You clearly meant harm by placing an enemy that reflects projectiles so early in the game, pon! That wasn't an accident, pon!"
"You're being paranoid. Magical Daisy just wasn't as cautious as she should've been."
Like a ball hitting the floor, Fal's body squashed flat, stretched, and shrank, its synthetic voice producing sounds resembling anguish. The girl took no notice of Fal's pain, smirking.
"...I sent a message to the Magical Kingdom a little while ago," said Fal. "I reported everything: what's being done here right now and who's been making these girls kill one another, pon."
"Oh, really?" the girl replied, still smirking.
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Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 32 |
[ POV: Pechka ]
Cherna Mouse fell. What happened after that, Pechka watched with total detachment.
Someone checked Cherna Mouse's magical phone, yelling out that it was one candy short. Another blamed Pfle for this, since she'd been the one checking all the phones, yet another took her side, defending her, and then they were all squabbling. Everyone seemed uneasy. They had gone with a method Fal had assured them would work out, and for some reason, it had failed. They discussed and shouted and foisted the blame on one another, contending, debating what happened with this, what was going on with that, and still they reached no conclusion. When they tried to ask Fal, he seemed confused as to what had happened. They were getting nowhere.
Detec Bell's party left the square to go bury Cherna Mouse, and the other groups split off. Vague anxieties remained in Pechka's heart. She was hit with the realization that sometimes, people would die, and they wouldn't understand why.
Just being dragged into this game and forced to play at the risk of her own life was enough to make her head spin, but the ambiguous rules ensured they had no idea how they might die, or for what reasons.
It had been about two hours since Cherna Mouse's death. Rionetta and Nonako Miyokata continued to bicker right up until their return to the real world. Clantail was clopping her hooves in irritation, while Pechka gazed up at the sky. It was pitch-black: no stars, moons, or clouds.
When Rionetta and Nonako noticed that Pechka was looking up at the empty sky, they stopped bickering and lifted their eyes, too. Clantail stopped tapping her hooves and followed suit.
Rionetta muttered, "Hunting will be easier now."
Cherna Mouse had been the gatekeeper helping her party squat on the good hunting spots. With her gone, no one would complain if Pechka's party wanted to go to those places. In fact, their party was now the only one to still have all four members. So then doesn't that mean we're the strongest in a fight right now? Pechka wondered, and then she was sorry for even having thought of that. When she looked at the others—not counting Rionetta, who'd been the one to say it out loud—Nonako was nodding, and it seemed she and Clantail were thinking the same thing. That just distressed Pechka even more.
The first thing that Chika did when she was back in reality was turn her attention to the sky. Clouds obscured two-thirds of the waxing crescent moon, and dark gray masses blocked the stars, too. Even so, it looked like a proper night sky. She was grateful to have come back to see it.
When Chika got up the next morning, she washed her face, put some incense on the family altar before breakfast, and pressed her hands together. This had never been a custom of hers, and she wasn't terribly devout, but she had nothing else to cling to. Her little brother laughed at her, her parents seemed concerned, and her grandfather praised her for it with a comment that he was impressed. But Chika wasn't really paying attention to her family's reactions. She focused earnestly on her prayer. She was aware that it looked silly, but still, she would cling to anything that might give her hope.
She zoned out a lot at school, and she had nearly run into a telephone pole en route. In class, the teacher pointed out her inattention, earning sniggers from the class. Chika, who had always tried to avoid standing out, was now the butt of ridicule. In the past, that might have made her mope for a week, but now it didn't really bother her.
If she let her mind wander, her thoughts would always return to the game. Her motivations were not completion oriented, like How can we unlock the next area? or The monsters in that spot are great for grinding. Half of them were wishes for everything to be okay, and the other half were sick imaginings of her premature death.
During her book club time, she left her seat for half an hour. When her friends showed concern, she put up a tough front, smiling and telling them she was fine. Then she rushed back home, transformed into Pechka, dug up some dirt from the garden, and threw it into a pot to make a boxed lunch: rolled omelets, bacon-wrapped asparagus, wieners cut to look like octopuses, rice with seaweed sprinkles, fried chicken, mini tomatoes, and a cooked spinach ohitashi salad. She packed some fruit in a separate plastic container.
Examining the contents of this lunch box, she thought it looked a little childish. She'd made it according to her own preferences, thinking it might be fun to eat such a lunch, and this was the result. Maybe I should do some research on a cooking website, she thought.
She then got changed and headed to the baseball grounds. On the way, she helped an old man who was loading his mini-truck with daikon radishes. He thanked her, and she replied with a smile, while internally, she was scoffing at herself for assisting people at a time like this. This was just another method of escaping reality.
Ninomiya literally came running to her. The baseball grounds had the facilities for night games, so to keep the darkness at bay, they put on glittering lights as they practiced. In the summertime, bugs gathered around the bright bulbs, including rhinoceros beetles and stag beetles, and that attracted kids and hobbyists with no interest in baseball.
Ninomiya wolfed down the lunch as fast as he could so that he would be on time for his evening practice, and when he was done, he faced Pechka with his hands together and bowed in appreciation. "Thank you so much for the food." She was happy to receive his gratitude, but it was a little embarrassing.
While Ninomiya ate, Pechka just sat together with him on the bench, placing about two empty seats' worth of space between them, and watched. If their eyes happened to meet by accident, he might realize that she had been staring at him the whole time, so she occasionally looked away, observing him in glances as he enjoyed the meal.
He had scrapes from shaving—and occasional bits of facial hair he'd missed. They were in the same class, and Chika thought of herself as still a child, but Ninomiya was already doing the same things as an adult man. His cheeks and jaw moved in time with the rising and falling of his sturdy chest. Acne faintly marked his cheeks—that part of him was still boyish. He'd run all this way after practice, so he was sweating. This close to him, the scent of his sweat reached her nose, making her blush even deeper. He was scarfing the food down but holding his chopsticks in the proper manner. He seemed like the son of a good family, and she liked that.
There was some rice stuck to his cheek. Should I point it out? she wondered. Would it be okay for me to pluck it off him? It would definitely be a bad idea to take it and put it in my own mouth. So if I wrap it in a tissue and throw it away, that wouldn't come off as gross, would it? But while she was busy worrying about it, Ninomiya wiped the offending grain off his cheek with a finger and popped it in his mouth.
This was all she did on the first day—observed his face and eating habits. She didn't talk much. Just thinking about saying something to him made her nervous, and she didn't want to bother him. He was focused on stuffing his cheeks and enjoying the food.
But on the second day, Ninomiya started talking to her. Chika was already aware that he was more of a chatterbox than might be expected. He talked enthusiastically about all sorts of things: how he'd been batting well lately; how the coach would sometimes bring his dog, which was big and scary-looking; how when he'd tried practicing a knuckle ball, the coach had gotten angry at him and told him to stop fooling around; and how the bicycle he rode to school was broken, so now he was running to school. Lots of things. Pechka was happy to watch Ninomiya enjoying himself.
But then he asked, "What about you?" And Pechka didn't know how to answer.
She realized that Pechka couldn't talk about herself. She couldn't say, "I'm a magical girl," and neither could she say, "I'm being forced to play this really horrible game." But on the other hand, she couldn't introduce herself as Chika, either. She could say they went to the same school, but that was Chika, not Pechka. Even if she didn't mean it as a lie, it would end up being one. If he were to search for Pechka and her perfect lunches at school, she wouldn't be there.
She replied that she always cooked for her friends, and when they ate it, they'd say it was really good. Ninomiya laughed. "Well, of course! Anyone who didn't think so couldn't be human!" Pechka smiled, but inside, she felt despondent.
Then the third day arrived. That evening, she would be summoned into the game again, where she would have to survive for three more days. She hated this. She wanted to cry. She wanted to give up. At the very least, she wanted to confess everything about her situation to him right there and then. Even if he couldn't help, he could offer sympathy, at least. But despite her desires, there was no way she could tell him anything. If she did, she would die on the spot.
So she talked about herself. Not Chika Tatehara, and not the magical girl Pechka, but a fictitious girl who attended a high school in the neighborhood, liked cooking, and enjoyed baseball. Her mother had taught her to cook. Her mother was far better at it. Recently, a cat had pooped in their yard, and her grampa had gotten angry about it. She even concocted a story about her friend slipping on a banana peel, like something out of a manga. She had gone to karaoke and input the wrong song numbers into the machine, but by coincidence, they had known all the songs, so they'd sung them to the end. Ninomiya laughed at her made-up stories of failure, and Pechka dammed up her sadness and pain with a smile.
He finished the lunch, thanked her with his hands together like he always did, and returned the box. When he handed it back to her, their pinkie fingers brushed. Ninomiya wasn't bothered by it at all. He just ran off. "See you later!"
Pechka studied the tip of her pinkie, touched the finger to her other hand, and squeezed it.
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Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 33 |
[ POV: Shadow Gale ]
Kanoe was getting lost in her thoughts more often. Or, more accurately, she was just zoning out and not even trying to hide her contemplation. That was something she'd never done before, and her parents and older brother were concerned. But when they asked if something was on her mind, she would grin back at them, saying it was nothing to worry about—and that was what really made them worry. They asked Mamori about her, too, but she couldn't give them an answer. If it were possible, she would have loved to tell them, "The young mistress is a magical girl, and right now, she's been forced into playing a game where failure equals death."
Kanoe was still mulling over something. That was fine. There were plenty of things Mamori would have liked to think about, too. But she chose certain places for her pondering. If she wanted to think, she would go to her own room. She wouldn't occupy someone else's room like she owned the place the way Kanoe would. She wouldn't put wine and crackers on a tray, barge in, and have her snack on someone else's study desk. She also wouldn't drop the crackers on the desk and scatter crumbs.
Mamori stood up, raised the blinds, and opened the window. The autumn wind at night was more than cool; it was rather chilly. The stale air swept outside, while the fresh breeze wafted in. There was a swath of green grass outside the window, and the dusk had dyed it dark-purplish. A tall hedge surrounded the yard, and the chirping of the insects sounded pleasant to the ears. Mamori had heard that they'd bought some pine crickets just to release them here. They were apparently a few thousand yen per cricket, but she wanted to believe that the story had been exaggerated in the telling.
She left the window, returned to the bed, and sat down. Glancing over, she saw that Kanoe was still on the swivel chair, lost in thought. Mamori wished she would at least think in her own room. The whole Totoyama family lived on Hitokouji lands, and Mamori's room was in the Hitokoujis' mansion, so it made it hard to complain when Kanoe marched in whenever she wanted.
But that chair was different. It was European-made, bought for thirty-five thousand yen from an order catalog. She intended to keep on using it for the next twenty or thirty years. It was wonderful and comfortable to sit in, and Mamori had bought it with money she'd saved over some time. It was clearly her own personal property. Even if it was inside the Hitokouji estate, Kanoe should have no right to use it.
"Would you please at least give me back my chair?" Mamori said.
"You have something on your mind, too, don't you?" Kanoe returned her question with another question. But she was right that Mamori was thinking about something, too. She'd been ruminating a lot, and she'd never been able to come up with any answers, either. How and what would you do to take one candy away from Cherna Mouse? Mamori had no idea. She didn't even know what the point of doing it was in the first place.
During the event at the end of the last logout day, Cherna Mouse had died. Detec Bell and Melville had immediately tried to revive her, but mouth-to-mouth and chest compressions hadn't done anything, and even the recovery medicine hadn't worked. They couldn't revive her. The cause of death was a heart attack.
As Fal had explained it, the one who held the smallest amount of magical candy would lose. The loss conditions were in the terms "smallest" and "one," both of which had to be fulfilled. Otherwise no one would lose. Pfle had guessed that if there was more than one person with the lowest figure, then nothing would happen, and Fal had said that was correct. If there were two or more magical girls holding the lowest number, then they could get through the event without anyone losing.
Everyone had cooperated in the reallocation of candy, and Pfle had double-checked. So they had managed to get through the event—or so they had thought for the instant before Cherna Mouse fell and Fal called her name out. When they had picked up her magical phone to check it, the number displayed there was one fewer than that of the other girls.
Some began to accuse Pfle of failing to check the candy numbers properly, but many others denied that.
In her duel with Cherna Mouse, Pfle had lost her wheelchair, so she got around by riding Shadow Gale piggyback. Shadow Gale had actually been the one walking around so Pfle could check the candy numbers of the magical girls sitting around the fountain. And that wasn't all she was doing. She'd been looking at their magical phones. She was certain their numbers had all been the same. There was no way she could have failed to notice that one was wrong.
The other magical girls also gave testimony to Pfle's innocence. They'd all followed the order to keep an eye on their neighbors, either because they couldn't trust one another or because they wanted to. To Cherna Mouse's right had been Detec Bell, and to her left, Melville. Shadow Gale had confirmed that the candy numbers on both their screens had matched the number on Cherna Mouse's phone.
So then why had Cherna Mouse died? Why had she ended up with one fewer than the others?
Mamori came to no answers.
You could use a magical phone to transfer candy. But if anyone had done that after everyone's candy was arranged, the phones' beeps would have exposed them. It would have been possible before all the candy was sorted out. While they'd been arranging the candy, the square had been filled with the beep, beep, beep, beep of enchanted electronics. But it would have been pointless to meddle with the candy numbers at that point. Pfle and Shadow Gale had checked them all afterward, and Cherna's neighbors on either side had done the same. If the numbers had been off, it would have been caught.
Had someone manipulated the phones with magic? That couldn't be done, either. You could physically smash the devices, but even after disassembly, it was impossible to rig anything there or set anything inside. If you tried to control a phone from the outside using magic, it would just break. Shadow Gale had already verified this personally.
"Cherna Mouse's candy..." Mamori's thoughts spilled from her mouth.
Kanoe pulled a math notebook out of a drawer in the study desk, flicked off the pen cap with her thumb, and smoothly wrote out the names of all the magical girls, the parties they were affiliated with, and the magic powers they had.
"That's my notebook...my pen...," Mamori protested.
"Yeah. I'm using them."
[ Party A ]
> Pfle: high-powered wheelchair
> Shadow Gale: mechanical modification
[ Party B ]
> Clantail: transforming the lower half of her body into an animal
> Rionetta: controlling dolls
> Nonako Miyokata: making allies of animals
> Pechka: creating delicious food
[ Party C (Cherna Mouse's party) ]
> Detec Bell: conversing with buildings—can't use it in the game (sat right of Cherna Mouse)
> Melville: camouflage (sat left of Cherna mouse)
> Lapis Lazuline: teleporting to location of her gem
> Cherna Mouse: making herself big (victim)
[ Party D ]
> Nokko: transmitting her emotions
> @Meow-Meow: capturing items within her talismans
> Genopsyko Yumenoshima: invincible suit (only her phone participated)
The postmortem breakdown was detailed with more information than Mamori had anticipated. "How is this so thorough? You've got the magic of people you've never even talked to listed here."
"Because unlike you with your hunting task, as the one in charge of exploration, I've come to know more people. After that great scuffle in the square, I immediately went asking around. Though in the end the killer was presumed to be that samurai girl, we were still victims. Our ally had been killed and her items stolen. I'm sure none of them wanted to draw suspicion by trying to hide their abilities and failing."
"And can we believe this information?" asked Mamori.
"When I asked each of these people, they were within earshot of their fellow party members. If they had lied, their allies would have reacted somehow. Even if they didn't directly accuse that person and ask why they were lying, they'd have had some kind of tell. But if someone is lying about her magic even to her own party...then that's something else." If someone were lying to even her own party about her magic, that one would be the culprit.
"Have you figured out who did it? Like does one of the girls have powers that could have manipulated Cherna Mouse's amount of candy?"
"I don't care about that."
"You don't? But—"
"I thought I told you: I don't need proof. All I need to know about is character. This memo is ultimately just an expression of goodwill toward you. I'm not going to try to deduct the culprit's identity based on opportunity or motive. But you're different, aren't you? So I'm sure you'll find this useful."
Kanoe shoved the notebook at Mamori, scooped up the stuffed bear that sat on the side of the bed, and plopped down on the chair again. So apparently, all that thinking hadn't been about how the culprit had removed a candy from Cherna Mouse's inventory. Mamori was privately disappointed, but she kept her expression stiff to hide her feelings from Kanoe. She plopped onto the bed and then lay down.
Using that knowledge of all of the girls' abilities, and also taking into consideration the in-game items, Mamori tried to come up with a way someone could have removed that candy from Cherna Mouse's magical phone. But she couldn't. In fact, it was impossible. Simply destroying the phone was one thing, but bending its functionality to your whims was impossible. Messing up the display or silencing the beeping just couldn't be done.
If Mamori were forced to come up with the most likely suspect, it would be herself. Her magical ability to modify machines was broad in scope, and even if she couldn't tamper with the displays or the noises they made, she could have come up with some incredible way to remove that one candy. However, Mamori knew that Shadow Gale was not the culprit. She hadn't done it.
But—there was a but. Though Mamori knew she was innocent, the others wouldn't know that for certain. She had plenty of motive to do it, too, after Cherna Mouse had beaten them in a duel the other day. If they began to suspect her, things could get bad.
"I didn't do it," Mamori said out loud.
"I know that."
Well, Kanoe would say that. Though to anyone else, it might appear as if she were trying to cover for her own, Kanoe would at least advocate on her behalf—whether or not that would work.
"It's all right," said Kanoe. "They're not going to suspect you—"
"Uh, I think most people would find me the most suspicious of all."
"—since I told them your magic is creating tanks." Mamori stared at Kanoe, shocked, and Kanoe returned her gaze with a calm expression. "Well, it's less suspicious, isn't it?"
"But even before that..." Mamori pushed her upper body off the bed. "We still haven't found who killed Masked Wonder and stole her items."
"Indeed."
Masked Wonder had been killed and her items robbed. The Miracle Coin, one of the items she'd been holding on to, hadn't been in any of their phones, but someone still had it. The item was at 1, so it had to be in someone's device.
Mamori felt like these two incidents were similar. With both the Miracle Coin and Cherna Mouse, the impossible had happened, and the magical phones were connected to the mystery. "...The same culprit?" Mamori suggested.
"That's possible."
What about motive? The reason behind Masked Wonder's murder was probably the theft of the Miracle Coin. But while it was a rare item, would you kill someone for something only ambiguously useful? It was true that the deadly stakes hadn't yet been revealed, but this game was full of just and true magical girls.
And Cherna Mouse... Had it just been because she'd been an obstacle? Cherna Mouse's role had been to chase away any parties that would try to set foot in their hunting spots. So it made sense that she'd be an obstacle to playing the game.
The motives for the both of these were related to the game. Setting aside Masked Wonder's death, by the time Cherna Mouse had been killed, the goal of everyone had already changed from finishing the game to escaping, which would be facilitated by playing. Cherna Mouse's party had been selfish and inconsiderate, but not enough to kill her for it. None of them knew what kinds of quests might come next, and without Cherna Mouse, they might run into a monster they couldn't beat. If the Evil King turned out to be three hundred feet tall and weighed 150,000 tons, then their survival would have depended on Cherna winning.
But someone had wanted Cherna Mouse gone nonetheless...or had they? What if Cherna Mouse hadn't been the target, and she'd just happened to be the one to die? Or...
"...Something just occurred to me that I really don't want to consider, but...may I?"
"Go ahead."
"This is all the master's work."
"And why do you think that?"
"I think that maybe both the theft of the Miracle Coin and the interference in that event were attempts to prevent us completing the game. The master has teased us with the hope that we can escape if we win, but they're secretly meddling in things to prevent us from succeeding. Can't you just imagine them laughing as they watch us tremble in our boots? Since the master has pulled us into the game world, that means their magic clearly has to do with machines or computers or something like that, right? I'm sure they can do anything they want within that realm. So wouldn't they be able to manipulate the magical phones and all that?" If that were true, then things were bleak. The master was both the sponsor and the manager of that world, so if they were serious about obstructing the players, the magical girls wouldn't stand a chance. If the master wanted to torture them to death, it would be done, and if the master wanted to kill them all on the spot, it would happen.
"You don't have to consider the idea that the master is the culprit."
"Why not?"
"Because if that's what the master wants," Kanoe explained, "then we'll be helpless to resist. We'll all die. There's no avoiding that."
"So are you saying that we shouldn't resist?"
"No."
It was a bleak idea. What's more, nothing else seemed likely to Mamori.
But even after all of that, Kanoe's full lips were curved in a faint smile. "If that's what the master wants to do, then there's nothing we can do about it. They're capable of locking sixteen magical girls inside a game world and maintaining total control over our lives and deaths. Their magic is powerful, so there's no point in thinking about how to kill them or make them surrender."
"You're saying to give up?"
"Let me finish." Placing the stuffed bear on her lap, Kanoe spun the swivel chair around to face Mamori. "Even if we were to pursue the possibility that the master has come to torment and kill us, we wouldn't be able to resolve the issue, so we won't consider that avenue. I presume completing the game will solve that. I'll expend efforts on the possibility that one of the magical girls participating in this game is malicious and has used some means to steal the coin from Masked Wonder and manipulate Cherna Mouse's candy."
"So that's that, then?" At first glance, it seemed like a proactive approach, choosing to ignore the most probable avenue because it was impossible to resolve even if you racked your brain and pursuing only the less likely option instead. But it was still just avoiding reality.
"If the master is the culprit," Kanoe continued, "then there's nothing we can do, so we should give up. There's no way we can fight the master from within the game as players, anyway. Even if we were to challenge them, it would be best put off until afterward. Besides, the theory that the culprit is someone other than the master isn't all that preposterous. One could take that view as well. The master has made a challenging and malicious game, but they've also prepared some escape keys that the more canny individuals can deduce. Such was the case with having multiple people hold the lowest value of candy, and also with how the monster encyclopedia was sold in the town near the monsters that reflect projectile weapons. The master is the type who offers a way out and then laughs at those who fail to notice this and die. Stealing items via physical force and manipulating the candy numbers from the outside are inconsistent with the master's character. Naturally, one would assume that someone other than the master is acting here. Well, I would."
The stuffed bear bulged. Kanoe's arms were wrapped around its neck, squeezing. Her smile was fixed as ever, but she was clenching the bear so hard, its figure distorted. "The culprit will pay." Mamori realized that Kanoe was angry.
Kanoe never forgave people who caused harm to her own—and "her own" did not mean her immediate family or blood relations. It referred to the people close to her generally.
When the two of them had just started high school, some people had called Mamori a parasite on Kanoe's butt. When the rumor reached even her, the target, she figured it had really been going around. Those who had gone to their middle school would never have dared to gossip like that, but a lot of people at their high school had come in from other schools.
Those girls who had gotten their kicks badmouthing Mamori were away from school for a week after that. By the time they came back, they'd transformed into good girls who would never belittle anyone. That was probably related to why they blanched and trembled whenever Kanoe got near them.
Masked Wonder had been an ally.
Mamori laced her fingers, placed her hands in her lap, and looked down.
Masked Wonder had been a real heroine of justice. When she saw someone who was hurt, she rushed to their aid with zero suspicion. When she believed she was in the right, she even stood up to an opponent over thirty yards tall without hesitation. Shadow Gale had been skeptical of her, finding it fishy that someone would introduce themselves as "justice," but Masked Wonder had expended every effort to do the right thing at all times. She had lacked any cynicism or sarcasm and always dealt with things sincerely.
Masked Wonder's head had been crushed by a rock, and then she had died. It was horrible that she'd met her end that way.
Biting her lip, Mamori lifted her head and looked over at Kanoe. That smile was still on her face. The stuffed bear wasn't bulging anymore. "I will observe character," said Kanoe, "and you think up method. This is how we'll find the culprit."
Still biting her lip, Mamori nodded.
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Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 34 |
[ POV: Detec Bell ]
They buried Cherna Mouse's body at the edge of town. They placed the sunflower seeds she'd loved in her grave, saving one extra for once they'd filled the hole. That seed sat on top of the mound of earth as a grave marker. Her giant sunflower seeds were, of course, not something that really existed. Cherna Mouse had said they were a part of her costume. They had also been edible, and whenever she'd had a free moment, she had nibbled on them. She was the only one of them who hadn't bought rations at the shop. Lapis Lazuline had envied her for that.
Now she was sniffling.
Detec Bell glanced over to Melville, thinking of calling out to her to discuss what would happen next. Melville's eyes were on her. The words Detec Bell had been about to say died halfway from her throat.
Melville said quietly, "Ah'm taekin' me leave o' this pairty."
"...What?" said Detec Bell.
Melville was even more detached than usual. "There be a vill'n among's, an' Ah cannae fathom who. Cherna's slain, an' Ah've no trust fer ennyone. Ah'm loathe t'leave ye, but Ah must."
"'One of us is a bad guy, and I don't know who it is. They killed Cherna. I can't trust nobody no more, so there's no point in having a party. I feel bad, but I'm leaving,' is what Melvy is sayin'... Wait, Melvy!" Lazuline wiped her tears and snot with a sleeve and put her hand on Melville's shoulder. "You're leavin' the party?! How can ya say that?! This is the part where everyone bands together! It'd be so sad if ya left the party now!"
"Y'wish to go wi' me? If ye follow, Ah shan't tell ye nay."
"I'm not goin'! But I'm totally against ya leavin', Melvy!"
Melville swiped aside Lazuline's hand. Lazuline tried to leap on her anyway, but Melville hopped lightly over the sunflower seed grave marker, putting it between them. Lazuline, unwilling to trample the grave marker, stumbled forward.
Detec Bell tried to find the right words. She couldn't let Melville withdraw from the party. If there were just something I could say to make her rethink this. If she could just stay with us, she thought, but she couldn't come up with anything. "Does this mean you don't trust me?" The words that came out of her mouth were horribly cold and dry. Detec Bell licked her lips. They felt parched and rough. No moisture at all. "You won't stop Lazuline from following, but you're leaving the party. That means you can't trust me, doesn't it?"
"Listen..." Melville's body faded. Her face, clothes, longbow, harpoons, everything turned the color of the wasteland dirt, blending into it. " 'Ere's no need fer such grievance. Dinnae trouble yerself wi' the question o' trust. Y'only must keep gaun yer own way. Ah'll be taekin' retribution fer Cherna an' then taekin' me leave."
"'You don't have to take it so badly,'" Lazuline translated. "'I'm going to go search for the one who killed Cherny and get revenge. You guys just aim to complete the game on your own,' she says."
"But it had to be the master who killed Cherna, right?" said Detec Bell. Clearly, no one else could have done it. Not only had Cherna Mouse's magical phone displayed the same number as everyone else's before the time limit was up, it had even displayed the same number after the time ran out. Detec Bell had been right beside her, watching, so she knew that for a fact. Cherna had fallen and dropped her magical phone, and once the phone had hit the ground, for some reason, it had one fewer candy. That sort of feat was impossible using either magic or items. And that impossible thing had, in fact, happened. There was only one person who could have pulled that off: the master.
"That event was designed to produce a loser, but Pfle found a way out and went for it," said Detec Bell. "That made the master angry, so they twisted the rules of the game. They made one of us lose, just according to their original plan, and then took away a magical candy from her so that we couldn't complain."
"Nay. Recall ye Fal's reaction. He 'os well aware."
"That's not right. Please, think back on how Fal reacted. He knew about it," Lazuline interpreted.
"'Twas no fault o' th' rules but a boon to th' players."
"That wasn't a hole in the rules. I think that was a way out for the players."
"Methinks 'twas pairt o' th' master's designs. No cause fer anger."
"The master originally planned that in. It was the right answer. There's no reason to be angry."
"Ah had a fearf'l notion that sommon 'os laughin'."
"I had this horrible feeling then. Someone was laughing at us."
"When Cherna fell. Sommon 'os laughin'."
"When Cherna fell, someone was laughing."
"An' Genopsyko says 'ere be a traetor."
"'And there's also that message Genopsyko left us. She told us there's a traitor."
"Tha's the lass wha' did the deed...an' I havte faend 'em."
"That person is the culprit. I'm going to find them."
Even as Melville spoke and Lazuline translated, Melville was fading into the background. Eventually, her form and her voice disappeared entirely. Lazuline was waiting to translate the next part, but Melville didn't say anything more.
"Ah...Melvy's gone!" Lazuline ran around the grave marker, flailing her arms, but all she swiped through was air. She never touched anything. Melville had made herself invisible and left.
Detec Bell turned on her magical phone and opened up the party composition screen. The party members' names were all registered there: Detec Bell, Lapis Lazuline, and Cherna Mouse. Melville's name was already gone. Fal had said parties were easy to join and easy to leave. It really was that easy.
"Lazuline."
"What? Is there some way we can call her back?"
"Let me see your phone for a second."
"Okay. What for, though?" Lapis Lazuline asked as she handed Detec Bell her magical phone.
It looked just the same as any other. Detec Bell tapped the heart-shaped screen to operate it, moving to the wallpaper screen and the address book. "Whoops, wrong screen." She went back a screen and brought up the party formation. It was just the same here as in Detec Bell's magical phone. Three names were all listed there, but not Melville's. Clicking on Cherna Mouse's name, she selected REMOVE, and then only two names remained. Apparently, the survivors had to remove the dead from their party.
Detec Bell handed the phone back to Lazuline and then tugged down her deerstalker cap. She was liable to start crying, and she didn't want Lazuline to see.
"Melvy...she said she was goin' to search for the culprit. I wonder if there really is one."
Was Lazuline talking to her, or just muttering to herself? When Detec Bell didn't reply, she didn't react, so it was probably the latter.
The detective clenched her teeth, the corners of her mouth turning downward. Her feelings of frustration, oppression, and helplessness were growing. She had believed that as long as they had Cherna Mouse, they'd be all right, no matter what happened. Cherna Mouse had been so prideful, too, saying that with her there, they could protect everyone. Though she'd abused her strength to drive off the others, she'd still been a reliable ally. And dependable Cherna had been killed in such an unwarranted manner, through means that had nothing at all to do with her strength.
Detec Bell was the party leader, but Cherna Mouse had been the real cornerstone of their party—and the one who'd been giving her orders had been Melville. Without their cornerstone, Melville had gone, and Detec Bell was left behind.
It might also have seemed like Lazuline had been abandoned, too—but it wasn't the same with her. Right as Melville had left, she'd invited Lazuline. When she'd said that she wouldn't stop Lazuline if she would accompany her, that had meant she was okay being in a party with Lazuline. In other words, that meant the reason Melville had left was Detec Bell.
Did Melville not trust her? Or did she consider her unnecessary? Whichever it was, thinking about it made her want to cry. Detec Bell had been their leader in name, but she hadn't particularly achieved anything. They hadn't managed to unlock even a single area. The other parties had done all of that.
Her magic was useless inside the game. But she still had experience working as a detective. She had the knowledge she'd gained from reading mystery novels. She'd believed that even if she couldn't use her magic here, she could still be useful. However, once they'd started the game, she'd been unable to unlock a single area, and she lacked any authority as their leader. Cherna Mouse and Melville had just ignored her instructions instead.
"If there is someone out there who killed Cherny," said Lazuline, "I ain't lettin' them get away with this! It's super-dangerous to have someone like that runnin' free without ever gettin' punished, right?"
Detec Bell observed her. Lapis Lazuline had gone from raging to frightened to restless. Melville had invited her to come along. Right before leaving their party, she'd invited Lazuline. Detec Bell glared at Lazuline from underneath her deerstalker cap.
The girl in blue smacked her right hand to her chest and assured her, "But don't you fret. As long as I, Lapis Lazuline, am here, you'll be safe, Bell."
Not long after that, they got their break from the game, and Detec Bell returned to reality and her life as Shinobu Hioka. No longer her magical-girl self, she was human again, but she was still smoldering on the inside.
She punched the wall of the apartment building and immediately called the office and requested ten days off. She dreaded that her boss would either tell her she didn't have to come back and fire her, or just berate her in his thick voice, asking her what the hell she was thinking. So she gave her request and immediately turned off her phone.
Shinobu pulled out her magical device and searched the Internet. She'd memorized the area code listed in Lazuline's phone's address book. She looked it up and immediately identified the name of the town in question. Writing it down on a memo pad, she then searched for the train schedule.
Detec Bell couldn't use her power inside the game—but she could use it in real life. First, Lapis Lazuline. Detec Bell would search for the region she worked in as a magical girl in real life and find out her real identity using the same methods she'd used investigating Magical Daisy.
She would work in reality and gather information in reality. If, as Melville said, one of the magical girls was in communication with the enemy, then Detec Bell would find out who. If she discovered someone to be a totally innocent magical girl with no secrets at all, that was also useful information. She just had to add to the list of people she could trust, one by one.
Yes, Lapis Lazuline came first. One of their party had been killed, and another of them had left, and yet she still acted so happy-go-lucky. Was that just the kind of person she was, or did she keep a secret that allowed her to feel that way? Detec Bell would find out.
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Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 35 |
[ POV: Pechka ]
When they went back into the game, they began in the wasteland area. No matter where they were upon logout, they'd return in the wasteland area. Simply put, it seemed they would be forced back to their starting points every single time. When Pechka checked the locations of her fellow party members on the map, she got the feeling they were in the same positions they had been the last time they came.
The wasteland hadn't changed at all. The sky was solid blue, the sun glared abnormally hot, the earth was barren, and the crumbling buildings towered high. Occasionally, a wind would gust through, sweeping up red-brown-colored dirt and sand, and every time, Pechka squeezed her eyes shut.
Pechka met with Clantail first. She thought she saw a doll on the horizon, and then suddenly, Clantail was in front of her. Though she'd lost to Pfle's wheelchair in a contest of speed, when Clantail sprinted at full velocity, she was much faster than the animals her transformations were based off.
"It's been a while," said Pechka.
"Yeah." Clantail was as taciturn as always. She turned away from Pechka and knelt. Pechka swung a leg over her back and wrapped her arms around Clantail's stomach—not her animal stomach, her human one. She recalled when they had first met, when she'd been bundled up in spider's silk, trembling and slung over Clantail's back. Back then, Clantail had seemed like a monster that had scared the wits out of her. But now that they were fighting dragons, Pechka was used to it. It was interesting how the animal part she sat on and the human part she gripped with her arms had different body temperatures.
"Clantail..."
"Hmm?"
"Your human and animal parts are different temperatures, huh?"
Clantail didn't reply. When Pechka tilted around to look at her face, she found it was stiff, her cheeks pink. Maybe she'd made Clantail angry? Just being more familiar with her didn't mean Pechka could be so cheeky with her. She was flustered and about to apologize when Clantail suddenly jumped. Pechka lost her balance and clung on tight, and when she looked behind them, she saw a big rock. They must have jumped over that. She'd nearly been shaken off, though that might have been a coincidence. Maybe she had made Clantail angry after all.
"Um...," Pechka began. "Thank you for giving me a ride every time, when we meet up."
"No..." Clantail's voice became quieter. "Thank you...for making food all the time..." She spoke so quietly, the sound of her hooves drowned out her voice, but Pechka still managed to catch that somehow. Did that appreciation mean Clantail wasn't mad?
Clantail lifted her spear, pointing ahead. "Over there."
Someone was waving. It was Nonako Miyokata. She was with the dragon she'd made her friend last time. "Ha-ha-ha! At last, the time has come! Long time no see!"
Nonako took Clantail's hand and shook it and then shook Pechka's so vigorously that she dragged her off Clantail's back. Even once she was down, Nonako didn't let go of her hand, swinging her around and spinning in a circle. "Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! I'm so excited!"
Nonako was clearly giddy and, once she was done swinging Pechka every which way, finally let go. She'd gotten herself so worked up, her shoulders were heaving. Her dragon was watching her with concern. "Oh...I got a little too excited...un peu..."
"Are you all right?" asked Pechka.
"I'm fine, I'm fine! No problème. Come on, let's go. If we dawdle even a little, that obnoxious doll girl will start whining."
The three of them all started running in the direction of Rionetta's icon. Even as they ran, Nonako occasionally laughed, fooled around, and played with her dragon.
She was making a deliberate attempt to act more cheerful. Pechka was, too. Clantail had always been the quiet type, but now she was smiling at Nonako's antics. The way things had ended during their last session, there was no way they could start things off on a merry note this time. But now they were all putting on this enthusiastic act. It was like they were hoping that if they acted as if this were a little joke, then maybe it really would turn into just a joke.
While dark thoughts gripped Pechka, they reached Rionetta. Her arms were folded, and she was steadily tapping on her forearm with her index finger. "You're late!" She was the only one not trying to hide her bad mood. "Why have you made me wait so long? I would very much appreciate it if you could explain just what you were up to that required such dawdling."
"See!" cawed Nonako. "Just like I said, hein? She'd still be whining even if we came at Mach 1 speed."
"Oh? What was that? Speaking poorly of me behind my back? What fabulous adaptive capability you have. I'm quite impressed by your mastery of Japanese culture."
"I was just speaking objective fact. If facts count as talking behind someone's back, then you're the one with the problème."
"You can never keep your mouth shut."
"Oh, then I shall try to do better." They were already at it with no signs of tiring.
Clantail didn't say anything; she just turned away from them and galloped off to the wasteland town. Still griping and sniping at each other, Rionetta and Nonako ran after her, while the dragon flew along behind them. Pechka was about to follow, but then she suddenly stopped.
She sniffed. Sniff, sniff. And two more sniffs—she could smell something. It was faint, but there was a floral scent in the air, something that seemed incongruous in the wasteland. Not a rare flower. If she had to say, it was common. Yes, this flower was...
"Pechkaaa...ou'll get le...hiiind..."
She was jerked back to reality. Looking off, she could see that the other three girls and the dragon had come to a halt in the distance and were turned back toward her. Nonako Miyokata's hands were cupped around her mouth, but she was still so far away, Pechka could only catch bits of what she was saying.
Flustered, Pechka dashed off.
"They went thataway! One red, one green!" Rionetta said, luring the enemy dragons in as Clantail raced past to strike one with her spear. There was the crackle and flash of a lightning strike, burning the red dragon black before it collided with a cliff.
They were still hunting dragons in the subterranean area. They'd done this so many times already, they'd generally come to grips with the creatures' attack patterns. They were now able to grind effectively, and they used up very little of the recovery medicine Pechka carried.
Just as Rionetta had said before the last logout, the lack of Cherna Mouse's obstruction made a big difference. Their worries that Melville or Lapis Lazuline would be keeping watch even with Cherna Mouse gone were unfounded. They were able to move freely between hunting grounds. Detec Bell's team had been occupying the dragon treasury, so they went on killing all three colors one after another to grind for the items and magical candy.
"I'd like to get a newer weapon," said Rionetta, "if you don't mind. Our current weapons are decent enough against dragons, but there is the future to consider. Whatever you buy at the subterranean shop is all so expensive. It's quite the concern."
"Can we roll some more R?" asked Nonako. "Also, if there are any weapons or armor mon bébé can equip, I'd like to buy them."
Pechka chimed in, too. "If you have the first aid kit item, you can put a dozen recovery medicines inside. I'd like to be able to carry more of those around."
They bought some more items, set up their equipment, and killed some more dragons. Afterward, Pechka made their meal.
As Rionetta, Nonako, and Clantail's tail all squirmed in ecstasy, they ate. From rolling more Rs, they got spoons, forks, plates, and bowls. With not just their food but their cutlery upgraded as well, it turned into a real, full-blown meal.
In a way, all this fighting, arming themselves with items and equipment, and eating good food was just an escape from reality. They had to keep moving, keep running, or they would surely lose their minds. Cherna's unwarranted death was more than enough reason for them to give up on the game, but even so, right now, they had no choice but to continue playing. They could only close their eyes to the inconceivable results that could fall upon them at any time and make themselves believe that it wouldn't happen anymore.
They just had to keep moving. They explored every inch of the subterranean area map and searched for hints. The underground region was big enough to span the entirety of the wasteland and the grasslands areas, and there were a lot of places to investigate. Doing that while also hunting dragons made progress slow and stalling.
"There was a message on a different-colored rock wall that said there's a dragon king," Pechka informed them.
"A king?" said Nonako. "I suppose it must drop lots of bonbons?"
"It says the space around its throne is bordered in red," added Rionetta.
As was clear from the fact that they hadn't managed even one area unlock quest, this party was not good at solving puzzles. Pechka was noncombat personnel, but that didn't mean she was the one in charge of intellectual labor; Rionetta and Nonako just moaned in the face of cipher texts; and from Clantail's manner, it seemed she'd never even considered that sort of thing to be her job.
They gathered a bunch of hints that they couldn't even be sure were helpful. The dragons have a king. The space around its throne is bordered in red. Under the city. Thirty-four, forty-one, twenty-six. Water and a big shield. Glasses of bygone days. What's gained from death. Leave it to the specialist. There was no way they could derive any answers from all that. This was exactly why their policy had been to leave it to others and allow the other parties to unlock areas. They collected hints just in case while they focused on their main task: hunting dragons.
"This is taking a rather long time, though," Rionetta murmured during their meal.
"More of your whining about others being late? You're always going on about time, hein?"
Rionetta ignored Nonako's jab and continued. "Isn't it about time that someone discovered the next area? I believe so far, they've been unlocked at a rather faster clip."
"Oh, you're right," agreed Pechka. "It has been a while."
"I don't want to linger so long in such a damp, dark place. How thoughtless of them. Oh, Pechka? Whatever are you using as a thickener in these Salisbury steaks?"
"I think it might be bread crumbs."
"Simply brilliant," Rionetta said.
"Now that you mention it, it has been a long time," Nonako said.
"Numpties like you never do understand unless it's spelled out for them, hmm?"
"Excusez-moi?"
"I was complimenting you, saying that you understand when things are explained to you. So what are you so cross about?"
"Um," Pechka interrupted, "there's more food, if anyone would like seconds."
"Donnez-moi! Please!"
"I shall partake."
Pechka served some to Nonako, some to Rionetta, and some to Clantail, who silently held her bowl out, then added some to her own bowl while she was at it. After that, she just spooned food into her mouth. Pechka was kind of like their mom now.
A few hours later, things started happening. Clantail's magical phone sounded its ringtone, and everyone froze. Clantail checked her phone and showed the other three the screen. It displayed her inbox, with a message from Pfle. The text was simple. It read,
Discovered area unlock quest. But completing it alone would be challenging. Help requested.
Rionetta said, "Seems we can finally carry on to the next area," smiling in satisfaction.
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Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 36 |
[ POV: Nokko ]
They hadn't been able to figure out why Cherna Mouse had died. At the very least, Nokko hadn't been involved, so that meant someone else had done it. There was some panicking about how maybe the master had done it, but based off what they had seen of the master's character thus far, it seemed unlikely that they would interfere in a way that ignored the rules to arbitrarily put the players at a disadvantage.
Cherna Mouse must have been hated by and alienated from the rest of them. A magical girl shutting the other parties out of the good hunting grounds was bound to incur dislike. Cherna Mouse may have been doing that under orders, but she was the one recognized for the act. Besides, you could also say it was her ability, or rather, her body, that allowed them to engage in that monopolistic behavior in the first place.
And her victory in her duel with Pfle had made that clear. The wheelchair tank, constructed from so much material, hadn't been able to beat Cherna. Nobody could beat her, and as long as she was around, Detec Bell's party would have continued to monopolize hunting grounds.
In order to stop their domination of the hunting grounds, Cherna Mouse had to go. However, no one would have used that as a basis to kill such a powerful player in an event. All their lives were hanging on completing the game, so if they were left with no more tanks, then they would all be in trouble. It was a horrible idea to kill someone over a petty squabble.
So then who had done it?
None of the players would have benefited from killing her. And it hadn't been a case of flying into a rage and doing it without thinking. There was also no reason for the master to have killed her. Nokko knew that she herself was not the culprit. There wasn't anyone who could have done it.
The entire incident seemed extremely ominous to Nokko, and @Meow-Meow had to feel the same way. It was the sort of incident that could make you fall into despair, if worst came to worst. But despite that, @Meow-Meow was hunting dragons, gathering hints, and searching for Genopsyko besides. She had given the other parties her number and told them to contact her if they saw the missing girl.
"There must be some reason," said @Meow-Meow. "Some kind of situation she can't get out of, and she just can't come to us."
"Yes...of course," Nokko agreed. She felt like @Meow-Meow was trying to convince herself of that, too. But still, she figured her friend seemed more positive, which was at least better than the stupor she'd been in before.
They hunted dragons, gathered candy, and bought equipment and items. Nokko surmised the other parties had to be doing the same thing. She didn't want to participate, but still, she couldn't see anything else she should do. This game was the only place for them to vent their feelings using their magical-girl powers, so Nokko hit the dragons with all her resentment and indignation.
That was when they got the message from Pfle.
Discovered area unlock quest. But completing it alone would be challenging. Help requested.
The message also said that Pfle's party would be waiting for a while in the subterranean town. So if they could help, please come.
"That's what it says. So what will we do?" asked Nokko.
"Of course we help them." @Meow-Meow was filled with intrepid spirit, her eyes shining with the light of her unbending will. But considering how uneasy she had to be in their situation and how unsteady she had been, all her overflowing energy now seemed off. Even if she did fit the standard magical-girl archetype of standing up in times of crises, trusted her allies, never faltering, and never giving in—even if she was just that sort of noble and righteous magical girl—it would have been normal for her to feel more tortured by feelings of helplessness.
Did @Meow-Meow know something? Before she'd snapped out of her daze, she'd been muttering to herself. Did she have some knowledge that enabled her to face all of this?
The town in the subterranean area looked pretty similar to the other towns. The old buildings were made of stone. There was no one in the streets and no one living there. There were windows, but no glass panes. All the messages in the shop were pure pleasantry. If there was any difference at all, it was that it was far more humid here, with a moldy smell on top of that. This was something Nokko could say of the subterranean area as a whole, and she wouldn't want to live there.
There were a number of magical girls at the meet-up spot. The centaur, shrine maiden, chef, and doll were Clantail's party of four. The shrine maiden and the doll were glaring at each other. Every time Nokko saw them, they were fighting. Were those two all right?
Detec Bell's party was there, too. Lacking Cherna Mouse, it was now Lapis Lazuline and Detec Bell. Then there was Melville... Nokko looked around for her and found her sitting on a rock alone, away from the party.
Shadow Gale was carrying Pfle on her back. Nokko and @Meow-Meow approached Pfle first, calling out to her.
"Hello," said Pfle. "Good of you to come."
"Your wheelchair still not fixed?" asked @Meow-Meow.
"It's not quite that it needs fixing. Rather, it needs remaking. Have you acquired any chairs through R?"
"I'm sorry," said Nokko. "We haven't been buying any Rs."
"I see... I've been asking everyone here, but no one has a chair. If you happen to acquire one, do allow us to have it. I'll make it worth your while."
That Pfle was without her wheelchair also meant that Shadow Gale was the only one between the two of them who could get anything done. Just thinking about it, it seemed like a rough time. Nokko surmised that was part of the reason Pfle had gathered them all for the area unlocking quest. But Pfle's expression showed no pain or suffering, and she didn't have dirty clothes or wounds everywhere or anything else that might make her seem pitiful. It was like she was flaunting how Shadow Gale was ferrying her around as if it were just the way things should be.
If anything, the one who looked tired was the one doing the carrying. The weight of one girl was no burden to a magical heroine. But carrying her while also fighting dangerous monsters and protecting her had to be exhausting.
"Now then, it seems everyone is here," Pfle announced. All the magical girls, aside from Genopsyko Yumenoshima, were gathered at the entrance to the subterranean town. Pfle looked around, eyeing each and every one of them in turn, until finally she nodded toward Nokko. "Well then, follow me. I'll explain this area unlock quest." On Pfle's orders, Shadow Gale set off at a walk, and they all followed.
The subterranean area was basically a cave. The walls were made of hard, angular rocks. It was damp, and many places were wet from the water dripping from above. If you were careless, you might slip, so Nokko took firm steps. She could hear the sound of all their shoes tapping as they walked. With such a big crowd, the drumming was pretty loud. There was one magical girl who didn't wear any—Clantail—but her hooves were louder than footwear. What's more, compared with the wasteland, grasslands, and mountains, the path was narrow, and they couldn't walk abreast. They were forced to make their way along in single file.
From her position as second-to-last, Nokko peered up at the front. It was a continuous view of magical girls' backs. They all looked entirely defenseless. Weren't they thinking about how one of them had malicious intent and might attack them from behind? Or was that actually on their minds, and that was why they were exposing their backs—as an attempt to lure that person out?
They walked on for a while until the march stopped. Pfle called out, "Ahead is the pathway leading to the stage of the area unlock quest! An extremely dangerous enemy will be present there! Everyone, stay on guard!" She pulled a pair of glasses out of her magical phone. They were simple in design, functional-seeming, entirely without ornament, and not very magical girl–like. Without a word, Pfle put them. Sure enough, they looked terrible on her. "Now then, come follow me," she ordered, and Shadow Gale started walking. With some detailed orders ("A little more to the right—yes, right there"), Shadow Gale walked straight forward toward the wall, hit it, and then was sucked silently inside.
While all the other magical girls were voicing their surprise, Pfle popped her head out of the wall and said, "You can enter through here. It's very narrow, so take care not to bump yourself."
Clantail, second in line, cautiously touched her hand to the wall. Her fingertips, wrist, and arm passed through the wall and out of sight. The wall was fake, like an illusion or a hologram, and beyond it was a passageway. That had to mean that Pfle's glasses were an item that could see through the false barrier.
The line began to move again. Clantail entered the wall, and those after her followed. Nokko touched her hand to it as well. Without meeting any resistance, she came out to the other side.
"Wow. It only look like real rock wall," said @Meow-Meow.
Just ahead of her, Nokko nodded in response to the remark and continued on. For just an instant, her vision darkened, but when she was on the other side, she saw a passage. Unlike the cave they'd been walking through so far, this passage had the look of something artificially carved. The walls, ceiling, and floor were all parallel, and the walls met the floor and ceiling at precise and even ninety-degree angles. The walls felt smooth compared with the plain, bare rock from before. There were torches set at regular intervals along the way, and when Nokko moved her hand close to one, she felt heat. It was real fire. Magical girls didn't need illumination to see in the dark, but it still felt like something to rely on, somehow.
The hidden passage continued on from that point about five hundred steps, and then the echo of the footsteps before her changed. At Nokko's height, she couldn't see ahead, so she poked her head out to the side. The torches were positioned lower on the walls. There were stairs.
The stairs were, just like the passage, artificial. They were not at all like anything naturally occurring. They didn't go straight forward but curved very gradually to the right. To the right, more right, and yet farther right. It was a downward spiral staircase, turning clockwise.
They had to have descended two hundred steps. Taking into consideration how they'd been underground to begin with, that meant this was quite deep. Perhaps it was Nokko's imagination, but it seemed to be getting warmer, and the air was thicker and harder to breathe. At the bottom of the stairs, they arrived at a massive open space. It was even bigger than the dragon spawn locations in the subterranean area—more than two or three times greater, perhaps.
The ground was stone-paved, and the walls, unlike the passage and stairway, were bare, angular rock. The ceiling was high, easily a hundred yards up. In the center of the cavern was a raised area like a steep cliff. When Nokko saw the creature there, she gasped. Shocked noises escaped some of the other girls, and some froze in place. Their reactions were various, but they were all stunned.
"So this is the situation." Pfle turned to them and shrugged. Partially because of the glasses, she looked sillier than necessary.
Nokko took a deep breath in and out.
The raised central platform was circular, about twenty yards in diameter, and on it lay a gigantic, sleeping creature. If you were to stretch out its curled-up tail and measure its whole length, it could be fifteen yards long. Every single one of its scales was so large, shining with red, metallic luster, that Nokko could pick them all out from where they stood. Even with its mouth closed, its fangs were visible from the outside. They were so big and long—and, from what she could see, sharp. Its wings were appropriately large for its size, but there was no way such a massive body could fly in the sky. Its claws were about as long as Nokko was tall, appearing big enough to tear one to shreds in just a single swipe.
This dragon was massive. Compared with this, the creatures they'd been hunting in the subterranean area were pretenders. It was larger, but also more dragon-like. It opened its eyes wide and looked toward them. Its pupils were long, vertical, and narrow. In its gaze and bearing, Nokko could sense its hostility and lethal intent. Her legs trembled.
"You see that red line there?" Pfle pointed. When Nokko looked, she saw a red line running along maybe thirty yards from the dragon. It surrounded the creature's position at an even distance. "When you go beyond that line..."
Shadow Gale picked up a fist-sized rock from the ground at her feet and tossed it at the dragon. Instantly, the dragon opened its sizable maw, showing them its rows of exposed, carnivorous fangs. There was a red glow in the depths of its throat, and then a great fireball burst out, hitting the rock and swallowing it up as it continued to shoot toward them. Nokko jumped to the side, while some of the others threw themselves to the ground and others raised their shields. But the fireball didn't pass the red line. It just vanished in midair. Still on guard, they all breathed deep sighs. The rock hadn't been burned to ash—it was entirely gone.
"This is how it attacks," explained Pfle. "Fortunately, its attacks don't pass the red line."
Nokko wasn't the only one thinking, So then tell us that first! The glares needling Pfle spoke more eloquently than words.
"Take a look over there, too." Pfle pointed to the rope ladder that hung above the dragon. It went up to the ceiling, where there was a hole just barely big enough for one person to get through. "The hints we've gathered indicate that hole is the gate to the next area. And in order to get there"—Pfle's finger lowered to point to the dragon—"it seems we'll have to eliminate our dragon friend doing his best over there."
"There's no way we can beat that!" Rionetta yelled hysterically. "Did you just see that? If something like that hits us, we'll end up as black smudges! And that colossal size! Those clearly hardened scales! Punch and kick that all you like, our attacks aren't going to do a bloody thing!"
Detec Bell muttered painfully, "If Cherna were here..."
"Why talk of people who are gone?" snapped Rionetta. "Everyone here is done for."
"That's not certain at all," said Pfle. "It seems the road to completion has been prepared for us, after a fashion." Her magical phone in hand, Pfle swiped the screen. "Everyone, boot up your monster encyclopedias. This creature's data is listed there."
Opening up the monster encyclopedia, Nokko found the data there. It was called the Great Dragon, a simple name without any sort of pretension or attempt at wit. Though it was listed in the encyclopedia, most of the entry was question marks. Its methods of attack, drop items, etc., were all hidden.
"I suppose this is what they call a midgame boss," commented Pfle. "Most of its information is hidden. But some parts are displayed." The name of the monster, its spawn point, and that its element was fire—those things weren't hidden. "Its element is fire, so if we equip water charms, we'll be able to increase our damage dealt as well as reduce damage taken. Well, taking a direct hit would still mean instant death, though."
"So then what point is there to that?!" Rionetta demanded.
"If you take a direct hit. If you're equipped with a water charm and guarding your front with a Shield +5, you'll avoid instant death. You'll suffer some burns, but you'll survive it." Shadow Gale nodded. She must have experimented with this herself. Pfle continued. "And then there's this." She pulled a blade out of her magical phone. The small dagger seemed easy to wield, though it had a fairly low attack power. "The Dragon-Killer. It deals especially high damage to dragon-type monsters. The Item Encyclopedia explains that one strike with this weapon will kill it. We went through some trouble to acquire this, but that's irrelevant now."
Pfle then added, "Also, @Meow-Meow."
"What?"
"What exactly is the range of your talismans? If you were to attack with a building, even a dragon wouldn't go unscathed."
@Meow-Meow frowned a little. She might have been remembering crushing the samurai girl with that building. "...I just throw talisman. So I have to get really close."
"Yes, of course. Then we just have to attack from two angles. The Dragon-Killer from the right, and you from the left, @Meow-Meow. Then if either reaches the dragon, it's victory for us."
Nokko pondered Pfle's instructions. The dragon's attacks would not be fatal. They outnumbered it by a wide margin. The dragon was massive, but it seemed to lack maneuverability due to its size. If they surrounded it with a crowd, it might just work out. They had two attacks that were sure to kill it, and if either of them connected, they could win. It was dangerous, but they had to defeat this monster in order to proceed to the next area, so the players would probably choose to fight.
"Can I ask one thing?" Clantail raised her right hand. "Water charms aside, we don't have enough Shield +5 for everyone. I'm the only one in our party who has one."
"Our party doesn't have any Shield +5, either," said Lazuline. "Shields and stuff are heavy."
"We only have one Shield +5," said @Meow-Meow.
"That's fine. We have extras." Pfle raised up her own magical phone. "I won't be stingy and say I'll just lend them to you. I relinquish these free of charge."
"That's quite kind of you," said Rionetta, "but can we assume there's some condition?"
"I want the area unlock reward," said Pfle. "Specifically, I want all the candy and the real money as my own." Such an uncomplicated demand silenced them all. All sound but the dragon's nasal breathing disappeared from the great underground cavern. "You don't mind? Since Shadow Gale and I were the ones who found the way to this point."
"It's asking too much."
"The real money is a million yen, isn't it? That's quite a sum. The greedy will die first, you know."
"No matter how you look at it, taking all the bonbons is a huge rip-off."
"Maybe tone it down a little..."
Complaints leaped from each mouth, and Pfle pouted in disapproval. "The area would be unlocked. What does the reward matter?"
"If the reward doesn't matter, then you should stop tryin' to take it all for yourself! Give us the candy!" insisted Lazuline.
Rionetta added, "We don't want you getting the outrageous idea that you can put us to work without any recompense."
"You leave me no choice," Pfle said. "Fine. Then the reward for completion will be split evenly between everyone here. But if the dragon drops an item, it will be mine. Agreed?" It had to drop an item. And if there was only one, then only one of them could take it. If any among them had the right to take it, would it not be Pfle?
Everyone shot their party members meaningful glances.
"Fine."
"Under those condition."
"We'll go with that." Clantail, @Meow-Meow, and Detec Bell all agreed on behalf of their parties.
Pfle's expression of disapproval instantly vanished, and she put on a beaming smile. "Well then, let's begin the operation. Those who don't have shields, come get them. Further discussion will be needed regarding positioning. I imagine you'd all be fine with the brave magical girls in the vanguard receiving a greater portion of the reward than the rest? Also, regarding who is to hold the Dragon-Killer..." Gleefully, Pfle began giving directions.
They all moved to their positions, waiting on standby with their toes just about touching the red line. Nokko wasn't used to equipment like the shield, and it felt like an even larger burden than it actually was. But that also made it feel more reliable. When the time came, it should protect her.
Beside Nokko was the magical girl in white who was from Clantail's party...Pechka. She was trembling. Perhaps Nokko was somehow fated to end up with this girl, as she was always nearby at times like these for some reason. From what Nokko could tell, she didn't seem all that reliable.
Clantail had the Dragon-Killer in her right hand and a Shield +5 ready in her left. @Meow-Meow was straight ahead of the dragon, also with a Shield +5. The other girls were each equipped with her own Shield +5, too. Only Melville was charged with support fire using her bow and harpoons. Water charms hanging from all their necks, they encircled the dragon.
While the magical girls were getting ready, the dragon observed them with half-lidded eyes without paying much attention. It seemed bored, as if it believed that no matter how much the humans prepared, it would never lose.
Shadow Gale lowered Pfle down onto a rock and headed to her own position.
"Now then..." Pfle was right about to give the signal for the operation to begin, when—
"Huh?" Rionetta stood up. She opened her mouth, eyes turning to the entrance of the great cavern. Nokko followed her gaze. Standing there was Genopsyko Yumenoshima.
"Genopsyko!" @Meow-Meow yelled, shooting to her feet. Her expression changed from shock to joy, sparking with the elation of finally having found the person she was searching for all this time.
Her visor was up, and they had a good view of her face. She was just like she had been before—no scars like what Detec Bell's party had seen. Had she healed up already? Or had she never had anything like that to begin with?
Genopsyko was smiling, too. She spread both arms and ran over to give @Meow-Meow a big hug. Grinning as well, @Meow-Meow hugged her back, the two of them tumbling over the red line—and then the dragon spewed flame.
Before they could grasp what had just happened, the dragon spat another fireball that hit the fallen pair. Raising its head up to the ceiling, the creature's throat rumbled as it howled. The great cavern resounded.
"Never ye stop! Chaerge!" cried Melville.
With a jerk, they all moved into action.
|
Magical Girl Raising Project 2 - Asari Endou.txt
| 37 |
[ MASTER SIDE #5 ]
"Fal?"
No voice responded to the girl's call.
"Faaal?"
The room was dead silent. The magical phone was still off and didn't activate. The corners of the girl's mouth quirked into a little smile, one that might warrant the label "twisted." She reached out to the magical phone, stopped right before touching it, then picked up the glasses beside it and hooked them over her ears. "I'm always so busy taking them off and putting them on again! By the way, you're not gonna reply, Fal?"
In contrast with the shining monitors dotting the room, the magical phone remained silent.
"Sulking because you feel like you've betrayed your master? If that's what's bothering you, don't worry about it." The girl rolled up the sleeves of her white coat. The lab coat was two sizes too big for her, and the sleeves were rolled up three times and held with clips. "That's part of why you caught my eye. Did you know? Of all the digital fairy-type familiars, the FA series is the one with security defects. Now that they've sent out that update patch, ostensibly, there's no more defective units going around, but you haven't installed the patch yet, have you, Fal? That's why I figured you'd betray your master, at least. Besides, you had this one predecessor—really out of this world—who wanted to see a magical-girl battle royal, no matter what it took, and tempted a master into it. Compared with that, you're a little cupcake, Fal. I took it for granted that you'd go against the will of your master and tattle on me to the Magical Kingdom. And if they were going to come try to persuade me, I figured that the one they'd send in would be you..."
The door was violently slammed open, and there stood a magical girl in white. The other girl smiled at her and, with her sleeves rolled up, beckoned her into the room. "Welcome to my world. It's good to meet you, Snow White."
|
After the Night - Linda Howard.txt
| 2 |
It was a good day for dreaming. It was late in the afternoon, the sun throwing long shadows when it could manage to break through the thick woods, but for the most part the translucent golden light was tangled in the tops of the trees, leaving the forest floor mysteriously shadowed. The hot, humid summer air was redolent with the pink sweetness of honeysuckle nectar, all mingled with the rich, brown odor of the earth and rotting vegetation as well as the crisp green scent of the leaves. Odors had color for Faith Devlin, and since she'd been a little girl she had entertained herself by coldring the smells around her.
Most of the colors were obvious, drawn from the way something looked. Of course the earth smelled brown; of course that fresh, tangy scent of leaves would be green in her mind. Grapefruit smelled bright yellow; she'd never eaten one, but once had picked up one in the grocery store and hesitantly sniffed its skin, and the scent had exploded on her taste buds, sour and sweet all at the same time.
The smell of things was easy to color in her mind; the color scent of people was more difficult, because people were never just one thing, but different colors mixed together. Colors didn't mean the same in people smells that they did in thing smells. Her mother, Renee, had a dark, spicy red scent, with a few sworls of black and yellow, but the spicy red almost crowded out all the other colors. Yellow was good in things, but not in people; neither was green, or at least some shades of it. Her father, Amos, was a sickening mixture of green, purple, yellow, and black. That one was real easy, because from a very early age she had associated him with vomit. Drink and puke, drink and puke, that's all Pa did. Well, and pee. He peed a lot.
The best smell in the world, Faith thought as she meandered through the woods, staring up at the captured sunlight and holding her secret happiness cradled deep in her chest, was Gray Rouillard. Faith lived for the glimpses of him she got in town, and if she was close enough to hear the deep, dark rumble of his voice, she trembled with joy. Today she'd gotten close enough to smell him, and he had actually touched her! She was still giddy from the experience.
She had gone into the drugstore in Prescott with Jodie, her older sister, because Jodie had stolen a couple of bucks from Renee's purse and wanted to buy some fingernail polish. Jodie's smell was orange and yellow, a pale imitation of Renee's scent. They had been coming out of the drugstore, the precious hot pink polish carefully tucked into Jodie's bra so Renee wouldn't see it. Jodie had been wearing a bra for almost three years now, and she was only thirteen, a fact she used to taunt Faith whenever she thought about it, because Faith was eleven and still didn't have any boobs. Lately Faith's flat, childish little nipples had begun to swell, though, and she was in an agony of embarrassment that someone would notice them. She had been intensely conscious of them poking out under the thin, purple LSU t-shirt she wore, but when they almost collided with Gray on the sidewalk as he was going into the drugstore and they were coming out, Faith forgot about the flimsiness of her shirt.
"Nice shirt," Gray had said, amusement dancing in his dark eyes, and patted her on the shoulder. Gray was home for the summer from college. He played football for LSU, a starting linebacker in his freshman year. He was nineteen, six foot three and still growing, and weighed a hard-packed two hundred thirty pounds. Faith knew because she'd read all that in the sports page of the local newspaper. She knew he ran a 4.6 forty, and had great lateral speed, whatever that was. She also knew that he was beautiful, not in a pretty way, but in the same wild, powerful way that his father's prize stallion, Maximillian, was beautiful. His French Creole ancestry was obvious in his dark coloring, and in the clear, strong bones of his face. His thick black hair hung down to his shoulders, making him look like a medieval warrior accidentally set down in the present time. Faith read every romance about medieval knights and their fair ladies that she could get her hands on, so she knew a knight when she saw one.
Her shoulder had tingled where Gray touched it, and her swelling nipples throbbed, making her blush and duck her head. Her senses were whirling dizzily with his scent, a rich, indefinable blend that she couldn't describe, warm and musky, with an even deeper red than Renee's, full of tantalizing colors in deep, luxurious hues.
Jodie thrust out her round breasts, covered by a sleeveless, hot pink blouse. She had left the top two buttons undone. "What about my shirt?" she asked, pouting a little to make her lips stick out more too, as she had seen Renee do thousands of times.
"Wrong color," Gray had said, his voice going hard and contempt leaking into the tone. Faith knew why. It was because Renee was sleeping with his father, Guy. She'd heard the way others talked about Renee, knew what "whore" meant.
He had brushed past them then, pushing open the door and disappearing into the drugstore. Jodie stared after him for a few seconds, then turned her greedy eyes on Faith. "Let me have your shirt," she said.
"It's too little for you," Faith replied, and was fiercely glad that it was. Gray had liked her shirt, had touched it, and she wasn't about to give it up.
Jodie had scowled at the obvious truth. Faith was small and skinny, but even her narrow shoulders strained at the seams of the two-year-old T-shirt.
"I'll get my own," she'd declared.
She would, too, Faith thought now as she gazed dreamily up at the flickering patterns made by the sun in the trees. But Jodie wouldn't have the one Gray had touched; Faith had taken it off as soon as she'd gotten home, carefully folded it, and hidden it under her mattress. The only way anyone would find it there would be if they stripped the bed to wash the sheets, and since Faith was the only one who did that, the shirt would be safe, and she could sleep on it every night.
Gray. The violence of her emotions scared her, but she couldn't control them. All she had to do was see him and her heart would begin pounding so hard in her skinny chest that it hurt her ribs, and she felt hot and shivery all at the same time. Gray was like a god in the small town of Prescott, Louisiana; he was wild as a buck, she'd heard people say, but he was backed by the Rouillard money, and even as a young boy he'd had a hard, reckless charm that made feminine hearts flutter. The Rouillards had spawned their share of rascals and renegades, and Gray had early shown the potential to be the wildest of the lot. But he was a Rouillard, and even when he raised hell, he did it with style.
For all that, he'd never been unkind to Faith, the way some of the people in town had. His sister, Monica, had once spat in their direction when Faith and Jodie had met her on the sidewalk. Faith was glad that Monica was in New Orleans at some fancy private girls' school, and wasn't home very often even during the summer, because she was visiting with friends. On the other hand, Faith's heart had bled for months when Gray had gone oif to LSU; Baton Rouge wasn't that far away, but during football season he didn't get much time off, and came home only on the holidays. Whenever she knew he was home, Faith tried to hang around town where she might catch a glimpse of him, strolling with the indolent grace of a big cat, so tall and strong and dangerously exciting.
Now that it was summer, he spent a lot of time at the lake, which was one of the reasons for Faith's afternoon expedition through the woods. The lake was a private one, over two thousand acres, and totally contained by Rouillard land. It was long and irregularly shaped, with several curves in it; broad and fairly shallow in some places, narrow and deep in others. The big, white Rouillard mansion was to the east of it, the Devlin shack on the west, but neither was actually on the lakeshore. The only house on the lake was the Rouillard summerhouse, a white, one-story house with two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, and a screened-in porch that totally encircled it. Down from the summerhouse was a boathouse and a pier, and a brick barbecue pit had been built there. Sometimes, during the summer, Gray and his friends would gather there for a rowdy afternoon of swimming and boating, and Faith would slip along the edge of the woods so she could watch him to her heart's content.
Maybe he'd be there today, she thought, aching with the sweet yearning that filled her every time she thought about him. It would be wonderful to see him twice in one day.
She was barefoot, and her threadbare shorts left her skinny legs unprotected from scratches and snakes, but Faith was as at home in the woods as the other shy creatures; she wasn't worried about the snakes, and disregarded the scratches. Her long, dark red hair tended to hang untidily in her eyes and annoy her, so she had pulled it back and secured it with a rubber band. She slipped like a wraith through the trees, her big cat eyes dreamy as she pictured Gray in her mind. Maybe he'd be there; maybe one day he'd see her hiding in the bushes, or peeking out from behind a tree, and he'd hold his hand out to her and say, "Why don't you come out from there and have some fun with us?" She lost herself in the delicious daydream of being part of that group of laughing, roughhousing, suntanned kids, of being one of those curvy girls in a brief bikini.
Even before she got to the edge of the clearing where the summerhouse was, she could see the silver gleam of Gray's Corvette parked in front of it, and her heart began the familiar violent pounding. He was here! She slid cautiously behind the shelter of a big tree trunk, but after a moment she realized that she couldn't hear anything. There were no splashing sounds, no yells or shrieks or giggles.
Maybe he was fishing from the pier, or maybe he'd taken the boat out. Faith moved closer, angling for a view of the pier, but the wooden length was empty. He wasn't there. Disappointment filled her. If he'd taken the boat out, there was no telling how long he'd be gone, and she couldn't stay there waiting for him. She had stolen this time for herself, but she had to get back soon and start cooking supper, and take care of Scottie.
She was turning to go when a muted sound reached her ears and she stopped, head cocked to try to locate it. She left the edge of the woods and took a few steps into the clearing, closer to the house, and now she could hear a murmur of voices, too low and indistinct for her to understand. Instantly her heart swelled again; he was here, after all. But he was inside the house; it would be difficult to catch a glimpse of him from the woods. If she went closer, though, she could hear him, and that was all she required.
Faith had the knack of small, wild things for silence. Her bare feet didn't make a sound as she crept closer to the house, trying to stay out of a direct line to any of the windows. The murmur of voices seemed to be coming from the back of the house, where the bedrooms were located.
She reached the porch and squatted by the steps, her head cocked again as she tried to catch the words, but she couldn't quite understand them. It was Gray's voice, though; the deep tones were unmistakable, at least to her. Then she heard a gasp, and a kind of moan, in a much lighter voice.
Irresistibly drawn by curiosity and the lodestone of Gray's voice, Faith eased out of her squatting position and cautiously tugged at the handle of the screen door. It was unlatched. She eased it open barely enough for a cat to slip through, and wriggled her own lithe, skinny body inside, then just as silently let the door close. Going down on hands and knees, she crawled across the plank porch to the open window of one of the bedrooms, from which the voices seemed to be coming.
She heard another gasp. "Gray," said the other voice, a girl's voice, strained and shaking.
"Shhh, shhh," Gray murmured, the sound low and barely reaching Faith. He said something else, but the words didn't make any sense to her. They slid past her ears without triggering any understanding. He was speaking French, she realized, and as soon as she did so, the words became clear, as if it had taken that small understanding for the sounds to find the needed rhythm in her brain. Though the Devlins were neither Cajun nor Creole, Faith understood most of what he was saying. The majority of the people in the parish spoke and understood French, in varying degrees.
It sounded as if he were trying to coax a scared dog to him, Faith thought. His voice was warm and crooning, the words scattered with reassurances and endearments. When the girl spoke again, her voice was still strained, but now there was a drugged undertone to it.
Curious, Faith eased to the side and carefully moved her head so that one eye peeked around the frame of the open window. What she saw froze her to the spot.
Gray and the girl were both naked on the bed, which was positioned with the headboard under the window on the adjoining wall. Neither of them was likely to see her, which was a stroke of fortune, because Faith couldn't have moved then even if they had both looked straight at her.
Gray was lying with his back to her, his left arm positioned under the girl's tousled blond head. He was leaning over her in a way that made Faith catch her breath, for there was something both protective and predatory in him. He was kissing her, long kisses that left the room in silence except for their deep sighs, and his right arm—it looked as if—he was—he shifted his position, and Faith could clearly see that his right hand was between the girl's naked thighs, right there on her kitty cat.
Faith felt dizzy, and she realized that her chest hurt from holding her breath. Carefully she let it out, and rested her cheek against the white wood. She knew what they were doing. She was eleven, and she wasn't a little girl anymore even if her breasts hadn't started to grow yet. Several years ago she had heard Renee and Pa carrying on in their bedroom, and her oldest brother, Russ, had leeringly and graphically explained what was going on. She had seen dogs doing it, too, and heard cats screeching while they did it.
The girl cried out, and Faith peeked again. Gray was on top of her now, still gently murmuring in French, cajoling, soothing. He told her how pretty she was, how much he wanted her, how hot and delicious she was. And as he talked, he was adjusting his position, reaching between their bodies with his right hand while he remained propped on his left arm. Because of the angle, Faith couldn't see what he was doing, but she knew anyway. With a shock, she recognized the girl. Lindsey Partain; her father was a lawyer in Prescott.
"Gray!" Lindsey cried, her voice tight with strain. "My God! I can't—"
Gray's muscular buttocks tightened, and the girl arched beneath him, crying out again. But she was clinging to him, and the cry was one of intense pleasure. Her long legs lifted, one twining around his hip, the other hooking around his leg.
He began moving slowly, his muscled young body rippling with power. The scene was raw and disturbing, but there was also a beauty to it that kept Faith riveted. Gray was so big and strong, his darkly tanned body graceful and intensely masculine, while Lindsey was slim and shapely, delicately feminine in his grasp. He seemed to be taking such care of her, and she was enjoying it so much, her slim hands clinging to his back, her head arched back and her hips lifting in time with his slow rhythm.
Faith stared at them, her eyes burning. She wasn't jealous. Gray was so far above her, and she was so young, that she had never thought of him in a romantic, possessive sense. Gray was the shining center of her universe, to be worshiped from afar, and she was giddily happy with the occasional glimpse of him. Today, when he had actually spoken to her, and touched her shirt, had been paradise. She couldn't imagine herself in Lindsey's place, lying naked in his arms, or even imagine what it felt like.
Gray's movements were getting faster, and the girl was crying out again as she strained up to him, her teeth clenched as if she were in pain, but instinctively Faith knew that she wasn't. Gray was hammering at her now, his own head thrown back, long black hair damp at the temples and the ends sticking to his sweaty shoulders. He tensed and shuddered, and a raw, deep sound burst from his throat.
Faith's heart was hammering, and her greenish cat eyes were huge as she ducked away from the window, slipping through the screen door and off the porch as silently as she had arrived. So that was what it was like. She had actually seen Gray doing it. Without his clothes, he was even more beautiful than she had imagined. He hadn't made disgusting snorting pig noises the way Pa did, whenever he was sober enough to talk Renee into the bedroom, which wasn't very often for the past couple of years.
If Gray's father, Guy, was as beautiful doing it as Gray was, Faith thought fiercely, she didn't blame Renee for choosing him over Pa.
She gained the safety of the woods and slipped silently through the trees. It was late, and she'd likely get a belting from Pa when she got home, for not being there to start his supper and look after Scottie, the way she was supposed to do, but it would be worth it. She had seen Gray.
Exhausted, elated, shaking and breathing hard in the aftermath of orgasm, Gray lifted his head from the curve of Lindsey's neck and shoulder. She was still gasping herself, her eyes closed. He had spent the better part of the afternoon seducing her, but it had been worth the effort. That long, slow buildup had made the sex even better than he'd expected.
A flash of color, a tiny movement in his peripheral vision, caught his attention and he turned his head toward the open window and the woods beyond the porch. He caught only a glimpse of a small, frail figure topped by dark red hair, but that was enough for him to identify the youngest Devlin girl.
What was the kid doing wandering around the woods this far from their shack? Gray didn't say anything to Lindsey, because she would panic if she thought someone might have seen her sneaking into the summerhouse with him, even if that someone was just one of the trashy Devlins. She was engaged to Dewayne Mouton, and she wouldn't take kindly to anything screwing that up, even her own screwing. The Moutons weren't as rich as the Rouillards—no one in this part of Louisiana was—but Lindsey knew she could handle Dewayne in a way she could never hope to do with Gray.
Gray was the bigger catch, but he wouldn't be a very comfortable husband, and Lindsey was shrewd enough to know she didn't have a chance with him anyway.
"What is it?" she murmured now, stroking his shoulder.
"Nothing." He turned his head and kissed her, hard, then disengaged their bodies and sat up on the edge of the bed. "I just noticed how late it is."
Lindsey took a look out the window at the lengthening shadows, and sat up with a squeal. "My God, I'm supposed to have dinner with the Moutons tonight! I'll never be able to get ready on time!" She scrambled from the bed and began grabbing up her scattered articles of clothing.
Gray dressed in a more leisurely fashion, but his mind was still on the Devlin kid. Had she seen them, and if she had, would she say anything? She was a strange little kid, shyer than her older sister, who was already showing signs of being as big a slut as their mother. But the younger one had wise old eyes in that thin kid's face, eyes that reminded him of a cat's eyes, hazel green with flecks of gold in them so that sometimes they were green and sometimes looked yellowish. He got the feeling that she didn't miss much. She would know that her mother was his father's piece on the side, that the Devlins lived rent-free in that shack so Renee would be handy whenever Guy Rouillard wanted her. The kid wouldn't risk getting on the bad side of any Rouillard.
Poor little skinny kid, with the fey eyes. She'd been born into trash and wouldn't have the chance to ever get out of it, assuming she even wanted to. Amos Devlin was a mean drunk, and the two older boys, Russ and Nicky, were lazy, thieving bullies, as mean as their father and showing signs of turning into drunks as well. Her mother, Renee, liked the booze too, but she hadn't let it get the upper hand on her the way it had on Amos. She was lush and beautiful, despite having borne five children, with the dark red hair that only her youngest daughter had inherited, as well as the green eyes and creamy, delicate skin. Renee wasn't mean, like Amos, but she wasn't much of a mother to those kids, either. All Renee cared about was getting screwed. The joke in the parish was that her heels were so round, she had been used as the pattern for Weebles. Unlike Weebles, however, Renee would stay down, as long as there was a man ready to crawl on top of her. She exuded sex, raunchy sex, drawing men to her like dogs to a bitch in heat.
Jodie, the oldest girl, was pure jailbait, already on the lookout for any hard cock she could get. She had Renee's single-mindedness when it came to sex, and he very much doubted that she was still a virgin, though she was only in junior high. She kept offering it to him, but Gray wasn't the least bit tempted. He'd rather screw a snake than Jodie Devlin.
The youngest Devlin boy was retarded. Gray had only seen him once or twice, and each time he had been clinging to the youngest girl's legs—what was her name, damn it? Something he'd thought a minute ago had reminded him of it. Fay? Fay with the fey eyes? No, it was something else, but like that—Faith. That was it. Funny name for a Devlin, since neither Amos nor Renee was the least bit religious.
With a family like that, the kid was doomed. In another couple of years, she'd be following in her mother's and sister's footsteps, because she wouldn't know any better. And even if she did know better, all the boys would come sniffing around her anyway, just because her name was Devlin, and she wouldn't hold out for long.
The whole parish knew that his father was screwing Renee, had been for years. As much as Gray loved his mother, he figured he couldn't blame Guy for going elsewhere; God knows, his mother didn't. Noelle was the least physical person Gray had ever seen. At thirty-nine, she was still as cool and lovely as a Madonna, unfailingly composed and remote. She didn't like to be touched, even by her children. The wonder was that she'd even had children. Of course Guy wasn't faithful, had never been, much to Noelle's relief. Guy Rouillard was hot-blooded and lusty, and he'd found his way into a lot of beds before settling, more or less, on Renee Devlin, But Guy was always gently courteous and protective with Noelle, and Gray knew he would never leave her, especially not for a cheap slut like Renee.
The only person upset by the arrangement, apparently, was his sister, Monica. Starved by Noelle's emotional distance, Monica doted on her father, and was fiercely jealous of Renee, both on behalf of her mother and because Guy spent so much time with Renee. It was a lot calmer around the house now that Monica had gone away to school and become involved with her friends there.
"Gray, hurry," Lindsey begged frantically.
He shoved his arms into his shirtsleeves, but disdained to button the garment, leaving it hanging open. "I'm ready." He kissed her, and patted her butt. "Don't get your feathers ruffled, chérie. All you have to do is change clothes. The rest of you looks beautiful just as you are."
She smiled, pleased by the compliment, and calmed down. "When can we do this again?" she asked as they left the summerhouse.
Gray laughed aloud. It had taken him most of the summer to get into her pants, but now she didn't want to waste any more time. Perversely, now that he'd had her, much of his ruthless determination had faded. "I don't know," he said lazily. "I have to report back to school soon, for football practice."
To her credit, she didn't pout. Instead she tossed her head so the wind lifted her hair as the Corvette streaked down the private road toward the highway, and smiled at him. "Any time." She was a year older than he was, and had her own share of confidence.
The Corvette skidded into the highway, the tires grabbing asphalt. Lindsey laughed as Gray handled the powerful car with ease. "I'll have you home in five minutes," he promised. He didn't want anything to interfere with her engagement to Dewayne, either.
He thought of skinny little Faith Devlin, and wondered if she'd made it safely home. She shouldn't be wandering around alone in the woods like that. She could get hurt, or lost. Worse, though this was private land, the lake drew the local high school boys like a magnet, and Gray had no illusions about teenage boys when they were in a pack. If they ran across Faith, they might not stop to think about how young she was, only that she was a Devlin. Little Red wouldn't have a chance against the wolves.
Someone needed to keep a closer eye on the kid.
|
After the Night - Linda Howard.txt
| 3 |
[ Three Years Later ]
"Faith," Renee said fretfully, "make Scottie stop. He's driving me crazy with that whining."
Faith put aside the potatoes she was peeling, wiped her hands, and went to the screen door, where Scottie was slapping at the screen and making the little snuffling sounds that meant he wanted to go outside. He was never allowed to go out by himself, because he didn't understand what "stay in the yard" meant, and he would wander off and get lost. There was a latch high on the screen, where he couldn't reach it, that was always kept fastened to prevent him from going out by himself. Faith was busy with supper, though likely only she and Scottie would be here to eat it, and couldn't go out with him right now.
She pulled his hands away from the screen and said, "Do you want to play ball, Scottie? Where's the ball?" Easily distracted, he trotted off in search of his dogchewed red ball, but Faith knew that wouldn't occupy him for long. With a sigh, she went back to the potatoes.
Renee drifted out of her bedroom. She was dressed fit to kill tonight, Faith noted, in a tight, short red dress that showed off her long, shapely legs and somehow didn't clash with her hair. Renee had great legs; she had great everything, and she knew it. Her thick red hair was brushed into a cloud, and her musky perfume clung to her in a deep, rich red scent. "How do I look?" she asked, whirling on her red high heels as she attached cheap rhinestone earrings to her earlobes.
"Beautiful," Faith said, knowing it was what Renee expected, and it was nothing less than the truth. Renee was as amoral as a cat, but she was also a startlingly beautiful woman, with a perfectly formed, slightly exotic face.
"Well, I'm off." She bent to brush a careless kiss over the top of Faith's head.
"Have fun, Mama."
"I will." She gave a husky laugh. "Oh, I will." She unlatched the screen and left the shack, long legs flashing.
Faith got up to latch the door again, and stood watching Renee get into her flashy little sports car and drive off. Her mother loved that car. She had driven up in it one day without a word of explanation about how she had gotten it, not that there was much doubt in anyone's mind. Guy Rouillard had bought it for her.
Seeing her at the door, Scottie returned and began making his "go outside" noise again. "I can't take you outside," Faith explained, endlessly patient though he didn't understand much. "I have to cook supper. Would you rather have fried potatoes or mashed ones?" It was a rhetorical question, because mashed potatoes were much easier for him to eat. She smoothed his dark hair and returned once again to the table and the bowl of potatoes.
Lately, Scottie wasn't as energetic as usual, and more and more his lips took on a blue tinge when he played. His heart was failing, just like the doctors had said would likely happen. There wouldn't be a miracle heart transplant for Scottie, even had the Devlins been able to afford it. The few available children's hearts were too precious to be wasted on a little boy who would never be able to dress himself, or read, or manage more than a few garbled words no matter how long he lived. "Severely retarded" was how he was categorized. Though a hard little lump formed in Faith's chest at the thought of Scottie dying, she wasn't bitter that nothing would be done about his failing health. A new heart wouldn't help Scottie, not in any way that mattered. The doctors hadn't expected him to live this long, and she would just take care of him for whatever time he had left.
For a while, she had wondered if he was Guy Rouillard's son, and felt furious on his behalf that he wasn't taken to live in the big white house, where he would have the best of care, and his few years would be happy. Because Scottie was retarded, she thought, Guy was happy to keep him out of sight.
The truth was, Scottie could just as easily be Pa's son, and it was impossible to tell. Scottie didn't look like either man; he simply looked like himself. He was six years old now, a placid little boy who was pleased by the smallest things, and whose security was rooted in his fourteen-year-old sister. Faith had taken care of him from the day Renee had brought him home from the hospital, protected him from Pa's drunken rages, kept Russ and Nicky from teasing him unmercifully. Renee and Jodie mostly ignored him, which was okay with Scottie.
Jodie had asked Faith to "double date" with her that night, and shrugged when Faith refused because someone had to stay home and take care of Scottie. She wouldn't have gone out with Jodie anyway; their ideas of fun were radically different. Jodie thought having fun was sneaking some illegal booze, since she was only sixteen, getting drunk, and having sex with the boy or group of boys who were hanging around her that night.
Everything in Faith shuddered in revulsion at the thought. She had seen Jodie come in, stinking of beer and sex, her clothes torn and stained, giggling at how much "fun" she had had. It never seemed to bother her that those same boys wouldn't speak to her if they met her in public.
It bothered Faith. Her soul burned with humiliation at the contempt in people's eyes whenever they looked at her, at anyone in her family. The trashy Devlins, that's what they were called. Drunks and whores, the whole bunch.
But I'm not like that! The silent cry sometimes welled up in Faith, but she always held it in. Why couldn't folks see beneath the name? She didn't paint herself up and wear too short, too tight clothes like Renee and Jodie. She didn't drink, didn't hang around rough joints trying to pick up anything in pants. Her clothes were cheap and ill made, but she kept them clean. She never missed a day of school, if she could help it, and she had good grades. She hungered for respectability, wanted to be able to walk into a store and not have the clerks watch her like a hawk, because she was one of those trashy Devlins and everyone knew they'd steal you blind. She didn't want people to make comments behind their hands whenever they saw her.
It didn't help that she resembled Renee far more than did Jodie. Faith had the same thick, dark red hair, as vibrant as a flame, the same porcelain-grained skin, the same high cheekbones and exotic green eyes. Her face wasn't perfectly proportioned like Renee's; her face was thinner, her jaw more square, her mouth as wide but not as full. Renee was voluptuous; Faith was both taller and leaner, her body more delicately made. Her breasts had finally grown, firm and pert, but Jodie, at the same age, had been wearing a bra cup two sizes bigger.
Because she looked like Renee, people seemed to expect Faith to act like her, too, acd then never looked beyond their own expectations. She was tarred with the same brush that had painted the rest of the family.
"But I'll get out someday, Scottie," she said softly. "See if I don't."
He didn't react to the words, just kept patting the screen.
As always, when she needed to cheer herself, she thought of Gray. Her painful feelings for him hadn't lessened in the three years since she had seen him making love to Lindsey Partain, but rather had intensified as she had matured. The awestruck joy with which she had watched him at eleven had grown and changed, as she had grown and changed. When she dreamed of him now, physical feelings mingled sharply with the romantic ones, and with her upbringing the details were far sharper and more explicit than other fourteen-year-old girls could have been expected to know.
Her dreams weren't colored just by her own surroundings; that day at the summerhouse when she had seen Gray with Lindsey Partain—Lindsey Mouton now—had given her a great deal of knowledge about his body. She hadn't actually seen his genitals, because at first his back had been turned to her, and then when he had gotten on top, their legs had blocked her view. It didn't much matter, though, because she knew what one looked like. Not only had she taken care of Scottie all of his life, but Pa and Russ and Nicky, when they were drunk, were just as likely as not to pull it out of their pants and take a pee off the front step as they were to use the toilet.
But Faith knew enough details about Gray's body to heat her dreams. She knew how muscled those long legs were, and that black hair grew on them. She knew that his buttocks were small and round and tight, and that he had adorable twin dimples just above them. She knew that his shoulders were broad and powerful, that his back was long, with the groove of his spine deeply indented between the thick layers of muscle. There had been a light dusting of black hair on his wide chest.
She knew that he made love in French, his deep voice soft and dark and crooning.
She had followed his career at LSU with secret pride. He had just been graduated with a double major in finance and business administration, with an eye toward taking over the Rouillard holdings someday. As good as he had been at football, he hadn't wanted a career in the pros, and instead had come home to begin helping Guy. She would be able to catch glimpses of him year round now, rather than just during the summer and holidays.
Unfortunately, Monica was home for good, too, and was as spiteful as ever. Everyone else was merely contemptuous; Monica actively hated anyone with the name of Devlin. Faith couldn't blame her, though, and sometimes even sympathized with her. No one had ever said that Guy Rouillard wasn't a good father; he loved both of his children, and they loved him. How did Monica feel, hearing people talk about Guy's long-standing arrangement with Renee, knowing that he was openly unfaithful to her mother?
When she was younger, Faith had daydreamed that Guy was her father too; Amos was nowhere in the picture. Guy was tall and dark and exciting, his lean face so much like Gray's that, no matter what, she couldn't hate him. He had always been kind to her, to all Renee's kids, but he had sometimes gone out of his way to speak to Faith and had once or twice bought her a small treat. It was probably because she looked like Renee, Faith thought. If Guy had been her father, then Gray would be her brother, and she would be able to worship him up close, live in the same house with him. Those daydreams had always made her feel guilty about Pa, and then she would try to be extra nice to him to make up for it. Lately, however, she was fiercely glad that Guy wasn't her father, because now she didn't want Gray to be her brother.
She wanted to marry him.
This most private of her daydreams was so shocking that sometimes it startled her, that she would dare to even dream so high. A Rouillard, marry a Devlin? A Devlin set foot in that hundred-year-old mansion? All the Rouillard ancestors would rise up from their graves to drive out the intruder. The parish would be aghast.
But still she dreamed. She dreamed of being dressed in white, of walking down the wide aisle of the church with Gray waiting for her at the altar, turning to watch her with those heavy-lidded dark eyes, the expression in them hot and wanting, and just for her. She dreamed of him sweeping her up in his arms and carrying her over the threshold—not at Rouillard House, she couldn't imagine that, but somewhere else that was theirs alone, maybe a honeymoon cottage—to a big bed that awaited them. She imagined lying under him, her legs around him as she had seen Lindsey's, imagined him moving, heard his seductive voice whispering French love words in her ear. She knew what men and women did together, knew where he would put his thing, even though she couldn't imagine how it would feel. Jodie said that it felt wonderful, the best thing in the world...
Scottie gave a sharp cry, jerking Faith from her daydream. She dropped the potato she had been dicing and jumped to her feet, because Scottie didn't cry unless he was hurt. He was still standing at the screen, holding his finger. Faith picked him up and carried him to the table, where she sat down with him on her lap and examined his hand. There was a small, deep scratch on the tip of his index finger; probably he had raked his hand across a hole in the screen, and the torn wire had dug into his skin. A single drop of blood had welled in the tiny wound.
"There, there, it's all right," she soothed, hugging him and wiping away his tears. "I'll put a Band-Aid on it and it'll get well. You like Band-Aids."
He did. Whenever he had a scrape that needed bandaging, she ended up plastering the things over his arms and legs, because he would keep nudging her until all the Band-Aids in the box had been used. She had learned to take most of the bandage strips out of the box and hide them, so that only two or three were there for him to see.
She washed his finger and got the box down from the top shelf, where it was kept to keep him out of it. His round little face was glowing with delight and anticipation as he held out his stubby finger. Making a big production out of it, Faith applied the bandage to the wound.
He leaned forward and peered into the open box, then grunted as he held out his other hand.
"Is that one hurt, too? Poor hand!" She kissed the grubby little paw and applied a bandage to the back of it.
He leaned over and looked into the box again, and grinned as he held up his right leg.
"My goodness! You're hurt all over!" she exclaimed, and bandaged his knee.
He checked the box again, but it was now empty. Satisfied, he trotted back to the door, and Faith returned to fixing supper.
With the long summer days, it was just twilight at eight-thirty, but by eight that evening Scottie was already tired and nodding off. Faith gave him a bath and put him to bed, her heart squeezing painfully as she stroked his hair. He was such a sweet little boy, oblivious to the health problems that would keep him from living to adulthood.
At nine-thirty she heard Amos driving up, his old truck clanking and backfiring. She went to unlatch the screen and let him in. The stink of whiskey came in with him, a purulent, greenish yellow stench.
He stumbled over the threshold, and righted himself.
"Where's your ma?" he growled, in the ugly mean tone he always used when he was drinking, which was most of the time.
"She went out a couple of hours ago."
He lurched toward the table, the uneven floor making his steps that much more perilous. "Damn bitch," he muttered. "Ain't never here. Always out shakin' her ass at her fancy rich boyfriend. Ain't never here to fix my supper. How's a man supposed to eat?" he suddenly roared, hitting the table with his fist.
"Supper's ready, Pa," Faith said quietly, hoping the uproar didn't wake Scottie. "I'll fix you a plate."
"Don't want anything to eat," he said, as she had expected. When he was drinking, he never wanted food, just more booze.
"Is there anythin' in this damn house to drink?" He staggered to his feet and began opening cabinet doors, slamming them when they didn't reveal what he wanted.
Faith moved quickly. "There's a bottle in the boys' bedroom. I'll get it." She didn't want Amos stumbling around in there, cussing and probably puking, and waking Scottie. She darted into the dark little room and blindly searched under Nick's cot until her hand brushed against cool glass. Dragging the bottle out, she carried it back into the kitchen. It was only about one quarter full, but anything would pacify Pa. She twisted the cap off and handed the bottle to Amos.
"Here, Pa."
"Good girl," he said, brightening as he tipped the bottle to his mouth. "You're a good girl, Faith, not a whore like your ma and sister."
"Don't talk like that about them," she protested, unable to listen. Knowing it was one thing, but talking about it was another. It wasn't as if Pa had any room to throw stones.
"I'll say what I damn well please!" Amos flared. "Don't sass me, girl, or I'll belt you one."
"I wasn't sassing you, Pa." She kept her voice calm, but prudently moved out of reach. If he couldn't reach her, he couldn't hit her. He was likely to throw something, but she was quick and his missiles seldom struck her.
"Fine kids she gave me," he sneered. "Russ and Nick are the only two I can stomach. Jodie's a whore like her ma, you're a prissy smart-ass, and the last one's a goddamn idiot."
Keeping her head turned away so he couldn't see the tears that burned her eyes, Faith sat down on the ragged, sagging couch and began folding the laundry she'd done that day. It would never do to let Amos see that he'd hurt her. If he ever scented blood, he moved in for the kill, and the drunker he was, the more vicious he became. The best thing to do was ignore him. Like all drunks, he was easily distracted, and she figured he'd soon be passed out anyway.
She didn't know why it hurt. She had long since ceased to have any feelings for Amos, not even fear. There was certainly nothing there to love, the man he had been long since destroyed in countless bottles of whiskey. If he had ever shown any promise, it had been gone by the time she'd been born, but somehow she thought he had always been pretty much as he was now. He was simply the type of person who always blamed others for his problems rather than doing something to correct them.
Sometimes, when he was sober, Faith thought she could see why Renee had once been attracted to him. Amos was a little over average height, with a wiry body that had never gone to fat. His hair was still dark, if thinning on top, and he could even be called a good-looking man—when he was sober. Drunk, as he was now, unshaven and with his hair mussed and hanging in dirty strings, his eyes red and rheumy with alcohol, his face bloated, there was nothing the least attractive about him. His clothes were dirty and stained, and he stank to high heaven. Judging by the sourness of his smell, he had already puked at least once, and the stains on the front of his pants meant that he hadn't been as careful as he should have been when he'd peed.
He finished off the bottle in silence, then belched loudly. "Gotta piss," he announced, staggering to his feet and heading toward the front door.
Faith's movements were measured, her hands never faltering as she listened to the stream of urine spattering in front of the step, for everyone else who came in that night to tramp into the house. She would mop the floor first thing In the morning.
Amos weaved back into the house. He hadn't zipped his pants, she noticed, but at least his sex wasn't exposed.
"Goin' to bed," he said, making his way toward the back room. Faith watched him stumble and right himself by bracing his hand on the doorframe. He didn't undress, but fell across the bed as he was. When Renee came home and found Amos lying across the bed in his filthy clothes, she would raise hell and wake everyone in the house.
Within minutes, Amos's heavy snoring was echoing through the cramped shack.
Faith immediately got up and went into the lean-to that had been built onto the back of the shack, which she shared with Jodie. Only Amos and Renee had an honest-to-goodness bed; all the rest of them had cots. She turned on the light, the single bare bulb glaring, and quickly changed into her nightgown. Then she pulled her book out from under the mattress. Now that Scottie was in bed and Amos passed out drunk, she would likely have a couple of peaceful hours before anyone else came home. Amos was always the first one home, but then he always got started first.
She had learned not to hesitate when an opportunity for enjoyment presented itself, but to seize each moment. There were too few of them in her life for her to allow any to pass untasted. She loved books, and read anything that came to hand. There was something magical in the way words could be strung together and a whole new world fashioned by the arrangement. While reading she could leave this crowded shack far behind, and go to worlds filled with excitement and beauty and love. When she was reading, she was someone else in her mind, someone worthwhile, rather than one of the trashy Devlins.
She had learned not to read in front of Pa or the boys, though. The least they did was make fun of her. Any one of them, in one of their meaner moods, was likely to snatch the book from her and throw it in the fire, or into the toilet, and laugh uproariously as if her frantic efforts to save it were the funniest thing they'd ever seen. Renee would grumble about her wasting her time reading instead of doing her chores, but she wouldn't do anything to the book. Jodie made fun of her sometimes, but in a careless, impatient way. She couldn't understand for the life of her why Faith would rather stick her nose in a book than go out to have some fun.
These precious moments alone, when she could read in peace, were the highlight of Faith's day, unless she had happened to see Gray. Sometimes she thought that if she couldn't read, just for a few minutes, she would go crazy and start screaming, and not be able to stop. But no matter what Pa did, no matter what she overheard someone say about her family, no matter what Russ and Nicky had been up to or how weak Scottie seemed, if she could open a book, she would lose herself in the pages.
Tonight she had more than a few minutes free for reading, for losing herself in the pages of Rebecca. She settled on her cot and pulled out the candle that she kept under her bed. She lit the candle, positioned it just so, balanced on a crate to the right of the cot, and scooted so that her back was braced against the wall. The light from the candle, small as it was, was enough to offset the back glare of the light bulb and allow her to read without straining her eyes too much. One of these days, she promised herself, she would get a lamp. She imagined it, a real reading lamp that gave off soft, bright light. And she would have one of those wedge-shaped pillows to lean against.
One of these days.
It was almost midnight when she gave up the battle against her heavy eyelids. She hated to stop reading, not wanting to waste any of this time to herself, but she was so sleepy, she couldn't make sense of the words any longer, and wasting the words seemed a lot worse than wasting the time. Sighing, she got up and returned the book to its hiding place, then turned out the light. She crawled between the threadbare sheets, the frame of the cot squeaking under her weight, and blew out the candle.
Perversely, in the sudden darkness, sleep wouldn't come. She shifted restlessly on the thin cot, drifting in a half daydream, half doze, reliving the strained, shadowed romance in the book she'd been reading. She knew instantly when Russ and Nicky drove up, close to one o'clock. They staggered into the house, making no effort to be quiet, laughing uproariously at something their drinking buddies had done that night. Both of them were still underage, but a little thing like a law had never gotten in the way whenever a Devlin wanted to do something. The boys couldn't go to roadhouses, but there were plenty of other ways they could get booze, and they knew them all. Sometimes they stole it, sometimes they paid other people to buy it for them, in which case they had stolen the money. Neither of them had a job, part-time or otherwise, because no one would hire them. It was well known the Devlin boys would steal you blind.
"OF Poss," Nicky was giggling. "Boooooom!"
It was enough to send Russ into drunken whoops. From the incoherent fragments she heard, evidently "Or Poss," whoever that was, had been scared by something that had made a loud booming noise. The boys seemed to think it was hilarious, but they probably wouldn't remember it in the morning.
They woke Scottie, and she heard him grunting, but he didn't cry, so she remained in bed. She wouldn't have liked traipsing into the boys' bedroom in her nightgown—in fact, she would have gone cold with dread—but she would have done it if they'd scared Scottie and made him cry. But Nicky said, "Shaddup and go back to sleep," and Scottie was quiet again. After a few minutes, they were all asleep, the chorus of snores rising and falling in the darkness.
Half an hour later, Jodie came home. She was quiet, or at least tried to be, tiptoeing through the shack with her shoes in hand. The stench of beer and sex came with her, all yellow and red and brown in a noxious swirl. She didn't bother to undress but flopped down on her cot and heaved a deep sigh, almost like a purr.
"You awake, Faithie?" she asked after a moment, her voice slurred.
"Yeah."
"Thought you were. You should've come with me. Had fun, lots of fun." The last sentence was deep with sensuality. "You don't know what you're missin', Faithie."
"Then I don't miss it, do I?" Faith whispered, and Jodie giggled.
Faith dozed lightly, listening for Renee's car so she would know everyone was safely home. Twice she came awake with a start, wondering if Renee had managed to come in without waking her, and got up to look out the window to see if her car was there. It wasn't.
Renee didn't come home at all that night.
|
After the Night - Linda Howard.txt
| 4 |
"Daddy didn't come home last night."
Monica's face was tight with misery as she stood at the window of the dining room. Gray continued eating his breakfast; there wasn't much that could curb his appetite. So that was why Monica was up so early, since she usually didn't crawl out of bed until ten or later. What did she do, wait up until Guy came home? He wondered with a sigh what Monica thought he could do about their father's hours; send him to bed without supper? He couldn't remember when Guy hadn't had women on the side, though Renee Devlin had certainly had a lot more staying power than the rest of them.
His mother, Noelle, didn't care where Guy spent his nights, so long as it wasn't with her, and simply pretended that her husband's affairs didn't exist. Because Noelle didn't care, Gray didn't either. It would have been different if Noelle had been distressed, but that was far from the case. It wasn't that she didn't love Guy; Gray supposed she did, in her fashion. But Noelle intensely disliked sex, disliked being touched, even casually. For Guy to have a mistress was the best solution all around. He didn't mistreat Noelle, and though he never bothered to hide his affairs, her position as his wife was safe. It was a very Old World arrangement that his parents had, and one that Gray knew he wouldn't like at all when he finally decided to get married, but it suited both of them fine.
Monica hadn't ever been able to see that, however. She was painfully protective of Noelle, relating to her in a way that Gray never could, imagining that Noelle was humiliated and hurt by Guy's affairs. At the same time, Monica adored Guy, and was never happier than when he was paying attention to her. She had a picture in her mind of how families should be, close-knit and loving, always supporting each other, with the parents devoted to each other, and she had been trying her entire life to make her own family match that picture.
"Does Mother know?" he asked calmly, and refrained from asking if Monica really thought Noelle would care even if she did know. He sometimes felt sorry for Monica, but he also loved her, and didn't deliberately try to hurt her.
Monica shook her head. "She isn't up yet."
"Then why worry about it? By the time she gets up, when he comes in she'll just think he's already gone somewhere this morning."
"But he's been out with her!" Monica whirled to face him, her dark eyes swimming with tears. "That Devlin woman."
"You don't know that. He could have gotten into an all-night poker game." Guy did love to play poker, but Gray doubted that cards had anything to do with his absence. If he knew his father, and he knew him very well, Guy had far more likely spent the night with Renee Devlin, or some other woman who caught his eye. Renee was a fool if she thought Guy was any more faithful to her than he was to his wife.
"You think so?" Monica asked, eager to believe any excuse other than the most likely one.
Gray shrugged. "It's possible." It was also possible a meteor would strike the house that day, but not very likely. He drank the last of his coffee and pushed back his chair. "When he comes in, tell him I've gone to Baton Rouge to look over that property we were talking about. I'll be back by three, at the latest." Because she still looked so forlorn, he put an arm around her shoulders and hugged her. Somehow Monica had been born without the decisiveness and arrogant self-assurance of the rest of the family. Even Noelle, as remote as she was, always knew exactly what she wanted and how to go about getting it. Monica always seemed so helpless against the forceful personalities of everyone else in the family.
She buried her dark head in his shoulder for a moment, just as she had when she'd been a little girl and gone running to her big brother whenever something had gone wrong and Guy hadn't been available to put-things to rights again. Though he was only two years older, he had always been protective of her, knowing even as a child that she lacked his own inner toughness.
"What do I do if he has been out with that slut?" she asked, her voice muffled against his shoulder.
Gray tried to stifle his impatience, but some of it leaked through in his voice. "You don't do anything. It's none of your business."
She drew back, stung, and stared reproachfully at him. "How can you say that? I'm worried about him!"
"I know you are." He managed to soften his tone. "But it's a waste of time, and he wouldn't thank you for it."
"You always take his side, because you're just like him!" The tears were slowly dripping down her cheeks now, and she turned away. "I bet the property in Baton Rouge happens to have two legs and big boobs. Well, have fun!"
"I will," he said ironically. He really was going to see some property; afterwards was a different story. He was a strong, healthy young man, with a sex drive that had shown no signs of slacking off since his middle teens. It was a persistent burning in his guts, a hungry ache in his balls. He was lucky enough to be able to get women to ease that hunger, and cynical enough to realize that his family's money added to his sexual success.
He didn't care what the woman's reason was, whether she came to him because she liked him and enjoyed his body, or whether she had her eye on the Rouillard bank account. Reasons didn't matter, because all he wanted was a soft, warm body beneath him, taking his surging lust and giving him temporary ease. He'd never loved a woman yet, but he definitely loved sex, loved everything about it: the smells, the sensations, the sounds. He was particularly entranced by his favorite moment, the instant of penetration when he felt the small resistance of the woman's body to his pressure, then the acceptance, the sensation of being taken in and enveloped with hot, tight, wet flesh. God, that was wonderful! He was always extremely careful to protect against unwanted pregnancies, wearing a rubber even if the woman said she was on birth control pills, because women had been known to lie about things like that and a smart man didn't take chances.
He didn't know for certain, but he suspected Monica was still virgin. Though she was far more emotional than Noelle, there was still something of their mother in her, some deep remoteness that so far hadn't let any man get too close. She was an awkward mix of their parents' natures, receiving some of Noelle's cool distance without any of her self-assurance, and some of Guy's emotionalism without his intense sexuality. Gray, on the other hand, had his father's sexuality tempered with Noelle's control. As much as he wanted sex, he wasn't a slave to his cock the way Guy was. He knew when, and how, to say no. Thank God, he seemed to have better sense picking his women than Guy did, too.
He tugged on a strand of Monica's dark hair. "I'll call Alex and see if he knows where Dad is." Alexander Chelette, a lawyer in Prescott, was Guy's best friend.
Her lips trembled, but she smiled through her tears. "He'll go find Daddy and tell him to come home."
Gray snorted. It was a wonder how Monica had reached the age of twenty and learned absolutely nothing about men. "I wouldn't bet on that, but maybe he can ease your mind." He intended to tell Monica that Guy was in a poker game, even if Alex knew the number of the motel room in which Guy was screwing the morning away.
He went into the study from which Guy handled the myriad Rouillard financial interests, and where Gray was learning how to handle them. Gray was fascinated by the intricacies of business and finance, so much so that he had willingly bypassed a chance to play pro football in favor of plunging headlong into the business world. It hadn't been that much of a sacrifice for him; he knew he was good enough to play pro, because he had been scouted, but he knew he wasn't star material. Had he given his life to football, he would have played eight years or so, if he'd been lucky enough to escape injury, and made a good but not spectacular salary. What it came down to, in the end, was that, as much as he loved football, he loved business more. This was a game that he could play much longer than he could football, make a hell of a lot more money, and was just as dog-eat-dog.
Though Guy would have burst his buttons with pride if his son had gone into pro football, Gray thought he'd been somehow relieved when Gray had chosen to come home instead. In the few months since Gray had gotten his degree, Guy had been happily cramming his head full of business knowledge, stuff that couldn't be gotten from a textbook.
Gray ran his fingers over the polished wood of the big desk. An eight-by-ten photograph of Noelle was positioned on one corner, surrounded by smaller photos of himself and Monica at various stages of growth, like a queen with her subjects gathered around her. Most people would have thought of a mother with her children gathered about her knee, but Noelle wasn't in the least motherly. The morning sunlight was falling across the photograph, picking up details that usually went unnoticed, and Gray paused to look at the still image of his mother's face.
She was a beautiful woman, in a totally different way from Renee Devlin's beauty. Renee was the sun, bold and hot and bright, while Noelle was the moon, cool and remote. She had thick, sleek, dark hair which she wore in a sophisticated twist, and lovely blue eyes which neither of her children had inherited. She wasn't French Creole, but plain old American; some folks in the parish had wondered if Guy Rouillard wasn't marrying beneath himself. But she had turned out to be more queenly than any Creole born to the role could have been, and those old doubts had long since been forgotten. The only reminder was his own name, Grayson, which was her family name, but as it had long since been shortened to Gray, most people thought it had been chosen because of its similarity to his father's name.
Guy's appointment book was open on the desk. As Gray hitched one hip onto the desk and reached for the telephone, he ran his eye down the appointments listed for that day. Guy had an appointment with William Grady, the banker, at ten. For the first time, Gray felt a twinge of uneasiness. No matter what, Guy had never let his women get in the way of business, and he would never go to a business meeting unshaven, and without a fresh change of clothes.
Quickly he dialed Alex Chelette's number, and his secretary answered on the first ring. "Chelette and Anderson, Attorneys at Law."
"Good morning, Andrea. Is Alex in yet?"
"Of course," she replied with good humor, having immediately recognized Gray's distinctive deep voice, like smoky velvet. "You know how he is. It would take an earthquake to keep him from coming through the door on the dot of nine. Hold on and I'll get him."
He heard the click as he was put on hold, but he knew Andrea too well to think that she was buzzing Alex on the intercom. He'd been in the office often enough, as both child and man, to know that the only time she used the intercom was when a stranger was in the office. Most of the time, she simply turned around in her chair and raised her voice, since the open door of Alex's office was right behind her.
Gray smiled as he remembered Guy roaring with laughter as he told how Alex had once tried to get Andrea to behave more formally, as was proper for a law office. Poor easygoing Alex hadn't stood a chance against his secretary. Affronted, she had turned so cold, the office had frosted over. Instead of the usual "Alex," she had started calling him "Mr. Chelette" whenever she had to address him, the intercom was always used, and their easy camaraderie had gone out the window. When he stopped by her desk to try to chat, she got up and went to the rest room. All of the small details that she had once handled as a matter of course, taking a good deal of work off his shoulders, were now dumped on Alex's desk for him to do. He found himself coming in earlier and staying later, while Andrea suddenly developed a very precise time schedule. There was no question of replacing her; legal secretaries weren't easy to come by in Prescott.
Within two weeks, Alex had abjectly surrendered, and Andrea had been yelling through his office door ever since.
The line clicked again as Alex picked up. His lazy, good-natured drawl came over the line. "Good mornin', Gray. You're out and about early today."
"Not so early." He had always kept earlier hours than Guy, but most people assumed like father, like son. "I'm going to Baton Rouge to look at some property. Alex, do you know where Dad is?"
There was a small silence on the other end of the line. "No, I don't." Another cautious little pause. "Is something wrong?"
"He didn't come home last night, and he has an appointment with Bill Grady at ten."
"Damn," Alex said softly, but Gray could hear the alarm in the word. "Oh, God. I didn't think he'd—goddamn it!"
"Alex." Gray's voice was as hard and sharp as polished steel, slicing through the wire. "What's going on?"
"I swear, Gray, I didn't think he'd do it," Alex said miserably. "Maybe he didn't. Maybe he just overslept."
"Do what?" '
"He mentioned it a couple of times, but only when he'd been drinking. I swear, I never thought he was serious. God, how could he be?"
The plastic of the receiver cracked under Gray's grip. "Serious about what?"
"About leaving your mother." Alex audibly swallowed, the gulping sound plain. "And running away with Renee Devlin."
Very gently, Gray replaced the receiver in its cradle. He stood motionless for several seconds, staring down at the instrument. It couldn't—Guy wouldn't have done that. Why should he? Why run away with Renee when he could and did screw her whenever he wanted? Alex had to be wrong. Guy would never have left his children or the business—but he had been relieved when Gray had chosen to turn down pro football, and had given Gray a crash course in running everything.
For a blessed little while Gray was numb with disbelief, but he was too much of a realist for it to last long. The numbness began to fade, and pure rage rushed in to fill the void. He moved like a snake striking, snatching the phone from the desk and hurling it through the window, shattering glass and bringing several sets of footsteps rushing down the hall to the study.
Everyone slept late except Faith and Scottie, and she left the shack as soon as she had fed Scottie his breakfast, taking him down to the creek so he could splash in the shallow water and try to catch the darting crawfish. He never did, but he loved to try. It was a gorgeous morning, with the sunlight slanting bright and golden through the trees, dappling the water. The smells were fresh and sharp, full of good, clean colors that wiped out the sour miasma of alcohol lingering in her nostrils, exuded from the four people she had left sleeping off the effects of the night.
Expecting Scottie to keep his clothes dry was like expecting the sun to rise in the west. When they reached the creek, she pulled off his shorts and shirt, and let him plunge into the water wearing only his diaper. She had brought a dry one to put on him when they left. She carefully hung the discarded garments on limbs, then stepped into the creek to wade and keep an eye on him. If a snake slithered toward him, he wouldn't know to be alarmed. She wasn't afraid of them either, but she was definitely cautious.
She let him play for a couple of hours, then had to pick him up and carry him out of the water, with him kicking and protesting every inch of the way. "You can't stay in the water," she explained. "Look, your toes are wrinkled like a prune." She sat down on the ground and changed his diaper, then "dressed him. It was a difficult job, with him still squirming and trying to escape back into the water.
"Let's look for squirrels," she said. "Can you see any squirrels?"
Distracted, he immediately looked upward, his eyes rounded with excitement as he searched the trees for a squirrel. Faith took his stubby hand in hers and slowly led him through the woods, taking a meandering path back to the shack. Maybe by the time they got back, Renee would be home.
Though her mother had stayed out all night before, it always made Faith uneasy. She kept it in the back of her mind, but she lived with the constant fear that Renee would leave one night and never come home. Faith knew, with bitter realism, that if Renee met some man who had a bit of money and promised her pretty things, she would be gone like a shot. Probably the only thing that kept her in Prescott anyway was Guy Rouillard, and what he could give her. If Guy ever dumped her, Renee wouldn't hang around any longer than it took her to pack her clothes.
Scottie managed to spot two squirrels, one jumping along a tree limb and another climbing a tree, so he was happy to go where Faith led him. When they came in sight of the shack, however, he realized that they were going home and began to make grunting noises of disapproval as he pulled back, trying to tug his hand from her grip.
"Scottie, stop it," Faith said, as she dragged him out of the woods into the rutted dirt road leading up to the shack. "I can't play with you anymore right now, I've got to do the wash. But I promise I'll play cars with you when I get—"
She heard the low, rumbling sound of a car engine behind her, getting louder as it got closer, and her first, relieved thought as she turned was Mama's home. But it wasn't Renee's flashy red car that came into sight around the curve. It was a black Corvette convertible, one bought to replace the silver one Gray had driven since high school. Faith stopped in her tracks, forgetting all about Scottie and Renee as her heart stopped, then began pounding against her rib cage with a force that almost made her sick. Gray was coming here!
She was so stunned with joy that she barely remembered to pull Scottie out of the road to stand in the weeds on the side. Gray, her heart sang. A fine trembling began in her knees and worked its way up her slender body at the thought of actually speaking to him again, even if it was just to mumble a hello.
Her gaze locked on him, drinking in the details as he drove closer. Though he was sitting behind the wheel and she couldn't see that much of him, she thought that he seemed leaner than he'd been while he was playing football, and his hair was a little longer. His eyes were the same, though, dark as sin and just as tempting. They flashed over her as the Corvette bumped past where she and Scottie were standing, and he curtly nodded his head.
Scottie squirmed and tugged at his hand, fascinated by the pretty car. He loved Renee's car, and Faith had to watch to keep him away from it, because it made Renee mad if he patted it and left his dirty little handprints behind.
"All right," Faith whispered, still dazed. "We'll go see the pretty car." They stepped back into the road and followed the Corvette, which had now stopped in front of the shack. Gray slid up from behind the wheel and swung one long leg over the door, then the other, stepping out of the low-slung car as if it were a child's vehicle. Going up the two rickety steps, he jerked open the screen door and went inside.
He didn't knock, Faith thought. Something's wrong. He didn't knock.
She speeded up, hurrying Scottie so that his short legs pumped and he gave a squawk of protest. She thought of his heart, and terror squeezed her insides. She skidded to a stop, and swiftly stooped down to pick him up. "I'm sorry, honey. I didn't mean to make you run." Her back arched from the strain of carrying him, but she ignored it and hurried her steps again. Small rocks rolled unnoticed under her bare feet, and little clouds of dust flew up with every thud of her heels. Scottie's weight seemed to drag at her, keeping her from reaching the shack. Blood roared in her ears, and a sense of dread swelled in her chest until she almost choked.
She heard some dim, faraway roar that she recognized as Pa's vo'ice, underlaid by Gray's deeper, more thunderous tones. Panting, she pumped her thin legs even harder, and finally reached the shack. The screen door squeaked as she jerked it open and hurled herself inside, only to skid to a stop, blinking in an effort to adjust her eyes to the dimness. Unintelligible shouts and curses swirled around her, making her feel as if she were caught in some nightmare tunnel.
She gulped in air as she let Scottie slip to the floor. Scared by the shouting, he latched on to her legs and buried his face against her.
As her vision adjusted and the roaring in her ears subsided, the shouts began to make sense, and she wished they hadn't.
Gray had hauled Amos out of bed and was dragging him into the kitchen. Amos was yelling and swearing, grabbing at the doorframe in an effort to halt Gray's momentum. He was no match for the young man's enraged strength, however, and could only scramble for balance as Gray shoved him toward the center of the room.
"Where's Renee?" Gray barked, looming threateningly over Amos, who shrank back.
Amos's rheumy eyes darted around the room, as if looking for his wife. "Not here," he mumbled.
"I can see she isn't here, you stupid bastard! I want to know where in hell she is!"
Amos weaved back and forth on his bare feet, and suddenly belched. He was bare-chested, his pants still gaping open. His uncombed hair stood out in all directions, he was unshaven, his eyes bloodshot, and his breath foul with sleep and drink. In contrast, Gray towered over him, six feet four of lean, steely muscle, his black hair neatly brushed back, his white shirt spotless and his slacks hand-tailored to fit him.
"You ain't got no call to be shovin' me around, I don't care who your daddy is," Amos complained. Despite his bluster, he cowered back every time Gray moved.
Russ and Nicky had crowded out of their bedroom, but they made no move to back their father. Facing down a raging Gray Rouillard wasn't their style; attacking anyone who could cause them trouble wasn't their style.
"Do you know where Renee is?" Gray asked again, his voice icy.
Amos hitched one shoulder. "Must've gone out," he mumbled sullenly.
"When?"
"Whaddaya mean, when? I was in bed. How in hell would I know what time she left?"
"Did she come home last night?"
"Course she did! Gawddammit, what're you sayin'?"
Amos yelled, the slur in his words testimony to the alcohol still in his blood.
"I'm saying your whore of a wife has left!" Gray yelled back, his dark face twisted with rage, his neck corded.
Pure terror sliced through Faith, and her vision blurred again. "No," she gasped.
Gray heard her, and his head snapped around. His dark eyes were glittering with fury as they raked over her. "You look sober, at least. Do you know where Renee is? Did she come home last night?"
Numbly Faith shook her head. Black disaster loomed in front of her, and her nostrils were filled with the sharp, yellow, acrid smell of fear... her own.
His upper lip curled, showing strong white teeth in a snarl. "I didn't think so. She's run away with my father."
Faith shook her head again, and then couldn't seem to stop it from wagging. No. The word reverberated through her brain. God, please, no.
"You're lyin'!" Amos yelled, tottering toward the rickety table and sagging into one of the chairs. "Renee wouldn't leave me and our kids. She loves me. Your whore-hoppin' pa's out with some new piece he's found—"
Gray lunged forward like a snake striking. His fist connected with Amos's jaw, knuckles smashing against bone, and both Amos and the chair crashed to the floor. The chair splintered into kindling beneath him.
With a terrified wail, Scottie burrowed his face harder against Faith's hip. She was too frozen to even put a comforting arm around his shoulders, and he began to cry.
Amos groggily scrambled up from the floor, and staggered to put the table between him and Gray. "Why'd you hit me?" he whined, holding his jaw. "I ain't done nothin' to you. Whatever Renee and your pa done, it ain't my fault!"
"What's all the yellin' about?" came Jodie's deliberately sultry voice, the one she put on whenever she was trying to entice a man. Faith looked toward the entrance to the lean-to, and her eyes widened with horror. Jodie posed against the doorframe, her uncombed reddish blond hair tossed back over her bare shoulders. She wore only a pair of red lace panties, and demurely held the matching lace camisole so that it barely covered her breasts. She blinked at Gray with wide-eyed innocence so blatantly false that Faith cringed inside.
Gray's expression tightened with disgust as he glanced at her; his mouth curled and he deliberately turned his back. "I want you gone by nightfall," he said to Amos, his voice steely. "You stink up our land, and I'm tired of smelling you."
"Leave?" Amos croaked. "You high-and-mighty bastard, you can't make us leave. There're laws—"
"You don't pay rent," Gray said, a cold, deadly smile twisting his lips. "Eviction laws don't apply to trespassers. Get out." He turned and started toward the door.
"Wait!" Amos cried. His panicked gaze darted around the room as if looking for inspiration. He licked his lips. "Don't be so hasty. Maybe... maybe they just took a little trip. They'll come back. Yeah, that's right. Renee'll be back, she didn't have no reason to leave."
Gray gave a harsh bark of laughter, his contemptuous gaze moving around the room, taking in the mean interior of the shack. Someone, probably the youngest girl, had made an effort to keep it clean, but it was like trying to hold back the tide. Amos and the two boys, who were younger editions of their father, sullenly watched him. The older girl still lounged in the doorway trying to show him as much of her tits as she could without actually dropping that scrap of cloth. The little boy with Down's syndrome was clinging to the younger girl's legs and bawling. The girl was standing as if turned to stone, staring at him with huge, blank green eyes. Her dark red hair hung untidily around her shoulders, and her bare feet were dirty.
Standing so close to him, Faith could read his expression, and she cringed inside as his gaze swept over the shack and its inhabitants, finally settling on her. He catalogued her life, her family, herself, and found it all worthless.
"No reason to leave?" he sneered. "My God, as far as I can tell, she doesn't have a reason to come back!"
In the silence that followed, he stepped around Faith and shoved the screen door open. It banged against the side of the shack, then slammed shut. The Corvette's engine roared to life, and a moment later Gray was gone. Faith stood frozen in the middle of the floor, with Scottie still clinging to her legs and crying. Her mind felt numb. She knew she needed to do something, but what? Gray had said they had to leave, and the enormity of it stunned her. Leave? Where would they go? She couldn't make her mind start working. All she could do was lift her hand, which felt as heavy as lead, and smooth Scottie's hair while saying, "It's all right, it's all right," even though she knew it was a lie. Mama was gone, and it would never be all right again.
|
After the Night - Linda Howard.txt
| 5 |
Gray managed to make it almost half a mile before the shaking became so hard that he had to stop the car. He leaned his head on the steering wheel and closed his eyes, trying to fight off the waves of panic. God, what was he going to do? He had never before been as scared as he was now.
Bewildered pain filled him, and he felt like a child who runs to hide his face in his mother's lap, much as that Devlin kid had tried to hide against his sister's skinny legs. But he couldn't go to Noelle; even when he had been a child, she'd pulled away from clinging little hands, and he'd learned to go to his father for reassurance. Even had Noelle been more affectionate, he couldn't look to her for support, because she would be looking to him for the same thing. Taking care of his mother and sister was his responsibility now.
Why had Guy done it? How could he have left? His father's absence, his betrayal, made Gray feel as if his heart had been torn out. Guy had had Renee anyway; what had she offered that tempted him into turning his back on his children, his business, his heritage? Gray had always been close to his father, had grown up surrounded by his love, had always felt his support like a solid rock at his back, but now that loving, reassuring presence was gone, and with it the foundation of his life.
He was terrified. He was only twenty-two, and the problems looming over him looked like unscalable mountains. Noelle and Monica still didn't know; somehow he had to find the strength to tell them. He had to be a rock for them, and he had to put aside his own pain and concentrate on holding the family finances together, or they stood to lose everything. This wasn't the same situation it would have been if Guy had died, for Gray would have inherited the shares, the money, and the control. As it was now, Guy still owned everything, and he was gone. The Rouillard fortune could come tumbling down around their ears, with wary investors jumping ship and various boards of directors seizing power. Gray would have to fight like a son of a bitch to keep even half of what they now had.
He, Monica, and Noelle had some assets hi their own names, but it wouldn't be enough. Guy had been giving Gray a crash course in managing it all, but hadn't given him the power to do so, unless he'd left a letter giving Gray his proxy. Desperate hope reared its head. Any such letter, if it existed, would be in the desk in the study.
Failing that, he'd have to call Alex and get his help in laying out a strategy. Alex was a damn smart man and a good corporate lawyer; he could have had a much more lucrative practice somewhere else, but he was backed by his own family money and hadn't felt the need to leave Prescott. He had handled all of Guy's business, as well as being his best friend, so he knew as much or more about the legal situation as did Gray.
God knows, Gray thought bleakly, he'd need all the help he could get. If there wasn't a letter of proxy, he'd be lucky to keep a roof over them.
When he raised his head from the steering wheel, he had regained his self-control, the pain pushed to the background and steely determination taking its place. By God, his mother and sister would have a hard enough time dealing with this as it was; he'd be damned if he let them lose their home, too.
He put the car into gear and drove away, leaving the last remnants of his boyhood behind on the rutted dirt track.
He went first into Prescott, to Alex's office. He would have to move fast to salvage anything. Andrea broke into a smile when he came in, something women often did at the sight of him. Color heightened a little on her round, pleasant face. She was forty-five, old enough to be his mother, but age had nothing to do with her instinctive female reaction to his tall, muscular presence.
Gray automatically returned the smile, but his mind was racing with plans. "Is anyone with Alex? I need to see him."
"No, he's alone. Go on in, hon."
Gray walked past her desk and into Alex's office, firmly closing the door behind him. Alex looked up from the well-ordered mountain of files on his desk, and got to his feet. His good-looking face was taut with worry. "Did you find him?"
Gray shook his head. "Renee Devlin's gone, too."
"Oh, God." Alex collapsed back into his chair and shut his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I can't believe it. I didn't think he was serious. My God, why would he be? He was—" He stopped and opened his eyes, flushing a little.
"Fucking her anyway," Gray finished bluntly. He walked over to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets, looking down on the main street. Prescott was a small town, only about fifteen thousand citizens, but today traffic hummed around the courthouse square. Soon everyone down there would know that Guy Rouillard had left his wife and children and run off with the Devlin whore.
"Does your mama know?" Alex's voice was strained.
Gray shook his head. "Not yet. I'll tell her and Monica when I go home." The original shock and pain had gone, leaving behind a ruthless willpower and a certain remoteness, as if he were standing at a distance watching himself go through the motions. Some of that distance leaked into his tone, making him sound cool and steady. "Did Dad leave a letter of proxy with you?"
Until then, evidently, Alex had thought only of the personal ramifications of Guy's defection. Now the legal aspects dawned on him, and his eyes widened with horror. "Shit," he said, lapsing into unusual vulgarity. "No, he didn't. If he had, I'd have known he was serious about leaving and tried to stop him."
"There may be a letter in the desk at home. He may call in a day or so. If so, there's no problem with the financial side of things. But if there isn't a letter, and he doesn't call... I can't afford to wait. I'll have to liquidate as much as I can, before news of this gets around and stock prices drop like a rock."
"He'll call," Alex said feebly. "He has to. He can't just walk away from this kind of financial obligation. A fortune is involved!"
Gray shrugged, his face a careful blank. "He walked away from his family. I can't afford to assume that the business means more to him." He paused. "I don't think he'll come back or call. I think he meant to walk away from everything and never come back. He's been teaching me as much as he could, and now I know why. If he had meant to stay in charge of everything, he wouldn't have done that."
"Then there should be a letter of proxy," Alex said insistently. "Guy was too sharp of a businessman not to have taken care of that."
"Maybe, but I have Mother and Monica to think about. I can't wait. I have to liquidate now, and get as much money as I can, so I'll have something to work with and rebuild. If I don't, and he doesn't make arrangements, we won't have a pot to piss in."
Alex swallowed, but he nodded. "Okay. I'll start doing what I can to shore up your legal position, but I have to tell you, unless Guy gets back in touch or left a letter of proxy, it's a mess. Everything is tied up unless Noelle divorces him and the court awards her half of his assets, but that will take time."
"I have to plan for the worst," Gray said. "I'll go home and look for a letter, but don't wait until you hear from me to get started. If there isn't a letter, I'll call the broker immediately and start selling. Either way, I'll let you know. Keep it quiet until I call."
Alex got to his feet. "I won't even let Andrea know." He shoved his hands through his dark hair, an indication of his worry, because Alex wasn't given to nervous gestures. His gray eyes were dark with misery. "I'm sorry, Gray. I feel like this is my fault. I should have done something."
Gray shook his head. "Don't blame yourself. Like you said, who would have thought he was serious? No, the only people I blame are Dad and Renee Devlin." He gave a wintry smile. "I can't imagine anything she had being good enough to make him walk out on his family, but evidently it was." He paused, lost for a moment in the grimness of his thoughts, then shook himself and headed toward the door. "I'll call you when I find out something."
After he had gone, Alex sank back into his chair, his movements stiff and feeble. He barely managed to control his expression when Andrea popped into the office, alive with curiosity. "What's going on with Gray?"
"Nothing much. A personal matter he wanted to talk over with me."
She was disappointed that he didn't confide in her. "Is there anything I can do to help?"
"No, everything will be all right." He sighed, and rubbed his eyes. "Why don't you go on to lunch, and bring me back a sandwich or something. I'm waiting for a call, so I can't leave."
"Okay. What do you want?"
He waved his hand. "Anything. You know what I like. Surprise me."
She rambled around in the outer office for a few minutes, cutting off the computer he'd bought the year before, storing the disks, collecting her purse. After she'd gone, Alex waited a few minutes before going into the other room and locking the door. Then he sat down in her chair and turned on the computer, and swiftly began typing. "Damn you, Guy," he whispered. "You son of a bitch."
Gray parked the Corvette in front of the five wide steps leading up to the covered porch and double front doors, though Noelle frowned on that and preferred that the family's cars be properly protected and out of sight in the attached garage behind. The front drive was for visitors, who shouldn't be able to tell which family members were at home by the vehicles parked in front. That way, one felt no obligation to admit to being there, and thus forced to receive unwanted guests. Some of Noelle's notions were positively Victorian; usually he indulged her, but today he had more important things on his mind, and was in a hurry.
He leaped up the steps with two strides, and pushed open the door. Monica had probably been watching from her bedroom window, because she was hurrying down the stairs, anxiety twisting her face. "Daddy still hasn't come home!" she hissed, glancing toward the breakfast parlor, where Noelle was evidently lingering over a late breakfast. "Why did you break the window in his study, then light out of here like a cat with its tail on fire? And why did you park in front? Mother won't like that."
Guy didn't answer, but strode rapidly down the hall to the study, his bootheels thudding on the parquet floor. Monica rushed after him, and slipped into the study as he began examining, one by one, the papers on Guy's desk.
"I don't believe Alex told the truth about the poker game," she said, her lips trembling a little. "Call him again, Gray. Make him tell you where Daddy is."
"In a minute," Gray murmured, not sparing her a glance. None of the papers on top of the desk was a letter of proxy. He began opening drawers.
"Gray!" Her voice rose sharply. "Surely finding Daddy's more important than looking through his desk!"
He stopped, took a deep breath, and straightened. "Monica, honey, sit down over there and hush," he said in a kind tone that nevertheless was underlaid with steel. "I have to look for a very important paper that Dad may have left here. I'll be with you in a minute."
She opened her mouth to say something else, but he gave her a look that changed her mind. Silently, vague surprise on her face, she sat down, and Gray returned to his search.
Five minutes later, he sat back with the taste of defeat bitter in his mouth. There was no letter. It didn't make sense. Why would Guy have gone to so much trouble to teach him everything, then leave without providing the proxies? As Alex had said, Guy was too smart not to have thought of it. If he intended to stay in charge himself, why had he bothered to give Gray such intense instruction? Maybe he had intended to turn over the reins to Gray, then changed his mind. That was the only other explanation there could be. In that case, they would be hearing from him again, within a few days at the most, because his financial dealings were too complicated to leave for longer than that.
But, as he'd told Alex, he couldn't afford to assume things would be taken care of. He couldn't imagine Guy not taking care of business, but until this morning he hadn't been able to imagine Guy leaving them for Renee Devlin, either. The impossible had happened, so how could he blindly trust in anything else he had always assumed to be true of his father? Responsibility for his mother and sister weighed heavily on his shoulders. He couldn't risk their welfare.
He reached for the telephone, but it wasn't there. Dimly he remembered throwing it earlier, and glanced at the window that was now boarded over, awaiting new panes. He got up and walked out into the hallway, to the phone on the table at the foot of the stairs. Monica trailed after him, still silent but plainly resenting the restriction.
He called Alex first. Alex answered the phone on the first ring. "No letter," Gray said briefly. "See what you can do about getting power of attorney for me, or anything else that will shore up my position." Power of attorney was a long shot, but maybe a few strings could be pulled.
"I've already started," Alex said quietly.
Next Gray called his broker. His instructions were brief, and explicit. If worst came to worst, he would need every bit of ready cash he could scrape together.
Now for the hardest part. Monica was staring at him, her big, dark eyes filled with alarm. "Something's wrong, isn't it?" she asked.
He mentally braced himself, then took Monica's hand in his. "Let's go talk to Mother," he said.
She started to ask something else, but he shook his head. "I can only say it once," he said, his voice rough.
Noelle was enjoying her last cup of tea as she read the society section of the New Orleans newspaper. Prescott had its own small weekly paper, in which she was regularly mentioned, but being in the New Orleans paper was what really counted. Her name was listed there often enough to make her the envy of the rest of the parish society. She was dressed in her favorite white, with her sleek dark hair pulled back into a French twist. Her makeup was minimal but perfect, her jewelry expensive but understated. There was nothing gaudy or frivolous about Noelle, not one bow or ruffle or jarring bit of color, just clean, classic lines. Even her nails never wore anything but clear polish.
She looked up as Gray and Monica entered the breakfast parlor, and her gaze flicked briefly to their clasped hands. She didn't comment on it, though, for that would express personal interest, and perhaps invite the same. "Good morning, Gray," she greeted him, her voice perfectly composed as always. Noelle could violently hate someone, but the person would never be able to tell by her voice; it never revealed warmth, affection, anger, or any other emotion. Such a display would be common, and Noelle allowed nothing about herself to sink to that low standard. "Shall I call for another pot of tea?"
"No, thank you, Mother. I need to talk to you and Monica; something serious has happened." He felt Monica's hand tremble in his, and squeezed it reassuringly.
Noelle put aside the newspaper. "Should we be more private?" she asked, concerned that one of the servants would overhear them discussing a personal matter.
"There's no need." Gray pulled out a chair for Monica, then stood behind her with one hand on her shoulder. Noelle would be upset because of the social nuances, the embarrassment of it, but Monica's pain would be worse. "I don't know of any way to make this easier. He didn't leave a note or anything like that, but Dad seems to have left town with Renee Devlin. They're both gone."
Noelle's slender hand fluttered toward her throat. Monica was motionless, not even breathing.
"I'm sure he wouldn't take a woman like that on a business trip," Noelle said with calm certainty. "Think how it would look."
"Mother—" Gray cut himself off, stifling his impatience. "He isn't on a business trip. Dad and Renee Devlin have run away together. He won't be coming back."
Monica gave a thin cry, and pressed both hands to her mouth to cut off the sound. Noelle's face lost its color, but her movements were precise as she placed her teacup in the center of the saucer. "I'm sure you're mistaken, dear. Your father wouldn't risk his social position for—"
"For God's sake, Mother!" Gray snapped, his tenuous control on his patience snapping like a thread. "Dad doesn't give a rat's ass about his social position. You're the one it's important to, not him!"
"Grayson, it isn't necessary to be vulgar."
He ground his teeth together. It was typical of her to ignore something she found unpleasant and focus on the trivial. "Dad's gone," he said, deliberately emphasizing the words. "He's left you for Renee. They've run away together, and he won't be coming back. No one else knows it yet, but it'll probably be all over the parish by tomorrow morning."
Her eyes widened at that last sentence, and horror filled them as she realized the humiliation of her position. "No," she whispered. "He couldn't do that to me."
"He did. It's done."
Blindly she got to her feet, shaking her head. "He—he's really gone?" she asked in a faint murmur. "He left me for that... that—" Unable to finish, she walked quickly from the room, almost as if she were fleeing.
As soon as Noelle was gone, as soon as she was no longer there to frown at unseemly displays, Monica wilted onto the table, falling forward to bury her face against her arm. Harsh sobs tore up from her throat and shook her slim body. Almost as angry at Noelle as he was at Guy, Gray knelt beside his sister and put his arms around her.
"It's going to be tough," he said, "but we'll get through this. I'm going to be really busy the next few days, getting our finances under control, but I'll be here if you need me." He couldn't bring himself to tell her that financial disaster was looming. "I know it hurts now, but we'll make it all right."
"I hate him," Monica sobbed, her voice muffled. "He left us for that... that whore! I hope he doesn't come back. I hate him, I never want to see him again!" Abruptly she tore away from him, overturning her chair as she shoved it back from the table. She was still sobbing as she ran from the parlor, and he heard the harsh, gulping sounds continue all the way up the stairs. A moment later the slam of her bedroom door echoed through the house.
Gray wanted to bury his own face in his hands. He wanted to punch something, preferably his father's nose. He wanted to roar his rage to the heavens. The situation was bad enough as it was; why did Noelle have to make it worse by being concerned only with what her friends would say? For once, why couldn't she give some support to her daughter? Couldn't she see how much Monica needed her now? But she had never been there for them, so why should that change now? Unlike Guy, Noelle was at least constant.
He needed a drink, a stiff one. He left the breakfast parlor and went back to the study, to the bottle of Scotch that Guy always kept in the liquor cabinet behind his desk. Oriane, their longtime housekeeper, was going up the stairs with an armload of towels, and she gave him a curious look. Not being deaf, of course, she had heard some of the uproar. The speculation between Oriane, her husband, Garron, who took care of the grounds, and Delfina, the cook, would be rampant. They would have to be told, of course, but he couldn't bring himself to do it right then. Maybe after he had that drink of Scotch.
He opened the cabinet and took out the bottle, and splashed a couple of inches of the amber liquid into a glass. The smoky, biting flavor was sharp on his tongue as he took the first sip, then threw the rest of it back with a neat, stiff motion of his wrist. He needed the sedative effect, not the taste. He had just poured himself a second drink when a shrill scream from upstairs pierced the air, followed by Oriane shrieking his name, over and over.
Monica. As soon as he heard Oriane scream, Gray knew. Dread congealed in his chest as he bolted from the study and took the stairs three at a time, his long, powerful legs propelling him upward. Oriane rushed down the hall toward him, her eyes wide with panic. "She's cut herself, bad! Ohmigod, ohmigod, there's blood all over the place—"
Gray pushed past her and ran into Monica's bedroom. She wasn't there, but the door to her bathroom was open, and he threw himself toward it, only to stop, frozen, in the doorway.
Monica had decorated her bedroom and bath herself, in delicate pinks and pearly whites that looked absurdly little-girlish. Normally Gray was reminded of cotton candy, but now the pink ceramic tile on the bathroom floor was covered with dark red splotches. Monica sat calmly on the fuzzy pink toilet lid, her big, dark eyes empty as she stared out the window. Her hands were neatly folded on her lap. Blood pulsed from the deep gashes she had made in both wrists, soaking her lap, running down her legs to pool on the floor.
"I'm sorry for the commotion," she said in an eerily remote little voice. "I didn't expect Oriane to bring up clean towels."
"Jesus," he groaned, and snatched up the towels Oriane had dropped. He went down on one knee beside Monica and grabbed her left wrist. "Damn it, Monica, I ought to tan your ass!" He wrapped one towel around her wrist, then tied another one around it as tightly as he could.
"Just leave me alone," she whispered, trying to tug her arm away from him, but she was already frighteningly weak. "Shut up!" he barked, taking her right wrist and repeating the procedure. "Goddamn it, how could you do something this stupid?" This, on top of everything else he had gone through that day, was almost more than he could bear. Fear and rage mingled in his chest and swelled until he thought he would choke. "Did you stop to think about anyone but yourself? Did you think that maybe I could use your help, that this is as hard on everyone else as it is on you?" He ground the words out between clenched teeth as he snatched her up against his chest and ran, past Noelle, who was simply standing in the hallway with a dazed expression on her bloodless face, down the stairs, and past Oriane and Delfina clutching each other in the foyer.
"Call the clinic and let Dr. Bogarde know we're on the way," he ordered as he carried Monica out the front door and down the steps, to the Corvette parked there. "I'll get blood in your car," Monica protested feebly. "I told you to shut up," he snapped. "Don't talk unless you have something sensible to say." Probably he was supposed to be more sensitive with someone who had just attempted suicide, but this was his sister, and he was damned if he would let her take her own life. He was in a towering rage, the fury just barely controlled. It seemed as if his life had gone to hell in just the past few hours, and he was fed up with the people he loved doing stupid things.
He didn't bother opening the door of the Corvette, but simply leaned over and deposited her in the seat, then vaulted over her into the driver's seat. He started the engine, let out the clutch, and left rubber on the driveway as he pushed the powerful motor to the limit. Monica slumped weakly against the passenger door, her eyes closed. He shot her a panicked glance, but didn't risk taking the time to stop. She was deathly white, and there was a faint bluish tinge forming around her mouth. Blood was already seeping through the towels, the bright red garish against the white fabric. He had seen the cuts; they hadn't been shallow slices, gestures made more to frighten and gain attention than seriously threaten a life. No, Monica had been very serious about the attempt. His sister might die because his father couldn't resist chasing after that redheaded Devlin whore.
He made the fifteen-mile trip to the clinic in just under ten minutes. The parking lot was full, but he pulled around to the back door of the one-story brick building and blew the horn, then leaped out to lift Monica into his arms again. She was totally limp, her head lolling against his shoulder, and hot tears seared his eyelids.
The back door opened and Dr. Bogarde rushed out, followed by both his nurses. "Put her in the first room on the right," he said, and Gray turned sideways to get her through the doorway. Sadie Lee Fanchier, the senior nurse, held the door to the examining room open and he carried Monica inside, then gently deposited her on the narrow table, the sheet-covered vinyl creaking as it took her weight.
Sadie Lee was wrapping a blood pressure cuff around Monica's arm even as Dr. Bogarde was untying Gray's first-aid efforts. Quickly she pumped it up, then listened through the stethoscope pressed to the inside of Monica's elbow. "Seventy-five over forty."
"Start an IV," Dr. Bogarde ordered. "Glucose." The other nurse, Kitty, moved to follow his instructions.
Dr. Bogarde kept his eyes on Monica's wrists as he worked. "She needs blood," he said. "Fast. We have to get her to the hospital in Baton Rouge, because I can't do it here. She'll need a vascular specialist to repair her veins, too. I can stabilize her, Gray, but I can't do any more than that."
Kitty hung the clear bag of glucose on the metal rack and deftly inserted the IV needle in Monica's arm. "We don't have time to get an ambulance here," the doctor continued. "We'll take her ourselves, in my car. You okay to drive?" he asked Gray, shooting him a sharp glance.
"Yes." The answer was flat, unequivocal.
Dr. Bogarde tightly taped Monica's wrists. "Okay, that's got the bleeding stopped. Kitty, I need a couple of blankets. Put one over the backseat of my car, and tuck the other one over Monica. Gray, pick her up again, and be careful of that IV line. Sadie Lee, call the hospital and let 'em know we're on the way, and then give a call to the sheriffs department so they can clear the roads a mite."
Gently Gray lifted his sister. Dr. Bogarde took the glucose bag in one hand and his medical bag in the other, and trotted at Gray's side as he carried Monica out to the doctor's four-door Chrysler. The doctor climbed in first, then helped Gray carefully maneuver Monica onto the backseat. Dr. Bogarde hooked the glucose bag on the garment hanger over the side window, and took up a position on his knees on the floorboard.
"Don't go slamming us around," he instructed as Gray squeezed his long frame under the steering wheel. Dr. Bogarde was barely five foot five, so the seat was so close to the steering wheel that Gray's chest was brushing it. He couldn't let the seat back, though, with Dr. Bogarde on the back floorboard. "Keep it at a steady speed and we'll make better time. And put on the emergency lights."
Gray had a violent thought about backseat drivers, but he kept it to himself. Following orders, he left the clinic more sedately than he had arrived, though his instincts were screaming at him to push the gas pedal to the floorboard and keep it there. Only the knowledge that the roomy sedan, built more for comfort than road handling, would likely straighten out a curve if he pushed it the way he did the Corvette kept him at a reasonable speed.
"How'd this happen?" Dr. Bogarde asked.
Gray glanced at him in the rearview mirror. The doctor was a small, dapper man with shrewd blue eyes. Despite his name, he was neither Creole nor Cajun; he had to be in his mid-fifties, with graying, sandy blond hair. Gray had known him all of his life. Noelle had never gone to him, preferring an urbane physician in New Orleans, but everyone else in the family had been to see him with everything from childhood cuts to influenza to the broken arm Gray had received in spring practice when he was fifteen.
Gray didn't want to tell him everything, preferring to keep the details quiet for a while longer until his broker had had time to sell and Alex had done his legal maneuvers, but it wouldn't be possible to completely stifle the news. He gave Dr. Bogarde the central fact, the only one that mattered. "Dad and Mother have separated. Monica..." He hesitated.
Dr. Bogarde sighed. "I see." Everyone in the parish knew how Monica doted on Guy.
Gray concentrated on his driving. The Chrysler's suspension evened out the bumpy roads, and the tires sang on the pavement. The sense of unreality he'd experienced earlier returned. The sun poured hotly through the window, burning his jean-clad leg, and the tall pines flashed by. The sky overhead was a deep, pure blue. It was high summer, and everything was as familiar as his own face. That was what was strange. How could it all be so unchanged, when his world had crashed around him today?
Behind him, Dr. Bogarde checked Monica's pulse and blood pressure again. "Gray," he said quietly. "You'd better go faster."
|
After the Night - Linda Howard.txt
| 6 |
It was ten-thirty that night when Gray and Dr. Bogarde left the hospital in Baton Rouge. Gray's eyes burned with fatigue, and he was numb from the emotional roller coaster he'd been on all day long. Monica had finally been stabilized and undergone surgery, and was sleeping peacefully, under sedation. She had gone into cardiac arrest soon after arriving at the hospital, but the emergency room team had gotten her heartbeat back almost immediately. She had been given four units of blood prior to surgery, and another two units in surgery. The doctor who had done the repair work thought there was no permanent damage in her right wrist, but she had severed a couple of tendons in her left wrist and might not regain full mobility there.
All that mattered to Gray was that she was going to live. She had awakened briefly when she was transferred from recovery to the private room he'd gotten for her, and had groggily murmured, "I'm sorry, Gray," when she had seen him. He didn't know if she'd meant she was sorry she'd tried to kill herself, sorry that she hadn't succeeded, or sorry that she had caused him so much worry. He chose to believe she meant the first possibility, because he couldn't handle the thought that she might try again.
"I'll drive," Dr. Bogarde said, reaching up to slap him on the shoulder. "You look like hell."
"I feel like hell," Gray rumbled. "I need a cup of coffee." He was just as glad to let Doc drive. His brain felt like a wasteland; it probably wouldn't be safe for him to do the driving, and it was the doc's car. His knees would still be sticking up under his chin, but at least he'd have room to breathe.
"I can manage that. There's a McDonald's a few blocks from here."
Gray folded and inserted himself, and thanked God that the Chrysler had a padded dashboard. If it hadn't, his shins would have been black and blue.
Fifteen minutes later, with a large polystyrene cup of coffee gently steaming in his hand, he watched the streetlights of Baton Rouge slide past. Some of the happiest years of his life had been spent here, at LSU. He had prowled all over this city, a wild, energetic, perpetually homy kid on the hunt for action, and there was plenty of it. No one knew how to have more fun than a Cajun, and Baton Rouge was full of coon-asses. His four years here had been a ball.
It hadn't been that long ago that he'd come home for good, only a couple of months, but it felt like a lifetime. This nightmarish, unending day had forever sealed away that high-spirited kid, leaving a definite line of demarcation between the two parts of his life. Gray had been growing up gradually, like most people, but today the full weight of adult responsibility had been dumped on his shoulders. They were broad enough to carry the load, so he'd braced himself and done what had to be done. If the man who emerged from the wreckage was grimmer and more ruthless than he'd been when he'd gotten out of bed that morning—well, if that was the price of survival, he'd gladly pay it.
More problems awaited him at home. Under these circumstances, most mothers would have had to be pried from their child's bedside with a crowbar, but not Noelle. He hadn't even been able to get her to the telephone. He'd talked instead to Oriane, who told him that Miss Noelle had locked herself in her bedroom and wouldn't come out. At his instruction, Oriane had relayed the information that Monica would be all right, shouting it through the locked door. At least he had no fears that Noelle would try the same stunt Monica had pulled. He knew his mother too well; she was too self-centered to harm herself.
Despite the coffee, he dozed on the way home, and woke only when Dr. Bogarde stopped the car at the rear of the clinic. He'd left the top down on the Corvette, having more important things on his mind, so dew had collected on the seats. He'd have a wet ass on the drive home, and he was almost grateful. Maybe it would keep him awake.
"Will you be able to sleep tonight?" Dr. Bogarde asked. "I can give you something if you think you'll need it."
Gray gave a short bark of laughter. "My problem will be staying awake until I get home."
"In that case, maybe you'd better sleep here at the clinic."
"Thanks, Doc, but if the hospital needs me, they'll call me at home."
"All right. Be careful, then."
"I will." Gray swung his leg over the door of the 'Vette and slid into the seat. Yep. A definite wet ass. The cool moisture made him shiver.
He left the top down, letting the air slap him in the face. The night smells were clear and sweet, fresher than when heated by the sun. As he left Prescott behind, the rural darkness closed in around him, soothing and protective.
One oasis of light disturbed the darkness, though. Jimmy Jo's, the local roadhouse, was still booming. The gravel parking lot was crowded with cars and pickup trucks, the neon sign blinked in endless welcome, and the walls were thudding with the force of the music. As Gray neared, the black Corvette slicing through the night, a battered pickup shot out of the parking lot into his path, tires screeching as they grabbed for traction.
Gray stomped the brake pedal, bringing the 'Vette to a sliding halt. The truck skidded sideways, almost overturned, then righted itself. His headlights caught the faces of the occupants, roaring with laughter as the one on the passenger side, waving a bottle of beer in his hand, leaned out and shouted something at Gray.
Gray froze. He couldn't understand what had been shouted, but that didn't matter. What mattered was that the occupants were Russ and Nicky Devlin, and that they were headed in the same direction he'd been going, toward Rouillard land.
The bastards hadn't left. They were still on his property.
The rage built slowly. It was cold, but it was powerful. Oddly detached, he felt it come, starting at his feet and working up, as if transmuting the very cells of his body. It reached his abdomen and tightened the muscles, then filled his chest before spreading upward to explode in his brain. It was almost a relief, banishing the fatigue and mental fog, leaving his thought processes cool and precise even as all systems kicked into overdrive.
He turned the Corvette around and headed back toward Prescott. Sheriff Deese wouldn't like being woken up this time of night, but Gray was a Rouillard, and the sheriff would do as he asked. Hell, he'd even enjoy it. Getting rid of the Devlins would cut the crime rate of the parish in half.
Faith hadn't been able to relax all day. She had been almost sick with a sense of disaster and loss, unable to eat. Scottie, sensing her mood, had been whiny and fearful, continually clutching at her legs and getting in her way as she mechanically tried to do her chores.
After Gray had left that morning, Faith had numbly started packing, but Amos had slapped her on the side of the head and yelled at her not to be stupid. Renee might've gone off for a couple of days, but she'd be back, and old man Rouillard wouldn't let that young son of a bitch run them out of their home.
Even in her misery, Faith wondered why Pa called Guy an old man, when he was a year younger than Pa.
After a while, Amos had gotten into his truck and gone in search of a drink. As soon as he was out of sight, Jodie darted into the bedroom and began going through Renee's closet.
Faith followed her sister, and watched in bewilderment as she began tossing garments onto the bed. "What are you doing?"
"Mama won't need these anymore," Jodie blithely replied. "Guy will buy her all new stuff. Why do you think she didn't carry this with her? I can sure use it, though. She never would let me borrow any of her clothes." This last was said with a tinge of bitterness. She held up a tight yellow dress with sequins around the neckline. It had been oddly striking on Renee, with her dark red hair, but clashed horribly with Jodie's carroty locks. "I had a hot date with Lane Foster last week and wanted to wear this, but she wouldn't let me," she said resentfully. "I had to wear my old blue dress, and he'd seen it before."
"Don't take Mama's clothes," Faith protested, her eyes filling with tears.
Jodie gave her an exasperated look. "Why not? She won't be needin' them."
"Pa said she'll come back."
Jodie hooted with laughter. "Pa don't know his ass from a hole in the ground. Gray was right. Why on earth would she come back? Nan, even if Guy chickens out and goes running home to that ice cube he's married to, Mama will get enough from him to keep herself real pretty for a long time."
"Then we'll have to leave," Faith said, and a salty tear trickled down her cheek to puddle at the corner of her mouth. "We should be packing."
Jodie patted her on the shoulder. "Baby sister, you're too innocent for your own good. Gray was mad as hell, but like as not, he won't do anything. He was just shootin' off his mouth. I think I'll go see him, and maybe get the same kind of arrangement his pa had with Mama." She licked her lips, and a hungry look came over her face. "I've always wanted to find out if what he has in his britches is as big as I've heard it is."
Faith jerked away, jealousy slicing through her misery. Jodie didn't have the sense to see that a snowball would have a better chance at surviving a Fourth of July picnic on the equator than she had of attracting Gray, but oh, how Faith envied her the gumption to try. She tried to imagine how powerful it would feel, to have the self-confidence to walk up to a man and be certain he found her attractive. Even when Gray turned Jodie down, it wouldn't put a dent in her ego, because there were too many other boys and men panting after her. It would just make Gray more of a challenge to her.
But Faith had seen the cold contempt in his eyes that morning when he had surveyed the shack and its inhabitants, and shame had shriveled her soul. She had wanted to say, "I'm not like that," wanted him to look at her with admiration. But she was like that, as far as he was concerned, because she lived in this squalor.
Humming happily, Jodie took Renee's gaudy rainbow of clothes into the back room, to try them on and put darts in the bodice, because Renee's breasts were larger.
Barely choking back sobs, Faith grabbed Scottie by the hand and took him outside to play. She sat on a stump with her face buried in her hands while he pushed his little cars around in the dirt. Normally he would be happy doing that all day, but after about an hour he came over to her and curled up by her legs, and was soon asleep. She smoothed his hair, terrified by the faint blue tinge of his lips.
She rocked back and forth on the stump, her eyes stark with misery as she stared at nothing. Mama was gone, and Scottie was dying. There was no telling how much longer he could last, but she didn't think it would be more than a year. As bad as things had been, at least there had been a kind of security, because things were the same day after day and she knew what to expect. Now everything had come apart, and she was terrified. She had learned how to get along, how to manage Pa and the boys, but nothing was going according to plan now and she was helpless. She hated the feeling, hated it with a ferocity that made her stomach knot.
Damn Mama, she thought rebelliously. And damn Guy Rouillard. All they had thought about was themselves, not their families, nor about the turmoil they would leave behind.
She hadn't felt like a child in a long time. Responsibility had been pushed onto her frail shoulders at an early age, giving her eyes a solemn maturity that jarred with her youth, but now she acutely felt her lack of years. She was too young to do anything. She couldn't take Scottie and leave, because she was too young to work and support them. She was too young even to live by herself, according to law. She was helpless, her life controlled totally by the whim of the adults around her.
She couldn't even run away, because she couldn't leave Scottie. No one else would look after him, and he was almost as helpless as an infant. She had to stay.
So she sat on the stump as the afternoon hours slid away, too miserable to go inside and do any of her regular chores. She felt as if she were on a guillotine, waiting for the blade to fall, and as evening approached the tension grew and stretched until every nerve ending felt raw and exposed, until she felt like screaming to shatter the waiting stillness. Scottie had awakened from his nap and played close by her legs, as if afraid to get too far from her.
But evening came, and the blade didn't fall. Scottie was hungry, pulling at her, wanting to go in. Reluctantly Faith got up from the stump and took him inside just as Russ and Nicky left to go about their nightly carousing. Jodie dressed in the yellow dress she had coveted, and left too.
Maybe Jodie was right, Faith thought. Maybe Gray had just been blowing off steam, and hadn't meant what he'd said. Maybe Guy had gotten in touch with his family sometime during the day, and somehow defused the situation. He could have changed his mind about leaving, and denied having Renee with him. Anything was possible.
No matter what, though, she didn't expect Renee to come back. And without Renee, even if Guy did return to his family, there wouldn't be any reason for him to let them stay on in the shack. It wasn't much, but it was a roof over their heads, and it was free. No, it was no use hoping; she had to use her common sense. One way or another, maybe not right away but pretty soon, they were going to have to leave. If she knew Pa, though, he wouldn't make a move to get out until he was forced. He would milk every free hour he could from the Rouillards.
She fed Scottie and bathed him, then put him to bed. For the second night in a row she had blessed privacy, and she hurried to take her own bath and put on her nightgown. But when she pulled out her precious book, she couldn't concentrate enough to read. The scene that morning with Gray continually replayed itself in her mind, like film on a mental tape that just kept running. Every time she thought of that look of contempt in his eyes, pain expanded in her chest until she could barely breathe. She rolled over and buried her face in her pillow, fighting the hot tears. She loved him so, and he despised her, because she was a Devlin.
She dozed, exhausted by the restless night before and the trauma of the day. Always a light sleeper, as alert as a cat, she awakened and mentally checked the roll every time a member of the family came home. Pa came home first. He was drunk, of course, having gotten such an early start on the process, but for once he didn't bellow for a supper that he wouldn't eat anyway. Faith listened to his progress as he stumbled and lurched toward his bedroom. Moments later came the familiar, labored snoring.
Jodie came home about eleven, sullen and pouting. Her evening must not have gone as she had planned, Faith thought, but she lay quietly on her cot and didn't ask. Jodie took off the yellow dress, wadded it up, and threw it into a corner. Then she flounced onto her own cot and turned her back.
It was an early night for everyone. The boys rolled in not long after, laughing and raising a ruckus, waking Scottie as usual. Faith didn't get up, and soon things quieted down again.
They were all home, all except for Mama. Faith cried silently, wiping her tears with the thin sheet, and soon dozed again.
A huge crash brought her upright in the cot, confused and terrified. A bright light flashed in her eyes, blinding her, and a rough hand hauled her out of the cot. Faith screamed and tried to tear away from the painful grip on her arm, tried to dig in her heels and brace herself, but whoever it was jerked her off her feet as if she weighed no more than a child, and literally dragged her through the shack. Over her own terrified screams she could hear Scottie's shrieks, hear Pa and the boys cussing and yelling, hear Jodie sobbing.
There was a semicircle of piercingly bright lights arranged out on the dirt yard, and Faith had a blurred impression of a lot of people, moving back and forth. The man holding her kicked open the screen door and shoved her outside. She tripped over the rickety steps and sprawled on her face in the dirt, her nightgown riding high on her legs. Rocks and grit skinned the hide from her knees and palms, and scraped a raw place on her forehead.
"Here," someone said. "Take the kid." Scottie was roughly deposited beside her. He was screaming hysterically, his round blue eyes blank and terrified. Faith scrambled to a sitting position, shoving her nightgown down over her legs, and gathered him into her arms.
Things were flying through the air, crashing and thudding all around her. She saw Amos, clinging to the doorframe as two men in brown uniforms bodily hauled him out of the house. Deputies, she thought, dazed. What were deputies doing out here, unless Pa or the boys had been caught stealing something? As she watched, one of the deputies cracked Amos's fingers with his flashlight. Amos cried out and released the frame, and they tossed him into the yard. A chair came sailing out the door, and Faith ducked to the side. It hit the ground right where she had been, and splintered. Half crawling, with Scottie's arms locked around her neck and dragging her down, she struggled toward the shelter of Pa's old truck, where she huddled against the front tire.
Stunned, she stared at the nightmare scene, trying to make sense of it. Things were being tossed out windows, clothes and pots and dishes flying. The dishes were plastic, and made a huge clatter as they landed. A drawer of flatware was emptied out a window, the cheap stainless steel flashing in the lights of the patrol cars.
"Clean it out," she heard a deep voice growl. "I don't want anything left inside."
Gray! The recognition of that beloved voice froze her, crouched there on the ground with Scottie clutched protectively to her. She found him almost immediately, his tall, powerful form standing with arms crossed over his chest, next to the sheriff.
"You ain't got no call to do this to us!" Amos was bawling, trying to grab Gray by the arm. Gray shook him off with no more effort than if he'd been a pesky little dog. "You can't throw us out in the middle of the night! What about my children, my poor little retarded boy? Ain't you got no feelin' at all, treatin' a helpless child like that?"
"I told you to be out by nightfall, and I meant it," Gray snapped. "Gather up what you want to take with you, because in half an hour I'm setting fire to whatever is left."
"My clothes!" Jodie yelped, leaping out from between the safety of two cars. She began darting around the wreckage, grabbing up garments and discarding them when they proved to be someone else's, draping her own over one shoulder.
Faith struggled to her feet with Scottie still clinging to her, desperation giving her strength. Their possessions were probably trash to Gray, but it was all they had. She managed to pry Scottie's hands loose long enough for her to bend down and scoop up an armful of tangled clothes, which she tossed into the back of Amos's truck. She didn't know what belonged to whom, but it didn't matter. She had to save as much as she could.
Scottie latched around her leg like a tick, determined to hang on. Hampered by him, Faith grabbed Amos's arm and shook him. "Don't just stand there!" she yelled urgently. "Help me get our things in the truck!"
He shoved her away, sending her sprawling. "Don't tell me what to do, you stupid little bitch!"
She bounced up, not even feeling the extra bruises and scrapes, anesthetized by urgency. The boys were even drunker than Amos, staggering around and cussing. The deputies had finished emptying the shack now and were standing around, watching the show.
"Jodie, help me!" She clutched at Jodie as her sister stormed past, crying because she couldn't find her clothes. "Grab what you can, as fast as you can. We'll sort it out later. Gather all the clothes, and that way you know yours wiil be there." It was the only argument she could think of to gain Jodie's cooperation.
The two girls began darting swiftly around the yard, gathering up every item they came to. Faith worked harder than she ever had in her life, her slender body bending and weaving, moving so fast that Scottie couldn't keep up with her. He followed in her path, sobbing hoarsely, his pudgy little hands clutching at her whenever she came within reach.
Her mind was numb. She didn't let herself think, couldn't think. She moved automatically, cutting her hand on a broken bowl and not even noticing. One of the deputies did, though, and gruffly said, "Here, girl, you're bleeding," and tied his handkerchief around her hand. She thanked him without knowing what she said.
She was too innocent, and too dazed, to realize how the lights of the cars shone through the thin fabric of her nightgown, silhouetting her youthful body, her slim thighs and high, graceful breasts. She bent and lifted, each change of position outlining a different part of her body, pulling the fabric tight across her breast and showing the small peak of her nipple, the next time revealing the round curve of her buttock. She was only fourteen, but in the stark, artificial light, with her long, thick hair flowing over her shoulders like dark flame, with the shadows catching the angle of her high cheekbones and darkening her eyes, her age wasn't apparent.
What was apparent was her uncanny resemblance to Renee Devlin, a woman who had only to walk across a room to bring most men to some degree of arousal. Renee's sensuality was sultry and vibrant, beckoning like a neon sign to male instincts. When the men looked at Faith, it wasn't her whom they were seeing, but her mother.
Gray stood silently, watching the proceedings. The rage was still there, still cold and consuming, undiluted. Disgust filled him as the Devlins, father and sons, staggered around, cussing and making wild threats. With the sheriff and his deputies there, though, they weren't going to do anything more than shoot off their mouths, so Gray ignored them. Amos had had a close call when he'd pushed the youngest girl down; Gray's fists balled, but she had jumped up, apparently unhurt, and he had restrained himself.
The two girls were rushing around, valiantly trying to gather up the most necessary items. The male Devlins took out their vicious, stupid frustrations on the girls, snatching things from their arms and throwing the items to the ground, loudly proclaiming that no goddamn body was going to throw them out of their house, not to waste time picking things up because they weren't goin' nowhere, goddamn it. The oldest girl, Jodie, pleaded with them to help, but their drunken boasting drowned out her useless efforts.
The younger girl didn't waste her time trying to reason with them, just moved silently back and forth, trying to bring order to chaos despite the clinging hands of the little boy. Despite himself, Gray found his gaze continually seeking her out, and himself unwillingly fascinated by the graceful, feminine outline of her body beneath that almost transparent nightgown. Her very silence drew attention to her, and when he glanced sharply around, he noticed that most of the deputies were watching her, too.
There was an odd maturity to her, and a trick of the lights gave him the strange feeling that he was looking at Renee rather than her daughter. The whore had taken his father from him, driven his mother into mental withdrawal, and nearly cost his sister her life, and here she was again, tempting men in her daughter's flesh.
Jodie was more voluptuous, but she was noisy and cheap. Faith's long, dark red hair swirled over the pearly sheen of her shoulders, bared by the straps of that nightgown. She looked older than he knew she was, not quite real, an incarnation of her mother drifting silently through the night, every move like a carnal dance.
Unwillingly, Gray felt his shaft stir and thicken, and he was disgusted with himself. He looked around at the deputies and saw his response mirrored in their eyes, an animal heat that they should be ashamed of having for a girl that young.
God, he was no better than his father. Give him a whiff of a Devlin woman and he was like a wild buck in rut, hard and ready. Monica had nearly died today because of Renee Devlin, and here he was watching Renee's daughter with his cock twitching in his britches.
She walked toward him, carrying a pile of clothes. No, not toward him, but toward the truck behind him. Her green cat eyes flickered at him, the expression in them hooded and mysterious. His pulse leaped, and the look of her broke his tenuous hold on his temper. The events of the day piled up on him and he lashed out with devastating fierceness, wanting the Devlins to suffer as he had suffered.
"You're trash," he said in a deep, harsh voice as the girl drew even with him. She halted, frozen to the spot, with the kid still clinging to her legs. She didn't look at Gray, just stared straight ahead, and the stark, pure outline of her face enraged him even more. "Your whole family is trash. Your mother is a whore and your father is a thieving drunk. Get out of this parish and don't ever come back."
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After the Night - Linda Howard.txt
| 7 |
Twelve years later, Faith Devlin Hardy returned to Prescott, Louisiana.
Curiosity had been her companion on the drive up from Baton Rouge, and she hadn't thought much beyond her reason for going back. Nothing about the road was familiar, because when she had lived in Prescott she'd seldom ventured farther than the small town, so no memories rose to link the past with the present, the girl with the woman.
But when she passed the Prescott city limit sign, when houses became closer together, forming actual streets and neighborhoods, when the tall pine and hardwood forests gave way to service stations and convenience stores, she felt an aching tension begin to grow in her. It increased when sheTeached the town square, with the redbrick courthouse looking exactly as it had in her memory. Cars still parked at angles all around the square, and park benches were still situated one to each side, for the old men to gather there on hot summer days, sheltering beneath the dense shade of the immense oak trees that grew on the square.
Some things had changed, of course. Some of the buildings were newer, while a few of the older ones were no longer there. Flower beds had been added to each corner of the courthouse square, no doubt by the enterprising Ladies' Club, and pansies nodded their purple funny faces to passersby.
For the most part, though, things were the same, and the small differences only made the familiar stand out. The ache in her chest swelled until she could barely breathe, and her hands shook on the steering wheel. A piercing sense of sweetness went through her. Home.
It was so sharp that she had to stop the car, easing it into a parking slot in front of the courthouse. Her heart was pounding wildly, and she took deep breaths to steady herself. She hadn't expected this, hadn't expected the tug of roots she thought had been severed a dozen years before. It shook her, it exhilarated her. She had been led here by nothing more than puzzlement, wanting to know for certain what had happened after the Devlins had been forcibly escorted out of the parish, but this burgeoning sense of belonging pushed curiosity aside.
But she didn't belong here, she told herself. Even when she had lived here, she had never really belonged, only been tolerated. Whenever she had gone into any store in town, she had been watched like a hawk, because everyone knew a Devlin would steal anything that wasn't nailed down. That wasn't acceptance.
Knowing that, however, had no effect on her heart. Her instincts, her senses, recognized this as home. The rich, colorful scents that were like nowhere else on earth, the sights that had been imprinted on her brain from birth, the subtle influences of latitude and longitude that were recognized by every cell in her body, said that this was home. She had been born here, grown up here. Her memories of Prescott were bitter, but still it pulled at her with invisible strings she hadn't even known existed. She hadn't wanted this. She had wanted only to satisfy her curiosity, gain a sense of closure, so she could completely let go of the past and build her future.
It hadn't been easy, coming back. Gray Rouillard's words still burned in her memory as if it had been yesterday he'd said them rather than twelve years before. Sometimes she went for days without thinking of him, but the pain was always there—under control, but there, a permanent companion. Coming back made the memories more immediate, and she heard his voice echoing in her mind: You're trash.
She drew in a deep, shaking breath, and inhaled the sweet green scent so bound up in memories of her childhood. Steadying herself, she made a more leisurely examination of the square, familiarizing herself once again with what had once been as well known as her own hand.
Some of the old businesses lining the square had been spruced up; the hardware store had a rock and cedar front now, and rustic double doors. A McDonald's occupied the space where the Dairy Dip had been. A new bank had been built, and she'd bet money that it belonged to the Rouillards.
People walked by, glancing curiously at her as small-town people did at strangers, but no one recognized her. She hadn't expected them to; twelve years had changed her from child into woman, and she had changed herself from helpless to capable, from poor to prosperous. In her tailored creamy business suit, with her heavy red hair tucked into a sophisticated twist and her eyes protected by sunglasses, there was nothing about her to remind people of Renee Devlin.
It was ironic, Faith supposed; Renee had been guilty as sin of most of the charges laid at her door, but she had been innocent of the one that had finally gotten the Devlins run out of town. She hadn't run away with Guy Rouillard.
It was curiosity about exactly what Guy had done that had brought Faith back to Prescott after all these years. Had he been shacked up with a new girlfriend, and turned up a day or so later astonished at the uproar he'd caused? Had he been on a drinking spree, or maybe even a marathon poker game? Faith wanted to know. She wanted to come face-to-face with him, look him in the eye, and tell him what his irresponsibility had cost her.
She stared sightlessly at the courthouse square, memories washing over her. Her family had splintered after that dreadful night. They had driven as far as Baton Rouge before stopping for the night, sleeping in their vehicles. Amos had been alone in his truck, Russ and Nicky in their truck, with Jodie following in her old rattletrap of a car.
Faith and Scottie had been in the car with Jodie, Scottie asleep on Faith's lap.
Looking back, most of what she remembered was terror and shame. Certain memories were frozen, crystal-clear in her mind: the blinding lights of the patrol cars, that moment of sheer terror when she had been dragged out of bed and pushed through the door onto the ground, Scottie's shrieks. Sometimes she could even feel the way his hands had clung to her, feel the terrified pressure of his little body against her legs. The most acute memory, though, the one that echoed in her mind with painful clarity, was Gray looking at her with that paralyzing contempt.
She remembered desperately trying to gather their pitiful possessions. She remembered the long drive through the darkness; it hadn't been that long, but had seemed to take forever, each second expanded so that a minute took an hour to pass. She didn't remember sleeping, even after they got to Baton Rouge; she had sat stiffly, staring with burning eyes into nothing, cradling Scottie's warm weight on her lap. Barely after dawn, a cop had run them off from the city park where they had stopped, and the shabby little caravan had started out again. They made it to Beaumont, Texas, before stopping again. Amos rented a motel room in the worst part of town, and the six of them crowded into it. At least it was a roof over their heads.
A week later, they got up one morning to find Amos gone, just as Renee had left, though Amos did at least take his clothes. Nicky and Russ handled the crisis by spending the meager remains of their cash on beer, and getting roaring drunk. Not long after that, Russ left, too.
Nicky tried. To his credit, he tried. He was only eighteen, but when suddenly faced with the care of his three younger siblings, he took what odd jobs he could. Jodie helped out by working at fast-food restaurants, but even with her help, it wasn't enough. It wasn't long before the social workers came around, and Jodie, Faith, and Scottie were taken into the custody of the state. Nicky made a few noises of protest, but Faith could tell that he was mostly relieved. She never saw him again. Adoption wasn't an option; Jodie and Faith were too old, and no one wanted Scottie. The best they could hope for was to be in the same foster home, where Faith could take care of Scottie. The best wasn't what they got, but the alternative was workable, at least for Faith. Jodie went to one foster home, while Faith and Scottie went to another. All of Scottie's care fell on her shoulders, but since she had been taking care of him since his birth anyway, that wasn't a burden to her. That had been the condition under which they had been able to stay together, so she worked hard to fulfill her promise.
Jodie didn't stay long at any one foster home, but was moved twice. Faith counted herself lucky in her foster home; the Greshams hadn't had much, but they had been willing to share what they did have with foster kids. For the first time in her life, Faith saw how respectable people lived, and she soaked up the life like a sponge. It was an unfailing delight to her to come home from school to a clean house, to the smells of supper cooking. Her clothes, though inexpensive, were neat and as stylish as the Greshams could afford on the money they were given for her upkeep. At school, no one called her "a trashy Devlin." She learned what it was like to live in a house where the adults loved and respected each other, and her hungry heart reveled in the wonder of it.
Scottie was petted, and they bought new toys for him, though it wasn't long before he began failing drastically. For Faith, the kindness that surrounded Scottie for the short time left of his life had been worth everything. For a little while, he had been happy. That first Christmas after Renee left had made him delirious with joy. He had sat for hours, too tired to play but content to stare at the twinkling lights on the Christmas tree. He had died in January, easing away in his sleep. Faith had known that the time was near and had started spending the nights in a chair by his bed. Something, perhaps the change in his breathing, had awakened her. So she took his stubby little hand in hers, and held it while his indrawn breaths came further and further apart, and finally, gently, ceased altogether. She had continued to hold his hand until she felt the growing coolness of his flesh, and only then did she wake the Greshams.
She had spent almost four full years with the kindly Greshams, Jodie finished high school, got married right away, and left for the bright lights of Houston. Faith was totally alone, all of her real family gone. She concentrated on school, ignoring the boys who continually pestered her for dates. She had been too numb, too traumatized by the upheaval in her life, to throw herself into the giddy teenage social whirl. The Greshams had shown her how good stability and respectability could be, how sweet, and that was what she wanted for herself. To that end, she focused all of her energy on building something out of the ashes to which her life had been reduced. After endless hours of study, she made valedictorian, and won a scholarship to a small college. Leaving the Greshams wasn't easy, but with the state no longer paying for her upkeep, she had to move on. She worked two part-time jobs to support herself while going to school, but Faith didn't mind hard work, having known little else for most of her life.
Her senior year in college, she fell in love with a graduate student, Kyle Hardy. They dated for six months, and got married the week after Faith was graduated. For a short while she had been almost dizzy with happiness, certain that dreams did come true, after all. The dream hadn't lasted long, not even as long as her brief marriage. Faith had envisioned settling down, furnishing a cute little apartment, and saving for the future, which included kids, a nice house, and two cars. It hadn't worked out that way. Despite the responsibilities of his new job, Kyle had continued to enjoy the heavy-drinking, freewheeling life he had enjoyed as a student. It had gotten the best of him one night, coming home from a bar, when his car went off a bridge. No other cars were involved, which was a blessing; when an autopsy was performed, it was found that his blood alcohol level was twice what was legal.
At twenty-two, Faith was alone again. She grieved, then doggedly rebuilt her life. She had a degree in business administration and money from the small life insurance policy Kyle had had, as well as that provided by his job. She moved to Dallas and got a job in a small travel agency; two years later, the agency belonged to her. It had already expanded to a branch in Houston; Faith took a leap of faith and spent her capital to open another branch, this time in New Orleans. To her joy, the business grew steadily.
She had achieved financial stability, and it was as wonderful as she had always imagined it would be, but she was aware of an aching emptiness in her life. She needed emotional solid ground, too. She didn't want to become romantically involved with anyone; the two men she had dared to love, Gray Rouillard and Kyle Hardy, had both taught her how dangerous that was. But she still had family out there, somewhere, and she wanted to find them.
Vaguely she had recalled that her grandmother on Renee's side had lived around Shreveport; Faith could remember seeing her only once in her life, and when the social services in Texas had tried to contact her grandmother, they hadn't been able to find her. But the social services were overworked and understaffed, and had given up after a desultory search. Faith had more time, and more determination. She began calling around, and thankfully there weren't that many Armsteads in the Shreveport area. She finally reached someone, a cousin on her grandfather Armstead's side, who knew that Jeanette Armstead had moved to Jackson, Mississippi, about ten or twelve years ago, right after that oldest daughter of hers had turned up again.
Faith had been stunned. Her mother, Renee, had been the oldest daughter. But Renee had run away with Guy Rouillard; what had happened that she had sought out her mother? Was Guy still with her, or had he returned to the bosom of his family? A lot of years lay between the present and that horrible night in Prescott. For all she knew, Guy might have spent them very happily with his family, while her own family had been torn apart, destroyed.
Faith had called Information, gotten her grandmother's number, and called. To her surprise, Renee had answered the phone. Even after all those years, she still remembered her mother's voice. Startled, excited, she had identified herself. Their conversation had been awkward at first, but finally Faith got up the nerve to ask Renee what had happened with Guy Rouillard.
"What about him?" Renee had said, sounding bored. "Jodie told me that wild tale about me and him runnin' off, but it was news to me. I got fed up with bein' Amos's punching bag and living like dirt, and God knows Guy Rouillard wasn't goin' to do nothing about it, so I just left, went up to Shreveport and moved in with Mama. Your aunt Wilma lives here in Jackson, so about a month after that, we moved here, too. I ain't seen Guy Rouillard."
Faith had had trouble absorbing everything at once, there were so many thoughts flying in her head. Jodie had obviously found their mother, but neither of them had made any effort to get in touch with Faith. Renee could have gotten her two youngest children out of foster care, but she had been content to leave them where they were. She hadn't even asked about Scottie, Faith noticed.
Then there was the mystery of Guy Rouillard. Maybe he hadn't left with Renee, but he had left, at least temporarily, and by his leaving had set in motion the events that had shaped her life. Puzzled and intrigued, Faith decided to find out for certain what had happened. At the age of fourteen, she had literally been thrown out into the night like a piece of trash, and she had lived with that pain ever since. She needed to know the end of the story. She wanted to close out her past, so she could get on with hef future.
So here she sat, parked on the courthouse square in Prescott, swamped by memories and wasting time. It shouldn't be very difficult to find out where Guy Rouillard had been for what was probably only that one day, that one crucial day that had totally altered her life.
Her first order of business, she supposed, was to find somewhere to stay for the night. She had flown into Baton Rouge that morning, conducted the business she had, then rented a car and driven to Prescott. It was late afternoon, and she was tired. It wouldn't take long to find out what she wanted to know, but she didn't want to make the drive back to Baton Rouge if she could get a motel room in Prescott.
There had been a motel twelve years ago, but it had been slightly seedy even then and might not still be there. It had been on the east side of town, on the road leading to 1-55.
She rolled down the car window and called to a woman walking down the sidewalk. "Excuse me. Is there a motel in town?"
The woman stopped, and came over to the side of the car. She was in her mid-forties and looked vaguely familiar, but Faith couldn't place her. "Yes, there is," the woman replied, and turned to point. "Go to the corner of the square and turn right. It's about a mile and a half that way."
It sounded like the same motel. Faith smiled. "Thank you."
"You're welcome." The woman smiled and nodded, and returned to the sidewalk.
Faith reversed out of the parking space and maneuvered the small rental car into the leisurely traffic. Prescott didn't bustle now any more than it had twelve years ago. In two minutes she reached the motel. It was in the same place, but it wasn't the same motel. This one looked new, no more than a couple of years old, and much more substantial. It was still only one story, though this one was built in a U around a center courtyard where a fountain bubbled and flowers grew. It lacked a pool, which she didn't mind. The fountain was much more charming.
The desk clerk was a man in his fifties, and his name tag read "Reuben." Memory stirred, and a last name surfaced to go with the first. Reuben Odell. One of his daughters had been in Faith's class. He chatted as he took her credit card imprint, glancing curiously at the name, but nothing about "Faith D. Hardy" rang a bell in his memory. Faith wasn't a common name, but probably he hadn't even known her first name back then, so of course, he wouldn't recognize it now.
"I'll give you number twelve," he said, taking the key from its compartment. "It's at the back of the courtyard, farther away from the road so the traflic won't bother you."
''Thank you." Faith smiled, and removed her sunglasses to sign the credit card slip. He blinked at her smile, his own expression growing fractionally warmer.
She parked the car at the rear of the courtyard, in front of number twelve. When she unlocked the door, she was pleasantly surprised. The room was larger than most motel rooms, with a love seat and coffee table close to the door, and a king-size bed beyond that. The dresser was long, with the television on one end, and a desk area on the end closest to the bathroom. The clothes rack was adequate, the vanity in the dressing area boasted two basins and was large enough for two people to get ready without continually bumping into each other. She looked into the bathroom, expecting the standard tub, but instead there was a sizeable shower stall with sliding doors. Since she never took a tub bath, she was pleased by the extra room to bathe. All in all, the little motel was a cut above the norm.
She unpacked her toiletries and the single change of clothes she'd brought, then plotted her course of action. There shouldn't be much problem in finding out what she wanted to know, as long as no one recognized her as a Devlin. Small towns could have notoriously long memories, and the town of Prescott had belonged to the Rouillards heart and soul, as well as most of its brick.
The easiest and most anonymous way, probably, was to go to the library and look through the old newspapers. The Rouillards had constantly been in the news, so if Guy Rouillard had returned from his little jaunt and resumed business as usual, she wouldn't have to check many editions before his name would crop up.
She checked her watch and saw that she probably wouldn't have more than an hour to do what she'd come to do; from what she remembered about the small library, it closed about six p.m. during the summer, and in a town the size of Prescott, that wasn't likely to change. She was hungry, but first things first; food could wait, the library wouldn't.
It was odd how selective memory could be; she had never been to the motel when she had lived here, and had often gone to the library, whenever she'd gotten the chance, but she had remembered the motel's location while she drew a blank on the library. She fished the small phone book out of the dresser and looked up the address, and after a moment remembered the library's location. Grabbing her purse and keys, she went out to the car and drove back to downtown Prescott. Before, the library had been located behind the post office, but when she got there she was dismayed to find the building gone.
She looked around, and heaved a sigh of relief. A prominent sign in front of the new building next door to the post office proclaimed it the Prescott Library. The builders had disdained the sleekness of modern architecture and instead used an antebellum style, a redbrick two-story with four white columns out front, and shutters on the six-foot windows. There were plenty of parking spaces, probably more than needed, for only three cars were parked in the lot. Faith brought the total to four, parking in front and hurrying to the double doors. The sign posted on the left-hand door told her that she'd been right about the hours the library was open: nine a.m. to six p.m.
The librarian was a small, plump, chatty woman who wasn't in the least familiar to Faith. She went up to the desk and asked where the old newspaper files were.
"Right over here," the woman said, coming out from behind the counter. "Everything's on microfiche now, of course. Are you looking for any particular dates? I'll show you how the microfiches are filed, and how to work the scanner."
"I'd appreciate that, thanks," said Faith. "I want to start about ten years ago, but I may have to go a little further back."
"That's no problem. It would have been until a couple of years ago, but Mr. Rouillard insisted that everything be put on microfiche when we moved into this building. I declare, the system here was positively antiquated; it's so much easier now."
"Mr. Rouillard?" asked Faith, keeping her tone casual despite the way her heart jumped. So Guy had come back.
"Gray Rouillard," said the librarian. "The family practically owns this town—the whole parish, come to that—but he'.s just as nice as he can be." She paused. "Are you from around here?"
"A long time ago," Faith replied. "My family moved away when I was a child. I thought I'd check the old obituaries for some of my parents' cousins. We lost track of them through the years, but I've started working on a family tree and got curious about what happened to them." For a spur-of-the-moment explanation, it wasn't bad. People trying to trace their family trees always made up the bulk of those using the microfiche machines, at least in her experience. From what she had gathered, listening to them talk and exchange tales of extended detective work that finally unearthed the whereabouts of Great-great-aunt Ruby on Mother's side of the family, the quest could become addictive.
She had hit the right tone, for the librarian beamed. "Good luck, dear, I hope you find them. I'm Carlene DuBois. Call me if you need any help. We do close at six, though, and that's less than an hour."
"It shouldn't take long," said Faith, while searching her memory for a DuBois family in the parish. None came to mind, so perhaps they had moved to the area after the Devlin family had left so ignominiously.
Once she was alone, she quickly began scrolling through the files, scanning page after page of the Prescott Weekly, beginning from the date they had been escorted from the parish. She found several mentions of Gray, and though she tried to ignore them, she found that she couldn't. Though that long-ago night had cured her of her infatuation for him, she had never been able to forget him; his image had lingered in her memory like a sore tooth, to be worried occasionally.
Helplessly giving in to the probing of that mental tongue, she scrolled back to the places where she had seen Gray's name. The Weekly would never print anything derogatory or scandalous about the Rouillards—that was left to the Baton Rouge and New Orleans newspapers—but the normal comings and goings of the family were all duly reported to the inquiring minds that wanted to know, which was most of the parish. The first two tiny articles were mere mentions that Gray had attended such and such function. The third article was in the business section, and, stunned, Faith read it through twice before the words really sank in.
No one else would have seen anything alarming or even unusual in the sentence. "... Grayson Rouillard, who has taken financial control of the family enterprises, voted against the measure to..."
Taken control of the family enterprises. Why would he have done that? Guy would still have been in charge, for after all, everything had belonged to him. Faith glanced at the date of the newspaper. August fifth, not quite three weeks after Renee had left. What had happened?
She switched off the microfiche machine and sat back in the chair, staring at the blank screen. She had come back to Prescott only to tie off some loose ends in her life, to see that things had gone on as before. No one would have missed the Devlins; their absence would have been noted with relief, and then forgotten, but Faith had never been able to forget. She had thought that, once she had seen Prescott again, seen how no one had missed them, or even remembered them, she would be able to forget about the town in return. If she ran into Guy Rouillard, so much the better. She had never blamed Gray for what he'd done; she'd seen the pain in his face, heard it in his voice. But Guy... yes, she blamed him, and Renee. Even if they hadn't run away together, Renee had walked out on her children, and Guy's irresponsibility had caused a lot of suffering.
But Gray had taken over the family business. Instead of tying up all the old loose ends, she had found another one: Why had Gray taken charge?
She got up and went in search of Carlene DuBois. The front desk was empty, and the rest of the library appeared to be, too. "Mrs. DuBois?" she called, the sound absorbed and flattened by the rows of books. Carlene heard her, however, for there was the squeak of rubber-soled shoes on the tile.
"Right here," said Carlene cheerfully, emerging from the back of the reference book section. "Did you find what you needed?"
"Yes, I did, thank you. I noticed something else that puzzjed me, though. It was just a little article, but it said that Gray Rouillard had taken over control of the family businesses. This was twelve years ago, and it seemed strange, because Gray had to have been only in his early twenties—"
"My, yes. You must have left before the big scandal, or maybe you were too young to pay much attention to that sort of thing. We moved to town, oh, eleven years ago, and it was still a hot topic of conversation then, I can tell you."
"What scandal?" Faith tensed, her puzzlement turning into alarm. Something wasn't right.
"Why, when Guy Rouillard ran off with his mistress. I don't know who she was, but everyone says she was nothing but trash. He must have absolutely lost his mind, is all I can say, to walk off from his family and fortune the way he did."
"He never came back?" Faith couldn't hide her shock, but Carlene saw nothing wrong with that reaction.
"No one's seen hide nor hair of him since then. When he left, he stayed gone. Some say his wife was enough to drive any man away, but I can't say for sure myself, because I've never met her. Folks say she hasn't left the house since the day he walked out. He never even bothered to get in touch with his own children again."
Faith was staggered. Guy Rouillard had adored his kids; regardless of his feelings for his wife, there had never been any doubt about how much he had loved Gray and Monica.
"I suppose Mrs. Rouillard divorced him?" she asked, but Carlene shook her head.
"Never has. Reckon she didn't want him to be able to marry again, if he was so inclined. Anyway, as young as Mr. Gray was, he stepped into his father's shoes and things carried on just as if Mr. Rouillard was still here. Probably better, from what folks say."
"I was too young to remember much about him," Faith lied. "I do remember that he was a sort of local hero, playing football at LSU, things like that."
"Well, honey, let me tell you, things haven't changed much," Carlene said, and fanned herself with her hand. "Lordy, that man rates a ten on my scale, I can tell you. He makes my heart flutter, and me ten years older than he is and about to be a grandmother besides!" She blushed, but gave a surprisingly bawdy laugh. "It might be those bedroom eyes, or maybe it's the hair. Or it could be that tight little butt!" She sighed dreamily. "He's a scoundrel, all right, but who cares?"
"Does he know you're sweet on him?" Faith teased.
"Honey, every woman in town is sweet on him, and yes, he knows it, the devil." Carlene gave her lusty laugh again. "My husband teases me about getting his ear pierced so he can compete."
Gray had a pierced ear? Faith found herself caught in imagination, and shook herself free. What she had learned was startling, and she needed to be alone so she could think things through.
She glanced at her watch. "It's almost closing time, so I'd better clear out. Thanks for your help, Mrs. DuBois. It was nice meeting you."
"You, too." Carlene paused. "I'm sorry, I don't believe I caught your name."
Because it hadn't been thrown, but Faith saw no reason not to tell her. "I'm Faith Hardy," she said.
"Well, nice to meet you, Faith. That's such a pretty, old-fashioned name. You don't hear it much anymore."
"No, I suppose you don't." Faith glanced at her watch again. "Good-bye. Thanks again for your help."
"Any time."
Faith drove back to the motel, stopping by McDonald's for a sandwich. She didn't particularly like fast food, but didn't want to go to a restaurant where she might be recognized, so she made do. She ate half the sandwich and tossed the rest of it in the trash, too disturbed to have much of an appetite.
Guy Rouillard had disappeared. But if he hadn't run away with Renee, what had happened to him?
Faith lay down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling, trying to sort things out. Guy wouldn't have walked away from his home, his family, his wealth, without a reason. Everyone had thought Renee was that reason, but Faith knew it wasn't so. And even if he had simply gotten fed up with his marriage, why hadn't he just gotten a divorce? The Rouillards were Catholic, but divorce wasn't a problem unless he wanted to remarry. But he had never seemed to be an unhappy man; why should he be? His world had been the way he wanted it. She couldn't think of any reason why he would have left so abruptly, without word, and never tried to contact his family.
Unless he was dead.
The possibility—no, the probability—was stunning. Faith felt almost sick at the idea as she considered and rejected scenarios. He might have simply gone away for a couple of days and suddenly gotten sick, or maybe had an accident, but if either of those possibilities had been the case, he would have been found, identified, his family notified. That hadn't happened. Guy Rouillard had disappeared, on the same night her mother had run away.
Dear God, had Renee killed him? Faith sat up and distractedly ran her hands through her hair. She couldn't dismiss the thought, even though she couldn't see her mother doing such a thing. Renee had the morals of an alley cat, but she wasn't, never had been, a violent person.
Amos, then? Faith could better envision that. If he'd thought he could get away with it, Amos had been capable of anything. But she remembered that night well; Amos had staggered home around nine, already falling down drunk and swearing at her because Renee wasn't at home. Both Russ and Nicky, also drunk, had come home after that. Could one of them have killed Guy Rouillard, or perhaps even both of them? But nothing had seemed out of the ordinary, and Faith would have sworn they had been as surprised as she when Renee didn't come home. More than that, they simply hadn't cared thai their mother was sleeping with Guy; neither had Amos, for that matter.
Who else was possible? Maybe Mrs. Rouillard. Maybe Noelle had killed her husband because she was tired of his unfaithfulness, though from all reports he had been sleeping around since the beginning of their marriage, and she had never seemed to care, had even been grateful. His affair with Renee had been going on for years; why should she suddenly object to it? No, Faith doubted Noelle had cared enough even to scold him, much less go to the trouble of murder.
That left one person: Gray.
Forcefully she rejected that thought. No, not Gray. She remembered his face as it had been when he had come to the shack that morning, and as he had been that awful night. She remembered his fury, his implacable hatred. Gray had thought his father had run away with her mother, and he'd been in a rage.
But Gray had had the most to gain from his father's death. With Guy gone, he had taken over the reins to the Rouillard fortune, and made himself even wealthier, from what the librarian had said. He had been groomed from the day of his birth to one day step into his father's shoes; had he gotten tired of waiting, and put Guy out of the way?
Faith's thoughts darted around like a squirrel in a cage, banging against the bars. The door rattled under the force of several heavy blows and she jumped, startled and not a little alarmed. Why would anyone be at her door? No one knew where she was, so there couldn't be a message from her office. She got up and went to the door, but didn't open it. There wasn't a peephole, either, she noticed. "Who is it?"
"Gray Rouillard."
Her heart almost stopped beating. It had been twelve years since she had heard that deep, smoky voice, but she went weak at the sound of it, excitement mingled with fear. He had hurt her worse than anyone else in her life, but still he had the power to electrify every cell in her body with nothing but his voice. Just hearing him again made her feel like the child she had been at fourteen, all shivery and agitated at his nearness. And always, always, was that ugly counterweight pulling her in the opposite direction, the stark memory of him saying, You're trash. She had never been able to find any balance where Gray was concerned, had never been able to forget him, dream and nightmare combined.
The timing of his arrival made her skin prickle. Had she conjured him up with her thoughts? She stood there for so long that the door rattled again under the impact of his fist.
"Open up." In his tone was the iron authority of someone who expected to be obeyed, immediately, and intended to see that he was.
Cautiously she unchained the door and opened it, and looked up at the man she hadn't seen for a dozen years. It didn't matter. No matter how long it had been, she would have recognized him. He stood there in the doorway, disdaining to come in, and the impact of his physical presence took her breath.
He was bigger than she remembered, but then six four always seemed taller when you were looking up at it. His waist and hips were still lean, but he was heavier through the chest and shoulders, having achieved the hard solidity of manhood. And he was definitely a man, all hint of boyhood long gone. His face was leaner, stronger, more harsh, with grooves bracketing his mouth and lines of maturity at the corners of his eyes. She stared up into the face of a pirate, and knew why Carlene DuBois had gotten the shivers at the mere mention of his name. His black hair was longer than she had ever seen it before, pulled back from his face and secured at the nape of his neck. A tiny diamond winked in his left earlobe. At twenty-two, he had been impressive. At thirty-four, he was dangerous, a pirate in nature as well as appearance. Looking at him made her feel hot and shivery all at once, her heart suddenly pounding so hard, she wondered that he couldn't hear it. She recognized the symptoms, and hated her sickness. God, was she doomed to spend her entire life going weak at the sight or sound of Gray Rouillard? Why couldn't she get beyond that leftover childhood reaction?
Above the thin blade of his nose, his sinfully dark eyes were still cold and implacable.
The sensual line of his mouth twisted as he looked down at her. "Faith Devlin," he said. "Reuben was right; you look just like your mother."
But if he had changed, so had she. Faith had won her confidence the hard way. She gave him a cool little smile and said, "Thank you."
"It wasn't a compliment. I don't know why you're here, and it doesn't matter. This motel belongs to me. You aren't welcome. You have half an hour to get packed and get out." He gave her a wolfish smile that wasn't really a smile. "Or do I have to call the sheriff again to get rid of you?"
The memory of that night lay between them, so strong that it was almost tangible. For a moment she saw again the lights, felt the confused terror, but she refused to let him throw her into a state of panic. Instead she gave a graceful shrug and turned away from him, strolling into the small dressing area, where she efficiently swept her few toiletries into her overnight case and took her single change of clothes from the rack. Acutely aware of those dark eyes boring a hole through her, Faith folded the clothes over her arm, slipped on her shoes, picked up her purse, and sauntered past him without ever changing her calm expression.
As she drove away from the motel, on her way back to Baton Rouge, he was still standing in the open door staring after her.
Faith Devlin! How about that for a blast from the past? Gray stood watching her taillights until they disappeared from view. When Reuben had called to tell him that a woman who was the spitting image of Renee Devlin had checked into the motel, and that she had registered as Faith D. Hardy, he'd had no doubt about her identity. So one of the Devlin spawn had finally worked up the nerve to come back to Prescott! He wasn't surprised that it was Faith. She had always had more backbone than the rest of the bunch put together. Which didn't mean he'd been inclined to let her stay.
He turned back into the lighted room that she had abandoned with so little fuss. Without any fuss, damn it. If he'd wanted a fight, she hadn't obliged him. She hadn't even asked for a refund on her credit card. Without so much as a flicker of an eyelash, she had gathered up her stuff and left. It hadn't taken a minute; hell, he doubted it had taken her thirty seconds.
She was gone, and except for the wrinkled bedspread, the room was as pristine as if she'd never been there, but her presence still lingered. There was a sweet, faintly spicy scent in the air that overrode the staleness endemic to all motel rooms, and his blood stirred in instinctive reaction to it. It was the smell of woman, universal in some ways, exclusive to her in others. He stepped farther into the room, drawn by that elusive scent, his nostrils flaring like a stallion's.
F.aith Devlin. Just hearing her name had brought back that night and he had seen her again in his mind, silent and willowy, with that dark-fire hair tumbling over her shoulders and her slender body silhouetted inside her thin nightgown, weaving a sensual spell over the deputies and himself. She had been only a kid then, for God's sake, but she had had her mother's sultry aura even then.
When she had opened the door to this room and he had seen her again, he had been stunned. She looked so much like Renee that he'd wanted to throttle her, but at the same time there was no mistaking her for her mother. Faith was a little taller, still more slender than voluptuous, though she had filled out nicely in the twelve years since he'd last seen her. Her coloring was the same as Renee's: the dark red mane, the slumberous gold-flecked green eyes, the translucent skin. What had infuriated him, though, was her eifort-less sensuality, and his own unwilling reaction to it. It wasn't anything she had said or done, or even what she'd been wearing, which had been a stylish business suit. A Devlin wearing a suit, by God! No, it had been something intrinsic in her nature, something Renee had also possessed. The older daughter—he couldn't remember her name—hadn't had that potent allure. She had been easy and cheap, not sexy. Faith was sexy. Not overtly so, as Renee had been, but just as potent. He had looked into those cat eyes and thought of the bed just behind her, thought of tangled sheets and hot flesh, of having her naked beneath him and feeling her thighs clasp his hips just as he found the soft opening between her legs and pushed deep inside...
Gray broke out in a sweat and swore aloud in the empty room. Damn, he was as bad as his father! Give him a whiff, and he was ready to forget everything else in his rush to screw a Devlin woman. No, not every Devlin woman, he mentally amended. Thank God for that, at least. He had seen Renee's potent appeal but found it resistible, and the idea of sharing a woman with his father repellent. Nothing about the older girl had been attractive to him. Faith, though... If she were anyone but a Devlin, he wouldn't rest until he had her in bed and settled down to a long, hard ride.
But she was a Devlin, and just the mention of that name made him furious. His family had been wrecked because of Renee, and he could never forgive or forget that. Forgetting was impossible, when he lived every day with the results of Guy's desertion. His mother had withdrawn until she was just a shell of her former self. She hadn't left her bedroom for over two years, and even now refused to venture from the house except for doctors' appointments in New Orleans, on those rare occasions when she was ill. Gray had lost his father, and to all intents and purposes had also lost his mother.
Noelle was a silent, sad ghost of a woman who spent most of her time in her room. Only Alex Chelette could coax her into a little smile and bring a hint of life to her blue eyes. Gray had realized some time ago that Alex had fallen in love with his mother, but it was a hopeless cause. Not only was Noelle oblivious to his devotion, she wouldn't have done anything about it if she had been aware of it. She was married to Guy Rouillard, and that was that. Divorce was unthinkable. Gray sometimes wondered if Noelle was still clinging to the hope that Guy would come back. He himself had long ago accepted that he would never see his father again. If Guy had intended to come back, he wouldn't have sent that letter of proxy which Gray had received two days after his disappearence. It had been mailed in Baton Rouge the day he left; the language had been terse and to the point, with nothing personal included. He hadn't even signed it "Love, Dad," but limited himself to a businesslike "Sincerely, Guy A. Rouillard." When he had read that, Gray had known that Guy was gone from his life forever, and his eyes had burned with tears for the first and only time.
He didn't know what he would have done without Alex those first desperate months when he had been scrambling to solidify his position with the stockholders and various boards of directors. Alex had guided him through the rocky shoals, fought with him for every advantage, done whatever he could to help with Noelle and Monica. Alex had grieved, too, for the loss of his best friend. Guy and Alex had grown up together, been as close as brothers. He had been stunned that Guy would actually turn his back on his family for the sake of Renee Devlin, and had left without even saying good-bye.
In some ways, Monica was stronger now than she had been before. She wasn't as emotionally needy, so dependent on others. She had quietly apologized to Gray for her suicide attempt, and assured him that she would never do something that stupid again. But if she was stronger, she was also more remote, as if that paroxysm of pain and grief had burned out her excess of emotion, leaving her calm but also distant. She had interested herself in his work and gradually became an excellent assistant, one on whom he could rely with every faith in her judgment and ability, but she was almost as reclusive as Noelle. Monica did go out into the community; she was particular about her appearance and got her hair styled regularly, and made an effort to dress well. She hadn't dated for years, though. At first Gray thought she was embarrassed by her suicide attempt, and would relax as the scars faded. She hadn't, though, and eventually he had realized that it wasn't embarrassment that had kept her at home. Monica simply wasn't interested in socializing with anyone. She would do it at a business function, but on a personal level she refused all invitations, and steadfastly turned aside his suggestions that she reenter the dating scene. All he could do to bolster her confidence was show her how he trusted her in their work, and pay her a good salary so she would have a tangible proof of her worth, and a sense of independence.
Last year, though, the new sheriff, Michael McFane, had somehow talked her into going out with him. Monica had been seeing him fairly regularly since then. Gray had been so relieved, he could have cried. Maybe, just maybe, Monica had a shot at a normal life, after all.
No, he would never forget what the Devlins had done to his family. And with luck, he would never see Faith Devlin again.
Thank you. Those had been the only words she'd uttered, other than to ask who was at the door. She had been cool and enigmatic, watching him as if faintly amused, her poise unshaken by his threat. It hadn't been a threat, though, but a promise. He would have had her escorted out of the parish for a second time if she hadn't left on her own. And he would have had to call the sheriff, because if he had touched her himself, he would have lost control, and he had known it.
She was a woman now, not the kid he remembered. She had always been different from the rest of the Devlins, a fey woodland creature who had grown up to be as much of a temptation as her mother. Some poor fool had evidently thought so, because the fact that her last name was now Hardy meant that she was married, though she hadn't been wearing a wedding ring. He had noticed her hands, slim, elegant, well kept, and been cynically amused by the absence of a wedding band. Renee hadn't worn one, either; it had cramped her style. Evidently her daughter felt the same way, at least when she was traveling sans the unknown Mr. Hardy.
She had looked prosperous, so, like a cat, she had landed on her feet. Gray wasn't surprised. It had always been a particular talent of the Devlin women that they could always find someone to support them. Her husband must be a good provider, the poor sap. He wondered how often she left her husband at home while she rambled.
And he wondered why she had come back to Prescott. There was nothing for her here, no family, no friends. The Devlins hadn't had friends, only victims. She had to have known she wouldn't be welcomed back with open arms. Probably she had thought she could slip in without anyone being the wiser, but folks around here had long memories, and her resemblance to her mother was too marked. Reuben had recognized her as soon as she'd taken off her sunglasses.
Well, it didn't make any difference. He had rid the parish of the Devlin vermin for the second time, and with a hell of a lot less trouble than it had been twelve years ago. He just wished she hadn't come back at all, hadn't revived the potent memory of his unwilling response to her, hadn't replaced his image of her as a young girl with the image of her as she was now, a woman. He wished he had never heard her soft, cool voice saying, "Thank you."
Faith drove steadily along the dark road, not letting herself stop even though her insides were shaking like jelly. She refused to let her reaction get the best of her. She had learned the hard way what Gray Rouillard thought of her, dealt with the shock and pain years ago. She would not let him hurt her again, or get the best of her. She hadn't had any choice but to leave the motel, because she had seen the ruthless determination in his eyes and known he hadn't been bluffing about having her thrown out. Why should he balk at that, when he hadn't balked at having her entire family removed? Her calm acquiescence didn't mean, however, that he had won.
The threat of the sheriff hadn't frightened her. What had her both scared and angry was the intensity of her reaction to Gray. Even after all those years, after what he had done to her family, she was as helpless as a Pavlovian dog to stop her response to him. It was infuriating. She hadn't rebuilt her life just to let him reduce her to the status of trash, to be gotten rid of as soon as possible.
The day had long passed when she could be intimidated. The quiet, vulnerable child she had been had died one hot summer night twelve years ago. Faith was still a fairly quiet person, but she had learned how to survive, how to use her own steely will and determination to get what she wanted out of life. She had even become confident enough to indulge in her redheaded temper from time to time. If he had wanted to get rid of her, Gray had made a mistake in forcing the issue. He would soon learn that what looked like a retreat just meant she was adjusting her position for attack from another angle.
She couldn't let him run her off again. Not only was it a matter of honor, she still hadn't found out what had happened to Guy. She couldn't forget about it, couldn't let it go.
A plan began to form in her agile mind, and a smile touched her lips as she drove. Gray would find himself outflanked before he knew it. She was going to move to Prescott, and there wasn't a thing he could do to stop it, because she would be ensconced before he knew it. It was past time she faced all of her old ghosts, cemented her own self-respect. She would prove herself to the town that had looked down on her, and then she could forget about the past.
And she wanted to prove to Gray that he had been wrong about her from the beginning. She wanted that so fiercely that she could taste it, the victory sweet in her mouth. Because she had loved him so intensely as a child, because he had been the stern, ruthless judge and executioner, so to speak, on the night when he had run them out of the parish, he had assumed far too much importance in her mind. It shouldn't be that way, she should have been able to forget him, but the fact was there: She wouldn't like anything other than trash until Gray was forced to admit that she was a decent, moral, successful person.
She didn't just want to find out what had happened to Guy. Maybe it had begun as that, or maybe she had hidden the truth from herself, but now she knew.
She wanted to go home.
|
After the Night - Linda Howard.txt
| 8 |
"Yes, that's right. I want everything handled in the agency's name. Thank you, Mr. Bible. I knew I could count on you." Faith's smile was warm in her voice, something Mr. Bible must have heard, because his reply made her laugh aloud. "You'd better be careful," she teased. "Remember, I know your wife."
She hung up the phone and her assistant, Margot Stanley, gave her a rueful look. "Was that old goat flirting with you?" Margot asked.
"Of course," Faith said good-naturedly. "He always does. It gives him a thrill if he thinks he's being wicked, but he's actually a sweet old guy."
Margot snorted. "Sweet? Harley Bible's as sweet as a rattlesnake. Let's face it, you have a way with men."
Faith restrained herself from an unladylike snort. If Margot had seen Gray run her out of town—again—she wouldn't think Faith had such a "way" with men. "I'm just nice to him, is all. It's nothing special. And he can't be as bad as you say he is, or he wouldn't still be in business."
"He's still in business because the old fart is a smart businessman," Margot said. "He has an evil genius for sniffing out prime property right before it becomes prime, and buying it up for a song. Damn him, people only go to him because he has the land they want."
Faith grinned. "Like you said, a smart businessman. He's always been as nice as he can be to me."
She might have restrained herself from snorting, but Margot had no such inhibition. "I've never seen a man who wasn 't nice to you. How many times have you been stopped for speeding?"
"All total?"
"Just this past year will do."
"Ummm... four times, I think. But that's unusual; it's just that I've been traveling so much this past year."
"Uh-huh. And how many times have you gotten a ticket?"
"None," Faith admitted, rolling her eyes. "That's just coincidence. Not once have I tried to talk my way out of it."
"You don't have to, and that's my point. The cop walks up to your car, you hand him your license and say, 'I'm sorry, I know I was flying,' and he ends up handing your license back and telling you to slow down, because he'd hate to see your pretty face all cut up in an accident."
Faith burst out laughing, because Margot had been in the car with her when she had been stopped that time. The Texas state trooper in question had been a burly gentleman of the old school, with a thick gray mustache and a drawl as slow as molasses. "That's the only time a cop has said anything about my 'pretty face,' quote and unquote."
"But they were all thinking it. Admit it. Have you ever gotten a speeding ticket?"
"Well, no." She controlled her amusement. Margot had gotten two speeding tickets within the past six months, and now was having to stick strictly to the speed limit, to her great resentment, because a third ticket would result in the temporary loss of her driver's license.
"You can bet neither one of the cops who stopped me said anything about slowing down before I got my pretty face all cut up," Margot muttered. "No sirree, they were pure business. 'Let me see your license, ma'am. You were doing sixty-five in a fifty-five zone, ma'am. Your court date will be such and such, or you can mail in your fine by such and such date and waive your right to a court appearance.'" She sounded so disgusted that Faith had to turn away to keep from laughing in her face. Margot didn't see anything funny about her two speeding tickets.
"I'd never had a ticket before in my life," Margot continued, scowling. Faith had heard it many times before, so that she could almost say the words in unison with her friend. "I've been driving for half my life without so much as a parking ticket, and then all of a sudden the damn things seem to be coming out of the woodwork."
"You make it sound as if you could paper your walls with them."
"Don't laugh. Two tickets are pretty damn serious, and a third one is a catastrophe. I'll be poking along at fifty-five for two years. Do you know how much this throws off a schedule? I have to get up earlier and leave earlier, everywhere I go, because it takes me so long to get there!" She sounded so aggrieved that Faith gave up the struggle and began giggling helplessly.
Margot was a joy. She was thirty-six, divorced, and had absolutely no intention of staying that way. Faith didn't know what she would have done without her. When she had finally scraped up enough money to buy the agency, she had known how to handle the customer part of the business, but despite her college degree in administration, there was a great deal of difference between textbooks and real life. Margot had been assistant to J. B. Holladay, the previous owner of Holladay Travel, and had been glad to handle the same duties for Faith. Her experience had been invaluable. She had kept Faith from making some serious mistakes in financial matters.
More than that, Margot had become a friend. She was a tall, lean woman with bleached blond hair and a dramatic flair for clothes. She made no bones about being in search of a new husband—"Men are a lot of trouble, honey, but they do have their good points, one big one in particular"—and was so good-natured about it that she had no trouble getting dates. Her social life would have exhausted the strongest debutante. For her to claim that Faith had a way with men, when Faith seldom went out with anyone and she herself was seldom at home, was pushing it a bit, in Faith's opinion.
"Don't laugh," Margot warned. "You're going to be stopped by a female cop one of these days, and that's when your luck will run out."
"That's all it is, luck."
"Sure it is." Margot abandoned that subject and gave her a curious look. "Now, what's this about a house in Godforsaken Louisiana?"
"Prescott," Faith corrected, smiling. "It's a little town north of Baton Rouge, almost at the Mississippi state line."
Margot snorted again. "That's what I said. Godforsaken."
"It's my hometown. I was born there."
"You don't say. And you actually admit that out loud?" Margot asked with all the incredulity of a true Dallas native.
"I'm going home," Faith said softly. "I want to live there." It wasn't a step she took lightly; she was going back with the full knowledge that the Rouillards would do everything they could to cause trouble for her. She was deliberately placing herself once more in proximity with Gray, and the danger of it made her lie awake at nights. Besides trying to find out what had happened to his father, all those years ago, she had a lot of ghosts to face, and Gray was the biggest one. He had tormented her, in one way or another, for most of her life, and she was still caught in the helpless childhood whirl of emotions where he was concerned. In her mind he was omnipotent, bigger than life, with the power to either destroy her or exalt her, and her last meeting with him had done nothing to dilute that impres-siqn. She needed to see him as a normal man, meet him on equal footing as an adult, rather than a vulnerable, terrified young girl. She didn't want him to have this power over her; she wanted to get over him, once and for all.
"It was that trip to Baton Rouge that did it, wasn't it? You got that close and just couldn't stand it." Margot didn't know about what had happened twelve years ago, didn't know anything about Faith's childhood other than she'd been in foster care and was very fond of her foster parents. Faith had never talked about her past or her family.
"I guess it's true about roots."
Margot leaned back in her chair. "Are you going to sell the agency, or what?"
Startled, Faith stared at her. "Of course not!"
There was a subtle relaxation of Margot's expression, and abruptly Faith realized how alarming her decision could be for her employees. "Everything will go on just like before, with two minor exceptions," she said.
"How minor?" Margot asked suspiciously.
"Well, for starters, I'm going to be living in Prescott. When Mr. Bible finds a house for me, I'm going to put in a fax machine, a computer, and a photocopier, so I'll be as in touch, electronically speaking, as I am now."
"Okay, that's one. What's the other?"
"You're going to be in charge of all the offices. A district manager, you might say, except there's only one district and you're the only manager. You don't mind traveling, do you?" Faith asked, suddenly anxious. She had forgotten to consider that when making her plans.
Margot's eyebrows arched in disbelief. "Me, mind traveling? Honey, are you out of your ever-lovin' mind? I love to travel. You might say it expands my hunting area, and God knows I've already given most of the prime bucks around here their chance for a life of excitement. It's their hard luck if some lucky guy somewhere else takes me out of circulation. Besides, it's never a hardship to go to New Orleans."
"And Houston and Baton Rouge."
"Cowboys in Houston, Cajuns in Baton Rouge. Yum, yum," said Margot, licking her lips. "I'll have to come back to Dallas to rest."
Her plan fell smoothly into place, but then Faith went to a lot of trouble to make certain it did. She took a great deal of satisfaction in her efforts; she had been helpless at fourteen, but now she had resources of her own, and four years in the business community had given her a lot of contacts.
With Mr. Bible's help, she quickly located and settled on a small house for sale. It wasn't in Prescott, but was situated a couple of miles outside the town limits, on the edge of Rouillard land. Buying it put a sizable dent in her savings, but she paid for it in full, so Gray wouldn't be able to pull any strings with a mortgage holder and cause her any trouble. She knew enough now to foresee what steps he might take to make things rough for her, and counteract them. It gave her great pleasure to know she was outflanking him, and he wouldn't know anything about it until it was too late to stop her.
Very quietly, handling everything through the agency so her name didn't appear anywhere that it might cause an alert, she got the utilities turned on, the house cleaned, and gleefully shipped her furniture to her new home. Only a month after Gray had run her out of town for the second time, Faith pulled her car into the driveway of her house and .looked at it with extreme satisfaction.
She hadn't bought a pig in a poke. Mr. Bible had arranged for her to look at photos of the house, both inside and out. The house was small, only five rooms, and had been built back in the fifties, but it had been remodeled and modernized with an eye toward selling it. The previous owner had done a good job; the new front porch went all the way across the front, and there was a porch swing at one end to lure the new inhabitants out to enjoy the good weather. Ceiling fans at each end of the porch guaranteed that the heat would seldom become too uncomfortable. Each room inside also had a ceiling fan.
Both bedrooms were the same size, so she had chosen the back one for herself and converted the front one into a home office. There was only one bath, but she was only one person, so she didn't expect to have a problem with that. The living room and dining room were pleasant, but the best thing about the house was the kitchen. Evidently it had been remodeled several years before, because she couldn't imagine anyone spending the money to customize a kitchen when a more standard approach would have made the house just as saleable and cost a lot less. Someone had loved to cook. There was a six-eye cooktop, and built-in microwave and conventional ovens. Floor-to-ceiling cupboards all along one wall provided enough storage space for a year's worth of food, if she so chose. Instead of a work island, a six-foot butcher-block table occupied the middle of the room, providing plenty of work space for any culinary adventures. Faith wasn't that enthralled with cooking herself, but she liked the room. She was, in fact, thrilled with the entire house. It was the first place she had ever lived that belonged to her; apartments didn't count, because she had rented those. This house was hers. She had a real home.
She was fizzing with internal delight when she drove into Prescott to stock up on groceries, and take care of two necessary errands. Her first stop was the courthouse, where she bought a Louisiana tag for her car and applied for her Louisiana driver's license. Next was the grocery store. It was a subtle pleasure to shop without thought of cost in the same store where the owner had once followed her around every time she came in, eyeing every move she made to make certain she didn't slip something into her pocket and walk out without paying for it. Morgan had been his name, she remembered, Ed Morgan. His youngest son had been in Jodie's class.
Leisurely she selected fruit and produce, putting each selection in a plastic bag and twisting a green tie around the bag to close it. A gray-haired man in a stained apron came out of the stockroom carrying a crate of bananas, which he began arranging on an almost empty display shelf. He glanced at her, then looked back, his eyes widening in disbelief.
Though his hair was a great deal thinner and what was left had changed color, Faith had no trouble recognizing the man about whom she had just been thinking. "Hello, Mr. Morgan," she said pleasantly as she wheeled her buggy past him. "How are you?"
"R-Renee," he sputtered, and something in the way he said her mother's name made Faith freeze inside, and look at him with new eyes. God, not him, too! Well, why not? Guy Rouillard hadn't always been available, and Renee wasn't the type of woman to deny herself.
Her smile faded, and her voice cooled. "No, not Renee. I'm Faith, the youngest daughter." She was incensed on behalf of her childhood self, constantly humiliated by being treated like a thief, when all the while the man who had made such a production of following her around in the store had been part of the pack of hounds baying after her mother.
She pushed the buggy on down the aisle. It wasn't a large store, so she heard the flurry of voices as he hurried to tell his wife who she was. Not long afterward, she became aware that she had picked up a shadow. She didn't recognize the teenage boy, also wearing a long, stained apron, who blushed uncomfortably when she glanced at him, but it was obvious he'd been told to make certain everything went into the buggy and not her purse.
Her temper flared, but she held it in tight control and didn't allow herself to be hurried. When she had gotten everything on her list, she wheeled the buggy to the checkout counter and began unloading it.
Mrs. Morgan had been operating the cash register when Faith had entered the store, but Mr. Morgan had taken over the duty and his wife was watching intently from the small office cubicle. He eyed the groceries she was unloading. "You'd better have the money to pay for all this," he said unpleasantly. "I'm real careful who I take a check from."
"I always pay cash," Faith retorted coolly. "I'm careful who I let see the number of my checking account."
It was a moment before he realized he had been insulted in kind, and he flushed darkly. "Watch your mouth. I don't have to take that kind of lip in my own store, especially from the likes of you."
"Really." She gave him a smile and kept her voice low. "You weren't that particular when it came to my mother, were you?"
The flush faded as abruptly as it had come, leaving him pale and sweating, and he cast a swift glance toward his wife. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Fine. See that the subject never comes up again." She pulled out her wallet and stood waiting. He began pulling the items down the counter, punching in prices as he went. Faith watched each price as he rang it up, and stopped him once. "Those apples are a dollar twenty-nine a pound, not a dollar sixty-nine."
He flushed again, furious that she had caught him in an error. At least, she assumed it was an error, rather than deliberate cheating. She would make certain she checked every item on the sales receipt before leaving the store. Let him get a taste of what it was like to be automatically assumed dishonest. Once she would have backed down, humiliated to the core, but those days were long past.
When he rang up the total, she opened her wallet and pulled out six twenty-dollar bills. Normally her grocery bill was less than half that, but she had let herself run out of a lot of things rather than going to the trouble of moving them, so she had to restock. She saw him eyeing the cash left in her wallet, and knew the story would fly around town that Faith Devlin had come back, and was flashing a roll that would choke a horse. No one would think she had come by it honestly.
She couldn't tell herself that she didn't care what the townspeople thought; she always had. That was one of the reasons she'd come back, to prove to them, and herself, that not all Devlins were trash. She knew in her mind that she was respectable, but she didn't know it in her heart yet, and wouldn't until the folks in her hometown accepted her. She couldn't divorce herself from Prescott; this town had helped shape who she was as a person, and her roots went deep. But wanting acceptance from the people here didn't mean she would let anyone insult her and get away with it. As a child she had been quietly obstinate about going her own way, but in the twelve years since she had lived here, she had grown up and learned how to stand up for herself.
The same boy who had followed her in the store carried the bags out to her car. He was about sixteen, she guessed; his joints still had the looseness of childhood, and his feet and hands were too big for the rest of him. "Are you related to the Morgans?" she asked as they walked across the parking lot, with him pushing the buggy.
He blushed at being personally addressed. "Uh, yeah. They're my grandparents."
"What's your name?"
"Jason."
"I'm Faith Hardy. I used to live here, and I've just moved back." She stopped at her car and unlocked the trunk. Like most teenage boys, he was interested in anything with four wheels on it, and gave it a good look. She had bought a solid, reliable sedan rather than a sports car; the sedan was better for business, and it took a certain type of attitude to drive around in a sports car anyway, an attitude Faith had never had. She had always been older than her years, and stability, dependability, were far more important to her than speed and flashy looks. But the car, a dark, sophisticated European green, was less than a year old and had a certain style to it, for all its reliability.
"Nice car," Jason felt moved to comment as he transferred the groceries from the buggy to the trunk.
"Thanks." She tipped him, and he looked at the dollar in surprise. By that, she could deduce that either tipping wasn't the norm in Prescott, or people usually carried out their own groceries and he had been pressed into duty so he could see if she kept the inside of her car clean, or something like that. She suspected the latter; the nosiness of smalltown people knew no bounds.
A small, white Cadillac wheeled into the parking lot as Faith was unlocking her car door, and abruptly braked as it came even with her. She glanced up and saw a woman staring at her, dumbstruck. It took a moment before she recognized Monica Rouillard, or whatever her name was now. The two women faced each other, and Faith remembered how Monica had always gone out of her way to be nasty to the Devlins, unlike Gray, who had pretty much treated them normally until Guy had disappeared. Despite herself, Faith felt a flash of pity; if her suspicions were right, their father was dead, and they had gone all these years without knowing what had happened to him. The Devlins had suffered because of Guy's actions, but the Rouillards had suffered, too.
Even in the shadows of the car, Faith could see how pale and strained Monica looked as she stared at her. This was one confrontation that would be best postponed; though she intended to stand her ground, there was no need to flaunt her presence in the Rouillards' faces. Turning away, she got into her car and started the engine. Monica was blocking her so she couldn't back out, but the space in front of her was empty, so there was no need. She simply drove out through the empty parking slot, leaving Monica still sitting there staring after her.
When she got home, she found several faxes waiting for her, all from Margot. She put up the groceries before settling down in the office to take care of whatever problems had cropped up. She enjoyed the travel industry; it wasn't without its share of headaches and crises, but for the most part, by the very nature of the business, the customers were upbeat and excited. The agency's job was to make sure their vacation tours were properly booked, with reliable accommodations. They gently steered vacationers away from inappropriate tour packages; for instance, a family with small children probably wouldn't be all that pleased with a cruise on a party ship geared more toward adult pleasures. Her employees knew how to handle things like that; most of the problems that came Faith's way were of a different nature. There was a payroll to meet, tax forms to complete, an unending parade of paper. Faith had decided that she would still handle the payroll, with the pertinent information faxed to her from the four office locations every Monday morning. She would do the paperwork, prepare the checks, and Express Mail them on Wednesday morning. It was a workable solution, and the convenience of working at home delighted her.
The biggest inconvenience was still doing her banking in Dallas, both business and personal, but she had decided against transferring her funds to Prescott or even Baton Rouge; the Rouillard influence had long arms. She hadn't checked to see if the family owned the new bank in town, because it hadn't really mattered; whether they owned it or not, Gray would have a lot of pull. There were rules and laws in banking, but in this part of the state the Rouillards were a law unto themselves. The balance in her accounts, even copies of her canceled checks, would be easy for Gray to get. She had no doubt that he could also cause trouble for her by delaying credit for checks deposited until the last possible minute, and bouncing her own checks if he could. No, it was best to keep her account in Dallas. Gravel crunched in the driveway and she looked out the window to see a sleek, gunmetal gray Jaguar come to a stop. Resigned, she let the curtain fall back into place and pushed her chair away from the desk. She didn't have to see who got out of the car to know who had come calling, just as she knew this wasn't the Welcome Wagon.
Going into the living room, she opened the door as she heard footsteps on the porch. "Hello, Gray. Please come in. I see you've given up your 'Vettes."
Surprise flickered in his eyes as he stepped over the threshold, immediately overwhelming her with his size. He hadn't expected her to calmly invite him inside, the rabbit offering the hospitality of its burrow to the wolf. "I'm slower in a lot of things than I used to be," he drawled.
It was on the tip of her tongue to say, "Better, too, I suppose," but she bit the words back. She doubted that Gray Rouillard would be making suggestive remarks to her, of all people, and if she took it as such, he would think it was just what he might have expected from a Devlin. There was no room for normal flirtatious byplay between the two of them.
The weather was hot this late spring day, and Gray was dressed in a loose, white cotton shirt that was open at the throat, and khaki linen trousers. Curly black chest hair was visible in the open vee of the shirt, and Faith forced herself to look away, conscious of a sudden difficulty in breathing. He brought with him the fresh, earthy scent of clean sweat and the animal muskiness of man. She never had been able to decide what color his scent was, she thought dazedly, inhaling his rich, subtle odor. His physical impact made her senses reel, just as it always had. Nothing had changed. It hadn't been the unexpectedness of seeing him the last time that had so shaken her; the old reactions were still there, still potent, undimmed by time and maturity. She looked at him with hidden, helpless rage. God, this man had all but ground her into the dirt, and wouldn't hesitate to do it again; what was wrong with her that she couldn't see him without feeling that hot, automatic tingle of excitement?
He stood too close to her, just inside the door, staring down at her with narrowed dark eyes. She moved away to give herself breathing space. He was physically too imposing, ten inches taller and with that lean, hard athlete's body.
She would have to go on tiptoe to kiss even the hollow of his tanned, muscular throat. The aberrant thought shocked her, shook her, and instinctively she guarded her expression. She could never let him know that she was even remotely attracted to him; it would give him a weapon of devastating power to use against her.
"This is a surprise," she said lightly, though it wasn't. "Have a seat. Would you like a cup of coflee, or maybe iced tea?"
"Skip the pleasantries," he said, moving toward her, and she heard the cold anger in his smoky voice. "What are you doing here?"
"I live here," she replied, arching her brows in mock surprise. She hadn't expected the confrontation to come quite so soon; he was more efficient than she had expected. She moved away from him again, desperate to keep a safe distance between them. His gaze sharpened, then gleamed with satisfaction, and with a chill she knew he had realized that his closeness made her nervous. She halted, determined not to let him know that he could intimidate her that way, and turned to squarely face him. She lifted her chin, the expression in her green eyes cool and unruffled. It took a lot of effort, but she managed it.
"You won't for long. You've wasted your time and effort in coming back."
With gentle amusement she said, "Even you could have problems throwing me out of my own house."
His gaze sharpened as he glanced around the neat, cozy living room. "I bought it," she enlarged. "It isn't financed, it's mine free and clear."
He gave a harsh crack of laughter, startling her. "You must have divorced Mr. Hardy and taken him to the cleaners. Did you get everything he had?"
Faith stiffened. "As a matter of fact, I did. But I didn't divorce him."
"What did you do, snare yourself an old geezer who kicked off after a year or two? Did he have heirs you gypped out of their inheritance?"
Color fled her cheeks, leaving her as pale as a statue. "No, I snared myself a healthy young man of twenty-three, who died in a car accident before we'd been married a year."
His mouth tightened. "I'm sorry," he said gruffly. "I shouldn't have said that."
"No, you shouldn't have, but I've never noticed that concern for other's feelings has ever worried a Rouillard."
He gave a snort of derision. "A Devlin should be careful about throwing rocks in that particular glass house."
"I've never harmed anyone," she said with a bitter little smile. "I just got caught between the lines when the battle started."
"All innocence, hmmm? You were pretty young when all that happened, but I have a real good memory, and you were sashaying around in front of me and all those deputies, wearing your little thin nightgown that we could see through. Like mother, like daughter, I'd say."
Faith's eyes widened, full of outrage and horrified embarrassment, and color flooded back into her face. She took two quick steps forward and jabbed him in the chest with her forefinger. "Don't you dare throw that in my face!" she said, choking with rage. "I was dragged out of my bed in the middle of the night, and tossed into the yard like a piece of trash. Don't say it," she warned sharply, when he opened his mouth to retort that trash was exactly what she'd been, and jabbed him in the chest again. "Everything we owned was dumped out, my little brother was hysterical and wouldn't turn loose of me. What was I supposed to do, take time out to find some of my own clothes and retire into the woods to change? Why didn't you so-called decent men turn your backs, if you were seeing a little too much?"
He looked down into her furious face, his expression strangely arrested, then his eyes became more heavy-lidded and intent. He took hold of her hand, moving it away from his chest. He didn't release her, but kept her fingers folded against his hard, calloused palm. "You've got a little redheaded temper there, haven't you?" he asked with amusement.
His touch shocked her with a hot twinge of electricity. She tried to jerk her hand free, but he merely tightened his grip, effortlessly restraining her. "Now, don't get all in a pucker," he said lazily. "Maybe you thought I'd stand here and let you poke holes in me with your fingernail, but I have to be in a different mood to enjoy that."
Faith glared up at him. She could humiliate herself by giving in to the useless urge to struggle, or she could wait until he decided to release her. Her instincts were to struggle away from the disturbing heat of his touch, the surprising roughness of his palm, but she forced herself to stand still, sensing that he would enjoy watching her try to free herself. Then the sensual undertone of his comment registered, and her eyes widened as shock rippled through her. There was no mistaking his meaning this time.
"Smart girl," he said, his gaze sliding down to her breasts. He took his time, examining the shape of them beneath her silk, mint green shirt. She caught her breath, his gaze like an actual touch that made her breasts tingle. "You don't want to start a tussle with me that you can't win—or do you? Your mama probably taught you that a man gets hard real quick when a woman starts wiggling against him. Did you come back thinking you might step into your mother's shoes? Do you want to be my whore, the way she was my dad's?"
Swift fury glittered in her eyes, and she swung her free hand with all her strength. Quick as a rattlesnake his other hand lashed out, blocking the blow and capturing that hand, too. He gave a low whistle at the force she had put into the swing. "Temper, temper," he chided, looking as if he were enjoying her anger. "Were you trying to knock my teeth out?"
"Yes!" she flared, gritting her teeth together and forgetting her determination to deny him the pleasure of a struggle. She jerked her hands, trying to twist free, and succeeded only in bruising her wrists. "Get out! Get out of my house."
He laughed down at her, easily reducing her to a standstill as he brought her hard against him. "What are you going to do, throw me out?"
She froze, alarmed to find that his reaction to a struggle was exactly what he'd said it would be. There was no mistaking the ridge pressed against her belly. She struck out with the only weapon left to her, her tongue. "If you'll let go of me, you Neanderthal, what I'll do is put ice on my wrists to stop them from turning black and blue!" she hotly retorted.
He looked down at his long fingers encircling her slender wrists, loosening his grip and scowling at the dark red marks that quickly formed. "I didn't mean to hurt you," he said, surprising her. He immediately released her. "You have skin like a baby."
She drew back, massaging her wrists and steadfastly refusing to look at the front of his trousers. That, too, could be ignored. "My guess is you didn't care if you hurt me. Now, get out."
"In a minute. I have a few things to say." • She gave him a cold look. "Then for God's sake, say them and leave."
Danger glittered in those dark eyes, and before she knew it, he was right in front of her again, almost playfully pinching her chin. "You're a ballsy little babe, aren't you? Maybe too ballsy for your own good. Don't take me on in a fight, sweet thing, because you'll get hurt. The best thing you can do is pack up your stuff and get out of here, just as fast as you moved in; I'll buy the house from you, for what you gave for it, so you won't be out anything. You aren't welcome here, and I don't want my mother and sister hurt by seeing you parading around as if nothing ever happened, bringing up that old scandal again and getting everybody upset. If you stay, if you force my hand, I can make things rough for you here, and you'll wind up getting hurt. You won't be able to get a job, and you'll find out damn fast that you don't have any friends here."
She jerked her chin away from him. "What will you do, burn me out?" she goaded. "I'm not a helpless fourteen-year-old anymore, and you'll find that it isn't as easy to bully me now. I'm here, and I'm staying."
"We'll see about that, won't we?" His hooded gaze dropped to her breasts again, and suddenly he grinned. "You're right about one thing: You're not fourteen anymore."
He walked out then, leaving Faith staring after him, her fists clenched with impotent anger, and panic clenching her stomach. She didn't want him to notice her as a woman, didn't want him to turn that hot, hooded gaze on her, because she wasn't certain of her ability to resist him. She felt sick at the thought of being like her mother, of being what he had taunted her with being, a whore for a Rouillard.
"Was it Renee?" Monica asked quietly, though she was drawn so tight that the tension was almost visible. She had called Gray from Morgan's grocery store, more upset than he had heard her in years, since the day he'd had to tell her that their father had left them for Renee Devlin, in fact. Monica had come a long way since then, but the haunted look in her eyes told Gray that the pain was still too close to the surface for her to be objective about it.
"No, but it was definitely a Devlin." He poured himself a finger of Scotch and tossed it back, then poured another finger, feeling that he needed it after another encounter with Faith Devlin. Faith Devlin Hardy, that is. A widow. A young, lovely, red-haired widow with so much fire in her that he'd wanted to check his hands for singe marks after touching her. He had disconcerted her a couple of times, but for the most part she exhibited a maddeningly cool confidence. She hadn't been the least bit worried by his threats, though she had to know he wasn't bluffing.
They were in the study, enjoying a before-dinner drink, at least Gray was. Alex was coming to dinner, and Noelle would be down soon, so Gray and Monica had gone into the study to have a few minutes of privacy for their discussion.
Monica looked blank. "It wasn't Renee? It looked just like her, as if she hadn't aged at all. She even looked younger. Oh—I see." Comprehension dawned. "It was one of the girls, wasn't it?"
"The youngest one. Faith. She always looked more like Renee than any of the others."
"What's she doing here?"
"She says she's come back to stay."
Horror filled Monica's dark eyes. "She can't! Mother couldn't bear it! Alex has gotten her to come out of her shell a little, but if she hears any of the Devlins are back in town, there's no telling how far it will set her back. You'll have to get rid of her again, Gray."
Wryly he considered his Scotch, and finished it with one gulp. The whole town knew the story about him running the Devlin family out of the parish. It wasn't something he was particularly proud of, but neither did he regret it, and the incident had become enshrined as a sort of local legend. Monica hadn't been there, hadn't seen the ugliness; she knew only the results, not the process. She didn't have the memory seared into her brain. It was always with him: Faith's terror, the little boy's hysterical shrieks and pitiful attempts to cling to her, her desperate struggle to gather up their belongings... and the potent, uncomfortable lust with which the men had watched her, the night shadows Concealing her youth and revealing only her resemblance to her mother.
With a sharp little pang he realized that that night was a link between them, him and Faith, a bond forged by a common memory that couldn't be broken short of death. He had never really known her, and twelve years lay between then and now, and yet... he hadn't thought of her or treated her as a stranger. It was as if they had resumed an acquaintance of long standing. They weren't strangers; there was that night between them.
"Getting rid of her may be harder this time," he said abruptly. "She's bought the Cleburne place, and as she pointed out to me, I can't kick her off her own property."
"If she's buying it, there has to be some way to interfere with the mortgage—"
"I didn't say she's buying it, I said she's bought it. There's a difference."
Monica frowned. "Where would a Devlin get that kind of money?"
"Probably life insurance. She's a widow. Her last name is Hardy now."
"How convenient for her," Monica said sarcastically.
"No, from what I gather, it wasn't," Gray said, seeing in his mind how pale Faith had gone when he had said much the same thing. He heard the doorbell ring, and Alex's voice as Oriane opened the door to him. Discussion time was over. He patted Monica's shoulder as they moved to the door. "I'll do what I can to make her leave, but it isn't a foregone conclusion. She isn't a typical Devlin."
No, not typical in any way. Even when she'd been a teenager, looking at her had been enough to get him hard. That hadn't changed. But she was also a more capable opponent than any of the rest of her family ever could have been. She was poised and intelligent, and seemed to have pulled herself, by whatever means, out of the gutters where her family had always lived. He respected her for that, but it didn't make any difference; she had to go. Monica was worried about what her presence would do to Noelle, but he was worried about what it would do to Monica as well.
They went out into the foyer as Noelle came gracefully down the stairs to greet Alex, offering her cheek for his kiss, allowing him to tuck her hand into the crook of his arm, small touches that she had seldom allowed her husband. Alex's devotion had been good for Noelle, soothing a bit the pain of her shattered self-confidence, but Gray wasn't so sure it had been good for Alex. His wife had died fifteen years before and he should have remarried; he'd been only forty-one at the time of her death. Perhaps he would have, in time, but then Guy had left, and Alex, good friend that he was, had devoted himself to helping the Rouillards through the crisis. Even after receiving the letter of proxy, it had taken Gray a good two years to consolidate his position, and Alex had been right there, sitting up through all-night strategy sessions, becoming a sort of surrogate father to Monica, gradually cajoling Noelle out of her total depression. He had fallen painfully in love with Noelle, a fact to which she seemed oblivious.
He should have seen it coming, Gray thought, watching his mother. She was still incredibly lovely, in a cool, classic way that would appeal to Alex's romanticism. Her dark hair was only lightly grayed, and it was remarkably becoming. Her skin was still smooth and unwrinkled, though somehow there was no mistaking her age. There was no youth in her, no lightness of spirit, and sadness always lurked in the depths of her blue eyes. Looking at his mother, at Monica, at Alex, Gray savagely damned his father for what he had done.
As Alex seated Noelle, he said to Gray, "I heard a curious rumor today, about one of the Devlins." Monica froze, her anxious gaze darting to Noelle, who had gone still and pale. Alex didn't see Gray's sharp, warning motion. "I ran into Ed Morgan, and it seems one of the girls has moved back to town."
Alex straightened, his eyes levelly meeting Gray's, and Gray realized that Alex had chosen not to see his warning. He had deliberately brought up the subject, forcing Noelle to confront it. He had done that a few times before, talking about Guy when Noelle recoiled from any mention of her husband. Perhaps it was the right thing to do; God knows, Alex had been able to get more response from Noelle than either Gray or Monica had ever managed.
Noelle's hand fluttered toward her throat. "Moved... back?"
"It's the youngest daughter, Faith," Gray said, keeping his voice calm. "She's bought the old Cleburne place and moved into it."
"No." Noelle turned her agonized gaze on her son. "I can't—I can't bear it."
"Of course you can," Alex said comfortably, taking his seat. "You don't go out or talk to any of the townspeople, so you'll never see her or know anything about her. There's no reason for you to be upset."
Gray leaned back in his chair, controlling a slight smile. He and Monica tended to handle Noelle with kid gloves; he couldn't help it, even when she frustrated the hell out of him. Alex had no such compunction. He was relentless in his efforts to completely pry her out of her shell and back into society. Probably he was right to bring the subject into the open, and Gray's and Monica's inclinations were too protective.
Noelle shook her head, still looking at Gray. "I don't want her here," she said, openly pleading. "People will talk... it will all be rehashed again, and I can't bear it."
"You won't know anything about it," Alex said.
She shuddered. "I don't have to hear it to know it's going on."
No, she probably didn't. Anyone who had ever lived in a small town would know all too well how gossip was recycled, and nothing was ever forgotten.
"Please," she said to Gray, blue eyes haunted. "Make her leave."
Gray sipped his wine, carefully expressionless. He was getting damn tired of the way people thought he could wave a magic wand and make people disappear. Short of kidnapping or murder, all he could do was make things as uncomfortable for Faith as possible. He had no legal ground this time, no charge of trespass, no family of drunks and thieves the sheriff had been glad to escort out of his parish. What he had was one young woman, stubbornly determined to stand her ground.
"It won't be easy," he said.
"But you have so much influence... with the sheriff, the bank—"
"She hasn't opened an account at the bank, and the sheriff can't do anything unless she breaks a law. So far, she hasn't." She wouldn't be opening an account at his bank, either, he realized. She was too smart. She had known exactly what she would be facing when she moved back to Prescott, otherwise she wouldn't have bought the Cleburne place outright. She had taken steps to limit what moves he could make against her. He had to respect her as an opponent, for her foresight. She had definitely made things more difficult for him. He would check around, use his sources to try to verify that she had indeed paid for the house rather than financing it, but he suspected she had been telling the truth.
"There must be something," Noelle said desperately.
Gray arched his brows. "I draw the line at murder," he drawled.
"Gray!" Shocked, she stared at him. "I wasn't suggesting anything of the sort!"
"Then we may have to get used to the idea of her living here. I can make things damned inconvenient for her, but that's about it. And I don't want anyone getting any bright ideas about having her physically harassed," he said, giving both Monica and Noelle a hard look, just in case the thought had occurred to either of them. It wasn't likely, but he didn't intend to take the chance. "If we can get rid of her my way, fine, but I won't have her hurt." He didn't question this odd protectiveness on behalf of a Devlin. Faith had had enough pain and fear in her life, he thought, remembering the terrified girl caught in the glare of a semicircle of headlights.
"As if we'd do anything like that," Monica said, insulted.
"I didn't think you would, but I didn't want to leave the matter open to question."
Delfina brought in the first course, a creamy cucumber soup, and by mutual consent the subject was dropped, to Gray's amusement. There wasn't anything going on in the house that Oriane and Delfina didn't know almost as soon as it happened, but Noelle and Monica both adhered to the old stricture against personal conversation in front of the servants. He doubted that anyone who worked for them considered him or herself a "servant," especially Delfina. She had worked there for as long as he could remember, and had whacked his hands with a wooden spoon whenever she'd caught him trying to sneak one of the petit fours she baked for Noelle's luncheons.
Monica began telling Alex about an interesting documentary she'd seen on television. Gray glanced at Noelle to make a comment, and stilled when he saw the tears gliding silently down her cheeks. She was calmly eating her soup, the spoon dipping and lifting in graceful rhythm, and all the while she was crying.
Alex joined Gray in the study after dinner, and they discussed business for half an hour before Gray said wryly, "Monica and I had decided not to tell Mother about Faith."
Alex grimaced. "I figured as much. I know it isn't my place to butt in—" Gray snorted, bringing a quick grin to Alex's face before he resumed. "But she can't keep hiding from the world forever."
"Can't she? She's been giving it a damn good try for the past twelve years."
"If she won't go to the world, I've decided to bring the world to her. Maybe she'll see that, if she can't escape it, she might as well join it."
"Good luck," Gray said, and meant it.
Alex gave him a curious look. "Are you really going to make Faith leave?"
Gray leaned back in his chair and propped his feet on the desk, lounging like a sleepy panther, relaxed but still dangerous. "I'm damn sure going to try, but I told Mother the truth. Legally, there isn't a lot I can do."
"Why not leave the girl alone?" Alex asked, and sighed. "I'd say she's had a rough enough life as it is, without folks deliberately trying to make trouble for her."
"Have you seen her?"
"No, why?"
"She looks enough like Renee to be her twin," Gray said. "Just being a Devlin is bad enough, but looking the way she does..." He shook his head. "She's going to stir up a lot of memories, and not just in my family. Renee Devlin got around."
"I still say give her a chance," Alex argued. "If she's trying to make something of herself, it would be a shame to stand in her way."
Gray shook his head. "I have to think of Mother and Monica. They're more important to me than a little piece of white trash trying to make good."
Alex regarded him with disappointment. Gray was a hard man and a dangerous enemy, but he'd always been fair. Guy's disappearance had thrust him headlong into a situation wherein responsibility for the family's financial, as well as emotional, well-being had been dumped on his young shoulders. Gray had been a cheerful, happy-go-lucky hell-raiser until then, but overnight he had changed into a much harder, more ruthless man. His sense of humor still bordered on the bawdy and outrageous, when he indulged in humor, but for the most part he was far more serious. Gray was a man who knew the extent of his power, and didn't shrink from using it. If Guy had been respected in the financial community, Gray was regarded with the awe and caution one would afford a marauder.
"You're too protective," Alex finally said. "Noelle and Monica won't collapse if Faith Devlin lives in Prescott. They won't like it, but they'll learn to live with it."
Gray shrugged. Maybe—hell, probably—he was too protective, but Alex wasn't the one who had watched Monica nearly bleed to death, or seen how total Noelle's emotional collapse had been. By the time Alex had become involved in cajoling Noelle out of her room, at least she'd been talking again, and feeding herself.
"I give up," Alex said, shaking his head. "You'll do whatever you want, anyway. But think about it, and maybe cut the girl some slack."
Later that night, sitting alone in the study with his feet still propped on the desk in his usual position, while he read a financial report on some stocks he'd bought, Gray found it difficult to concentrate. It wasn't the Scotch; he had poured himself a drink when he had begun doing paperwork, over two hours before, and most of the liquor was still in the glass. The fact was, he couldn't get the problem of Faith Devlin out of his mind. Noelle's silent tears had reached him in a way nothing she could have said would have. If Faith didn't deserve to be hurt again, neither did his mother or sister. They had been innocent victims too, and Monica had almost died. He couldn't forget that, and he couldn't see them upset without trying to do something about it.
And it was a fact that if Faith Hardy stayed in Prescott, Noelle and Monica would be even more hurt and upset than they were now.
Gray stared broodingly at the level of Scotch in the glass. Maybe if he drank it, he could forget how warm and vital Faith had felt under his hands, how that sweet, spicy scent of hers had gone straight to his head and made him dizzy with lust. Maybe if he drank the whole goddamn bottle, he could forget about the urge to plunge his hands into the fire of her hair to see if it burned him, or the hunger to taste the wide, full bloom of her lips. He thought of her skin, so fine-grained and translucent that he marked her with the lightest touch; her breasts, high and round, the peaks of her nipples discernible even beneath her bra. She had it, the same indefinable quality Renee had possessed, an effortless sensuality that drew men to her like a lodestone. Faith wasn't as blatant about it as Renee had been; she had toned it down with better clothes, but the quality had merely been refined, not diluted. What Faith Hardy looked like was a classy lady who loved a long, hard ride in bed, and damn if he didn't want to give it to her.
If she didn't leave, it was likely that the residents of Prescott were going to be shocked out of their small-town minds, and Noelle ten times more upset than she was now, by the spectacle of another Rouillard man having a hot and heavy aiFair with a Devlin woman.
|
After the Night - Linda Howard.txt
| 9 |
Ed Morgan made a point of meeting Faith at the door as she entered the grocery store. "Sorry," he said, not looking the least bit regretful. "I don't have anything you need."
Faith stopped, and gave him a cool look. "You don't know what I need," she pointed out.
"Doesn't matter." He folded his arms and smirked at her. "Guess you'll have to shop somewhere else."
Faith controlled her temper. She detected the fine hand of Gray Rouillard in this, and getting into an argument with Mr. Morgan wouldn't accomplish anything except possibly getting her arrested for causing a public disturbance, which would suit Gray just fine.
He had kept his word about making it difficult for her to live-in the parish. Not ten minutes earlier, the attendant at the service station where she stopped had gleefully told her that they were out of gas, and she'd have to go elsewhere. At the tune, the man at the next pump had been filling his car.
If Gray thought this would send her packing, he had seriously underestimated his opponent. She could sue these people for refusing service, but that wouldn't make her very popular in town. She intended to live here, so she discarded that option. Besides, the real battle was between her and Gray; everyone else was secondary.
She shrugged as she turned to leave. "Fine. If you can do without my money, I can do without your groceries."
"All the other stores in town are in the same predicament," he called after her, gloating. "Fresh out of whatever it is you want."
Faith contemplated giving him the finger, but resisted the urge; he might take it as an invitation. She walked calmly back to her car. Obviously she'd have to do her shopping and buy her gasoline somewhere else, but it was only an inconvenience, not an insurmountable problem.
Inconvenient in the short term, that is; long term, she would have to do something about it. And in the very shprt term, she was mad as hell.
There was a pay phone on the corner. Faith stalked past her car and down to the open kiosk. This one had a phone book in it, swinging from a stiff metal cord. It would be just like the Rouillards to have an unlisted number, she silently fumed as she opened the thin little book and flipped through the pages until she reached the Rs. But no, there it was. She dug a quarter out of her purse and fed it into the slot, then punched in the number.
A woman's voice answered on the second ring. "Rouillard residence."
"Gray Rouillard^ please," Faith said in her most businesslike tone.
"May I say who is calling?"
"Mrs. Hardy," she replied.
"Just a moment."
No more than ten seconds later, the line clicked and Gray's velvety dark voice purred, "Is this the Mrs. Hardy?"
She could hear the mocking amusement in his voice, and her hand clenched around the receiver so hard, it was a wonder the plastic didn't crack. "It is."
"Well, well. I'll bet you didn't think you'd be asking for favors so soon, did you, sweetheart? What can I do for you today?" He didn't even try to disguise the satisfaction in his tone.
"Not a damn thing," she said coldly. "I just wanted you to know your childish little tricks won't work. I'll have my groceries shipped in from Dallas before I'll give you the satisfaction of seeing me leave!" She slammed down the receiver before he could reply, and marched to her car. She hadn't really accomplished anything, other than blowing off some steam and letting him know that she realized who was behind this latest development, and that it wasn't going to work. It was satisfying anyway.
At Rouillard House, Gray chuckled as he sat back in his chair. He'd been right about her redheaded temper. He'd have liked to see her just now, with those green eyes snapping fire. Maybe his maneuver had made her dig in her heels rather than prompting her to go to a friendlier locale, but one thing for certain, it had gotten a reaction! Then his eyes sharpened. Dallas, huh? Maybe he should do some checking there.
Faith allowed herself to stew for a minute, then put her anger aside as a waste of energy. She refused to let this town, and Gray Rouillard, get the best of her. She would change their opinions of her if it took twenty years! The key to changing their minds, she realized, was proving that Guy Rouillard hadn't run off with her mother. For whatever reason he had left, it couldn't be blamed on her family. Taking that into consideration, she had far more reason to hold a grudge than did the Rouillards or anyone else in the parish.
Knowing that Guy hadn't been with Renee and proving it, however, were two different things. Perhaps if she could get Renee to talk to Gray, he would at least be curious enough to start searching for his father. Maybe he already had, and Mrs. DuBois at the library simply didn't know the result of the search. If Guy was alive, though, there would be a traceable paper record somewhere.
She drove to New Roads, where she filled up the car and bought the few groceries she had needed. So much for Gray's effort to starve her out, she thought with satisfaction when she returned home and carried in the bag. She hadn't even had to go that much farther afield.
After she had put up the groceries, she went into her office and called her grandmother Armstead in Jackson. As before, Renee answered the phone.
"Mama, this is Faith."
"Faith! Hi, honey," Renee said in her lazy, sultry voice. "How're you doin', baby? I didn't expect to hear from you again so soon."
"I'm fine, Mama. I've moved back to Prescott."
There was a moment of silence on the line. "Why'd you do that? From what Jodie told me, them folks didn't treat you right."
"It was home," Faith said simply, knowing Renee wouldn't understand. "But that isn't why I called. Mama, everyone here still thinks you ran off with Guy Rouillard."
"Well, I told you that isn't so, didn't I? It's no skin off my nose what they think."
"It's causing me a little bit of trouble, though. Mama, if I can get Gray Rouillard to call you, would you talk to him and tell him that you didn't run away with his father?"
Renee gave an uneasy laugh. "Gray wouldn't believe a word I said. Guy was easy to get along with, but Gray... No, I don't want to talk to him."
"Please, Mama. If he doesn't believe you, that's up to him, but—"
"I said no," Renee interrupted sharply. "I'm not going to talk to him, and you're just wastin' your breath. I don't give a shit what those bastards in Prescott think." She slammed down the receiver, and Faith winced at the crash in her ear.
She hung up the phone, frowning in thought. For whatever reason, Renee was nervous about talking to Gray, and that meant Faith didn't have much chance of changing her mind. Renee had never been one to go out of her way for anyone, even in a matter as simple as a telephone call.
Well, if Renee wouldn't talk to Gray, then Faith had to find some other way to convince him, and the best way to do that was find out what had really happened to Guy.
How did you go about finding out if someone who had disappeared twelve years ago was alive or dead? Faith wondered. She wasn't a detective, didn't know the procedures to follow to gain access to the records that would normally be examined if you were looking for someone. The thing to do, she supposed, was to hire a real private detective, one who would know those things. It would be expensive, though, and she didn't have much extra money after spending her ready cash on the house.
Where to find a detective? There wasn't any such animal in Prescott, but she supposed they could be found in any moderate-sized town; Baton Rouge was a city of almost a quarter million people, but it was also a little too close to Gray's sphere of influence. New Orleans would probably be safer. Maybe she was being paranoid about Gray's power, but she would rather be paranoid than caught unawares. A man who would try to stop a woman from buying groceries was diabolical! Her mouth quirked at the thought, and she allowed herself a tiny smile. On a more serious note, she had a healthy respect for the lengths to which he would go to follow through on his promises, and his warnings.
She would find a good detective and hire him to search credit card and bank records, things like that. If Guy was alive, surely he would have used some of his vast financial assets to support himself; she couldn't see him washing dishes at minimum wage. Perhaps it would be possible to find out if he had filed an income tax return. Surely any decent detective would be able to do that in a short amount of time, maybe a week, so the cost should be manageable.
What if the detective did find a paper trail? If Guy had used a credit card, Gray would have known about it, seen the charge on the monthly statement. Had Gray known where his father was all these years, and not said anything? The possibility was intriguing... and infuriating. If Gray had found Guy, wouldn't he have contacted him? And if he had done that, then he would know that Guy hadn't left with Renee. It followed, then, that for whatever reason, Gray had never tried to find his father, otherwise he would know there was no reason for this vendetta against her.
She couldn't forget what she considered the most likely scenario: Guy was dead. She could see him leaving, though divorce would have been a more logical step, but she couldn't see him never contacting his kids again, or walking away from the Rouillard money. That just wasn't human nature. She had to give the private detective a chance to find Guy, but she didn't think he'd succeed. After that, she would start asking questions around town; she didn't know what she could discover, but the answer to the puzzle was there, if she could just figure out how to put the pieces together. Someone had to know what had happened that night. The truth was there, waiting for someone to find it. She pulled out a sheet of paper, paused for a moment, and unwillingly wrote her mother's name at the top. It was asking too much of coincidence for Renee to have left the same night Guy had disappeared and not know anything about it. Maybe they really had run away together, and something had happened to Guy afterward, something that Renee didn't want known. Though the only circumstances under which Faith could imagine Renee stirring herself to violence would be to protect herself, she had to put Renee's name at the top of the list.
Beside Renee's name, because he had the motive, she wrote "Gray" in block letters. She looked at the two names. One of them, possibly both of them, knew what had happened to Guy. She would bet her socks on it. Nausea roiled in her stomach. Between murder suspects, which did she choose as the most likely: her mother, or the man she had always loved?
Stricken, Faith stared bitterly at the paper. Self-knowledge was seldom sweet. She must be the biggest fool alive, for no matter how Gray had wrecked her life or tried to make things impossible for her, no matter that she thought he might be involved in his father's death, she couldn't run from, destroy, or even ignore that bone-deep, compelling attraction to him, like metal shavings to a magnet. Just the sight of him made her go weak inside, and when he touched her she felt the electricity of it in every cell of her body. He had never touched her except in anger; v;hat would it be like if he came to her as a lover, with pleasure his intention? She couldn't imagine it. Her blood would boil, her heart stop.
What would she do if she found that Gray had indeed killed his father, or had him killed? The thought caused a sharp pain in her chest, and she barely stifled a moan. She would have to do the same thing she would do if it were anyone else. She couldn't live with herself otherwise. And she would grieve for the rest of her life.
There were other suspects, though less likely. She listed them under the two top names. Noelle. Amos. Perhaps Monica. Thinking laterally, the list widened to the other men Renee had slipped around and slept with, as well as Guy's other women. For two people infatuated with each other, they had been remarkably unfaithful. Ed Morgan had to go on that list, and Faith wrote his name down with pleasure. She racked her brain, trying to think of more names, but twelve years was a long time and most of the men had been eminently forgettable. Maybe town gossip could supply them, as well as some of Guy's conquests. From his reputation, he had cut quite a swath through southeastern Louisiana. Probably she could list quite a few of Prescott's society ladies, which would also make their husbands legitimate candidates for the list. Wryly she tossed down the pen. The way this list was going, she might as well take a phone book and start at the A's.
"You don't look like a private detective."
Francis P. Pleasant looked like a prosperous, conservative businessman. There were no ashtrays in his office; it was neat, and his light gray suit fit well. He had sad, dark eyes, but the expression in them lightened and warmed as he smiled at her. "Did you think I would have a bottle of bourbon on my desktop, and a cigarette with an inch-long ash dangling from my mouth?"
"Something like that." She returned his smile. "Or that you'd be wearing a Hawaiian shirt."
He laughed aloud at that. "Not my style. My wife always picked out my clothes—" He stopped, and the sadness returned to his eyes as he glanced at a photograph on his desk.
Faith followed his gaze. The frame was set at an angle to her, but she could still see that it was a picture of a pretty middle-aged woman, her expression so cheerful that it invited smiles. She must have died, for that sadness to be in his eyes. "Is that your wife?" she asked gently.
He managed another smile, but it was strained. "Yes, it is. I lost her a few months ago."
"I'm so sorry." She had just met him, but her sympathy was genuine.
"It was a sudden illness," he said, his voice a little jerky. "I have a bad heart; we both thought I would be the first to go. We were prepared for that. We were saving as much money as we could, for the time when I wouldn't be able to work. Then she got sick, just a cold, we thought, but forty-eight hours later she was dead from viral pneumonia. By the time she realized she was really sick, that it wasn't just a cold, it was too late."
Tears swam in his eyes, and Faith reached across the desk to put her hand on his. He turned his hand to squeeze her fingers, then blinked in bewilderment.
"I'm sorry," he apologized, blushing. He took out his handkerchief and blotted his eyes. "I don't know what came over me. You're a client, we've just met, and here I am crying on your shoulder."
"I've lost people I loved, too," she said, thinking of Scottie and Kyle. "Sometimes it helps to talk about it."
"Yes, it does, but that was still inappropriate of me. My only excuse is that there's something very warm about you, my dear." He realized that he had added an endearment, and blushed again. "Well! Perhaps I'd better ask what has brought you here."
"A man disappeared twelve years ago," she said. "I'd like you to find out if he's still alive."
He picked up a pen and rapidly scrawled something on a legal pad. "Your father? An old boyfriend?"
"Nothing like that. He was my mother's lover." Mr. Pleasant glanced up at her, but didn't appear startled. Probably in his business he had received requests far more bizarre than hers. Thinking that he would have a better chance of finding something if he knew all the details and circumstances, rather than just the bare facts of Guy's name, age, and description, she related everything that had happened twelve years ago, and why she wanted to find out if Guy was still alive. "I have to tell you," she said, "I think he's dead. Maybe my imagination is running away with me, but I think someone killed him."
Mr. Pleasant carefully placed the pen on the legal pad, positioning it between the blue lines. "You do realize, Mrs. Hardy, that, considering what you've told me, your mother is likely involved. For her to have left the same night... well, you understand how that looks."
"Yes, I understand. I can't think, though, that she would have killed him herself. My mother," Faith said with a faint smile, "would never kill the goose that laid the golden egg."
"But you do think that she knows what happened."
Faith nodded. "I've tried to get her to talk about it, but she won't."
"I assume there's no evidence to bring to the attention of the sheriff?"
"None. I don't want you to find out if Guy was murdered, Mr. Pleasant, I just want you to find out, if you can, whether or not he's alive. There is a remote possibility that he simply walked away from everything."
"Very remote," he said dryly. "Though I have to admit that stranger things have happened. If there's a paper trail, though, I'll find it. If he had been running from the law, he would have changed his name, but there was no reason for him to disguise his identity. It should be fairly easy to find out if he's ever surfaced."
"Thank you, Mr. Pleasant." She took out a business card and gave it to him. "Here's my number. Call me when you know something."
She left his office feeling pleased with her selection. She had contacted him first by phone, discussed his fee, and made an appointment. Then she had checked his references, and been well satisfied with the answers. Mr. Pleasant had been highly recommended by her business contacts, described as both honest and competent, the kind of person one instinctively trusted. If Guy was alive, Mr. Pleasant would find him.
She glanced at her watch. She had left Prescott early that morning and driven down to New Orleans for her appointment with Mr. Pleasant, which hadn't taken as long as she had anticipated. Margot was in town, and Faith had made a lunch date with her at the Court of Two Sisters. She had plenty of time to get there, so she drove back to her hotel and left the car, then set out on foot to do some window-shopping along the way.
It was steaming hot as she walked along the narrow streets of the French Quarter, and she crossed over to the shady side. She visited New Orleans frequently, because of the agency office here, but she had never really taken the time to explore this old district. Horse-drawn carriages moved slowly through the streets, with the driver and guide pointing out attractions to the tourists in the carriage. Most people, though, depended on their own feet to take them through the Quarter. Later, the main attraction would be the bars and clubs; this early in the day, shopping was the goal, and the myriad of boutiques, antiques shops, and specialty stores gave plenty of choice and opportunity to people who wanted to spend their money.
She went into a lingerie shop and bought a peach silk nightgown that looked like something one of the Hollywood movie queens would have worn back in the forties and fifties. After wearing almost nothing but hand-me-downs for the first fourteen years of her life, she felt sinfully self-indulgent about new clothes now. She could never bring herself to go on shopping binges now that she had a bit of cash, but every so often she allowed herself a luxury purchase: lace underwear, a sumptuous nightgown, a really good pair of shoes. Those small indulgences made her feel as if the bad times were truly in the past.
When she reached the restaurant, Margot was waiting for her inside. The tall blonde jumped up and hugged her enthusiastically, though it had been only a little over a week since Faith had left Dallas. "It's so good to see you! Well, are you settling down okay in your little burg? / don't think I'll ever settle down again! My first business trip, and it's to New Orleans. Isn't this a great place? I hope you don't mind sitting in the courtyard rather than inside. I know it's hot, but how often do you get to eat lunch in a courtyard in New Orleans?"
Faith smiled at the barrage of words. Yes, Margot was definitely excited by her new job. "Well, let's see. I'm twenty-six, and this is the first time I've eaten lunch or anything else in a courtyard, so I'd say it doesn't happen too often."
"Honey, I can give you ten years, so it's even rarer than you think, and I intend to enjoy every minute." They took their seats at one of the tables in the courtyard. Actually, it wasn't uncomfortably hot; there were umbrellas, and trees to give shade. Margot eyed the bag in Faith's hand. "I see you've been shopping. What did you buy?"
"A nightgown. I would show it to you, but I don't want to drag it out here in the middle of the restaurant."
Margot's eyes twinkled. "That kind of nightgown, huh?"
"Let's just say it isn't a Mother Hubbard," Faith replied delicately, and they laughed. A smiling waiter poured water for them, the light tinkle of the ice cubes making her suddenly aware of her thirst, and how hot she had become on the walk to the restaurant. She glanced around at the other diners as she sipped the cold water, and looked straight at Gray Rouillard.
Her heart gave that immediate, betraying little jump. He was sitting, with another man whose back was to her, two tables over from her and Margot. His dark eyes gleamed as he lifted his glass of wine to her in a silent toast. She lifted the water glass in a return salute, inclining her head in a mock gracious nod.
"Do you know someone here?" Margot asked, turning in her seat. Gray smiled at her. Margot smiled in return, a rather weak effort, then turned back to Faith with a poleaxed expression on her face. "Holy cow," she said in a dazed voice.
Faith understood perfectly. The flamboyance of New Orleans suited Gray. He was wearing a lightweight, Italian-cut suit, and a pale blue shirt that flattered the olive tones of his skin. His thick black hair was brushed back from his face and secured with a bronze clasp at the nape of his neck. The tiny diamond stud glittered in his left earlobe. With the breadth of his linebacker's shoulders and the feline grace with which he lounged at the small table, he drew the eye of every woman in the courtyard. He wasn't pretty-boy handsome; his French ancestors had bequeathed him a thin, high-bridged Gallic nose, slightly too long, and a heavy beard that left him with a five-o'clock shadow even at lunchtime. His jaw looked as solid as a rock. No, there was nothing pretty about Gray. What he was, was striking, and dangerously exciting, with his bold, dark eyes and the lazy, sensual curve of his mouth. He looked like a man who was adventurous and confident, both in bed and out.
"Who is he?" Margot breathed. "And do you know him, or are you flirting with a stranger?"
"I'm not flirting," Faith said, startled, and deliberately turned her gaze to the other side of the courtyard, away from Gray.
Margot laughed. "Honey, that little toast you gave him said, 'Come and get me, big boy, if you think you're man enough.' Do you think a pirate like that is going to ignore the challenge?"
Faith's eyes widened. "It did not! He raised his wineglass to me, so I did the same with my water glass. Why would he think anything about it when he started it?"
"Have you looked in the mirror lately?" Margot asked, sneaking another look over her shoulder at Gray, and a smile spread across her face.
Faith made a dismissive gesture. "That has nothing to do with it. He wouldn't—"
"He is," Margot said with satisfaction, and Faith couldn't control a little jump as she looked around and saw Gray almost upon them, "Ladies," he drawled, lifting Faith's hand from the table and bowing over it with an Old World gesture that seemed entirely natural to him. Her startled eyes met his, and she saw deviltry, as well as something hot and dangerous, in those dark depths before he shielded them as he touched his lips to her fingers. His lips were soft and warm, very warm. Her heart banged painfully against her ribs and she tried to withdraw her hand, but his grip tightened and she felt the tip of his tongue probe delicately into the sensitive hollow between her last two fingers. Startled, she jumped again, and his awareness of that betraying little movement was in his eyes as he straightened and finally released her hand. He turned to Margot, bending low over the hand she had extended with a dazed expression, but Faith noticed that he didn't kiss Margot's fingers. It didn't matter. Margot couldn't have looked more bedazzled if he had presented her with diamonds. Wondering if that same weak, yielding expression was on her face, Faith quickly looked down to disguise it, though of course it was too late. Gray was too experienced to miss any of the nuances. Her fingers tingled, and the skin between her fingers throbbed where his tongue had touched. The tiny damp spot felt both hot and cold, and she clenched her hand to dispel the sensation. Her face was burning. His action had been a subtle parody of sex, a mock penetration that her body recognized, and responded to with a pooling of heat in her lower body, a growing moistness. She could feel her nipples tighten and thrust against the lace of her bra. Damn him!
"Gray Rouillard," he was murmuring to Margot. "Faith and I are old acquaintances."
At least he hadn't lied and said they were friends, Faith thought, watching tautly as Margot introduced herself, and, to her horror, asked Gray to join them. Too late, she gave Margot a warning nudge with her foot.
"Thank you," Gray said, smiling down at Margot with such charm that she didn't react at all to Faith's kick. "But I'm here on business, and I have to get back to my own table. I just wanted to come over and speak to Faith for a moment. Have you known each other long?"
"Four years," Margot replied, and proudly added, "I'm her district manager."
Faith nudged her ankle again, harder this time, and when Margot gave her a surprised look, she glared a warning.
"Really," Gray said, sounding interested. His gaze was sharper. "What business are you in?"
Finally having gotten the message, Margot gave Faith a swift, questioning glance.
"Nothing on your scale," Faith said, smiling at him so coolly that he shrugged, realizing he wasn't going to gain any more information.
She exhaled with relief, but tensed again when he squatted by the table, a gracefully masculine action that brought his face more on a level with hers. It was more difficult to hide her expression now than when he had been standing. This close, she could see the bottomless black pupils of his eyes, the glitter in them as he looked at her. "I wish I'd known you were coming to New Orleans, sweetheart. We could have driven down together."
If he thought she would dissemble in front of Margot, he had sadly mistaken her. If he thought his charm had turned her brain into mush, he was wrong there, too. How she would like to rub his nose in the fact that she was a successful businesswoman, but the past week had made her wary of giving him any information about herself. Respectability wouldn't make any difference to either him or the town of Prescott; until—and if—she could prove that her mother hadn't run away with his father, nothing would change his attitude. Lifting her chin, a sure sign of temper, she said, "I'd rather have walked all the way than get in a car with you."
Margot made a choking sound, but Faith didn't spare a look for her, she kept her gaze locked with Gray's, the battle visually joined. He grinned with a buccaneer's reckless enjoyment of a fight.
"But we could have had a lot of fun, and shared... expenses."
"I'm sorry you're having money problems," she said sweetly. "Perhaps your business associate will put you up if you can't afford your own hotel room."
"I don't have to worry about hotel expenses." The grin broadened. "I own the hotel."
Damn, she thought. She'd have to find out which one he owned, and make sure she didn't book any tour groups into it.
"Why don't we have dinner together tonight?" he suggested. "We have a lot to talk about."
"I can't imagine what. Thank you, but no." She was driving back to Prescott this afternoon, but she would much rather he think she was refusing the invitation purely because she didn't want his company.
"It would be to your advantage," he said, and the dangerous look was back in his eyes.
"I doubt that anything a Rouillard suggested would be to my advantage."
"You haven't listened to my... suggestions yet."
"I don't intend to, either. Go back to your table and leave me alone."
"I'd planned on doing the first." He stood and trailed a long forefinger down her cheek. "There's no way in hell I'll do the last." He nodded to Margot and strolled back to his own table.
Margot blinked, her eyes owlish. "Shouldn't I check him for wounds? You really had the knife out for him. What on earth has that dark-eyed piece of work done to make you so mad at him?"
Faith took refuge in her water glass again, sipping from it until she had her expression under control. When she lowered it, she said, "It goes back a long way. He's a Hatfield and I'm a McCoy."
"A family feud? C'mon."
"He's trying to run me out of Prescott," Faith said baldly. "If he found out about the travel agency, it's possible he could cause trouble by ruining some of the tours we arrange. That would hurt our reputation, and we'd lose money. You heard him: He owns a hotel here. Not only is he filthy rich, so he has the money to bribe people to do what he wants, but he has contacts in the business. I wouldn't put anything past him."
"Wow. This sounds serious. What started this feud, and has there ever been actual bloodshed?"
"I don't know." Faith fiddled with her silverware, not wanting to mention her suspicion that Guy had been killed. "My mother used to be his father's mistress. Needless to say, his family hates anyone with the name of Devlin." That would do for an explanation; she couldn't go into the full tale, couldn't trot out her memories of that night even for a sympathetic audience.
"What did you say is the name of this town?" Margot demanded. "Prescott? Are you sure it isn't Peyton Place?"
They both laughed, and the waiter approached then to ask their preference for lunch. They both chose the buffet, and went inside to make their selections. Faith was acutely aware of a dark gaze following her every move, and wished Margot hadn't been so set on eating in the courtyard. She would much rather have been shielded from his view. Who could have guessed that he would be in New Orleans today, though, or that in a city of this size they would immediately run into each other? True, the Court of Two Sisters was a popular restaurant, but New Orleans was larded with popular restaurants.
Gray and his business associate left the restaurant not long after Faith and Margot returned to the table with their loaded plates. He paused beside Faith. "I do want to talk to you," he said. "Come to my suite tonight at six. I'm at the Beauville Courtyard."
She hid her dismay. The Beauville was a lovely, mid-size hotel with a great atmosphere, built around an open courtyard. She had booked tour groups and vacationers in there many times. If Gray owned it, she would have to find another lovely, mid-size hotel with a great atmosphere, because she didn't dare use his again. In answer to his command, for that was what it was, she shook her head. "No. I won't be there."
His eyes gleamed. "Then take your chances," he said, and walked away.
"Take your chances?" Margot echoed indignantly, staring at his broad back. "What the hell did he mean by that? Was he threatening you?"
"Probably," Faith said, lifting a bite of pasta salad to her mouth. She closed her eyes in delight. "Mmmm, taste this. It's wonderful."
"Are you out of your mind? How can you eat when Mr. Macho just threatened to... do something, I guess." Frustrated, Margot picked up her fork and tasted the pasta salad. She paused. "This is good. You're right, worrying about him can wait until after we eat." Faith chuckled. "I'm used to his threats."
"Does he ever carry through with them?"
"Always. One thing about Gray, he means what he says, and he isn't shy about throwing his weight around."
Margot's fork clattered to the table. "Then what are you going to do?"
"Nothing. After all, he didn't actually threaten anything specific."
"That means you have to be on your guard against everything."
"I am anyway, where he's concerned." Pain pierced her at her own words, and she looked down at her plate to hide it. How wonderful it would be to feel safe and relaxed with Gray, to feel she could trust that all his ruthless determination, his vital intensity, would be used in defense of her rather than against her. Did Noelle and Monica know how lucky they were, to have someone like him standing ready to go to battle on their behalf? She loved him, but he was her enemy. She could never let herself forget that, not let wishful thinking cloud her common sense.
Deliberately she steered the conversation into safer waters, namely the few problems that had developed with her in Prescott rather than on the scene in Dallas. She was relieved that the problems were few, and relatively minor. Some difficulties had been expected, but Margot was a good business manager and got on well with the travel agents in the other offices. The only real difference was that now Margot was the one traveling around, instead of Faith, though there would be times when Faith's presence was required. For the most part, everything had worked out. They decided that, since Faith was so close to Baton Rouge and New Orleans anyway, she would continue overseeing those offices, because it would be foolish for Margot to fly or drive all that way. Margot was a little disappointed, because she was entranced with New Orleans, but she was also extremely practical, and the change was her suggestion. There would be times when it wouldn't be convenient for Faith to get to either city, so she would content herself with the occasional visit.
After lunch, they parted company outside the restaurant, for Margot's hotel was in the opposite direction from where Faith had left her car. It was even hotter now than it had been before, the mugginess making the air feel thick, hard to breathe. The smell of the river was stronger, and black clouds were looming on the horizon, promising a spring thunderstorm that would temporarily relieve the heat, then turn the streets into a steam bath. Faith speeded up her steps, wanting to be on her way home before the storm broke.
As she drew even with a recessed doorway that led into a darkened, deserted shop, a strong hand seized her arm from behind and dragged her into the doorway. Mugged! she thought, and anger flashed through her, red-hot and reckless. She had struggled too hard for what she had to give it up without protest, the way the police advised. Instead she jabbed her elbow backward, slamming it into a hard belly and eliciting a very satisfactory grunt from her assailant. She turned, her fist drawn back, and belatedly opened her mouth to yell for help. She had a blurred impression of height and wide shoulders, then she was jerked hard against him and her voice was muffled against an expensive, oatmeal-colored Italian suit.
"God Almighty," Gray said, amusement rich in his deep voice. "You little redheaded wildcat, if you're as wild as this in bed, it must be a hell of a ride."
Shock at his comment mingled with relief at his identity, and neither diluted her anger. Breathing hard, she shoved at his chest, freeing herself. "Damn you! I thought I was being mugged!"
His eyebrows drew together. "And you started slinging that sharp little elbow?" he asked in disbelief, rubbing his stomach. "What if I hadbeen a mugger, and had a knife or a gun? Don't you know you're supposed to give up your purse rather than chance getting hurt?"
"Like hell," she snapped, pushing her hair out of her face.
His face cleared, and he laughed. "No, I guess you wouldn't." He reached out and tucked a fiery strand behind her ear. "Attack first and think about it later, hm?"
She jerked her head away from his touch. "Why did you grab me like that?"
"I've been following you since you left the restaurant, and thought this would be as good a place as any for our little chat. You really should pay more attention to who's behind you."
"Skip the lecture, if you don't mind." She glanced at the sky. "I want to get to my car before that storm gets here."
"We can go to my hotel—or yours—if you don't want to talk here."
"No. I'm not going anywhere with you." Especially to a hotel room. He kept making those sexually loaded remarks, alarming her. She didn't trust his motives, and she didn't trust herself to resist him. All in all, it was best to stay as far away from him as she could.
"Then here it is." Gray looked down at her, standing so close to her in the narrow space of the doorway that her breasts were almost brushing his suit. When he had jerked her against him to muffle her scream, he had felt them, firm and round and luscious. He wanted to see them, wanted to touch them, taste them. He was so physically aware of her that he felt as if he were standing in the middle of an electrical field, with the air snapping and sizzling around them, sparks flying. Fighting with her was more exhilarating than making love to other women. Maybe as a young girl she had been as shy as a fawn, but she had grown into a woman who wasn't afraid of anger, hers or anyone else's.
"I'll buy the house from you," he said abruptly, reminding himself why he had wanted to talk to her. "I'll give you double what you paid for it."
Her green eyes narrowed, making them look even more catlike. "That isn't a good business decision," she said, her tone light, but with temper still seething just below the surface.
He shrugged. "I can afford it. Can you afford to turn it down?"
"Yes," she said, and smiled.
The satisfaction in that smile almost made him laugh again. So she had made something of herself, had she? More than had been obvious at first; if she had a district manager, then obviously she had other employees, in several locations. He felt unwilling pride at what she had accomplished swell in his chest. He knew in intimate detail how little she had possessed when he'd had the Devlins thrown out, because he had watched her frantically picking her things up out of the dirt. Most people had a backup system of friends and relatives, pooled resources; Faith had had nothing, making her accomplishments all the more remarkable. If she'd had his assets, Gray thought, she might own the whole state by now. It wouldn't be easy to get rid of a woman with that kind of grit.
Lust coiled and tightened in his guts. He'd never been attracted to weak, helpless women who needed protecting; he had enough of that with his family. There was nothing weak about Faith.
He studied her face, seeing both the resemblance to Renee and the differences. Her mouth was wider, more mobile, her lips red and lush and as velvety as rose petals. Her skin was perfect, with a porcelain texture that would show the imprint of a touch, a kiss. He thought of marking her with his mouth, kissing his way down her body until he reached the soft folds between her legs, folds that protected places even more tender. The image brought him to full, painful erection. Standing this close to her, he could smell the sweet, delicious scent of her skin, and he wondered if that sweetness would be more intense between her legs. He had always loved the way women smelled, but Faith's scent was so enticing that every muscle in his body tightened with need, making it difficult for him to think of anything else.
He knew he shouldn't do it, even as he reached for her. The last thing he wanted was to follow his father's example; he still couldn't think of his father's leaving without feeling the hurt and anger, the betrayal, as fresh as if it had just happened. He didn't want to hurt Noelle and Monica, didn't want to revive that old scandal.
There were a hundred reasons, all of them good, why he shouldn't want Faith Devlin in his arms, but in that instant none of them mattered a rat's ass. His hands closed on her waist, and the feel of her, warm and soft, so vibrant that his palms tingled where he touched her, went to his head like a potent wine. He saw her eyes widen, the black pupils expanding until only a thin rim of green remained. Her hands lifted and flattened against his chest, the placement covering his own nipples, and a shiver of response rippled his skin. Inexorably, his gaze fastened on her mouth, he drew her closer until her slim body rested against him. He felt her legs tangle with his, her firm breasts push against his stomach, saw those soft, full lips part as she drew in a startled breath. Then he lifted her on tiptoe and bent his head, and fed that particular hunger.
Her lips felt like rose petals, too, soft and velvety. He slanted his head and increased the pressure of his mouth, forcing them to open, a flower blooming at his command. Blood thundered through his veins and he pulled her tighter, sliding his arms around her and holding her welded to his body, letting her feel the swollen ridge of his erection against the softness of her belly. He felt her shudder, felt the convulsive movement of her hips, arching into him, and fierce male triumph flooded him. Her arms slid upward over his shoulders, to twine around his neck, and her teeth parted to allow him deeper access. A low growl sounded deep in his throat, and he took it, plundering her mouth with his tongue. Her taste was sweet and hot, flavored with the strong coffee she had drunk with her dessert. Her tongue curled around his in heated welcome, then she sucked daintily, holding him within her mouth.
He drove her backward, forcing her against the locked and boarded door. Dimly he could hear the voices of the people passing on the sidewalk behind them, hear the sullen rumble of thunder, but they meant nothing. She was live fire in his arms, not struggling against his kiss, not just accepting it, but responding wildly to his touch. Her lips trembled and clung and caressed. He wanted more, wanted everything. Deliberately he cupped her buttocks and lifted her, drawing her hips inward so that his erection was nestled in the soft notch of her legs. He rubbed her back and forth against him, groaning aloud at the exquisite pressure.
Rain pattered on the street, signaling the arrival of the storm, and there was a scurry of movement as people darted for cover. A clap of thunder made him lift his head and look around, a little irritated by this intrusion into the sensual haze that clouded his mind.
Whether it was the thunder or his own reaction to it that broke the spell on Faith, she suddenly stiffened in his arms and began shoving against him. He caught a glimpse of her furious face and quickly set her on her feet, releasing her and stepping back before she began screaming bloody murder.
She wriggled past him, onto the sidewalk, where the rain immediately soaked her, and turned to face him. Her eyes were yellowish with turbulence. "Don't touch me again," she said, her voice rough and low. Then she turned and began walking as fast as she could, her head lowered against the rain that swept down the narrow street like a gray curtain. He started after her, intending to drag her to shelter, but forced himself to stop and step back into the doorway. She would fight him like a wildcat if he went after her now. He watched her until she turned the corner two blocks down, and disappeared from sight. She was almost running by then... escaping. From him.
For now.
|
After the Night - Linda Howard.txt
| 10 |
Faith was dripping wet and shaking with both cold and reaction when she reached her car. Her hands trembled as she tried to fit the key into the lock, and it took her several tries before she succeeded. Crawling in, she collapsed against the steering wheel, pressing her forehead hard against the cold vinyl. Idiot! she thought violently. Fool!
She had to have been insane to give in to the craving to kiss him. Now he knew; she couldn't hide it from him any longer. For the sake of a few moments of pleasure, she had let him see her weakness, and now he knew that she wanted him. Humiliation burned in her face, ate like acid at her insides. She knew his nature very well, having firsthand experience of his ruthlessness. He was a predator, and the first hint of weakness would draw him straight in for the kill.
He wouldn't rest now until he'd had her; the occasional suggestive remark would become full-fledged attempts at seduction, and what had just happened proved that she couldn't trust her common sense to resist him. Where he was concerned, she didn't have any common sense. Horror filled her at the thought of being casually used and discarded, as if she were a sexual Kleenex. He thought of her as her mother's clone, a slut willing to spread her legs for anyone who had the equipment—and from what she'd felt, he had more than his share—while she ached for him, her childhood infatuation having changed into a very adult yearning. She wanted nothing more than to be loved by him, to be free to open the floodgates on her own dammed-up reservoir of love; he would turn that dream into a bitter nightmare, using her weakness for him as a means to hurt her, reduce her to being, after all, another Devlin whore for a Rouillard to use.
As much as she wanted to stay in Prescott, she would rather leave than live with that humiliation, to see contempt in his eyes when he looked at her, as she had seen it once before. His words echoed in her mind, a refrain that she had heard many times over the years: You're trash. The phrase was branded on her subconscious, surfacing every so often to taunt her.
No. She couldn't live through that again. But for a few minutes, she had been in heaven. His arms had been around her and she had been free to touch him, to stroke his shoulders, thrust her fingers into the thick, silky tail of hair gathered at the nape of his neck. What would he look like with his hair loose, hanging to his shoulders? Or damp with sweat, and swinging forward as he bent over her, his face tight with passion –
She moaned, aching with a sweet pain that only he could ease. She had never been promiscuous; she had been a virgin when she'd married Kyle, and he was the only man with whom she'd ever made love. Her chastity, however, reflected her horror of being like Renee, with all the ugly association of being the town whore, rather than a lack of interest in the act itself. She loved making love, loved the feel of a man inside her, loved the scents and sounds, the tangled sweatiness. As her grief at Kyle's death had eased, her hunger for sexual contact had grown, intensified by her own restraint. She simply couldn't bring herself to have sex purely for the physical release, and after Kyle's death she hadn't wanted emotional involvement, either. She had gone four years without being held, without being kissed, until Gray had taken her in his arms and briefly opened the door to paradise.
There was a hot earthiness in him that fanned the banked coals of her own sexual fire. He had been as hard as a rock, and blatant about it. He had wanted her to feel him, had deliberately pulled her into him, lifted her to push the hard ridge of his erection against her mound. They had been on a public street, in daylight, but that hadn't stopped him. Even though this was New Orleans, where such things might not be all that unusual, she had never before done anything like that. She had always gone out of her way to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Respectability, responsibility, were too important to her for her to allow herself to be publicly fondled, yet that was exactly what she had done.
When he touched her, she forgot everything else but the hot joy of being in his arms. Despairing, she wondered if she would have stopped him even if he had done more, or if she would have let herself be taken there in the street like the lowest of whores, oblivious to decency, modesty, even legality. Her face burned at the thought of being arrested for public lewdness, or whatever it was called. Acute stupidity would be a better term.
It would never have happened with anyone but Gray. With no one else would she have lost herself so completely. She sat motionless in the car, watching the rain beat down in sheets beyond the concrete pillars of the public parking garage, and let appalled realization seep into her mind. Perhaps she had always sensed the truth, but pushed it away. She couldn't hide from the full reach of reality any longer. She had loved Kyle, enjoyed sleeping with him, but it was as if only half of her had been involved. There had always been this other part of herself that was set aside, and belonged, irrevocably, to Gray. She had cheated Kyle; perhaps he had never known, and granted, their marriage had been in trouble because of his drinking, but still she should never have married him without loving him wholeheartedly. In the back of her mind had always been the thought that she would remarry someday, but now she knew that she couldn't; she couldn't cheat another man. There was only one man whom she could love completely, heart and soul and body, nothing held back, and that was Gray Rouillard. And he was the one man to whom she didn't dare give herself, because he would destroy her.
When the rain stopped, Gray walked back to his hotel and went up to his suite, where he made one phone call, to Dallas. "Truman, look something up for me. You have a city directory, don't you? See if there's a Faith Hardy listed in it."
He crossed his legs at the ankle, his feet propped on the coffee table, and waited while his friend and business associate thumbed through the massive volume. A moment later the Texas accent twanged in his ear. "I got two Faith Hardys, and about ten other Hardys with the first initial F."
"Any of them F. D. Hardy?"
"Ah... no. There's an F. C. and an F. G. but not an F. D."
"Occupations?"
"Let's see. One's a schoolteacher, one's retired..." Truman ran down the list of occupations. None fit the meager facts Gray had on Faith. Dallas might not be the right city, after all, but it was more likely that Faith had declined to be listed in the city directory.
"Okay, that's a dead end, I think. Look up Margot Stanley, M-a-r-g-o-t."
Truman snorted. "Are you sure it isn't M-a-r-g-a-u-x? Isn't that the way the 'in' people spell it these days?"
"Look up both spellings."
There was the sound of more pages being turned, and Truman humming. He paused. "There's a shit pot full of Stanleys."
"Any Margots, of either the American or 'in' variety?"
"Yeah, here's an American-variety Margot."
"Where does she work?"
"Holladay Travel. Spelled with two I's and an a."
"Cross-reference that, and see if it lists the owner." More humming. "Bingo," Truman said. "The owner is F. D. Hardy."
"Thanks," Gray said, amused at how easy it had been, after all. "Any time."
Gray hung up the phone and considered what he had just discovered. Faith owned a travel agency. Good for her, he thought, inexplicably pleased. On a hunch, he dragged the New Orleans phone directory out of the desk and looked through the yellow pages. There it was, in a discreet, tasteful ad: "Holladay Travel—Put the Holiday Back in Your Vacation, and Leave the Worry to Us."
So she had at least two offices, and probably more, which explained how she had been able to pay cash for her house. He grinned as he remembered the satisfied little smile on her face when she had thrown his offer to buy the house back in his face. But if she was this prosperous, why did she want to keep it such a secret? Why wasn't she broadcasting it all over Prescott, to show everyone that a Devlin could crawl out of the trash heap, after all? Why had she so obviously interrupted Margot and kept her from giving out any more information than she had already let slip?
It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out. Faith was afraid he would do something to sabotage her business. Not only did he carry a lot of weight in Louisiana and beyond, but he had just told her that he owned a hotel, in a city that made its living from tourists. It would be easy for him to cause trouble for her agency, and she evidently expected him to do exactly that. Her opinion of him wasn't very high, he thought wryly.
Hell, why should it be? On a steamy summer night, twelve years ago, he had ground her into the dirt. After that night, she probably thought of him as the devil incarnate.
Only an hour before, he had scared her by unceremoniously grabbing her from behind, though Little Red had seemed more furious than frightened; she had come out swinging, those green eyes narrowed and determined. Then he had all but mauled her on a public street, gripping her ass, lifting her up and grinding his cock against her mound. No wonder she had run from him, when he had finally turned her loose.
Except... she hadn't protested. Instead she had been so hot and sweet that he felt dizzy remembering her in his arms, plastered against his body. She had been taut and trembling with desire, vibrating with it. Her response had broadsided him, knocked him so crazy that he still hadn't recovered. For a moment he had been blind with lust, insensible to everything else but the driving need to be inside her. If that clap of thunder hadn't startled him, he might have tried to take her right there, standing in the doorway, with people walking past no more than two feet away. He couldn't remember ever before being so wild for a woman that nothing else mattered, but Faith had reduced him to that level with only a kiss.
Just a kiss, sweet and spicy at the same time, so hot it had seared him. Her tongue, curling against his in love play. The unreserved sensuality in the way she had sucked on his tongue. The press of her body, eager and instinctive. She wanted him, as fiercely as he wanted her.
Memory re-created the resilient fullness of her buttocks in his hands, and he clenched them into fists to contain the tingling of his palms. It was worse than he had thought, this gnawing lust to have her. He wasn't accustomed to denying himself any of his sexual appetites, but the barriers between them were both solid and maddening. There was his mother, who had so totally withdrawn when faced with the humiliation of her husband leaving her for the town whore. Monica, her wrists slashed and her blood pooling at her feet; her white face was another image that never left him. There were his own feelings, the rage and pain at being abandoned by his father. The barriers weren't all on his side, either; the memory of that night lay between him and Faith, a mental Berlin Wall, stark and shattering. Too much pain, too many reasons.
Their bodies didn't give a damn.
That was it in a nutshell. He wasn't a Don Juan, but it was a fact that getting sex had always been easy for him. Nothing in his considerable experience, however, had prepared him for this... fever. They couldn't look at each other without feeling its heat. And when they touched, it was like an inferno.
Restlessly he paced the floor, trying to find some way around the barriers. She couldn't stay in Prescott; that was asking too much of his family. No, he couldn't let up on making life as miserable as possible for her there, not that he had been able, or willing, to do much anyway. He had inconvenienced her, period. He couldn't bring himself to really persecute her. She didn't deserve it; she had been a victim, too. She had worked hard to make something of her life, and had succeeded. If it weren't for his family, hell, he'd welcome her with open arms. An open fly, too, he thought wryly, and felt the twinge of arousal in his groin.
But he couldn't make his family go away, couldn't change the way they felt, so Faith had to go. Maybe not far. Maybe he could convince her to move to Baton Rouge, or even any of the small towns around Prescott. Just somewhere out of the parish, but close enough that they could see each other. She had made a strategic mistake in letting him see how much she wanted him, because he could use that as a means of convincing her to move. We can't be together here. Move, and we'll see each other as often as possible. She wouldn't like it; she'd probably tell him to go to hell, at first. But the fever was there, burning in her the same way it was burning in him. If he used every opportunity to fan the flames, she would eventually see things his way, assuming they didn't both go up in smoke in the meantime.
She could keep the house in Prescott, if selling it made her feel as if she was giving up too much. He'd buy her another house, anywhere she wanted.
He was faced with two facts. She had to leave Prescott, and he had to have her. Whatever it took, he had to have her.
"I agree with you," Mr. Pleasant said, sipping from the glass of iced tea Faith had given him. "I think Guy Rouillard is dead, and has been for twelve years."
He was dressed today in a pale blue seersucker suit; it would have been tacky if it hadn't fit so well, if his white shirt hadn't been so pristine, his tie so impeccable. On Mr. Pleasant, a seersucker suit looked natty. Some of the sadness was gone from his dark eyes, replaced by the sparkle of interest.
They sat in the air conditioned coolness of her living room. Faith had been surprised when he'd called her; it had been only two days since she had hired him. But here he was, with a notepad balanced on his knee.
"There's been no trace of him since the night he vanished," he said. "No credit card purchases, no bank withdrawals, no Social Security taxes paid in or tax return filed. Mr. Rouillard wasn't a criminal, so there was no need for him to change his name or disappear so completely. Logically, then, he's dead."
Faith drew a deep breath. "That's what I thought. I wanted to make certain, though, before I begin asking questions."
"You do realize that, if he was murdered, your questions could make someone very anxious." He took another sip of his tea. "The situation could be dangerous for you, my dear. Perhaps it would be better to let sleeping dogs lie."
"I've thought of the possibility of danger," she admitted. "But considering my mother's involvement with him and the fact that everyone thinks they ran away together, no one would be surprised at my interest. My gall, maybe, but not my interest."
He chuckled. "It depends on the nature of the questions, I suppose. If you came right out and said you thought Mr. Rouillard had been killed, that would attract a lot of attention." He sobered, and his tone softened. "My advice is to forget about it. The murder, if there was one, is twelve years old. Time covers a lot of tracks, and you have no evidence to tell you where to begin looking. You aren't likely to find anything, but you may put yourself in danger."
"Not even try to find out what happened?" she asked softly. "Let a murderer go unpunished?"
"Ah. You're thinking about justice. It's a wonderful concept, if you have the means to accomplish it. Sometimes, though, justice has to be weighed against other considerations, and reality gets in the way. Probably Mr. Rouillard was murdered. Probably your mother is involved, in knowledge if not in deed. Could you handle that? What if his death was an accident, but she was brought up on murder charges? Gray Rouillard is a powerful man; do you think he'd let his father's death go unpunished? The worst scenario, of course, is if his death wasn't an accident. In that case, my dear, you would definitely be in danger yourself." She sighed. "My reasons for wanting to find out what happened to him aren't entirely altruistic. In fact, they're mostly selfish. I want to live here; this is home, this is where I grew up. But I won't be accepted here as long as everyone thinks Guy ran away with my mother. The Rouillards don't want me here; Gray is making things difficult for me. I can't buy my groceries in Prescott, I can't fill up my car. Unless I can prove Mama didn't have anything to do with Guy's disappearance, I'll never have a friend here."
"And what if you prove she killed him?" Mr. Pleasant softly asked.
Faith bit her lip, and rolled the cold, damp glass between her hands. "That's a chance I'll have to take." The words were low, almost inaudible. "I know that, if she's guilty, I won't be able to live here. But knowing what really happened, no matter how bad, won't be as bad as not knowing. Maybe I won't find out anything, but I'm going to try."
He sighed. "I thought you'd say that. If you don't mind, I'd like to ask a few questions around town, just out of curiosity. Folks might tell me things that they wouldn't tell you."
That was true. Now that her identity was known, most people would clam up around her rather than defy Gray. Still, Mr. Pleasant had already completed the job for which she'd hired him. "I can't afford any further investigation," she said honestly.
He waved his hand in dismissal. "This is for my own curiosity. I've always loved a good mystery."
She eyed him doubtfully. "Has that ever kept you from charging your regular fees?"
"Well, no," he admitted, and laughed. "But I don't need the money, and I'd like to know what happened to Mr. Rouillard. I don't know how much longer I'll be able to work with my heart the way it is. Probably not long, so I'm only going to spend my time on cases that interest me. As for money... well, let's just say I don't have much need for it now."
With his wife dead, he meant. He suddenly busied himself with flipping through his notes, and she knew he was once again fighting tears. She allowed him the dignity of pretense and asked if he would like more iced tea.
"No, thank you. It was delicious, just the thing on a hot day." He stood, smoothing the crisp seersucker into place. "I'll let you know if I get any interesting answers. Is there a motel in town?"
She gave him the directions to the motel as she walked out on the porch with him. "Have supper with me tonight," she invited on impulse, disliking the thought of him eating alone, making do with a fast-food sandwich.
He blushed, the color extending all the way into his thinning hair. "I'd be delighted."
"Would you mind if we ate at six? I prefer eating early."
"So do I, Mrs. Hardy. Six o'clock, then." He was smiling as he walked jauntily to his car. Faith watched him drive away, then returned to the paperwork she had abandoned at his arrival. She looked forward to supper; she had developed a definite soft spot for Mr. Pleasant.
He arrived promptly at six, as she had known he would, and they sat down to a light meal of tender grilled pork chops, saffron rice, and fresh green beans. He kept looking around, absorbing the little details—the starched linen napkins, the fragrant centerpiece of tiny wild roses, the aromas of home-cooked food—and she knew that he had missed this since his wife had died. They lingered over dessert, a lemon sorbet with just the right amount of tartness. Talking with him was easy; he was very old-fashioned, and she found that comforting. Consideration of any sort had been in such short supply during her formative years that she doubly appreciated it now.
It was almost eight when a single hard knock rattled her front door. Faith stiffened; she didn't have to open the door to know who was standing on her porch.
"Is something wrong?" Mr. Pleasant asked, too astute to miss her change of expression.
"I think you're about to meet Gray Rouillard," she said, getting to her feet and crossing to the door. As usual, her heart was beating too fast and too hard at the prospect of seeing him, talking to him. In over fifteen years, that hadn't changed; she might as well be eleven again, big-eyed with hero worship. It was twilight, the long spring days reluctant to give up their glow. He was silhouetted against the pale opal of the sky, a tall, broad-shouldered, faceless figure. "I hope Fm not interrupting you," he said, but there was a hard undertone to his rumbling voice that told her he didn't give a damn if he was or not.
"If you were, I wouldn't have answered the door," she replied as she let him in. She couldn't erase the challenge of her own tone, though she tried to moderate it for Mr. Pleasant's sake.
Gray's smile was nothing more than a baring of teeth as he turned to Mr. Pleasant, who had politely risen from his seat at Gray's entrance. The room suddenly seemed too small, filled and dominated by Gray's vital masculine presence, all six feet four of it. He was wearing a white shirt, black jeans, and low-heeled boots, and looked more like a pirate than ever. His teeth flashed as white as the tiny diamond in his ear.
"We've already finished dinner," Faith said smoothly, recovering her control. "Mr. Pleasant, this is Gray Rouillard, a neighbor. Gray, Francis Pleasant, from New Orleans."
Gray held out his hand, and Mr. Pleasant's smaller hand was swallowed by his grip. "A friend or a business associate?" he asked, as if he had a right to the information.
Mr. Pleasant's eyes twinkled, and he thoughtfully pursed his mouth as he retrieved his hand. "Why, both, I believe. And you? A friend as well as a neighbor?"
"No," Faith said.
Gray shot her a hard, quick look. "Not exactly," he said.
Mr. Pleasant's eyes twinkled even more. "I see." He took Faith's hand in his and lifted it to his mouth for a courtly kiss, then bestowed another one on her cheek. "I must be going, my dear; my old bones want to rest. My hours resemble an infant's these days. It was a lovely dinner. Thank you for inviting me."
"It was my pleasure," she said, patting his hand and kissing his cheek, too.
"I'll call," he promised as he went out the door. As she had that morning, Faith waited in the doorway until he was in his car, and waved as he reversed out of the driveway.
Fighting down her dread, she closed the door and turned to face Gray, who had silently approached until he stood only a foot behind her. His eyes were black with temper. "Who the hell is he?" he growled. "Your sugar daddy? Did you mix business with pleasure in New Orleans, or is it all business to you?"
"None of your business," she said flatly, mocking him with her repetition of the word. She glared up at him, fighting the tiny red flare of rage and not completely succeeding. Mr. Pleasant was forty years older than she, but of course, Gray's first thought was that she was sleeping with him.
He moved one step closer, erasing the small distance between them. "By God, it is my business, and has been for the past two days."
Hot color ran into Faith's cheeks at the reference to what had happened between them in New Orleans. "That didn't mean anything," she began, her voice gruff with embarrassment, but he gripped her shoulders and gave her a single shake.
"The hell it didn't. Maybe you need to refresh your memory." He bent his head and, too late, she put up her hands to try to hold him away. Her palms flattened against his chest as his mouth covered hers, and immediately she was engulfed in heat. His heat. Her own. Dizziness roared in her ears. She swayed against him, her lips parting to mold more precisely to the demanding pressure of his, to admit the hot probe of his tongue. All the rich blues and golds and burgundies of his scent swirled around her, inside her, possessing her. His heartbeat thudded, strong and heavy, beneath her right palm. She felt the hard, immediate swell of his erection against her belly, and her hips moved automatically, seeking.
He lifted his head and moved back, putting a few inches between them. He was breathing hard, his eyes fierce with arousal, his lips red and moist and a little swollen from that hard kiss. His fingers moved on her shoulders, massaging, caressing. "Don't deny what happened."
"Nothing happened." She uttered the lie with a defiance that hid her desperation. He knew it was a lie, she saw the anger in his face, but she said it anyway. She knew what he was doing. In New Orleans she had made the mistake of giving him an inch, and now he was trying to take full advantage of it and gain a mile. Perhaps he had come here tonight thinking she would be easy for him; he could take her to bed, then cajole her into leaving town. For him, he would say. So they could be together without upsetting his mother. Her blatant lie served notice that she didn't intend to let him have his way. She wrenched away from him, sliding sideways to prevent him from pinning her against the door. "It was just a kiss—"
"Yeah, and King Kong was just a monkey. Goddammit, stand still," he said irritably, reaching out to grab her, this time holding her arms. "You make me dizzy with that damn two-step. I'm not going to throw you down and crawl on top of you—not just yet, anyway."
Her eyes flared with panic. "You can bet your sweet bottom dollar, you're not!" she shouted, once again trying to jerk away. "Tonight, or any other time!"
"Would you stop that?" he snapped. "You're going to bruise yourself." With a quick movement he whirled her around and folded his arms about her, crossing them under her breasts and holding her wrists manacled. Just that quickly, that easily, she was subdued and surrounded, his muscled body hard and warm against her back. Temptation rose, strong and immediate, urging her to relax her neck and let her head fall backward onto his chest, let her body soften and mold itself against his, let herself inhale the rich, musky scent of his skin and grow intoxicated on it. She shuddered as hunger surged within her, and knew that if she gave him the smallest response now, she would be lost. It wouldn't take five minutes for him to have her flat on the bed.
"You see?" he asked, his voice softening to a velvety punas he felt her tremble. His warm breath stirred her hair. "All I have to do is touch you. It's the same for me, Faith. I don't like this worth a damn, but by God, I want you, and we're going to do something about it."
She closed her eyes, still shaking with the effort of resisting him, and gave a sharp little shake of her head. "No."
"No, what?" He nuzzled his cheek against the top of her head. "No, you don't want me, or no, we aren't going to do something about it? Which one are you lying about now?"
"I won't let you," she said, not letting him distract her. She opened her eyes and stared straight ahead, focusing on one of the lamps in an effort to ignore the feel of his arms around her. "I won't let you treat me like dirt again."
He stilled, even his breath halting for a moment. Then he let it out with a quiet sigh. "It's always between us, isn't it?" There was no need to be more specific; the memory of that night was almost tangible. He paused. "Baby, I know about Holladay Travel, that you've worked for everything you have. I know you're not like your mother."
Oh, God. He knew about her agency. She fought a lurch of panic, and instead concentrated on his last statement. "Sure you do," she said bitterly. "You think so highly of my character that you just accused me of having a sugar daddy. My God, I invited a lonely old man to have dinner with me, so of course I'm crawling into bed with him!" Infuriated, she tried once again to wrench free.
His arms tightened until she could barely breathe. "I told you to stop that," he warned. "You'll be black and blue."
"If I am, it'll be your fault, not mine! You're the one doing the manhandling!" She kicked backward, catching his shin with her heel, but she was wearing soft-soled slippers and he was wearing boots; he grunted, but she knew she hadn't hurt him. She twisted her body, trying to turn around so she could do more damage.
"You... little... wildcat," he said, panting with the effort of controlling her. "Damn it, would you be still! I was jealous," he admitted baldly.
For a moment, she was too stunned to react. She stood motionless in the circle of his arms, wariness at battle with a dizzying spurt of elation. Jealous! He couldn't be jealous unless he cared—no. She couldn't let herself fall into that trap. She didn't dare believe him. She had witnessed his seduction technique before; she remembered how he had soothed Lindsey Partain, complimenting her, telling her how much he wanted her, needed her. He was adept at getting what he wanted. While she had no doubt that he wanted her physically, with the evidence so prominent, she knew that nothing else had changed. He still wanted her to leave, and would use her weakness for him to convince her to go.
"Do you honestly expect me to believe you?" she finally asked, weariness in every word.
He nudged his hips forward. "Do you deny this?"
She forced herself to shrug. "What's there to deny? You have a hard-on. Big deal. That doesn't mean anything."
A chuckle vibrated in his chest. "It's a good thing I have a healthy ego, or you'd give me an inferiority complex."
She wished he wouldn't laugh. She didn't want him to have a sense of humor. She wanted him to be mean-spirited and small-minded, so she could despise him. Instead he was bold and audacious, with a disarming laugh. He was ruthless, but he wasn't mean.
He bent his head to nuzzle her ear, his warm breath tickling the sensitive whorls. "There doesn't have to be a problem," he murmured. "We can be together—not here, but there's a workable solution."
Faith stiffened again. "I'll just bet there is. And it involves my leaving town, doesn't it?"
His tongue flicked out, lazily playing with her earlobe before he caught it between his teeth and sensuously nipped at it. "You wouldn't have to go far," he cajoled. "You don't even have to sell this house. I'll buy another house for you, a bigger one, if you want—"
Rage engulfed her, red-hot and seething. She wrenched free of his slackened embrace and spun to face him, her face white and her eyes burning. "Shut up! You can't stop thinking that I'm for sale, can you? The only change is that you've moved me up into a higher price bracket! I don't want your damn house, but I do want you out of mine. Right now!"
His eyes narrowed, and he didn't move an inch. "I wasn't thinking about buying you. I was trying to make things as easy as possible for you."
"Nice try, but I know too much about you. I've seen you in action, remember?" The memory of that night was bitter in her tone, and flashed starkly between them. She had that other memory, too, one he didn't know about: the time she had watched him with Lindsey Partain. She'd seen him in action, all right.
He was silent a moment, his dark gaze moving over her. "That won't happen again," he said gently.
"No, it won't," she agreed, lifting her chin. "I won't let you ever treat me that way again."
"You wouldn't have much choice, if I decided to do it," he said, that dangerous glitter coming into his eyes. He chucked her under the chin. "Remember that, baby. I can play a lot rougher than I have so far." She jerked her head away. "So can I." His gaze slid down her body, the expression in his eyes changing into something slow and heated. "I'll bet you can. You almost tempt me to find out how rough you can be, just for the fun of it. But this discussion has gone way off course. We aren't in a war, baby. We can have a nice arrangement, and enjoy ourselves without hurting my family, if you'll only agree to it."
"No," she said.
"That must be your favorite word. I'm getting damn tired of hearing it."
"Then stay away." She sighed, weary of the battle, and shook her head. "I don't want to hurt your family. That isn't why I came back. This is my home; I don't want to cause any trouble, I just want to live here. If I have to fight you to do that, then I will."
"The battle lines are drawn, then." He shrugged. "It's up to you, how much trouble you want to put up with to live here. I won't back down; you're still going to be unwelcome in town. If you change your mind, though, all you have to do is call me. I'll take care of you, no questions asked, and no gloating."
"I won't call."
"Maybe you won't, but maybe you will. Think about what we could have together."
"What? A couple of quickies every week? Lying about where you are, because you don't want your family to know? Thanks, but no thanks." He reached out and cupped her cheek, and this time she didn't pull away. His touch was gentle as his thumb rubbed her lower lip, probing the inner softness. "There's more to it than just the fucking," he said softly. "Though God knows I want that so much I hurt."
Because she wanted so desperately to believe him, she didn't dare. She had to fight tears as she shook her head. "Please leave."
"All right, I'll go. But think about it." He turned toward the door, then stopped. "About your company—"
Instantly she was alarmed, and tensed for another battle. "If you dare do anything to hurt my business—"
He gave her an impatient look. "Hush. I'm not going to do a thing. I just wanted you to know how proud I am of you. I'm glad you've accomplished as much as you have. In fact, I told my manager at the hotel to give special consideration to any groups booked by your agency."
Proud of her? Faith stood silently as he left, and the tears she had successfully held back began to trickle down her cheeks. Did she dare believe him in this? She couldn't, she realized. She would keep to her original decision not to book any more groups into his hotel.
But the tears still fell. He'd said he was proud of her.
|
After the Night - Linda Howard.txt
| 11 |
Monica took her time in the bathroom, needing the privacy to get herself back. It was always slightly alarming, that loss of self, of personhood. Michael didn't seem to feel it; he was always content, a little drowsy, when he moved off of her. She could hear the squeak of the bed now as he moved, probably to put out his cigarette. He didn't smoke much, he was trying to quit, but after sex was one of the times when he found cigarettes harder to resist. Today his hand had been shaking a little as he flicked his lighter, making the tiny flame dance.
That telltale reaction made her feel soft inside, and she stayed in the bathroom longer than usual so he wouldn't see. It was bad enough that he knew how wild she went when he was inside her, moaning, clutching at him with wet hands, her hips moving. No matter how she tried, she couldn't make them stay still. And she was wet down there, too; she heard the embarrassing slurping sounds when he moved in and out of her. She wasn't embarrassed then, all she could think of was the fever building inside her, but afterward she felt the shame.
It wasn't that way with Alex. With Alex she could restrain herself; he seemed to prefer it that way, and she knew why. He was pretending she was Mama.
She didn't want to do it with Alex, but at the same time, she did. She couldn't say that he forced her, not even to make herself feel better about what she did. She loved Alex, but—he was almost like a father to her. He couldn't take Daddy's place, no one could do that, but Alex had been Daddy's best friend, and he had been so hurt when Daddy had left like that. Quietly he had given them all a shoulder to lean on, or to cry on, as the case may be. Sometimes, in those first awful days, she had been able to pretend a little bit that he was her father, that nothing had changed.
But the pretense hadn't held up for long. The horrible shock of that day had forever changed something inside her, and she had accepted that things would never be perfect. Daddy wasn't coming back; he'd preferred living with that slut rather than living with his own family. He didn't love Mama and never had.
Alex loved Mama, though. Poor Alex. She couldn't remember when she had first realized how he felt, when she had seen the devotion and sadness in his eyes; it had been several years after Daddy had left, though. It was about the time he had first coaxed Mama to eat dinner with them. He could do more with Mama than either she or Gray could; maybe it was the gentle, devoted courtesy with which he treated her. God knows Daddy had never been like that with her. He had been polite, and gentle, but you could tell he was just going through the motions and didn't really care. Alex cared.
She remembered the night it had first happened. Gray had been in New Orleans on business. Mama had come down for dinner, but despite Alex's cajoling, had been more depressed than usual and had really made an effort just to eat with them. She had gone back to her room almost immediately, despite his pleas. When he had turned back to face Monica, she had seen the desolation in his eyes, and impulsively reached out to put her hand on his arm, wanting to comfort him.
It had been a chilly winter night. There was a fire in the parlor, so they had gone in there, and she had set herself to easing that look from his eyes. They had sat on the sofa in front of the fire, talking quietly of many things while he sipped an after-dinner brandy, his favorite. The house was quiet, the room dim, with only one lamp on. The fire had softly snapped. And in the firelight, she must have looked like Mama. She had worn her dark hair in a twist that night, and she always dressed in the conservative, classic style Mama preferred. For all those reasons, the brandy, the solitude, the darkened room, his own disappointment, her resemblance to Mama—it had happened.
A kiss had become two, then more. His hands were in her hair, and he was groaning. Monica remembered how her heart had pounded, in fear and an almost painful sympathy. He had touched her breasts, almost reverentially, but only through her clothes. And he had pushed up her skirt only enough to bare the essential part, as if he didn't want to violate her modesty more than was necessary. She had a confused memory of naked flesh, unseen but felt, as he pressed himself to her, then a sharp sting of pain and the quick pumps into her. Unfaded by time, however, was the memory of how his voice had broken as he murmured, "Noelle," in her ear.
He didn't seem to know he'd been the first. In his mind, she'd been Mama.
And in her mind, God help her, he'd been Daddy. It was so sick that she was still disgusted at herself. She'd never had any sexual feelings for Daddy; hadn't had any at all, until Michael. But in the tumult of emotion that night, she'd thought, Maybe he won't leave, if I give him what Mama won't. So she had taken her mother's place, offering herself sexually as a bribe to keep Daddy at home. Poor Alex... poor her. Both of them surrogates for something neither one could ever have. Freud would have had a field day with her.
But that night had been the first of many, over the past seven years. Though not that many, come to think of it. Michael had probably had her more often in just a year than Alex had in seven. Alex had been so ashamed, so apologetic. But he had come to her again, helplessly needing the pretense that Noelle would ever lie in his arms, and Monica had let him have the ease that he needed. He never approached her when Gray was home, only when he was out of town on business.
The last time had been just two days ago, when Gray had been in New Orleans. She had gone to Alex's office that night, as she usually did, and he had done it to her on the sofa there. It never took long. He never undressed her, or himself. Seven years he'd been doing it to her, and she'd never seen him naked, had actually only seen his thing a few times. He was still apologetic about his need, as if she really were Mama, and thought the process was nasty. So he finished as fast as he could, and Monica cleaned herself and went home.
It wasn't like that with Michael. She still didn't know what had attracted him to her, or how she had actually allowed things to progress so far. He'd grown up in Prescott, so she'd known him, to put a name to his face, to speak to, all of her life. He was five years older than Gray, and already a deputy with the sheriffs department when she had finished high school. He'd married his high school sweetheart and had two little boys. They'd been like Ward and June Cleaver, and then she'd up and left him, right out of the blue. She had moved to Bogalusa and remarried a couple of years later. His sons were seventeen and eighteen now, and he had a good relationship with them.
Michael had a good relationship with everyone, she thought, a smile curving her mouth. That was why he'd been elected sheriff when Sheriff Deese had finally retired three years ago. He was a true good old boy, disdaining suits in favor of a uniform, and wing tips in favor of boots. He was a lanky six feet, with sandy hair and friendly blue eyes, and a smattering of freckles across his nose. Opie, all grown up.
One day, a year ago, she'd been in town and decided to eat lunch at the courthouse grill, which made the best hamburgers in town. Mama would have been horrified at such a plebeian taste, but Monica loved hamburgers and treated herself occasionally. She'd been sitting at the little table when Michael had come in, gotten his own hamburger, and was on his way back to a booth when he suddenly paused by her table and asked if he could join her. Startled, she'd said yes.
At first she'd been stiff, but Michael could tease the starch out of a shirt. Soon they'd been laughing and talking as easily as if they were best friends. She'd had another moment of stunned awkwardness when he'd asked her to have dinner with him; she was acutely aware that Mama wouldn't approve. There was nothing upper-crust about Michael McFane. But she had agreed, and to her surprise, he had cooked dinner himself, grilling steaks in his backyard. He lived now on the small farm where he'd grown up, with the closest neighbor a mile down the road, and Monica had felt relaxed by the quiet solitude of his rural home.
Relaxed enough, after they'd eaten and danced to country tunes on the radio, moving slowly around his small living room, to let him take her into his bedroom. She hadn't planned to let him, hadn't even considered that he'd try. But he'd started kissing her, and his kisses were warm and slow, and for the first time in her life she felt the curl of desire deep in her body. Alarmed by what was happening, and the speed of it, she had nevertheless stood in his bedroom and let him unzip her dress, then unhook her bra and remove it. No one had ever seen her bare breasts, but all of a sudden Michael had not only seen them, but was busy sucking on them. The drawing pressure of his mouth had made her go wild, and they had tumbled to the bed. Not for him a discreet pumping, with trousers barely lowered. Soon they were both naked, locked together on the cotton sheets, and that curl of desire had exploded into a wantonness that still alarmed her.
No lady would act in such a manner, but then Monica had always known she wasn't a lady. Mama was a lady; Monica had been trying all her life to be like Mama, so Mama would love her, but she'd always fallen short. Mama would be horrified and disgusted if she knew her daughter spent several hours a week in bed with Michael McFane—the sheriff, of all people!—screwing like a rabbit.
Sometimes Monica felt resentful of the strictures that had been drummed into her from the cradle. Gray hadn't been subjected to, and confined by, all the things that ladies didn't do. It was as if Mama had written Gray off as a lost cause from the moment of his birth; he was a male, therefore she expected him to act like an animal. Because she was a lady, she had ignored the sexual escapades of both father and son; such things were of no interest to her, and she expected her daughter not to be interested in them, either.
It hadn't worked that way, though Monica had tried. She had tried really hard, for the first twenty-five years of her life. Even after Mama had withdrawn from them, after Daddy left, Monica had kept trying, hoping that, if she was good enough, Mama wouldn't feel so bad about Daddy being gone.
But she had always hungered for more. Mama had always been so reserved and cool, perfect, untouchable. Daddy had been warm and loving; he had hugged her, tussled with her despite Mama's disapproval of such rowdiness with her daughter. Gray was even more physical than Daddy; he had always burned with an inner fire that Monica had recognized at an early age.
She remembered once, when Gray had been home from college, they had lingered around the dinner table, talking. Gray had been lounging in his chair with that big-cat grace of his, laughing as he described a prank some of the football players had pulled on one of the coaches, and there had been... she couldn't quite describe it... a sort of sensual wildness in the tilt of his head, the motion of his hand as he picked up his glass. She had glanced at Mama and found her staring at Gray with an expression of revulsion on her face, as if he were a disgusting animal. He had been an animal, of course, a healthy, rambunctious teenage boy, blazing with the testosterone pumping into his body. But there was nothing repulsive about him, and Monica had felt resentful of that disapproval, on his behalf.
Gray was a wonderful brother, she didn't know what she would have done without him, in those awful days after Daddy left. She had been so ashamed of her own attempted suicide that she had sworn then she would never again be that weak, that much of a burden to Gray. It had been a struggle, but she'd kept that promise to herself. She had only to look at the thin, silvery lines on her wrists to forcibly remind herself of the price of weakness.
Seeing Faith Devlin in the parking lot at the grocery store had shocked her so much that, for the first time in a long while, she'd fallen into the old habit of running to Gray, expecting him to take care of her problems. She was disgusted with herself for falling to pieces the way she had, but when she had seen that dark red hair, such a rich color that it was almost wine-colored, her heart had almost stopped. For a wild, dizzying moment, she had thought, Daddy's back! because if Renee was here, then surely Daddy was, too.
But Daddy was nowhere in sight. There was only Renee, looking even younger than when she had left, which was pure injustice. Someone as wicked and trashy as Renee Devlin should wear her sins on her face, so everyone would know. But the face staring back at Monica had been as exquisitely complexioned as ever, without a wrinkle in sight. The same slumberous green eyes, the wide, soft, sensual mouth—nothing had changed. And for a moment, Monica had been again the hurt, helpless girl she'd been before, and she had gone running to Gray.
Only it hadn't been Renee; the woman in the parking lot was Faith Devlin, and Gray had been oddly reluctant to use all his influence against her. Monica couldn't recall much about Faith, just a vague memory of a skinny little girl with her mother's hair, but that didn't matter. What wasn't vague was the twist of pain at seeing her, the rush of memories, the old sense of betrayal and abandonment. She had been afraid to go to town since then, afraid she would see Faith again and feel the sting of salt in the reopened wound.
"Monica?" came Michael's lazy voice. "You go to sleep in there, honey?"
"No, I was just primping," Monica called, and ran the water in the basin to give credence to her lie. Her reflection looked back at her. Not bad, for thirty-two. Sleek dark hair, not as black as Gray's, but not a silver strand in sight. Her face was fine-boned, like Mama's, but she had the Rouillard dark eyes. Not overweight, and her breasts were firm.
Michael was still sprawled naked on the bed when she left the bathroom, and a slow smile lit his face as he held out his hand to her. "Come snuggle," he invited, and her heart turned over. She crawled back into bed, and into the warmth of his encircling arm. He sighed with contentment as he settled her against him, and his big hand moved to squeeze one resilient breast. "I think we should get married," he said.
Her heart didn't just turn over this time, it almost stopped. She stared up at him, eyes round with both panic and astonishment. "M-Marry?" she stuttered, then crammed both hands against her mouth to hold back the hysterical giggle that bubbled up. "Michael and Monica McFane?" The giggle erupted anyway.
He grinned. "So it sounds like we're twins. I can live with it if you can." He thumbed her nipple, enjoying the way it peaked at his touch. "But if we have a kid, its name will start with anything but an M."
Marriage. Kids. Oh, God. Somehow she had never envisioned that he might want to marry her. She had never even thought of marriage in connection with herself. Her life had gone into deep freeze twelve years ago, and she had never expected it to change.
But nothing is static. Even rock changed, ground down by time and the elements. Alex hadn't disrupted the even rhythm of her life, but Michael had blazed through like a comet.
Alex. Oh, God.
"I know I don't have much to offer you," Michael was saying. "This house sure ain't nothing like what you're used to, but I'll fix it up any way you want; you just tell me what to do and I'll do it."
Another shock. She had lived her entire thirty-two years at Rouillard House. She tried to imagine living anywhere else, and couldn't. Twelve years ago the entire foundation of her life had crumbled, and since then she hadn't dealt well with any change, even a relatively minor one such as getting a new car. Gray had finally forced her to give up the one she had been driving since she was nineteen, just as, five years ago, he had forced her to redo her bedroom. She had been heartily sick of the little-girl decor for years, but the thought of changing it had made her feel even worse. It had been a relief when Gray had brought a decorator in one day while she had a dentist appointment, and returned to find the wallpaper already stripped off and the carpet removed. Still, she had cried for three days. So little of her former life had remained the way it was before Daddy left, and it hurt to give up anything else. After she stopped crying, and the decorator was finished, she loved the room; it was the transition that was so wrenching.
"Honey?" Michael said now, hesitation creeping into his voice. "I'm sorry, I guess I thought—"
Fiercely she put her hand against his mouth. "Don't you dare put yourself down to me," she said, low and violent, aching inside that he would think for a minute that she would consider herself too good for him. The reverse was true; Michael was too good for her. Only two days ago she had lain on the leather sofa in Alex's office and let him screw her. Ugly word. Ugly process. It had nothing in common with Michael's lovemaking. She had felt nothing, except pity, and relief when it was over.
If Michael knew about Alex, he wouldn't want her any longer. How could he? For the past year he had thought she was his alone, and all the while she had been letting an old family friend screw her, just as she had for the six years before.
She hadn't felt any guilt at all, on Alex's behalf, when Michael had become her lover. She didn't feel any connection with Alex; how could she? It wasn't even her he was doing it to, but her mother. But she was eaten alive with guilt when she went to Alex, because it was such a betrayal of Michael. She would have to tell Alex that it had to stop, but the old terror was still there, buried deep. If she stopped letting him do it, would he leave? Would it matter if he did? She wasn't a hurt, confused girl any longer, she didn't need Daddy—or his stand-in.
But what would happen to Mama if Alex stopped coming to the house? He loved Mama, but could he bear to see her, so lost to him, if he didn't have the release of pretending that he was making love to her?
"I love you," she said now to Michael, and tears trickled from her eyes. "I just—I never thought you'd want to marry me."
"Silly." He wiped the wetness from her cheeks, and a crooked smile lit his grown-up Opie face. "It took me a year to work up the nerve, is all."
She managed a smile of her own. "I hope it doesn't take me that long to work up the nerve to say yes."
"That scary, huh?" he asked, and laughed.
"Any... any change is hard for me." She swallowed, terrified at the prospect, and of telling Mama about Michael. Gray knew about him, of course; it was no secret that they were seeing each other, but no one suspected they'd been sleeping together for a year. But since Mama never went to town anymore, and didn't have any friends over to visit, she knew nothing about what went on these days. She wouldn't like it on two counts. One, she wouldn't like the idea of Monica marrying anyone, because that would mean her pristine daughter would be subjected to a man's disgusting touch. Two, she especially wouldn't like it if that man were Michael McFane. The McFanes had never been anything but poor farmers, certainly not in the same social stratum as the Graysons and the Rouillards. The fact that Michael was the sheriff wouldn't raise him any in her estimation; he was just a public servant earning a nice but unspectacular salary.
And she would have to tell Alex.
"It'll be all right," Michael said comfortingly. "I'll get started on fixing up the house. It should be finished in, say, six months. That'll give you enough time to get used to the idea, won't it?"
She looked up into his beloved face and said, "Yes." Yes to it all. Her heart was pounding wildly. She would manage. She would tell Mama, and face that chilly disapproval. She would tell Alex that she couldn't meet him again. It would hurt him, but he would understand. He wouldn't abandon Mama; it was silly of her even to think it. She had to look at things as an adult, not a scared girl. Alex hadn't remained a friend because she'd allowed him to stick his thing in her; he was Gray's legal representative, and a friend even before she'd been born. Probably he had just gotten into the habit of using her. Maybe he'd be glad of an excuse to stop, maybe he felt as guilty about it as she did.
She had to make things as right as possible. Not even one little thing could be wrong, or it would all unravel. A normal, happy life loomed before her like the golden ring on a carousel, and she could grab it if she could just manage to do everything right. The last time, Renee Devlin had wrecked her dream.
Her thoughts jolted. Even as Michael was hugging her exuberantly, a face swam before her eyes: sleepy green eyes, a sensuous mouth that drove men wild. Renee was still there, in the form of her daughter.
Faith had to go. Mama would be much happier if Faith left town. She might even approve of Monica, if she were the one to make Faith leave. And if Michael were involved, too...
Her hands pushed at his bare shoulders. "There's a problem."
He released her, sighing with disappointment. The reason for his disappointment twitched in his lap. "What?"
"It's Mama."
He sighed again. "You don't think she'll like the idea of you marryin' me?"
"She won't like the idea of me marrying anyone," Monica said bluntly. "You don't know—she'll be so upset."
He looked startled. "For God's sake, why?"
Monica bit her lip, uncomfortable with airing their family laundry. "Because that means I'd be sleeping with you."
"Of course you'd—oh." Now he looked uncomfortable. He was probably recalling all the old gossip about the arrangement Mama and Daddy had had. "I guess she doesn't like things like that."
"She hates the very idea. And with Faith Devlin back in town, she's already upset." Cautiously Monica nudged him in the direction she wanted him to go. "If Faith left again, it would put Mama in a lot better mood, but I don't know how to manage that. Gray is trying to make her leave, but he says there isn't much he can do, not like before."
To her surprise, Michael went still, and a grim look darkened his face.
"I know how he feels. I wouldn't want to do anything to put that girl out of another home, either."
Monica drew back, uneasy that he had responded directly opposite to the way she had wanted. She had expected him to understand immediately. "She's a Devlin! I can't look at her without feeling sick—"
"She didn't do anything," Michael pointed out in a reasonable tone that set her teeth on edge. "We had trouble with all the other Devlins, but not her."
"She looks just like her mother. Mama nearly went to pieces when she found out one of the Devlins had come back here to live."
"There's no law that says she can't live where she wants."
Because he seemed to have trouble grasping the point, Monica decided to be blunt. "You could do something about it, though, couldn't you? Gray isn't doing much, but you could think of some way to make her leave."
But Michael shook his head, and disappointment knotted her stomach. "I was there the last time," he said soberly, a distant and somber look darkening the blue of his eyes. "When we ran them out of that shack they lived in. For the rest of the Devlins, I didn't care, it was nice to get rid of them, but Faith and that little boy—well, they suffered. I'll never forget the look that was on her face, and I bet Gray still thinks about it, too. That's probably why he's taking it easy on her this time. God knows I couldn't do something like that to her again."
"But if Mama—" Monica stopped herself. He wasn't going to do it. He couldn't understand, not really, because he didn't live with Mama, didn't know how that cold disapproval could slice to the bone. She controlled her dismay, and smiled at him. "Never mind. I'll handle Mama, somehow."
But how? She had never yet managed to handle Mama, to shrug off those hurtful things she said the way Gray did. Gray loved Mama, she knew, but he ignored her a lot of the time. Monica still felt like an anxious little girl, trying so desperately to live up to the standards Mama set, and always falling short.
She would have to do it. She couldn't lose Michael. She would tell Alex she couldn't meet him anymore, and somehow—somehow—she would get rid of Faith Devlin, and make Mama so happy, she wouldn't mind if Monica got married.
|
After the Night - Linda Howard.txt
| 12 |
Faith hung up the phone, a puzzled frown on her face. That was the sixth time she'd called Mr. Pleasant and not gotten an answer. He didn't have a secretary; Mrs. Pleasant had filled that role, and he hadn't had the heart to replace her when she had died. Mr. Pleasant had checked out of the motel; rather, the key had been left on the nightstand in the room, and his things were gone. The room had been paid for in advance, so there was nothing unusual in that. She had done it herself, more than once.
What was unusual was that he hadn't called her, and he'd said that he would. She couldn't believe he had forgotten. He would have called if something wasn't wrong. Given the state of his health, she was afraid he was in a hospital somewhere and was too ill to call. He could even be dying, and she wouldn't know about it. The thought of dying alone made her chest hurt. Someone should at least be there to hold his hand, as she had held Scottie's.
Other than being worried about him, she didn't know what, if anything, he had found or whom he had questioned. She would have to continue on her own, without the benefit of whatever answers he had gotten.
She didn't have a clear idea of how to go about it, what clues to look for, even what questions to ask—assuming anyone would talk to her. The only ones who were likely to answer her questions would be any newcomers, and they wouldn't be in a position to know anything. The old-timers would know, but they would heed Gray's edict against having anything to do with her.
A thought came to her, and she grinned with anticipation. There was one person, at least, who would talk to her—unwillingly, but he would talk.
She dragged a brush through her hair and twisted the heavy mass into a top-knot, securing it with a few pins and leaving tendrils loose around her face and at the nape of her neck. That was the limit of her grooming; a few minutes after having made up her mind, she was on her way to Prescott, to Morgan's Grocery.
As she had expected, Mrs. Morgan spotted her the moment she entered the door. Faith ignored her and wandered toward the dairy section, which was at the back of the store, safely away from Mrs. Morgan's sharp ears. It wasn't long before Ed came hot-footing it down the aisles, his beefy face florid with both indignation and exertion. "Maybe you didn't understand too good," he said, huffing to a stop in front of her. "Get on out of my store. You can't buy your groceries here."
Faith stood her ground and gave him a cool smile. "I didn't come here to buy anything. I want to ask you a few questions."
"If you don't leave, I'm goin' to call the sheriff," he said, but an uneasy expression crossed his face.
His mention of the sheriff made her stomach clench, probably the reaction he had hoped to get. Her spine stiffened, and she forced herself to ignore the threat. "If you answer my questions," she said quietly, "I'll be gone in a few minutes. If you don't, your wife may learn more than you want her to know." When it came to threats, she could make a few of her own.
He paled, and cast an anxious look toward the front of the store. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Fine. My questions don't concern my mother. I want to know about Guy Rouillard."
He blinked, surprised by the turn. "About Guy?" he repeated.
"Who else was he seeing that summer?" she asked. "I know my mother wasn't the only one. Do you remember any of the gossip?"
"Why do you want to know about all that? It don't matter who else he was seeing, because it was Renee he ran away with, not any of the others."
She glanced at her watch. "I figure you have about two minutes before your wife comes back here to see what's going on."
He glared at her, but said reluctantly, "I heard he was seeing Andrea Wallice, Alex Chelette's secretary. Alex was Guy's best friend. Don't know that it's true, though, because she didn't seem tore up when Guy left. There was a waitress out at Jimmy Jo's, I can't remember her name, but Guy saw her a few times. She's not there anymore. Heard tell he had a thing going with Yolanda Foster, too. Guy got around. I can't remember who all he was messin' around with, or when, exactly."
Yolanda Foster. That must be the ex-mayor's wife. Their son, Lane, had been one of that group of boys who hung around Jodie when they wanted a good time, but wouldn't speak to her if they met her in public.
"Was that common knowledge?" she asked. "Were there any jealous husbands around?"
He shrugged, and glanced again toward the front of the store. "Maybe the mayor knew, but Guy donated a lot of money to his campaigns, so I doubt Lowell Foster would have kicked up very much if he'd known Yolanda was... uh, collecting donations." He smirked, and Faith thought how much she disliked him.
"Thanks for the information," she said, and turned to go.
"You won't come here again?" he asked anxiously.
She paused and gave him a considering look. "Maybe not," she said. "Call me if you think of any more names." Then she walked briskly from the store, not even glancing at Mrs. Morgan on the way out.
Two names, plus the possibility of the unknown waitress. It was a beginning. What intrigued her, though, was the mention of Guy's best friend, Alex Chelette. He would likely have the answers to most of her questions.
The Chelettes were one of the old, monied families in the parish—not on a level with the Rouillards, but then neither was anyone else. She knew the name, but couldn't dredge up any memories of them as people. She had been only fourteen when she'd left, and more withdrawn than most, keeping to herself as much as possible. She had paid attention only to those who had direct contact with her family, and as far as she could remember, she had never met any of the Chelettes. Alex was still likely to be around, though; the case of Guy Rouillard aside, old money tended to remain in one place.
She walked down to the pay phone at the end of the parking lot and looked up the Chelettes. The residence was listed as "Alexander Chelette, atty." Below it was the number for "Chelette and Anderson, Attorneys at Law."
Thinking that now was as good a time as any, she fed in a quarter and dialed the law office. A musical voice answered on the second ring.
Faith said, "My name is Faith Hardy. Could Mr. Chelette see me today?"
There was a tiny pause that told Faith her name had been recognized, then the musical voice said, "He's in court all morning, but he can see you this afternoon at one-thirty, if that's convenient."
"It is. Thank you." As she hung up, Faith wondered if the musical voice belonged to Andrea Wallice, who had been Mr. Chelette's secretary when it had all happened, or if this was a different one.
She had almost three hours to kill, unless she wanted to drive home and come back later. Her stomach rumbled, reminding her that the slice of toast she'd eaten at six-thirty had long since vanished. She wondered if she would be served in any of the restaurants in town, or if Gray's influence had extended there, too. She shrugged. No time like the present for finding out.
There was a small cafe on the square. She had never been in it, she thought as she parked almost directly in front of the door. She had never eaten out until she had gone to live with the Greshams, and they had introduced her to the wonders of restaurants. The thought of them made her smile as she entered the cool, darkened cafe, and she made a mental note to call them that night. She tried to stay in touch, calling them at least once a month, and it had been almost that long since they last spoke.
Customers seated themselves, so Faith chose the booth at the rear of the cafe. A pleasant-faced young woman, short and round, bustled up with a menu. "What will you have to drink?"
"Sweet tea." That the tea would be iced was a given, unless hot tea was specifically requested. The usual choices were merely between sweet and unsweetened.
The waitress darted off to get the tea, and Faith glanced down the selections on the plastic menu. She had just decided on the chicken salad when someone paused beside the booth. "Aren't you Faith Devlin?"
Faith tensed, wondering if she would be asked to leave. She looked up at the woman standing there. "Yes, I am." The woman looked vaguely familiar, brown eyes, brown hair, and a square-jawed, dimple-cheeked face. She was smallish, about five foot three, and had the perkiness of a cheerleader.
"I thought so. It's been a while, but it's hard to forget hair that color." The woman smiled. "I'm Halley Bruce—Johnson, now. I was in your class at school."
"Of course!" As soon as she heard the name, the face clicked in her memory. "I remember you. How are you?" Halley had never been her friend—she hadn't had any friends—but neither had Halley taken part in any of the cruel-teasing Faith had endured. She had been civil, at least.
The expression in her eyes now, however, was downright friendly. "Will you join me?" Faith invited.
"Just for a minute," Halley said, slipping into the booth opposite Faith. The waitress returned with Faith's tea, and took the order for her chicken salad. When they were alone again, Halley smiled wryly. "My husband's folks own this place, and I run it for them. I'm expecting a delivery any minute now, and I'll have to check it in."
Since Gray already knew about the agency, there was no point in not talking about it, so Faith said, "I'm playing hooky. I have a travel agency in Dallas, and I really should have told my manager where I'd be, but I forgot to call before I left the house."
Social and financial positions established, they smiled at each other as equals. Faith felt a warm rush of pleasure. Even after she had gone to live with the Greshams and attended high school, she hadn't had any girlfriends; she had still been too wary and withdrawn, too traumatized, to form any friendships. It wasn't until she had started college that she had made any friends at all, and the casual acceptance of her dorm mates had been a revelation to her. Shy at first, she had quickly bloomed, joyfully participating in the female rituals that had been closed to her as a girl: the all-night gab sessions, the teasing and laughter, the swapping of clothes and makeup, the frenzy of getting ready in the mornings, sharing the bathroom mirror with her roommate. For the first time she had participated in the endless analysis of the murky mystery of men—rather, she had listened, smiling a little at their naivete. Though at that point many of her dorm mates had already had sex and Faith had still been virgin, she had felt infinitely older, more experienced. They still viewed men through the rosy lenses of romance, while she had no such illusion.
But female friendship had remained a special joy to her, and she looked at Halley Johnson with the hope of finding that trembling within her.
"Where did you move to, when you left?" Halley asked, with a casual note that glossed over the circumstances under which Faith had left Prescott.
"Beaumont, Texas. Then I moved to Austin when I started college, and Dallas afterward."
Halley sighed. "I've never lived anywhere but here, don't guess I ever will. I used to think about traveling, but then Joel and I got married, and the kids came. We have two," she said, brightening. "A boy and a girl. With one of each, it seemed like a good time to stop. How about you?"
"I'm a widow," Faith said, her eyes darkening with the shadow of sadness that she always felt when she thought about Kyle, dying so young and so needlessly. "I married right out of college, and he died in a car wreck within the year. No kids."
"That's rough." There was genuine sympathy in Halley's voice. "I'm so sorry. I can only imagine what it would be like to lose Joel. He drives me crazy sometimes, but he's my rock, always there when I need him." She was silent a moment, then the smile came back to her face. "What brings you back to Prescott? I can imagine someone leaving Prescott to move to Dallas, but not vice versa."
"It's home. I wanted to come back."
"Well, I don't want to be nosy or rude, but I would have thought Prescott would be the last place you'd want to live. After what happened, I mean."
Faith gave her a quick look, but couldn't see any malice in Halley's expression, only a certain watchfulness, as if she hadn't quite made up her mind about Faith.
"It hasn't been a bowl of cherries," she replied, and decided she could be as frank as the other woman. "I don't know if you've heard or not, but Gray Rouillard won't like it if he finds out you've served me. I gather he's put out the word to all the merchants that he doesn't want them doing business with me."
"Oh, I've heard," Halley said, and grinned, some of the watchfulness fading. "But I like to make up my own mind about people."
"I don't want to cause trouble for you."
"You won't. Gray isn't vindictive." She paused. "I can see where you might not agree with me. Granted, I wouldn't want him for an enemy, but he won't turn mean just because you ate some chicken salad in here."
"Everyone else in town seems to take him seriously."
"He has a lot of influence," Halley agreed.
"But not with you?"
"I didn't say that. It's just that I remember you from school. You weren't like the others. If it had been Jodie, now—she wouldn't be sitting here waiting for her chicken salad. You're welcome any time, though."
"Thanks, but let me know if there's a problem."
"I'm not worried about it." Halley smiled as the waitress set the plate of chicken salad on the table. "If he'd meant to be a hard-ass about it, he'd have said so. One thing about Gray, you don't have to second-guess him. He says what he means, and means what he says."
Alex Chelette's secretary was still Andrea Wallice, according to the nameplate on her desk. The woman sitting behind the desk was comfortably fiftyish, her face wearing every one of the years, her gray hair styled in a short, neat bob. Looking at her, trying to subtract a dozen years, Faith still couldn't imagine her as the type of woman Guy Rouillard would pursue. His taste had run toward the flamboyant, not this tidy woman with the openly curious gaze.
"You look like your mother," Andrea finally said, her head tilting a bit to one side as she studied Faith's face. "A few differences, but for the most part you could be her, especially in your coloring."
"Did you know her?" Faith asked.
"Only by sight." She gestured to the sofa. "Have a seat. Alex hasn't come back from lunch yet."
Just as Faith sat down, the door opened and a slim, good-looking man entered. He was wearing a suit, an oddity in Prescott, unless one happened to be an attorney who had been at the courthouse all morning. He glanced toward Faith and visibly started, then relaxed, and a smile touched his mouth. "You must be Faith. God knows, you couldn't be anyone else, unless Renee discovered the Fountain of Youth."
"That's what I thought," Andrea said, turning to him, and for a moment the expression in her eyes was unguarded. Faith quickly looked down. From what she had just seen, she very much doubted that Andrea had ever been involved with Guy, because she was very much in love with her boss. She wondered if Mr. Chelette knew, and just as quickly decided that he didn't. There was no hint of awareness on his part.
"Come in," he invited, ushering Faith into his office ahead of him, and closing the door. "I know we must seem rude, discussing you that way. I'm sorry. It's just that the resemblance is so pronounced, and yet, on second glance, the differences are obvious."
"Everyone seems to have that reaction when they see me for the first time," she admitted, and smiled at him. It was very easy to smile at Alex Chelette. He was the type of man whom age refined; always slim, he would pare down even more with the passing years. His dark hair had grayed at the sides, and there were lines at the corners of his gray eyes, but he easily looked to be in his mid-forties, rather than his fifties. His scent was light green, as fresh as newly cut grass.
"Sit down, please," he said, and settled into his own chair. "What can I do for you today?"
Faith seated herself on the leather sofa. "Actually, I came on personal reasons, and I realize now I shouldn't have taken up your work time—"
He shook his head, smiling. "It's my pleasure. Now, tell me what's bothering you. Is it Gray? I tried to get him to leave you alone, but he's very protective of his mother and sister, and he doesn't want them upset."
"I understand Gray's position very well," Faith said dryly. "That isn't why I'm here."
"Oh?"
"I wanted to ask you some questions about Guy Rouillard. You were his best friend, weren't you?"
He gave her a faint smile. "I thought so. We grew up together."
Should she tell him that Guy hadn't, after all, left with Renee? She toyed with the idea, then discarded it. As friendly as he seemed, she couldn't forget that he was an old family friend of the Rouillards. She had to assume that anything she told him would go straight to Gray.
"I'm curious about him," she finally said. "That night wrecked my family, just as it did Gray's. What was he like? I know he wasn't faithful to my mother any more than he was to his wife, so why would he all of a sudden walk away from everything, his family, his business, to be with her?"
"I don't think you really want me to answer that," he replied wryly. "To put it as politely as I can, Renee was a fascinating woman, at least to men. Physically she was... well, Guy was very responsive to Renee's sensuality."
"But he was already having an affair with her. There wasn't any reason for them to leave."
Alex shrugged, a very Gallic gesture. "I've never understood it myself."
"Why didn't he just get a divorce?"
"Again, I don't have an answer for that. Perhaps because of his religion; Guy wasn't a regular at mass, but he felt more strongly about religion than you might have expected. Perhaps he thought it would be easier on Noelle if he didn't divorce her, if he just handed everything over to Gray and left. I simply don't know."
"Hand everything over to Gray?" Faith repeated. "What do you mean?"
"I'm sorry," he said gently. "I can't divulge details of my clients' business dealings."
"No, of course not." Quickly she backtracked. "Do you remember anything else about that summer? Who else Guy was seeing?"
He looked startled. "Why would you want to know?"
"Like I said, I have an interest in the man. Because of him, I haven't seen my mother since that day. Was he likeable? Did he have any honor, or was he just a tomcat?"
He stared at her for a moment, and pain crept into his eyes. "Guy was the most likeable man in the world," he finally said. "I loved him like a brother. He was always laughing, teasing, but if I needed him for anything, he was there like a shot. His marriage to Noelle was a disappointment to him, but still I was surprised when he left, because he was so close to Gray and Monica. He was a terrible husband, but a wonderful father." He looked down at his hands. "It's been twelve years," he said softly. "And I still miss him."
"Did he ever call?" she asked. "Or get in touch with his family in any way?"
He shook his head. "Not to my knowledge."
"Who else was he seeing that summer, besides Yolanda Foster?"
Once again, her question startled him. His eyebrows rose, and rebuke was in his voice when he spoke. "None of that matters. As I keep telling Gray, it's in the past; let it go. There was a lot of pain that summer, and keeping it alive doesn't do anyone any good."
"I can't let it go, when no one else in the parish will. No matter how successful I am, or respectable, some people here still think of me as trash." Her voice trembled a little on the last word. She hadn't meant to let her control waver, and she was both embarrassed and irritated that it had. Sometimes, though, the pain leaked through.
Alex must have heard it, because his expression changed, and suddenly he left his chair to come sit beside her and take one of her hands in both of his. "I know it's been difficult for you," he said gently. "They'll change their minds, when they get to know you better. And Gray will eventually relent. As I said, he reacted the way he did because he's so protective of his family, but basically he's a very fair man."
"And ruthless," Faith added.
A rueful smile touched his face. "That, too. But not unkind. Take my word for it. If there's anything I can do to change his mind, I promise you I'll do it."
"Thank you," Faith said. That wasn't why she'd come to see him, but he was too conscientious to divulge personal details about his clients and friends. The visit wasn't a total waste, however, she felt she could safely mark Andrea Wallice off her list.
She took her leave, and drove home pondering the scraps of information she'd gotten that day. If Guy had been murdered, Lowell or Yolanda Foster seemed to be the most likely suspects. She wondered how she could contrive a meeting with either of them. And she wondered where Mr. Pleasant was, and if he was all right.
"I met Faith today," Alex said that night as he and Gray were-going over some papers. He picked up his brandy and keenly eyed the younger man over the rim of the glass. "The resemblance is eerie, at first glance, but by the second look there's no way of mistaking her for Renee. Odd, isn't it, the way Renee was more beautiful, but Faith is more attractive?"
Gray glanced up, wry awareness in his dark eyes as he caught the expression in Alex's gray ones. "Yes, I've noticed how attractive she is, if that's what you're asking. Where did you meet her?" He picked up his own glass, filled with his favorite Scotch, and savored the smoky bite of it on his tongue.
"At my office. She came to ask me about Guy."
Gray almost choked. He set his glass down with a force that made the whisky slosh dangerously close to the rim. "She what? What in hell did she want to know about Dad?" The thought of Faith asking anything about his father made him bitterly angry. It was a knee-jerk reaction; for a moment she wasn't Faith, the person, but a Devlin, with all the connotations elicited by the name. He himself wanted her with a fierce need that both alarmed and disgusted him, even though he knew he was going to ease that need if possible, but he didn't want anything about her touching his family. He didn't want Monica or Noelle exposed to her, and he sure as hell didn't want her asking about his father. Guy was gone. His absence, his betrayal, was a wound that remained perilously close to the surface, and bled at the slightest scratch.
"She wanted to know what he was like, had he ever gotten in touch, if he'd been seeing anyone else that summer."
Furious, Gray half rose from his chair, intending to go to her house right now and have it out with her. Alex stopped him with a hand on his arm. "She has a right to know," he said mildly. "Or at least to be curious."
"I'll be goddamned if she does!" Gray snapped.
"She hasn't seen her mother since then, either."
Gray froze, then sank back into the chair. Alex was right, damn it. It rankled, but he had to admit the truth. At least he'd been a grown man, if inexperienced in business, when his father had left; Faith had been only fourteen, as helpless and vulnerable as a child. He didn't know anything about her life between then and now, except that she was a widow and now owned a successful travel agency, but he'd bet his last red cent it hadn't been pleasant. Living with Amos Devlin and those two hoodlum boys, as well as her slut of a sister, couldn't have been easy. It wouldn't have been easy before, but at least Renee had been there.
"Let up on her, Gray," Alex said softly. "She deserves better than the reception she's getting from some people, and part of it's your fault."
Gray picked up the glass and swirled the whiskey, looking down into the amber depths. "I can't," he said gruffly. He got up and carried his drink to the window, where he stood staring at his reflection in the glass, and the darkness beyond. He took another sip of fortification. "She has to go, before I do something that really hurts Monica and Mother."
"Such as?" Alex asked, puzzled.
"Let's just say that, where Faith is concerned, I'm caught between a rock and a hard place. The rock is my family, and the hard place—" he looked around with a sort of angry amusement in his eyes "—is in my pants."
Appalled, Alex stared at him. "My God."
"It must be genetic." That was the only explanation for it, he thought grimly. He had inherited his father's cock. Put a Devlin woman in front of it, and it got hard. No, not just any Devlin woman; two of them had left him cold. But Faith... Nothing about him was cold if she was anywhere within a country mile.
"You can't do that to your mother," Alex whispered. "The humiliation would kill her."
"Hell, I know that! That's why I want Faith to leave, before I do something stupid." He turned to face Alex, that angry amusement still burning in his eyes. "The attraction isn't all on my side, damn it. It'd be easier if it was. I went to her house the other night to put a proposition to hen If she didn't want to leave the area, I'd buy a house for her in any town close by, as long as it wasn't in this parish. That way we could see each other without hurting anyone. There was an old man there, having dinner with her, and I was so jealous, I accused her of having a sugar daddy." He shook his head, and laughed softly at himself. "Can you believe it? The old guy looked as frail as a toothpick, but he was all dressed up like something out of the fifties, and all I could think was that he was trying to get her in bed."
"What old guy?" Alex asked, plainly curious. "Anyone I know?"
"He was from New Orleans. His last name was Pleasant. I was so mad, I don't remember if she told me his first name. He said he was a business associate."
"Was he?"
Gray shrugged. "Probably. Faith owns a travel agency, and she has a branch in New Orleans."
"She owns it?"
"She's done pretty good for herself, hasn't she?" There it was again, that damn little twinge of pride. "She started out in Dallas. I don't know how many branch offices she has, but I have someone gathering information on her. I expect to have a report any day."
"Are you going to try to ruin her business if she doesn't leave?" Alex asked, but less sharply than Gray had expected.
"No. For one thing, I'm not that big of a bastard. For another, if I did, I could kiss my chances with her goodbye." His mouth twisted in a wry smile. "Decide for yourself which reason is the most important."
Alex didn't smile in return. "This is a hell of a situation. If you're bound and determined to have her—"
"I am," Gray said, and tossed back the last of the whiskey.
"—then she can't live here. Noelle would be devastated."
"I'm worried more about Monica than I am Mother."
Alex blinked, as if he hadn't considered Monica. He probably hadn't; all of his attention was focused on Noelle. He knew about Monica's suicide attempt, of course; it hadn't been possible to keep it quiet, not with all the commotion at Dr. Bogarde's office. Monica didn't try to hide the scars, anyway. She was too proud to let herself take the cowardly route of long sleeves or wide bracelets.
"Monica is a lot stronger than she was then," Alex finally said. "But Noelle doesn't have anything to fall back on. I thought at the beginning, and still do, that she should face up to facts and get on with her life, but if she found out you were having an affair with Faith—no. She couldn't stand it. She might try suicide herself."
Gray shook his head, amazed that Alex could have known Noelle all these years and still not realized that she was too self-centered to harm herself. The myopia of love allowed him to see only her cool, perfect, unattainable beauty. It was that romantic streak in him, a strange characteristic for a lawyer.
"She has to go," Alex said regretfully.
|
After the Night - Linda Howard.txt
| 13 |
The fax machine was humming, so Faith didn't hear the car turn in to the driveway. When the knock rattled the front door, she leaned over to look out the window. She couldn't see who was standing on the porch, but she could see the gray Jaguar parked behind her car, and she sighed as she went, coffee cup in hand, into the living room to answer the door. It was barely eight-thirty, too early to have to deal with Gray Rouillard.
The first thing she noticed when she opened the door was that he was in a towering rage.
The only other time she had seen him like this was the day he'd come to the shack to tell them Renee had left, and again that night, when he'd had them thrown out. As she looked up into the cold ruthlessness of those dark eyes, the memory of that night flashed in her mind, the stark images reducing her in an instant to the terrified girl she'd been then. Her blood chilled, and she fell back a step as he came inside, letting the screen door slam behind him.
She jumped at the sound. Her eyes, green and unblinking, were fastened on his face as if she didn't dare look away.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" he asked very softly, the velvety sound as chilling as a sword sliding against another blade. He advanced another step, so that he loomed over her, and Faith retreated again. The coffee cup shook in her hand.
For every step he took forward, she took one back, a slow dance that ended when she bumped into the wall, her shoulder blades pressing hard against the Sheetrock as if she could force her way through it. His arms shot out before she could slide sideways, his palms flattening against the wall on either side of her shoulders, imprisoning her within the cage of his arms and body. He leaned down slightly; the top two buttons of his white shirt were open, revealing a wedge of warm olive skin decorated with curly black hair. His pulse throbbed visibly in the hollow at the base of his strong throat, right in front of her eyes. Faith fastened her gaze on that rhythmic movement, desperately seeking to steady herself. She was not fourteen. He could not throw her out of her own house.
"Well?" he asked, still in that dangerous, purring tone.
His thick wrists were squeezing her shoulders, bared by her sleeveless blouse; his skin was hot against hers. His wide shoulders and broad chest were like a wall in front of her, and his rich, musky male scent made her nostrils flare in automatic delight. Still clasping the coffee cup, holding it like a shield between them, she swallowed and managed to say, "What are you talking about?"
He leaned closer, so close that his stomach brushed against her fingers. "I'm talking about all those questions you've been asking. Alex told me last night you'd been to his office. Talking to Alex is one thing, he'll keep his mouth shut, but guess who I saw this morning. Ed Morgan." Despite the calmness of his tone, she could see the cold fury flickering in his eyes. If he'd been having a roaring fit, she wouldn't have been half as nervous. In this mood, he was capable of anything, but oddly enough, she didn't fear him physically. No, if Gray harmed her, the damage would be to her emotions.
"I'm only going to tell you once." He said the words very precisely, leaning down even closer, until his nose was almost touching hers. "Don't ask any more questions about my father. Your nosiness will only stir up gossip, and hurt my family again. If that happens, Faith, I will run you out of the parish again, by any means necessary. You can take that to the bank. So keep it in mind: I don't want your pretty mouth even shaping my father's name."
Wide green eyes stared into chilly dark ones, only a couple of inches apart. Her chin tilted upward, and her mouth, which he thought was pretty, parted as she deliberately tugged on the tiger's tail, and uttered two words: "Guy Rouillard."
She saw his pupils widen in disbelief, then the chill in his eyes was swallowed by pure fire. Maybe it hadn't been prudent to provoke him, but watching the result was fascinating. He seemed to expand with fury, dark color running into his face, and if his long hair hadn't been pulled back and secured, she rather thought it would have lifted from his head.
She had a split second in which to enjoy the entertainment. Then he moved with the blurring speed she had seen before, his hands leaving the wall to clasp hard around her upper arms, and he gave her a teeth-rattling shake. Her grip loosened on the forgotten cup in her hands, and she felt it slip. With a cry she tried to juggle it, but he was too close, and all she could do was knock the falling cup toward herself, rather than let the steaming liquid burn him. The coffee soaked into her thin skirt, plastering it to her right thigh, and splattered over their feet. She cried out again, this time in pain. The cup hit the floor with a crash, breaking off the handle but otherwise remaining intact. Gray jumped back, automatically releasing her, and frantically she pulled the wet fabric away from her stinging thigh.
His dark gaze swept down her, and he said, "Shit," in a rough tone. He grabbed her, pulling her against him, and his hands worked briefly at the back of her waist. Her skirt loosened and dropped to her feet. He lifted her out of the circle of fabric, swinging her up in his arms, and dizzily she clutched his shoulders as the room whirled around her.
"What are you doing?" she cried in alarm as he rapidly carried her into the kitchen. She was confused by the shock of pain, and he was moving too fast for her to get her bearings. Beneath all that, she was acutely aware of her bare legs draped over his arm, and that she was dressed in only her panties and blouse.
He hooked his foot around a chair leg and pulled the chair away from the table, then carefully set her in it. Turning to the sink, he pulled off several paper towels, folded them into a pad, and wet them under the cold water. The pad was still dripping when he plopped it over her reddened, stinging thigh. She jumped at the chill. Trickles of water ran down her thigh, into the seat of the chair, and soaked into her panties.
"I forgot about the coffee," he muttered. Truth to tell, he hadn't even noticed it until he'd seen it spilling down her leg. "I'm sorry, Faith. Do you have any tea?" Before she could answer, he was already opening the refrigerator door, and taking out the pitcher of tea that was almost de rigueur in southern kitchens.
He opened and closed cabinet drawers until he found her clean towels. Taking one out, he dropped it into the pitcher of tea, then removed it and carefully squeezed out most of the excess liquid. She watched in bemusement as he took away the pad of paper towels, tossing it into the sink with a sodden plop, and replaced it with the tea-soaked towel. If the water had been cold, the tea was icy. Faith drew in a hissing breath as it, too, ran down her leg to pool beneath her bottom.
"Does it hurt?" Gray asked, going down on his knee beside the chair to smooth the towel over her thigh. His voice was tight with anxiety.
"No," she said bluntly. "It's cold, and you're soaking my rear end."
His face was level with hers. At her words, she saw the worry leave his eyes, and the tension ease from his shoulders. He grasped the back of the chair with his left hand, and with wry, faint humor asked, "Did I overreact?"
She pursed her lips. "A tad."
"Your thigh is red. I know you're burned."
"Only a little. It stings a bit, is all. I doubt it'll blister." She narrowed her eyes at him, trying to hide the laughter she could feel bubbling in her chest. "I appreciate your concern, but it certainly didn't warrant having half my clothes stripped off."
He looked down at her bare legs, and the white cotton underwear barely visible beneath the hem of her blouse. A tremor ran through him. He put his right hand on her uninjured thigh, smoothing his palm over the firm, cool resilience of her flesh, entranced by the silky texture. "I've wanted to get your panties wet for a long time," he murmured. "But not with tea."
Her laughter disappeared as if it had never existed. Tension stretched between them, almost palpable in its thickness. Her insides clenched at his words, heat pooling in her loins, her breasts tightening. She felt the dampening of desire, and the admission You have trembled on her lips. She bit it back, knowing that voicing the telltale response would cross a boundary over which she didn't dare pass. Sexual tension emanated from him like a force field, hot and urgent. It would take only that confession, and he would be on her.
She ached with the need to touch him, to press herself against that big, steely body and open her own body to him. Only the instinct for self-preservation kept her silent, and still.
He leaned imperceptibly closer, inhaling her spicy sweet scent. His blood throbbed through his veins, pulsing, swelling. Silently they watched each other, like two adversaries coming face-to-face in a dusty street. He wanted to pull down her panties and bury his face in her lap, the impulse so strong that he shuddered with the effort of resisting it, and wondered what she would do if he gave in. Would she be frightened, would she push him away... or would her legs fall open, and her hands clench in his hair?
His hand flexed on her thigh, his fingers pressing into the silky flesh that had warmed beneath his touch. He saw her pupils dilate, then her lashes droop heavily as she drew in a deep, slow breath that made him acutely aware of her breasts. He shifted his hand a little, and rubbed his thumb back and forth, each sweep moving higher, probing deeper into the cleft of her clenched thighs. He wanted to touch her.
He forgot about Monica, about Guy, about everything but the slow, hot movement of his thumb, closer and closer to the exquisitely tender flesh between her legs, so flimsily protected by the thin layer of cotton. He would slide his thumb under the elastic of the leg opening, and find the furrow of her tightly closed folds. Then he would drag his thumb upward, opening her as he went, until he found the tiny bud at the top of her sex.
If she let him touch her, she'd be his. He'd have her then.
His thumb brushed elastic. And she moved, her hand clamping down over his and tugging it away from her thigh. "No," she whispered.
Frustration roared through him like a brush fire. A sound very much like a growl rumbled in his throat as physical instincts fought for supremacy over thought. His brain won, but barely. He was sweating, shaking with the need to have her. His erection strained painfully against the restriction of his pants.
"No," she said again, as if the original refusal needed reinforcing, and perhaps it did.
Slowly he turned his hand, so that his fingers meshed with hers. "Then hold my hand for a minute."
She did, clinging tightly to him, feeling his fingers twitch and flex as if reaching for something. His other hand was clamped around the slat of the chairback, his knuckles white from the pressure.
After a moment of unknown duration, time suspended as their gazes locked and lust shimmered between them, the terrible tension in him began to fade. He winced and shifted position, stretching his leg out. He freed his hand to reach down and make an adjustment, the furrow between his brows smoothing out as he made himself more comfortable.
She cleared her throat, uncertain what to say, if anything.
He rose stiffly to his feet. The thick ridge in his pants was unmistakable, but he was in control now. He plucked the hand towel from its rack and draped it over her thighs, removing temptation from sight, if not proximity.
After a minute he said in a quiet voice, "Are you certain you're not hurt?"
"Yes." She too spoke quietly, as if a too loud noise would shatter their control and send them tumbling over the precipice she had barely managed to avoid. The hunger hadn't been one-sided. "It's a minor burn. I probably won't even feel it tomorrow." The stinging had completely vanished, soothed away by the cold, wet tea.
"All right." He looked down at her, and lifted his hand as if he would smooth her hair, but then let it fall back to his side. He couldn't safely allow himself to touch her just yet. "Now, tell me why you've been asking all those questions about Dad."
She looked up at him, the dark fire of her hair spilling down her back. She wanted to tell him what she suspected, that his father was dead, but found that the words stuck in her throat. She couldn't do it. She had to believe he knew nothing about it, that he had nothing to do with his father's death, because she loved him and it would break her heart otherwise. And because she loved him, she couldn't bring herself to hurt him. She had deliberately tilted the falling coffee cup towards herself to keep him from suffering a minor scald; how could she now tell him that the father he loved was probably dead, murdered?
So instead she told him what was both the truth in substance and a lie in intent, murmuring, "He was my past, too. I can barely remember when he wasn't there, but I never really knew him. He was always kind when he saw me, which wasn't often, but then I lost my mother because of him. Do you think I'm not curious about the kind of person he was? That I shouldn't try to fill in the gaps, to make sense of what happened?"
"Good luck," he growled. "I thought I knew him better than anyone else on earth, and I still can't make sense of it." He paused. "If you have any more questions about him, ask me, because I meant what I said. I don't want to get rough with you, Faith, but I'll do what's necessary to protect my family. Remember that."
Since he'd offered... But, no, it was hardly the time to prolong this encounter by firing questions at him, with her sitting there half-naked, and Gray a sexual powder keg, primed and ready to explode. So she merely looked at him in silence, and after a moment his mouth quirked with a smile. "I'm not hearing any promises, am I? Think about it, baby. Don't make it any tougher on yourself than it has to be. Just keep quiet, and behave yourself."
"Like a good little girl?"
"Like a smart woman," he corrected. Again his hand moved toward her, and again the movement was aborted. She could sense that he wanted to stay, wanted to continue what he had begun, but she had refused him and he was forcing himself to accept her decision—for now. Every time they met, the battle would be joined again, and the temptation to give in would be just that much stronger for having been denied.
"I'm going to go," he said.
"All right."
He didn't move. Then: "I don't want to."
"Do it anyway."
He chuckled. "You're a hard woman, Faith Devlin."
"Hardy."
"I didn't know him. He isn't real to me. Did you love him?"
"Yes." But not the way I love you. Never like that.
His dark eyes glittered, and this time he did touch her, his hand cupping her cheek. "You'll always be a Devlin to me, with that red hair and your witch's eyes." He bent, and moved his mouth warmly against hers in a brief kiss. Then he was gone, and when the door closed behind him, Faith sagged back in the chair with relief.
She felt as if a storm had entered the room and tossed her around. Her heart was still pounding, and her muscles felt like spaghetti noodles. Those few moments had been among the most erotic of her life, and all he had done was touch her leg. If he had actually made love to her, she would have totally lost control of herself. She was frightened by the intensity of the desire he could arouse with a look, a brief touch, even the delicious muskiness of his male scent.
You'll always be a Devlin to me.
Not the greatest of recommendations. She could only suppose that he meant he'd never be able to forget her background, her heritage, that nothing she did would ever change his mind about her.
And I'll always love you, she whispered to him in her mind. Always.
Just a touch on her leg, and he'd been almost ready to come, Gray thought wryly. God, if he ever actually got inside her, his heart would probably explode from the strain.
His hands were shaking as he drove, a common reaction if he spent more than a minute in Faith's company. It would be easier if she didn't respond to him the way she did; she might hold herself still, she might be able to say no, but that hot, languorous look was still in her eyes. He knew all the signs. Her breathing deepened, her breasts rising round and full, her nipples peaking. Though he hadn't kissed her until that light peck on the lips as he was leaving, because he couldn't resist the urge any longer, her mouth had been red and swollen. A delicate flush had glowed under her translucent skin.
He wanted her. He had to make her leave. He wanted her. The opposing needs were driving him crazy.
She hadn't agreed to stop asking questions. She hadn't argued with him, but he was beginning to realize that her silence masked a streak of stubbornness as wide as the Grand Canyon. She might not fight, but she definitely resisted. As a girl, Faith had too often been beaten down by life, when she had been helpless to make her own decisions. Now that she could decide her own course, she let very little sway her from it. That single-mindedness was probably the main reason why, at the young age of twenty-six, she owned her own business.
Given that, it wasn't likely he would be able to convince her to leave. And since he sure as hell couldn't trust his own good sense to keep him away from her, he foresaw some rocky days ahead.
Monica's hands were shaking as she opened the door to Alex's office and smiled at Andrea. She managed to keep her voice steady and cheerful, though, as she said, "I hope he's in. I was in town, and thought of something I wanted to ask him."
"It's your lucky day," Andrea said, smiling. She had known Monica since babyhood. "He came in about five minutes ago. He's washing up, but he'll be out in a minute. Go on in and have a seat."
Washing up, of course, was a polite way of saying he was in the bathroom. It was what Mama would say, Monica thought, if she alluded to a bathroom at all. In thirty-two years, she couldn't remember her mother in any way acknowledging the real function of a toilet. Physical reality had to be hidden if possible, and ignored if not. Try as she might, Monica couldn't imagine her mother having sex, though she and Gray were proof that it had happened at least twice. And as for visiting an obstetrician, and the indignity of having a baby—the wonder was that Mama hadn't locked Daddy out of the bedroom after Gray was born, rather than go through that again.
Monica avoided the leather sofa and walked over to the window, to look out at the courthouse square. The fresh blooms of spring were rapidly giving way to the lush, heavy foliage of full summer. Time moved relentlessly onward, the earth and plants going through their cycles oblivious to the puny humans who were so caught up in their own grandeur that they thought they affected everything.
Alex entered the room, smiling as he saw her. "What brings you here today?" He'd had dinner with them the night before, so any business would have been discussed then.
Monica looked at that lean, good-looking face, the kind gray eyes, and her throat went dry. She had been trying for a week to work up enough courage to talk to him. She had actually made it as far as his office, but now her voice had failed her.
He frowned at the misery in her dark eyes. "What is it, dear?" he asked softly, closing the door and coming over to take her hand.
She sucked in a deep breath. Sometimes she thought she was crazy, that those times with Alex existed only in her imagination. There was never any hint of it in his eyes, or his manner, when they were together during normal times. He was just Alex, as he had always been, a sturdy shoulder to lean on, quietly stepping in to take on as much of the weight as he could, until she and Gray had been able to manage. It really was as if those furtive moments existed between two other people, between Daddy and Mama, coming together in borrowed flesh.
This was Alex, she reminded herself. He wouldn't leave. His love and support didn't depend on whether or not she slept with him. She had been a convenience for him, that was all, an outlet for his pent-up emotions.
That was what logic told her. Emotionally, however, she was terrified. One father had already left her, his love for her not strong enough to hold him against the lure of screwing Renee Devlin. She couldn't bear it if she lost Alex, too.
But then there was Michael. Sweet, sexy Michael. If she didn't seize her chance now, she might lose him forever, and of the choice between the two men, there was no choice at all. Michael was her heart, the very blood moving through her body.
"Monica?" Alex prodded, gray eyes darkening with worry.
She gulped. She had to tell him. She closed her eyes and blurted it out. "I'm going to marry Michael McFane."
There was silence for a moment, and she squeezed her eyes tighter, waiting with dread. But the seconds ticked past, and still Alex didn't say anything, and finally the stress became so acute that she couldn't stand it any longer and opened her eyes.
He was smiling at her, fond exasperation on his face. "Congratulations," he said, then chuckled. "What did you expect me to say?"
Stunned, she stared at him. "I—I don't know."
"I'm happy for you, dear. Neither you nor Gray have shown any inclination to get married, and I've worried about that. The sheriff is a good, steady man."
She wet her lips. "Mama won't like it."
He paused, considering that for a moment. "Probably not, but don't let that stop you. You deserve happiness, Monica."
"I don't want to upset her."
"There are some things she needs to face, and some things she shouldn't have to. In this case, marry Michael, and be as happy as possible. Believe me, this won't upset her half as much as hearing about Faith Devlin."
Faith Devlin? Monica blinked. "What about her?" Since Mama already knew the woman had moved back to Pres-cott, Alex's statement didn't make sense.
"Gray hasn't told you?" He seemed surprised.
"Evidently not. Told me what?"
He sighed. "She's been asking questions around town—about Guy. Personal questions. If she isn't stopped, she'll stir everything up again, and that will hurt Noelle far more than your marriage."
Monica felt as if she'd been slapped. Faith Devlin was asking around town about her father? The very thought outraged her. Wasn't it enough that her slut of a mother had taken her daddy away, and she'd never seen him again? Her face flushed with anger. "What sort of questions has she been asking? My God, what business is it of hers?"
"Personal questions, what sort of person he was, things like that. She came here yesterday, because she'd heard I was Guy's best friend. Talking to me is one thing, but Gray found out this morning that she'd been pestering Ed Morgan with questions, too."
"She's been asking Ed Morgan about Daddy?" Monica cried. "The man's the biggest gossip in town!"
"Gray took care of it," Alex said soothingly, and patted her hand. "You know Gray. He had Ed stuttering and back-stepping within ten seconds."
Gray in a temper was a fearsome sight, with those dark eyes turning so cold and deadly. She couldn't imagine Ed Morgan withstanding him for even ten seconds. The notion entertained her for a brief moment, but then was pushed aside by her indignation at Faith Devlin's gall.
"I understand her curiosity," Alex said, "but as I told Gray, it could be disastrous for your mother to find out."
"Well, / don't understand her curiosity!" Monica cried. God, it took so little to bring it all back, the sense of loss, and of being lost, and the suffocating pain. Hatred swelled within her. She pulled her hand free, and turned away. "Gray shut up Ed Morgan, but what's he doing about her?"
"I don't know." He shook his head. "I know you don't agree, but when she first moved back, I was all for leaving her alone. What happened wasn't her fault, and she deserves the right to live where she wants. That was something Noelle should have faced, and made the best of. This is different. This is deliberate, and it's something that is her fault."
"Gray will take care of it," Monica said. "He has to."
"I don't know if he can."
"Of course he can! There are a lot of things he could do."
"Then let me put it another way. I don't think he can be that drastic with Faith, considering how he feels about her. Wake up, Monica!" he admonished. "Pay attention to your brother. He's attracted to her. Nothing about this is easy for him."
Monica felt the blood drain out of her face, leaving it stiff. Gray was... attracted to that woman? No. God couldn't be that cruel. He wouldn't make her live through that nightmare again.
Unable to say anything else, she warded off Alex with an outstretched hand, unable to cope with the sympathy she could see in his eyes. Hurriedly she left his office, and it wasn't until she reached the street that she realized she hadn't told him she couldn't be with him anymore.
It would kill Mama if Gray took up with Renee Devlin's daughter. The gossip would be so vicious, she would never be able to lift her head again. Monica gave a bitter little laugh. And to think she'd been worried what Mama would think about Michael McFane!
|
After the Night - Linda Howard.txt
| 14 |
Mr. Pleasant's office was located on the top floor of a two-story building. Faith climbed the stairs, hoping against hope that she would find him there, that his telephone had been out of service, that he would be all right. A malfunctioning telephone wasn't much of a possibility, because if he hadn't been able to call out, he would have known about it and simply gone to another phone. Surely, too, he would have noticed if there were no incoming calls. Maybe he'd taken another case, and forgotten about her.
She doubted Francis P. Pleasant ever forgot anything.
His office was the first door on the left. The upper half of the door was glass, but the interior blinds had been closed, preventing her from seeing inside. The day she had met him, the blinds had been open. She tried to open the door and found it locked. Not really expecting a response, she knocked, and put her ear against the glass. The room beyond was silent.
There was a mail slot in the door. Faith pushed the little flap open, and angled her head to look inside. Her view was extremely limited, but she could see the mail, quite a lot of it, scattered across the floor.
He wasn't here, and the amount of his mail indicated that he hadn't been here in several days.
Growing more worried by the minute, Faith walked down the hall to the next door. According to the lettering on the door, she was at the law office of Houston H. Manges. She could hear the clatter of a typewriter and voices, so she opened the door and entered.
Houston H. Manges's environs were small and cramped, with file cabinets crammed into every available space. She was in the reception area, populated by a tiny white-haired woman and three rubber plants, one of which had reached gargantuan size. The room beyond, which she could see through the open door, was about the same size, with floor-to-ceiling books. A heavyset man lounged behind a battered desk, and he was talking to a client who sat in one of the two cracked imitation leather chairs positioned in front of the desk. All that was visible of the client was the back of his head.
The tiny woman looked up and smiled in question, but made no move to close the door and give her employer and his client any privacy. Faith gave a mental shrug and approached.
"I'm a client of Mr. Pleasant, next door," she said. "I've been trying to reach him for several days and can't seem to locate him. Do you happen to have any idea where he is?"
"Why, no," the tiny woman said. "He left about a week ago to go to this little town up close to Mississippi, I don't remember the name. Perkins, something like that. I assumed he was still there."
"No, he left there the next day. He has a bad heart, and I'm worried about him."
"Oh, dear." The small face took on a distressed look. "I never thought about his heart. I knew, of course. His wife, Virginia—we used to have lunch together, it was so sad when she died—told me about his trouble. It was really bad, she said. I never thought to check on him." She reached immediately for the phone index, and flipped through it until she came to the Ps. "I'll try his home phone. It's unlisted, you know. He didn't like business intruding on his private life."
Faith knew. She had called information, trying to get the number. It was her lack of success that had spurred her to drive down and try to find him.
After a minute the little lady hung up the phone. "There's no answer. Oh, dear. I am worried now. It isn't like Francis not to let someone know where he is."
"I'm going to call all the hospitals," Faith said decisively. "May I borrow your telephone?"
"Of course, honey. We have two lines, so people will still be able to get through. If a call comes in, though, I'll need you to hang up so I can answer it."
Thanking God for southern hospitality, Faith accepted the New Orleans directory and flipped to the listing of hospitals. There were more than she had expected. Starting at the top, she began dialing.
Thirty minutes and three interruptions for incoming calls later, she hung up in defeat. Mr. Pleasant wasn't a patient in any of the local hospitals. If he had taken ill while driving back from Prescott, he could be in a hospital somewhere else, but where?
Or something could have happened to him. It was a possibility she didn't want to consider, but one she had to accept. If Guy Rouillard had been murdered, and Mr. Pleasant had been asking questions that made someone uncomfortable... She felt sick at the thought. If anything had happened to that sweet old man, it would be her fault for involving him. It wasn't as if she'd had anything to go on, other than Renee's statement that Guy hadn't been with her at all, that she hadn't seen him since that night twelve years ago.
Most people wouldn't have suspected murder. Most people wouldn't now be afraid that poor Mr. Pleasant had somehow run afoul of the same person who had killed Guy. But neither had most people been dragged out of their home in the middle of the night and thrown into the dirt; until Renee and Guy had disappeared, Faith's life had been predictable, if a bit grim. But that night her trust in the comforting ordinariness of life had been shattered, and she had never regained that sense of security, of obliviousness to things that just didn't happen to normal people. It was as if a curtain had been torn aside, and after that night she was acutely aware of all the dangers and what-ifs. Bad things were not only possible; in her experience, there was a damn good chance they would happen. She had held Scottie's hand as he died, she had identified Kyle's body in a morgue... Yes, bad things happened.
"What are you going to do?" the little secretary asked, automatically accepting that Faith would do something.
"File a missing person's report," Faith said, because it was the only thing she could think to do. Mr. Pleasant had disappeared as suddenly and thoroughly as Guy Rouillard had; he had been asking questions about Guy. Coincidence? Not likely, but neither did she have any evidence that would warrant a criminal investigation. The best she could do was file a missing person's report. At least that would trigger an investigation of some sort.
She asked directions to police headquarters, and managed to find it with only two wrong turns. A desk sergeant directed her to the proper office, and soon she was seated in a straight-back chair reciting what information she had to a tired detective in a tired suit, who nevertheless managed to seem interested.
"You called the motel where he'd been staying, and he'd checked out?" Detective Ambrose asked, his world-weary eyes warming a bit when he looked at her.
"The clerk didn't actually see Mr. Pleasant. He said the key was left on the nightstand, and Mr. Pleasant's things were gone."
"Had the room been paid for in advance?"
Faith nodded.
"Nothing unusual in that, then. Let's see. No one has seen him since he left Prescott, the mail is piling up at his office, there's no answer at his home, and he has a bum ticker." The detective shook his head. "I'll go by his house and see what I can find, but..." He hesitated, sympathy in his expression.
But probably the old guy's heart failed, was what he was thinking. Faith hunched her shoulders in misery. She would hate it if Mr. Pleasant had died, and she hadn't been there to hold his hand or even attend his funeral. She had checked only the current admissions at the hospitals, not whether he'd been a patient any time in the past week. But he'd known about his heart, had been prepared, had even been waiting to join his wife; she would grieve, but there would be a sense of lightness if he'd gone that way. The real nightmare would be if the detective couldn't find him. Then she would fear the worst, and have no way of knowing for certain.
She extracted a business card from her purse and handed it across the desk. "Please call me if you find anything," she said. "I didn't know him very well, but I liked him a lot. He was a sweet old man." To her horror, she realized she was referring to him in the past tense, and flinched.
The detective took the card, and rubbed his fingers along the thin edges. "There's something I'd like to know, Mrs. Hardy. What was he investigating for you?"
She'd known he would ask, and told him the truth. "Twelve years ago, my mother ran away with her lover. I wanted Mr. Pleasant to find them, if he could."
"And did he?"
She shook her head. "He hadn't the last time I talked to him."
"Which was...?"
"I had dinner with him, the night before he left the motel."
"Did anyone see him after that?"
"I don't know." It was easy to see the direction of this line of questioning. At least the detective was taking her seriously.
"Did he seem all right when he left?"
"He seemed fine. I had some unexpected company, and Mr. Pleasant left right after dinner."
"So you weren't the only one to see him?"
She gave him a faint smile. "No."
"Who was your visitor?"
"A neighbor, Gray Rouillard. He came to see about buying my house." It was amazing how far the bare facts could be from what had really happened. She was becoming an expert at exposing the tip while keeping the rest of the iceberg of truth submerged.
"Gray Rouillard," Detective Ambrose repeated, tired eyes lighting with recognition. "Would that be the same Rouillard who played football for LSU, oh, ten or so years ago?"
"Almost thirteen years," she said. "Yes, he's the same man."
"The Rouillards are big stuff in this part of the state. Well, well. So you're selling your house to him?"
"No. He asked to buy it, but I don't want to sell."
"Are you on good terms with him?"
"Not exactly."
"Oh." He seemed disappointed. Faith stared at him a moment, then her mouth curved in a tiny smile. This was the South, after all. Pro football had made some inroads, but college football still reigned supreme.
"No, I don't have any influence with him to get tickets to the games," she said.
He shrugged, and a responding smile twitched his lips. "It was worth a try." He clicked his pen and rose to his feet, indicating that he had no more questions to ask. "I'll see what I can find out about Mr. Pleasant. Will you be in town awhile longer, or are you going home now?"
"I'm going home. My only reason for driving down was to see if I could find him." Gratefully she stood up from the straight-back chair, and refrained from stretching.
He put his hand on her arm, the touch light. "You know my first check will be of the obituaries," he said gently.
Faith bit her lip, and nodded.
His hand made two brief pats. "I'll let you know."
She cried during most of the drive back to Prescott. She had cried very little in the past twelve years, some tears shed for Kyle and more for Scottie, but the thought of losing Mr. Pleasant made her ache inside. She hadn't had much room for optimism in her life, and she expected the worst.
Detective Ambrose was on the ball. When she checked the answering machine immediately on arriving home, there was a message from him: "I've checked Mr. Pleasant's residence, and there's no sign of him. The mail has piled up there, too, and the neighbors haven't seen him." A pause. "He hasn't been listed in the obits, either. I'll keep checking, and get back to you."
He wasn't there. The thought echoed around and around in her mind. No one had seen him since he'd left Prescott. Assuming he had ever left.
Pure rage began to build, and push aside the grief. Her mother and Guy had created a tangle, twelve years ago, that was still wreaking destruction. Faith had to absolve Renee of any involvement in Mr. Pleasant's disappearance, since her mother hadn't known the man existed, but she was still part and parcel of the root cause.
For Faith, deed followed closely on the heels of thought. Furiously she picked up the telephone and dialed her grandmother's number.
She was thwarted, however, by the endless ringing on the other end. No one was home.
She called four more times before she got an answer, and her grandmother's cracked voice called Renee to the phone. "Who is it?" she heard Renee ask in the background. "That girl of yourn, the youngest one."
"I don't want to talk to her. Tell her I'm not here." Faith's hand tightened on the receiver, and her eyes 'narrowed. She heard her grandmother fumbling with the phone again. She didn't wait for the parroted excuse. "Tell Mama that if she doesn't talk to me, I'm going to the sheriff." It was a bluff, at least at this point, but a calculated one. Renee's response to it would tell her a lot. If her mother didn't have anything to hide, the bluff wouldn't work. If she did –
There was a pause as the message was relayed, then more fumbling with the telephone. "What on earth are you talkin' about, Faithie? What's the sheriff got to do with anything?" The tone was too bright, too cheerful. "I'm talking about Guy Rouillard. Mama—" "Would you quit harping about Guy Rouillard? I told you, I ain't seen him."
Faith suppressed the nausea roiling in her stomach, and made her voice more soothing. "I know, Mama. I believe you. But I think something happened to him that night, after you left." Don't let Mama think she was suspected of anything, or she'd close up tighter than a miser's purse. "I don't know nothing about that, and if you're as smart as you think you are, missy, you'll stop pokin' your nose into other folks' business."
"Where did you meet him that night, Mama?" Faith asked, ignoring the motherly advice.
"I don't know why you're so worried about him," Renee said sullenly. "If he'd done what he should, I'd've been taken care of. You kids, too," she added as an afterthought. "But he kept puttin' it off, waiting until Gray was out of school—well, it don't make no difference now."
"Did you go to the motel? Or did you meet him somewhere else?"
Renee drew in a seething breath. "You're like a bulldog when you get something on your mind, did you know that? You always were the most stubborn of my kids, so bound and determined to have your way that you'd do what you wanted, even knowin' your Pa would slap you for it. We met at the summerhouse, where we usually went, if you just have to know! Go nosing around there, and you'll find out in a hurry that Gray ain't nearly as easygoin' as Guy was!"
Faith winced as Renee slammed down the phone, then drew a deep, shaky breath as she replaced her own receiver. Whatever had happened that night, Renee knew about it. Only her own self-interest could stir her to do something she didn't want to do, so she had a reason for not wanting Faith to talk to the sheriff. Getting her to admit it, however, would take some doing.
It had to be the summerhouse, of course, Faith thought with resignation. Why couldn't Guy and Renee have rendezvoused at a motel, in keeping with the American tradition? Faith's memories of the summerhouse were bittersweet, like everything else connected with Gray Rouillard. She didn't want to see it again, for doing so would remind her too vividly of the child she had been, of the long hours she had spent lurking at the edge of the woods, hoping for a glimpse of Gray. She had lain on her belly in the pine needles and contentedly watched him and his friends swimming in the lake, listened to their boisterous Shouts of laughter, and woven fancy daydreams of one day joining in their fun. Silly dreams. Silly child.
There, too, she had watched Gray making love to Lindsey Partain. Her stomach tightened now as she thought of it, and her hands curled with an impotent mixture of anger and jealousy. At the time, she had merely thought how beautiful he was. Now, however, she was a woman, with a woman's needs and desires, and she didn't want even to think of him making love to another woman, much less see it.
That had been fifteen long years ago, but she could still call up his image in her mind as if it had been yesterday. She could hear his deep, smoky voice murmuring French love words and husky reassurances, see his powerful young body moving between Lindsey's spread legs.
Damn him. Why had he kissed her, that day in New Orleans? It was one thing to dream of his kisses, and another to know exactly how he tasted, how soft his lips were, how it felt to be in his arms and feel his erection thrusting insistently against her stomach. It was unfair of him to feed her hunger, and then try to use it against her. But then, everything about Gray was unfair. Why couldn't bis hair have thinned over the years, rather than remaining that thick, vibrant mane? Why couldn't he have put on weight, developed a beer belly and worn his pants slung low under it, rather than honing down to such lean muscularity, even more finely tuned than during his football days? And even if he hadn't changed, why couldn't she have, altering enough so that he no longer affected her so violently, or her heart would beat normally in his presence?
Instead, in that respect, she was still the adoring girl who had spent hours, weeks, months of her childhood lying on her belly in the woods, her eyes straining for a glimpse of her hero. Not even finding out that her hero could be a ruthless bastard when he wanted had been able to shake that painful fixation.
She didn't want to go back to the summerhouse, to the scene of her youthful foolishness. What could she possibly find there, after twelve years? Nothing.
But no one else had looked at it with her eyes. No one had suspected that Guy Rouillard might have spent the last hours of his life there.
Faith growled at herself. She was tired and hungry, after the long drive to New Orleans and back, as well as exhausted by worry over Mr. Pleasant. She didn't want to go to the summerhouse, but she had just given herself a convincing argument on why it was necessary. And if she was going, she should do it now, while the afternoon sun was still strong.
She grabbed her keys and stalked out of the house.
The best way to get there, she supposed, was the way she had gone when she'd been eleven. There was a road from the Rouillard house to the lake, but she could hardly take that route. From her younger days of roaming and spying, however, she knew the Rouillard land as well as she knew her own face. She drove to a secluded spot close to the old shack where she had grown up, but when she reached the last curve before the shack would come into view, she stopped the car and sat for a moment, hands gripping the steering wheel. She couldn't bring herself to drive around the curve. The shack had probably fallen in by now, but that wouldn't ease her memories. She didn't want to see it, didn't want to relive the memories of that night.
Pain was a lump in the middle of her chest, obstructing her breathing, making her eyes burn. She didn't cry. She had cried for Mr. Pleasant, for Scottie, for Kyle. She hadn't cried for herself since the night Renee had left.
Well, delaying wouldn't accomplish anything except putting off dinner, and she was already starving. She got out of the car and locked the doors, and dropped the keys into her skirt pocket. Brush grew thickly along the sides of the road, now little more than a track as the vegetation gradually reclaimed the land. She had to pick her way around some briar bushes, but once into the woods, it was fairly easy to walk. She picked up a stick, in case she came across a snake, but she wasn't at all afraid. She had grown up in these woods, played in them, hidden in them when Amos had been drunk and slinging his fists at anyone who got in his way.
The familiar scents washed over her, fresh and powerful with spring, and she stopped for a moment to absorb them. Her eyes closed so she could concentrate. There was the rich brown scent of the earth, the fresh verdant of leaves, the spicy golden scent of pine sap. She inhaled that last with a little shiver of recognition. Gray's scent contained a hint of that golden spice. She would love to have him naked and at her disposal, so she could explore all the shadings of his scent. She would absolutely wallow on him, drunk with delight –
Her eyes popped open. The telltale wanning of her body told her where that particular fantasy had been going. It was coming back here that had done it; in her mind, the smells of the forest were inextricably linked with Gray: the hope of seeing him, the fizzing joy of seeing him.
Resolutely she walked on. If she didn't get him out of her mind, she'd find herself lying on her stomach in the pine needles at the edge of the woods, completely reverted to childhood.
The walk to the lake wasn't a long one, about twenty minutes. The forest had changed, of course; time didn't stand still with trees any more than it did with people. She had to pick her way around obstacles that hadn't been there before, and old landmarks were missing, but still she knew her way with the accuracy of a homing pigeon.
She approached the summerhouse from the angle she always had, from the back and right side. From there she could see the dock, and a corner of the boathouse. Once she had prayed to see a Corvette parked in front, but now she was just as glad not to see a Jaguar there. It would have been too ironic for Gray to appear. Thank God he had business concerns now, and didn't have the luxury of spending long, lazy days swimming and fishing.
Time had laid its hand on the summerhouse, too. It wasn't dilapidated, Gray had kept it up, but an air of disuse had fallen over it. Things that had regular human use wore a certain sheen of accomplishment, a sheen that the summerhouse no longer possessed. There was a subtle reverse of order. Before, the grass had always been neatly manicured, and though the yard wasn't overgrown with weeds now, it still showed a certain roughness that said it had been over a week since the grass had been cut. On the other hand, the summerhouse had always been littered with the flotsam of human habitation, and now it was too neat, without the activity that had kept it cluttered and alive.
She went up the back steps, the same steps where she had crouched to listen to Gray making love to Lindsey Partain. The screen door to the porch wasn't latched, and creaked a little as she opened it. The sound made her smile, so woven was it into the days of her childhood.
For all the difficulties, she hadn't had a horrible childhood. Much of it had been downright enjoyable, rich with fantasy, especially the long hours spent exploring the woods. She had waded in creeks, caught crawdads with her bare hands, marveled at the delicate tracery of a leaf held up to the sun. She had never had a bicycle, but she'd had fresh air and blue skies, the anticipation of turning over a rotting log to see how many insects and worms it hid. She had eaten wild berries straight off the bush, found the occasional arrowhead, and painstakingly constructed her own bow and arrow from a green limb, old fishing line, and sharpened sticks. The joys of all those things had created a reserve of strength for her to draw on when times were bad.
The boards of the porch creaked beneath her feet as she crossed to the back door. In the old days, there had been several rocking chairs scattered about the porch, for the enjoyment of fine summer nights. All swimming and fishing paraphernalia was supposed to have been kept in the boathouse, but somehow bits of it had always been lying about on the porch: an inner tube that needed patching, a fishing rod, an assortment of lures, hooks, and floats. Now, however, the porch was empty, no longer a place for rowdy teenagers and rendezvousing adults.
She walked to the window where she had watched Gray and Lindsey making love; the room was empty now, the hardwood floors bare and coated with a light layer of dust. She stood for a moment, remembering that long-ago summer day, gilded with the magic of childhood.
Turning away, she tried the back door, and was surprised when the knob twisted easily in her hand. She had never been inside the summerhouse. The closest she had ever been was on the porch, that one time. She stepped into the kitchen, looking around with interest. Once there had been a refrigerator and stove, for empty spaces and the electrical connections marked where they had stood. She opened the cabinet doors and drawers, but they were all empty. Each sound echoed through the bare rooms.
Everything was clean enough, without the smell of mice, though it had obviously been a couple of weeks since the last cleaning. As she wandered into the other rooms, she saw that none of the light fixtures sported so much as a single light bulb. There was a small closet in each of the two bedrooms, and she looked in both of them. Nothing, not even a single clothes hanger. The summerhouse was completely empty.
Which one of the bedrooms had Renee and Guy used? It didn't matter; there was nothing to be found here, no interesting nooks or crannies where a body could have been hidden. There was absolutely nothing suspicious about the house. Any evidence had long since been swept away, mopped up, or painted over. She wondered that there wasn't any sign of vagrants, considering the house was unlocked, but since it was in the middle of Rouillard land, she supposed there weren't many passersby.
There was still the boathouse to check, though she didn't really expect to find anything. She had come only to satisfy herself that she had done everything possible to find out what had happened to Guy, and Mr. Pleasant. Leaving by the front door, she walked down to the dock. Both the dock and boathouse were set at an angle to the house, slightly to the left, positioned on the curve of a small slough. Since she had been here last, twelve years ago, vegetation had been allowed to grow over the banks. Young willow trees, growing in clumps along the lake's edge, had matured to provide much more shade and cover than she remembered. Once there had been an almost unobstructed view of the lake, except for the boathouse, but now saplings and bushes had taken advantage of the subtle neglect to sink their roots into the rich soil.
The dock had been kept in good repair, though, and she walked out to the end. It was a calm day, with an almost imperceptible breeze making faint ripples in the water, which lapped against the dock pilings with wet, rhythmic slaps. It was one of those hot, lazy days that made her want to lie on her back on the dock, and stare up at the fat white clouds floating across a deep blue sky. Birds were calling in the trees, and somewhere a fish jumped, a quiet splash that didn't disturb the peace. Over to the left, a red and white float bobbed happily on the little ripples—She stiffened, her eyes widening with dread as she slowly turned. A fishing float meant someone was fishing, someone who had been hidden from her view by the angle of the boathouse. Like a felon approaching the gallows, her gaze followed the fishing line as it arced gracefully up from the float, across the water, to where it was threaded through the eyes of a fishing rod. A fishing rod that was held by Gray Rouillard, standing shirtless on the bank on the other side of the boathouse, watching her with narrowed dark eyes.
For an instant they stared at each other across the small expanse of water. Faith's thoughts darted about in panic, trying to think of a good reason for her presence, but her normally nimble mind was blank with shock. She had thought herself totally alone, and then to turn and see Gray, of all people—a shirtless Gray, at that. It wasn't fair. She needed all her wits about her when dealing with him; she couldn't afford to be distracted by that bare expanse of chest, and his long hair hanging loose to his shoulders.
He began reeling in the float with quick, deliberate movements. Choosing caution over valor, Faith bolted up the dock, her feet thudding on the planks. He threw down the fishing rod and sprinted around the boathouse. Panting, she reached for more speed; if she could just get to the edge of the woods ahead of him, he wouldn't be able to catch her. She was smaller, slimmer, and would be able to dodge between trees he would have to go around. But as fast as she was, he still had the speed of a linebacker. She saw him out of the corner of her eye, too close, and gaining ground with each long stride. He beat her by a split second, his big body suddenly blocking her way off the dock. She tried to stop, but she was already on him, and her shoes weren't made for traction. She slammed into his chest, the impact knocking her breath out with a whoq/J He grunted and staggered back a few steps, his arms coming up just in time to catch her against his chest and prevent her from falling on her face.
He caught his balance, and gave a muffled laugh as his arms tightened around her, holding her off the ground. "That's a pretty good hit, for a lightweight. Nice speed, too. Where're you going in such a hurry, Red? And what the hell are you doing here in the first place?"
She fought for her breath, sucking in desperate drafts to fill her aching lungs. God, he was as hard as a rock! She had probably bruised herself, barreling into him that way. After a short while she managed to say, "Reminiscing," and pushed against his bare shoulders in a hint that he should set her on her feet.
He snorted, and ignored the hint. "You're trespassing. You'll have to think of a better reason than that."
"Nosy," she offered breathlessly, still finding oxygen in somewhat short supply. The tightness of his arms was interfering with her efforts to take deep breaths. She squirmed against him, then immediately stopped. The friction of his bare skin against her was too distracting, too dangerous.
"That I can believe," he muttered. "What are you up to now?" He decided to let her down, loosening his grip so that she slid against his body. Faith's cheeks flushed as she stepped away from him, and the color wasn't just from the deep breaths she was taking. He was wearing only a pair of glove-soft jeans and scuffed boots, and she stared in helpless fascination at his naked torso. His shoulders were a good two feet wide, and heavy with muscle, a powerful layering that continued in plates across his chest. Curly black hair grew there, almost completely hiding his tiny, flat nipples, and arrowing down the middle of his abdomen to where it grew straight and downy around his shallow navel, which was exposed by sinfully low-riding jeans. A light sheen of sweat gleamed on his skin, making him glisten like a warm-toned statue with carved muscle and sinew.
"How did you get here?" she blurted, not answering his question. "I didn't see a car."
"Horseback." He jerked his head toward the field on the other side of the slough. "He's over there, eating his head off."
"Maximillian?" she asked, remembering the name of the prize stallion Guy had owned.
"One of his sons." Gray frowned down at her. "How do you know about Maximillian? And how did you get here?"
"I imagine most of the people in the parish know you have horses." As she spoke, she edged sideways.
He reached out and clamped one hand on her arm. "Hold it. Yeah, a lot of people know we have horses, but not many would know the name of our breeding stallion. You've been asking questions about us again, haven't you?" His hand tightened. "Who have you been talking to now? Tell me, damn it!" He emphasized the demand with a slight shake.
"No one," she flared. "I remembered the name from before."
"How would you have known it back then? Renee didn't balk at much, but I doubt she went home and regaled her family with details of her lover's life."
Faith closed her lips tightly together. She had known the stallion's name because she had been like a sponge, absorbing every little snippet of conversation she overhead, if it pertained to Gray. She wasn't about to admit such a thing to him, though. "I remembered it from before," she finally repeated.
He didn't believe her, and his face darkened.
"I haven't been talking to anyone!" she cried, trying to tug away from him. "I remembered the horse's name, that's all." Why did every encounter with him seem to involve playing tug-of-war with one or both of her arms?
He surveyed her upturned face with narrowed eyes. "All righf, I'll give you that one. Now tell me why you're poking around my summerhouse, and how you got here. I know damn good and well you don't have a horse."
That, at least, seemed safe enough to tell him. "I walked," she said. "Through the woods."
Pointedly he looked down at her feet. "You're not dressed for hiking through the woods."
That was true enough. She hadn't taken the time to change clothes, so she was still wearing the midcalf skirt, hosiery, and dress flats that she'd worn to New Orleans. She had grown up roaming barefoot through those woods, so she certainly hadn't worried about wearing flats. Shrugging to show her indifference, she said, "I didn't think about it." Quickly she added, "I'm sorry I trespassed. I'll leave—"
"Whoa." He drew her to a standstill again. "You'll leave when I say you can leave, and not before. I'm still waiting for an answer to my other question."
Thankfully her brain was working again. "I was just curious," she said. "They used to meet here, so... I wanted to see it." There was no need to elaborate on who "they" were.
To her dismay, his eyes grew cold. "Don't give me that. You've been here before, because I've seen you."
Shocked, she stared at him. "When?"
"When you were a kid. You slipped around through the woods like a little ghost, but you forgot to cover your head." He tugged on a strand of hair, then smoothed it behind her ear. "It was like watching a flame bob through the trees."
He had known she was there. For an appalled, heart-stopping moment she wondered if he had guessed he was the attraction that had drawn her like a moth. Bitterly she remembered all her childish fantasies, that one day he would look up and see her, and ask her to join their fun. He'd seen her, all right, but no invitation had been issued. The surprise would have been if he had asked her to join them. The eight-year age diiference between twenty-six and thirty-four was almost nonexistent, but an enormous gulf between eleven and nineteen. Even if she hadn't been too young, she was a Devlin, forever locked outside his circle.
"I'm going to ask you one more time," he said softly, when she remained silent. A chill ran down her spine at the steel in his tone. "What are you doing here?"
"I told you." She lifted her chin and met his gaze. "Nosing around."
"The next question is: Why? You've been doing a lot of nosing around since you moved back here. What are you up to, Faith? I warned you about stirring up old gossip and upsetting my family, and I meant every word of it."
She had already given him the only answer she could, and he hadn't believed it. She could tell him the entire truth, or she could lie. In the end, she chose to do neither, but stood silently in his grasp.
His jaw flexed with anger, and his hand tightened on her arm. Faith winced, and his gaze dropped to the livid marks where his fingers bit into her soft skin. He cursed and relaxed his grip, and like a shot she tore away from him, sprinting for the safety of the woods. Within two steps she knew it was a mistake, but emotion rather than logic had the upper hand. He reacted like the predator he was, springing after her. She was barely halfway across the grass when the impact of his heavy body knocked her off her feet, a tiger bringing down a gazelle. He fell with her, holding her tight against his chest and twisting his body so that he took the brunt of the fall, with her on top of him. Her vision was filled with a confusing tumble of grass, trees, and sky as he rolled, deftly placing her beneath him.
Oh, God. The surge of primal recognition shocked her body into stillness, as if she didn't dare move in that first shattering moment of delight. Being in his arms was one thing; lying sprawled beneath him was quite another. His considerable weight pressed her into the grass, releasing the sweet green fragrance of the crushed blades to mingle with the heady masculine scent of his sweaty skin. The fall had rucked her skirt up to midthigh, and one of his legs rode high between hers, so that her thighs clasped the muscular column. Instinctively she had clung to him as they were falling, and now her fingers were digging hard into his bare back, feeling the slick heat of his flesh. Their position was that of lovemaking, and her body responded with mindless intensity. Her senses blurred, overloaded in that first explosion of sexual signals.
"Are you all right?" he muttered, raising his head.
Faith swallowed, words sticking in her throat. Her insides were clenching, urging her to lift against him in blind, searing need. She resisted the urge, turning her head to the side so she couldn't see if it was mirrored in his dark eyes.
"Faith?" His tone was more insistent, demanding an answer.
"Yes," she whispered.
"Look at me." He lifted himself to his elbows, removing most of his weight so that she breathed easier, but he was still far too close, his face mere inches from hers.
Temptation shimmered between them, made all the more potent by the times she had resisted it. It took so little to bring desire into full flame, a kiss, a touch, like a spark to dry straw. Each time it was more difficult to resist him, and only the strength of her aversion to casual sex, to being a moral replica of her mother, had enabled her to hold him at bay. But each contact with him eroded her willpower, wearing it down bit by bit so that each refusal took more effort.
His breath wafted over her lips, the subtle touch making them part as if she would inhale his essence. His head lowered, his mouth moving toward hers.
Desperately she wedged her arms between them, bracing her hands against his chest. The curls of hair tickled her palms, and she felt the hard nubs of his nipples against the heels of her hands. Hidden beneath blouse and bra, her own nipples had peaked.
He paused, hovering over her. A trickle of sweat ran down his temple and curved along his jaw. His nipples felt like tiny spikes, burning into her hands. She wanted to touch them, to put her mouth over them and feel them with her tongue, taste the saltiness of his skin, feel him stiffen and shudder from excitement.
Temptation gnawed at her, sharp and insistent. He inhaled, his chest expanding beneath her palms, and the sand castle of her resistance crumbled beneath the wave of pleasure. Letting out her breath on a soft sigh, she turned her hands, moving them so that her thumbs brushed over his nipples, once, twice, again. The delight of it made her feel dizzy.
His pupils dilated, the black centers flaring until they all but eclipsed the dark irises. His head fell forward between his arms, his long black hair curtaining their faces, and his breath hissed between his teeth. Having given in, she couldn't make herself stop touching him. She explored the hard planes of his chest, returning time and again to the hard little peaks that had lured her so far into dangerous territory. She couldn't touch him enough, couldn't sate her hunger for the feel of him.
Then he drew her hands away from his body, and his eyes were fierce as he looked down at her. "Turnabout's fair play," he said, and put his hand on her breast.
She arched beneath him, crying out at the hot lash of pleasure. Her breasts strained into his touch, so taut and sensitive that the hot weight of his hand was almost unbearable, and yet the cessation of contact would be torture. Even through her clothes, the rasp of his thumbs made her nipples burn and throb.
He lowered his head and kissed her, the pressure hard and ravaging, while he tugged her blouse loose from the waistband of her skirt. When it was free, he thrust his hand beneath the cloth, burrowing under her bra to close his fingers on the satiny mound of her bare breast. "You know what I want," he said roughly, moving more fully onto her and pushing his muscular legs between hers to make a place for himself.
She knew. She wanted it too, so fiercely that the need almost obliterated all other considerations. His callused fingers plucked at her nipple, rolling it between finger and thumb. She wanted his mouth there, sucking strongly. She wanted him to take her, here on the grass with the hot sun burning down on their bare bodies. She wanted him, forever.
"Tell me," he said. "Tell me why." The words were muffled against her throat as he trailed kisses down to her collarbone.
She blinked, staring up at the clouds in confusion. Then the meaning of the words washed over her like a dash of ice water. He wanted her—the thick ridge of proof pushed against her loins—but while she had been lost in the fog of desire, his brain had been clear, still working, still trying to get answers.
With a hiss of rage she erupted, shoving against him, kicking. He rolled off of her and sat up, looking like a half-naked savage with his hair tangled around his face and his dark eyes narrowed with dangerous lust.
"You bastard!" she spat, so angry she was quivering. She surged to her knees, hands clenched into fists as she fought the urge to hurl herself at him. Now wasn't the time to challenge him physically, not with his entire big body taut with the need to mate. Control, his and hers, was stretched to a hairsbreadth; the least pressure would snap it. He waited, poised to meet her attack, and she saw the sexual anticipation hot in his eyes. For a long moment they faced each other, until gradually she forced herself to relax. There was nothing to be gained in this confrontation.
There was nothing to be said, either. Perhaps she hadn't exactly started the fire, but she had certainly fanned the flames by caressing his nipples the way she had. If things had gone beyond what she wanted, she had only herself to blame.
At last she got to her feet, moving stiffly. Her skirt was torn, her panty hose shredded down one leg. She turned away, only to find herself caught again, this time by a handful of skirt. "I'll take you back," he said. "Let me get the horse."
"Thank you, but I'd rather walk," she replied, the words as stiff as her body.
"I didn't ask what you wanted. I said I'll take you back. You shouldn't be wandering around in the woods by yourself." Not trusting her to remain there if he released her, he began dragging her along in his wake.
"I wandered around them by myself for over half my life," she growled.
"Maybe so, but you aren't doing it now." He slanted a brief, hard glance her way. "It's my land, and I make the rules."
He kept his fist twisted in her skirt, so she was obliged to keep step with him or have her clothes torn off. They walked past the boathouse and around the slough, a distance of about a hundred yards, to where Gray had hobbled the stallion so he could graze. At his whistle, the big, dark brown animal began moving toward him. To her dismay, there was no saddle anywhere in evidence.
"You rode him bareback?" she asked uneasily.
His dark eyes glinted. "I won't let you fall."
She didn't know a lot about horses, having never been on one, but she did know that stallions were fractious animals, difficult to control. She tried to back away as the horse ambled closer, but Gray's grip on her skirt kept her at his side.
"Don't be afraid. He's the sweetest-tempered stallion I've ever seen, or I wouldn't be riding him without a saddle." The horse came within reach and he caught the halter, crooning praise into the pricked ears.
"I've never been on a horse," she admitted, staring up at the big head as it lowered. Velvety lips whuffled at her arm, scooped-out nostrils flaring as he caught her scent. Hesitantly she put out her hand and stroked above his nose.
"Then your first ride will be on a Thoroughbred," Gray said, and lifted her onto the broad back. She clutched at the thick mane, alarmed by the height at which she found herself, while the living platform beneath her moved restlessly.
Gray gathered the reins, then caught two handfuls of mane and swung up behind her. The stallion skittered beneath the extra weight, making Faith catch her breath, but Gray's touch, and the sound of his voice, soothed him immediately.
"Where did you leave your car?" he asked.
"On the last curve before you get to the shack," she replied, and those were the only words spoken during the ride. Gray guided the horse through the trees, avoiding low-hanging limbs, walking him around obstacles. Faith held on, acutely aware of Gray's bare chest against her back, and of the way her buttocks were nestled against his crotch. His muscular thighs hugged her hips, and she felt them clenching and relaxing as he guided the horse. They reached the road far too quickly, but in another sense the journey had taken a small eternity.
He reined in beside her car and swung to the ground, then reached up to catch her under the arms and lift her down. Suddenly alarmed that she might have lost her keys in the scuffle, she patted her skirt pocket, and heard the reassuring rattle. She didn't want to look at him, so she took out the keys and turned to unlock the car.
"Faith."
She hesitated, then turned the key in the lock and opened the door. He stepped forward, and the expression in his eyes made her grateful for the car door between them.
"Stay off my property," he said evenly. "If I catch you on Rouillard land again, I'm going to give you the fucking you've been asking for."
|
After the Night - Linda Howard.txt
| 15 |
The next day, Faith found the note inside her car, lying on the driver's seat. She saw the folded piece of paper and picked it up, wondering what she had dropped. She unfolded it, and saw the block letters.
She leaned against the car, a light breeze fluttering the paper in her hands. She didn't lock her car at home, so she didn't have to wonder how the note had gotten in there. She stared at the paper, reading it again and wondering if she had been threatened, or if the writer had simply used a familiar phrase. Shut up if you know what's good for you. She had heard variations of it a hundred times, with only the command changing. The note might or might not be a threat; likely it was more of a warning. Someone didn't like her asking questions about Guy.
Gray hadn't left the note. It wasn't his style, for one thing; he had delivered his threats in person, and spelled them out. The last one still had her rattled. Who else would have been disturbed by her questions? There were two possibilities: someone with something to hide, or someone who thought to curry Gray's favor.
She had been on her way to town for yet another fact-finding mission, this time to try having a word with Yolanda Foster, so there was a certain irony to the timing of the note's appearance. After a moment's consideration, she decided that she was still going to try. If the writer wanted her to take the threat seriously, he or she would have to be more specific.
First, though, she carried the note inside and locked it in the desk, being careful not to handle the paper more than necessary. In itself, this wasn't something that warranted calling the sheriff, but if she received another, she wanted to be able to present both of them to him for evidence. She wasn't eager to see the sheriff in any case. She had a stark memory of him standing beside his patrol car, beefy arms folded as he approvingly watched his deputies empty the shack of the Devlins' belongings. Sheriff Deese was thoroughly in Gray's hip pocket; the question was whether or not he would do anything even if she received a death threat.
The note properly stored, she drove to town. Lying in bed last night, unable to sleep, she had planned her strategy. She wouldn't call Mrs. Foster; that would give her a chance to refuse a meeting. It would be best to take her by surprise, face-to-face, and slip in a few questions before Yolanda got over being startled. She didn't know where the Fosters lived, however, and the address in the phone book had been unfamiliar to her.
Her first stop was the library. To her disappointment, the chatty Carlene DuBois wasn't behind the desk; instead it was manned—or girled—by a frothy little blonde who barely looked old enough to be out of high school. She was chewing gum as she leafed through a rock music fanzine. What had happened to the stereotypical librarian with her hair pulled back in a bun and reading glasses perched on a thin nose? The gum-chewing rock fan wasn't an improvement.
Realistically, Faith knew, she herself was probably no more than four or five years older than the little librarian. Mentally and emotionally, however, she wasn't even in the same generation. She had never been young in the way this girl still was, and she didn't think it was a bad thing. She'd had responsibilities from an early age; she could remember cooking when the iron frying pan had been too heavy for her to lift, and she'd had to stand on a chair to stir a pot of beans. She had swept with a broom that was almost twice as tall as herself. Then she'd had Scottie to care for, the greatest responsibility of all. But when she had finished high school, she'd been prepared for life, unlike kids who had never taken care of anything and had no idea how to cope. Those "kids" were still running back to their parents for help when they were twenty-five.
The girl looked up from her magazine to pull her bubble-gum pink lips into what passed for a professional smile. Her eyes were so heavily lined with black that they looked like almonds in a pit of coal dust. "May I help you?"
The tone was competent, Faith thought with relief. Maybe the girl was just stuck in makeup limbo. "Do you have maps of both the town and parish?"
"Sure." She led Faith to a table on which a large globe stood. "Here are all the maps and atlases. They're updated yearly, so if it's an older map you need, you'll have to go to the archives."
"No, I need a current map."
"Here you go, then." The girl pulled out an enormous book, easily three by two feet, but she handled it easily as she placed it on the table. "We have to seal the maps in plastic and put them in the book," she explained. "If we don't, they get stolen."
Faith smiled as the girl left her. The solution made sense to her. It was one thing to fold a map and put it in your pocket; spiriting out a huge, plastic-encased sheet would take some ingenuity.
She didn't know if the Fosters lived in town or out in the parish, but she looked first in the town map, running her finger down the list of streets printed on the back. Bingo. Noting the coordinates, she flipped the page and quickly located Meadowlark Drive, in a subdivision that hadn't existed when she had lived here before. With a name like Meadowlark Drive, she should have known. Land developers were an unimaginative bunch. After memorizing how to get there, she replaced the map book and left. The librarian was engrossed in her magazine again, and didn't look up as Faith passed the desk.
Prescott being the size it was, finding Meadowlark Drive took less than five minutes. The subdivision included acreage, rather than just lots, so the houses were fewer and farther apart than normal. There probably weren't many people in Prescott who could afford to build there, either, as the houses looked to be in the two-hundred-thousand range. In the Northeast and along the West Coast, they would have been worth a cool million, easy.
The Foster house was designed to look like a Mediterranean villa, nestled comfortably amid huge oaks draped with Spanish moss. Faith parked in the driveway and walked up the brown brick pathway to the double front doors. The button for the door bell was disguised amid some scrolls, then discreetly lit so people could find it. She pressed it, and heard the chimes echo through the house.
After a moment there was the rapid tapping of heels on a tiled floor, and the right half of the door was pulled open to reveal a very pretty middle-aged woman, stylishly clad in slim taupe pants and a white tunic. Her short, ash brown hair was a tumble of curls, swept to one side, and she wore gold hoop earrings. Startled recognition flashed in the dark blue eyes.
"Hello, I'm Faith Hardy," Faith said, hurrying to correct the woman's horrified assumption that she was Renee. "Are you Mrs. Foster?"
Yolanda Foster nodded, evidently struck speechless. She continued to stare.
"I'd like to talk to you, if it's convenient." To tilt the answer in her favor, Faith took a step forward. Yolanda fell back, in an involuntary gesture of admittance.
"I really don't have much time," Yolanda said, her tone apologetic rather than impatient. "I'm having lunch with a friend."
That was believable, unless Yolanda always dressed at home as if she were the nineties version of June Cleaver. "Ten minutes," Faith promised.
Looking puzzled, Yolanda led her into a spacious living room, and they sat down. "I don't mean to stare, but you are Renee Devlin's daughter, aren't you? I heard you were in town, and the resemblance—well, I'm sure you've been told it's startling."
Unlike a lot of people, there was no censure in Yolanda's tone, and Faith found herself unexpectedly liking the woman. "Several people have mentioned it," she said dryly, earning a chuckle from her hostess that made her like her even more. Liking her, however, didn't deflect Faith from her course. "I want to ask you some questions about Guy Rouillard, if I may."
The blusher-pinkened cheeks paled a bit. "About Guy?" Her hands fluttered a bit, then she clasped them in her lap. "Why ask me?"
Faith paused. "Are you alone?" she finally asked, not wanting to cause the woman any trouble if someone should overhear their conversation. "Why, yes. Lowell is in New York this week." That was fortuitous in one way, and not in another, because depending on her conversation with Yolanda, she might want to talk to Lowell, too. She took a deep breath and went right to the heart of the matter. "Were you having an affair with Guy that summer before he left?"
The blue eyes darkened with distress, and the cheeks paled even more. Yolanda stared at her, the seconds ticking away in silence. Faith waited for a denial, but instead Yolanda gave a curiously gentle sigh. "How did you find out?"
"I asked questions." She didn't say that it had evidently been common knowledge, for Ed Morgan to know about it. If Yolanda wanted to think she had been discreet, let her have.that dubious comfort.
"That was the only time I was ever unfaithful to Lowell." The older woman looked away, and her fingers plucked nervously at her slacks.
"I'm sure it was," Faith said, because Yolanda seemed to need to be believed. "From what I've heard about Guy Rouillard, he was an expert at seduction."
An unwilling, rueful little smile touched Yolanda's lips. "He was, but I can't blame it on him. I was determined to sleep with him before I ever approached him." Her fingers continued their nervous little movements, now smoothing the upholstered arm of the chair. "I found out Lowell was carrying on with his secretary, and had been for years. I pitched a fit, let me tell you. I threatened him with all sorts of things if he didn't stop, immediately, and divorce was the only one of them that wasn't physically damaging. He begged me not to leave him, swore that she didn't mean anything to him, it was just the sex, and he'd never do it again—you know, that kind of bull. But I caught him, not three weeks later. It's so silly, the little things that give them away. When he undressed one night, his shorts were on wrong side out, the label visible in the back. The only way he could have gotten them turned wrong would be if he'd had them off."
She shook her head, as if she couldn't understand why he hadn't been more careful. The words were spilling out of her now, as if she had held them inside for twelve years. "I didn't say anything to him. But the next day I called Guy and asked him to meet me at the summerhouse on their lake. Lowell and I, and some other friends, had been there for barbecues and picnics, so I knew the place."
The summerhouse again! Faith thought wryly. Between father and son, the sheets in those two bedrooms must have stayed hot. "Why did you pick Guy?" she asked.
Yolanda gave her a surprised look. "Well, I'd hardly have picked anyone repulsive, would I?" she asked reasonably. "If I was going to have an affair, I at least wanted it to be with someone who knew what he was doing, and from Guy's reputation, I thought he likely filled the bill. Then, too, Guy was safe. I intended to tell Lowell what I'd done, because what good is revenge if no one knows about it, and Guy was powerful enough that Lowell couldn't do anything to him, if Lowell found out his identity. I intended to keep that secret, at least.
"So I met Guy at the summerhouse, and told him what I wanted. He was very sweet, very reasonable. He tried to talk me out of it, if you can imagine! Talk about a wound to the ego!" Yolanda smiled, her eyes misty with memory as they met Faith's. "Here was a man who tomcatted all over the state, and he turned me down. I had always considered myself attractive, but evidently he didn't. I almost cried. I did tear up a little bit, and Guy was frantic. He was so sweet, a real woman's man. Tears turned him to mush. He started patting my shoulder, explaining that he really thought I was pretty and he'd love to take me to bed, but I had asked for all the wrong reasons, and Lowell was his friend—he went on and on."
"But you finally convinced him?"
"What I said was, 'If it isn't you, it'll be someone else.' He just looked at me with those dark eyes that made you feel like you could drown in them, and I could tell he was wondering who I would pick next. He was worried about me, thinking I'd be down at Jimmy Jo's, looking that crowd over for candidates. Then he took my hand, put it on his crotch, and he was ready. He said, 'I'm it,' and took me to the bedroom." She shivered a little, her gaze unfocused as she looked back in time. She fell silent, and Faith waited patiently for her to sort through her memories.
"Can you imagine," Yolanda finally said, her voice soft, "what it's like to be married for twenty years, to love your husband and be perfectly satisfied in bed—and then find out that you had no idea what passion could be? Guy was... God, I can't tell you what Guy was like as a lover. He made me scream, he made me feel and do things I didn't—I only meant it to be that one time. But we stayed there the whole afternoon, making love.
"I didn't tell Lowell. Telling him would have ended my revenge, and I couldn't do it, I couldn't stop seeing Guy. We met at least once a week, if I could manage it. Then he left." She glanced at Faith, as if gauging the effect of her next sentence. "With your mother. When I heard, I cried for a week. And then I told Lowell.
"He was furious, of course. He ranted and raved, and threatened to divorce me. I sat there and watched him, not arguing or anything, and that made him even madder. Then I said, 'You should always make sure your shorts are right side out before you put them back on,' and he stopped dead, staring at me with his mouth open. He knew that I'd caught him again. I got up and left the room. He followed me about half an hour later, and he was crying. We made up," she said, briskly now. "And as far as I know, he's never been unfaithful again."
"Did you ever hear from Guy?"
Slowly Yolanda shook her head. "I hoped, at first, but... no, he never wrote, or called." Her lips trembled, and she looked at Faith with anguish stark on her face. "My God," she whispered, "I loved him so."
Another dead end, Faith thought as she drove home. According to Yolanda, her husband hadn't known about her affair with Guy until after Guy had already disappeared, which put Lowell in the clear. Yolanda had been too open, too oblivious to even the possibility that Guy had been killed, or that there was the slightest reason why she shouldn't unburden herself to Faith. Instead she had wound up clinging to Faith's hands while she wept for a man whom she hadn't seen in twelve years, but with whom she had shared a summer of passion.
She had finally recovered her poise, flustered and embarrassed. "My goodness, look at the time—I'm going to be late. I can't imagine—I mean, you're a stranger—crying all over you this way, carrying on—oh, my." This last as she fully realized just what she had been saying to this stranger. She had stared at Faith with horrified dismay.
Feeling compelled to comfort Yolanda, Faith had touched her shoulder and said, "You needed to talk about it. I understand, and I swear I'll keep your confidence."
After a few strained seconds, Yolanda had relaxed. "I believe you. I don't know why, but I do."
So now Faith was left with no suspects or leads, not that she'd had anything concrete to begin with. All she had was questions, and her questions were annoying someone. The proof of that was in the note she'd found that morning. Whether the note was indicative of a guilty conscience, she didn't know.
Nor did she know what else to do, except keep asking questions. Sooner or later, someone would be stung to respond.
If she could keep busy enough, maybe she wouldn't think about Gray.
The theory was proving difficult to put into practice. She had avoided thinking about him, purposefully pushing him from her mind after she had left him the afternoon before. She had ignored the unfulfilled ache in her body, and refused to think about what had almost happened between them. But for all her will, her subconscious had betrayed her, admitting him into her dreams so that she had awakened in the early morning to find herself reaching for him. The dream had been so vivid that she had cried out, in longing and disappointment.
She had no more resistance to him; she might as well admit it. If he hadn't said what he had, she'd have given in to him there on the grass. Her morals and standards were useless when he took her in his arms, paper tigers that were vanquished by his first kiss.
As she eliminated each person from her list of suspects, the tower of motive leaned more and more toward Gray. Logically, she could see it. Emotionally, the idea met with total rejection. Not Gray. Not Gray! She couldn't believe it; she wouldn't believe it. The man she knew was capable of going to extraordinary lengths to protect those he loved, but cold-blooded murder wasn't one of them.
Her mother knew who the killer was. Faith was as certain of that as she'd ever been of anything. Getting Renee to admit it, however, would take some doing, for that would mean trouble for herself. Renee wasn't likely to act against her own self-interest, certainly not for such an abstract notion as justice. Faith knew her mother well; if she pushed too hard, Renee would run, partly from fear, but the biggest reason would be to avoid trouble for herself. After wringing the information about the summerhouse from her, Faith knew she would have to wait awhile before calling again.
The box was delivered the next day.
She returned home from a grocery-shopping expedition to the neighboring parish, and after carrying the groceries in and putting them away, went out to the mailbox to collect the day's mail. When she opened the lid of the oversized box, there was the usual assortment of bills, magazines, and sales papers lying there, with a box deposited on top of them. Curiously she picked it up; she hadn't ordered anything, but the weight of the box was intriguing. The flaps had been sealed with shipping tape, and her name and address were scrawled across the top.
She carried everything in and placed it on the kitchen table. Taking a knife from the cabinet drawer, she slit the tape down the seam of the flap and opened the two halves, then parted the froth of tissue paper that had been used for packing. After one horrified glance, she turned and vomited into the sink.
The cat wasn't just dead, it had been mutilated. It was wrapped in plastic, probably to keep the smell from alerting anyone before the box was opened.
Faith didn't think, she reacted instinctively. When the violent retching had stopped, she reached out blindly for the telephone.
She closed her eyes as the deep, smoky voice spoke in her ear, and she held on to the receiver as if it were a lifeline. "G-Gray," she stammered, then fell silent as her mind went blank. What could she say to him? Help, I'm scared, and I need you? She had no claim on him. Their relationship was a volatile mixture of enmity and desire, and any weakness on her part would only give him another weapon. But she was both sickened and abruptly terrified, and he was the only person she could think of to call for help.
"Faith?" Something of her terror must have been evident in the one word she'd spoken, because his voice became very calm. "What is it?"
Turning her back on the obscenity on the table, she fought to regain control of her voice, but still it emerged as only a whisper. "There's a... cat here," she managed to say. "A cat? Are you afraid of cats?" She shook her head, then realized he couldn't see her over the phone. Her silence must have made him think the answer was yes, though, because he said soothingly, "Just throw something at it; it'll scat."
She shook her head again, more violently this time. "No." She took a deep breath. "Help."
"All right." Evidently deciding she was too terrified of cats to deal with it on her own, he assumed a brisk and reassuring tone. "I'll be right there. Just sit someplace where you can't see it, and I'll take care of it when I get there."
He hung up, and Faith took his advice. She couldn't bear to be in the house with the thing, so she went outside on the porch and sat motionless in the swing, waiting numbly for him to arrive.
He was there in less than fifteen minutes, but those fifteen minutes seemed like an eternity. His tall form unfolded from the Jaguar, and he strolled up to the porch with his graceful, loose-hipped gait and a faint smile of masculine condescension on his lips, the hero arrived to save the helpless little woman from the ferocious beast. Faith didn't take umbrage; he could think what he liked, if he would just get rid of that thing in her kitchen. She stared up at him, her face so bloodless that his smile faded.
"You're really frightened, aren't you?" he asked gently, hunkering down in front of her and taking one of her hands in his. Her fingers were icy, despite the steamy heat of the day. "Where is it?"
"In the kitchen," she said, through stiff lips. "On the table."
With a comforting pat to her hand, he stood and opened the screen door. Faith listened to his footsteps moving through the living room and into the kitchen.
"Goddamn fucking son of a bitch!" She heard the vicious curse, followed by a string of others. Then the back door slammed. She put her hands over her face. Oh, God, she should have warned him, she shouldn't have given him the same shock she had received, but she simply hadn't been able to say the right words.
A few minutes later he came around to the front of the house, and remounted the steps to the porch. His jaw was set, and his dark eyes were colder than she had ever seen them before, but this time his rage wasn't turned on her.
"It's all right," he said, still in that gentle tone. "I got rid of it. Come inside, baby." Putting his arm around her, he urged her up from the swing and into the house. He directed her toward the kitchen; she stiffened and tried to pull back, but he was having none of it. "It's okay," he reassured her, and forced her into a chair. "You look a little shocky. What do you have to drink around here?"
"There's tea and orange juice in the refrigerator," she said, her voice faint.
"I meant the alcoholic variety. Do you have any wine?"
She shook her head. "I don't drink alcohol."
Despite the fury in his eyes, he gave her a little grin.
"Puritan," he said mildly. "Okay, orange juice it is." He took a glass from the cabinet and filled it with orange juice, then thrust it into her hand. "Drink it. All of it, while I make a call."
She sipped obediently, more because it gave her something to concentrate on than because she wanted it. Gray opened the phone book, ran his finger down the first page, then punched in the number. "Sheriff McFane, please."
Faith lifted her head, suddenly more alert. Gray stared down at her, his expression daring her to protest. "Mike, this is Gray. Could you come out to Faith Hardy's house? Yeah, it's the old Cleburne place. She just got a real ugly surprise in her mail. A dead cat... Yeah, there's one of those, too." He hung up, and Faith cleared her throat. "One of what, too?"
"A threatening letter. Didn't you see it?"
She shook her head. "No. All I saw was the cat." A shudder rippled through her body, making the glass tremble in her hand. He began opening and closing doors. "What are you looking for?" she asked.
"The coffee. After the sugar to counteract shock, you need a shot of caffeine."
"I keep it in the refrigerator. Top shelf."
He got out the canister, and she directed him to the filters. He made coffee rather competently, for a rich man who probably never did it at home, she thought, and felt a ghost of amusement flicker inside.
Once the coffee was in the process of making, he drew up another chair and sat facing her, so close that their legs touched, his on the outside of hers, warmly clasping. He didn't ask her what had happened, knowing she would soon be going through that with the sheriff, and she was grateful for his tact. He just sat there, lending her his heat and the comfort of his nearness, those dark eyes sharp on her face as if he were debating pouring the orange juice down her, if she didn't drink it as fast as he thought she should.
To forestall just such an action, she took a healthy swallow of juice, and actually felt a slight lessening of tension in his muscles. "Don't you dare," she muttered. "I'm trying my best not to throw up again."
The grimness of his expression was lightened briefly by amusement. "How did you know what I was thinking?"
"The way you were staring at the glass, and then at me." She took another swallow. "I thought Deese was the sheriff."
"He retired." Gray had the fleeting thought that her memory of Sheriff Deese wouldn't be a pleasant one, and wondered if that was why she had looked at him with such alarm when he'd asked for the sheriff. "You'll like Michael McFane. How's that for a good Irish name? He's young for the job, still interested in keeping up with new techniques." Mike had also been at the shack that night, Gray remembered, but Faith wouldn't know that, probably wouldn't recognize him. In her shock, the deputies would have been faceless uniformed figures. Only he and the sheriff, standing off to the side, would have been locked in her memory.
The puzzling contradiction formed in his mind. She had been.obviously reluctant to meet Sheriff Deese, but she had never revealed any such uneasiness in her dealings with himself. She'd been bold, provoking, maddening, frustrating, but she'd never shown the least hesitation about being in his company.
Nor was hesitation something that had troubled him. Why else, when he'd gotten her call, he thought to remove a pesky cat from the premises, had he promptly canceled a business meeting and driven here as fast as possible, with Monica's enraged protests still ringing in his ears? Faith had called him for help, and no matter how minor he thought the problem, he would help her if he could. As it turned out, the problem hadn't been minor at all, and all his protective instincts had been outraged. He intended to find out who had done such a disgusting thing, and someone would catch hell. His fists ached with the need to pound them into the culprit's face.
"Why didn't you think I'd done it?" he asked softly, his attention locked on her face to catch every flicker of expression. "I've been trying to get you to leave town, so logically I should have been the person you'd suspect first." She was shaking her head before he'd finished speaking, the movement making the sleek bell of her hair swing about her face. "You wouldn't do something like that," she said with absolute conviction. "Any more than you would have left me the first note."
He paused, distracted from the pleasure of her trust in him. "Note?" Sternness laced that one word.
"Yesterday. When I went out, there was a note in the front seat of the car."
"Did you report it?"
She shook her head again. "It wasn't a specific threat."
"What did it say?"
The look she gave him now was slightly uneasy, and he wondered why. "To quote: Shut up if you know what's good for you."
The coffee was ready. He got up and poured a cup for both of them. "How do you drink yours?" he asked absently, his thoughts still on the note and the package, which this time had been accompanied by a more specific threat. The wings of cold, black fury beat upward within him, barely controlled. "Black."
He gave her the cup, and sat down again in his original position, close enough to touch. She was more adept than anyone else at reading his face, and something in his expression must have alarmed her, because she launched into one of those deflecting maneuvers of hers, "I used to drink coffee with loads of sugar, but Mr. Gresham is diabetic. He said that it was easier to give up everything sweet than to fool with artificial sweeteners, so there wasn't anything in the house to use. They would have bought it for me if I'd asked, but I didn't want to impose—"
If she'd meant to distract him, he thought irritably, she'd succeeded. Even recognizing the maneuver didn't blunt its effectiveness, because she used such interesting bait. "Who's Mr. Gresham?" he asked, breaking into the flow of words. He felt the burn of jealousy, wondering if she was telling him about some guy she'd lived with before moving back to Prescott.
The slumberous green eyes blinked at him. "The Greshams were my foster parents."
A foster home. God. A cold fist clenched his stomach. He had imagined her life as continuing in much the same vein as before. Realistically, a good foster home would have been far preferable to the way she'd been living, but it was never easy for kids to lose their families, no matter how rotten, and be deposited with strangers. Finding a good home was a crapshoot, at best. A lot of kids were abused in foster homes, and for a young girl who looked like Faith...
The crunch of gravel signaled Mike's arrival. "Stay here," Gray growled, and went out the back door. He beckoned to Mike as the other man's lanky form unfolded from the patrol car, and walked around to the back of the house where he had left the box.
Mike joined him, his freckled face tightening with disgust as he looked down at the carcass. "I see a lot of sick things in this job," he said conversationally, squatting by the box, "but some things still turn my stomach. Why in hell would someone do this to a helpless animal? Have you handled the box much?"
"Just to carry it out. I was careful to touch only the front left corner, and the back right. I don't know how much Faith handled it before she opened it. I used a pen to open the flaps wider," he added. "There's a message on one of them."
Mike used the same technique, taking a ballpoint from his pocket. He pursed his lips as he read the message, printed in block letters, with a felt-tip marker, on the cardboard:
|
After the Night - Linda Howard.txt
| 16 |
"I'll carry it in, see if we can get any fingerprints. The plastic would be our best bet, since it hasn't been disturbed." He glanced toward the house. "Is she okay?"
"She was pretty shaky when I got here, but she's settled down now."
"Okay." Still using the pen, Mike closed the flaps and stared down at the box for a few seconds, then grunted.
Gray looked down, too, and saw what he had missed the first time. "Shit. There's no postage mark. It was on top of her other mail, so I thought it had been mailed, too."
"Nope. Someone hand-delivered it. Let's go see if she heard anything, or saw a car."
They entered the kitchen, and Gray saw that Faith was still sitting where he had left her, sipping her coffee. She glanced up, outwardly calm now, but he suspected her control was hanging by no more than a few thin threads.
She immediately got to her feet, looking at Mike. "Ma'am." He touched his fingers to his hat. "I'm Michael McFane, the sheriff here. Do you feel like answering a few questions?"
"Of course," she said. "Would you like some coffee?"
"Please."
"Sugar or cream?"
"Sugar."
That social nicety taken care of, Faith returned to her chair. Gray stood beside her, propped against the enormous table. Mike took up his position by the sink, his feet crossed at the ankles.
"Where did you find the box?" Mike asked.
"In the mailbox."
"There's no postage mark on it. It wasn't mailed, so I'm assuming someone put it in the box after your mail was delivered. No one's supposed to use the box except the postal service, so the carrier probably would have taken it out. Did you hear the mail run, or see another car pass by?"
She shook her head. "I wasn't here. I'd been grocery shopping. I came home, put up the groceries, then went out to get the mail."
"Is anyone mad at you? Someone who might give you a dead cat to get even?"
Another shake of the head.
"She found a note in her car yesterday," Gray interjected.
"What kind of note? What did it say?"
"To shut up if I knew what was good for me," Faith replied.
"Did you keep it?"
She sighed, gave Gray a wary glance, and went to get the note. She came back holding the sheet of paper by one corner. "Put it on the counter," Mike said. "I don't want to handle it."
She obeyed, and Gray moved beside Mike to read it. It was printed in the same block letters than adorned the cardboard box. Don't ask any more questions about Guy Rouillard shut up if you know what's good for you. Gray flashed her an irritated glance, understanding now that wary look she'd given him.
"All right," he growled. "What have you been up to now?"
"You know as much about it as I do," she replied, with a smoothness that he was beginning to think hid as much as it revealed.
"Well, now." Mike scratched his jaw. "What does your daddy have to do with this, Gray?"
"Little Miss Nosy has been asking questions about him all over town." He scowled at her.
"Why would that aggravate someone so much that they'd send her a note like this, and leave a dead cat in the mailbox?"
"It aggravated the hell out of me," Gray said frankly. "I don't want Monica or Mother upset by having all the old gossip stirred up again. I don't know who it would piss off this much."
The sheriff was silent, blue eyes hooded as he thought. "On the surface," he finally drawled, "you're the most likely suspect, Gray." Faith started an immediate protest, but he waved her to silence. "Guess you knew that, too, what with the note and all," he said to her. "So that makes me wonder why you called him, rather than the sheriff's department."
"I knew he didn't leave the note, or the box."
"It's no secret that you weren't happy when she moved back," Michael said, looking at Gray.
"No, I wasn't. I'm still not." Gray's hard mouth curved into a humorless smile. "But threatening notes and dead cats aren't my style. I fight my battles out in the open."
"Hell, I know that. I just wondered why Mrs. Hardy called you for help."
Gray snorted. "Figure it out."
"Reckon I already have."
"Then stop being an asshole."
The sheriff didn't take umbrage, just grinned. An instant later, he was all business again. "I need for both of you to come down to the courthouse so we can get your fingerprints, and check the box and note for any sets that don't match. You'll need to give us a statement, too, Mrs. Hardy."
"All right. I'll get my keys." Faith stood, and Gray caught her arm.
"I'll drive you."
"There's no need in your coming all the way back here—"
"I said I'll drive you." Implacably he looked down at her, forcing his will on her. She looked irritated, but made no further protest, and the sheriff grinned again.
Gray hustled her out and deposited her in the luxurious leather seat of the Jaguar. "You don't have to drive me," she said grumpily, as she buckled the seat belt.
"Sure I do, if I want to talk to you."
"What's there to say?"
He started the car and reversed out of the driveway, following Sheriff McFane's patrol car down the road. "Obviously some nutcase has it in for you. You'll be a lot safer somewhere away from Prescott."
She averted her head, staring stonily out the window. "It didn't take long for you to come up with that angle," she retorted.
"You stubborn little witch, can't you get it through that red head of yours that you might be in danger?"
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After the Night - Linda Howard.txt
| 17 |
Faith was boiling mad by the time she left the courthouse, though she had kept her temper mostly under control. Gray had badgered her all the way to town about moving out of Prescott, and to her fury, Sheriff McFane had agreed that she might not be entirely safe, living alone as she did, and with no close neighbors. Faith had pointed out that if she left, the harassment would stop, they'd never find who did it, and the guilty party would be pleased as punch that his tactics had worked. She wasn't inclined to give him the satisfaction.
Sheriff McFane had allowed that her logic was impeccable, and her bravery was commendable, but her common sense was a mite off. She could get hurt.
She had agreed with him in that assessment, and stubbornly refused to budge an inch. Now that she had gotten over the shakes, she was seeing cause and effect. The dead cat meant that, somehow, she had gotten close to finding out what had really happened to Guy, and if she left now, she would never know for certain. The sheriff and Gray thought someone was harassing her; she knew that it was far more serious than that. She had to fight the temptation to tell them what she thought was behind the cat and the notes; if word got out that she was suggesting Guy had been murdered, it would warn the guilty party, making him or her even more difficult to catch. So she kept silent, and the frustration of it made her irritable.
She could ignore Sheriff McFane's arguments that she leave; Gray's went straight to her heart. His cajoling suggestions had long since deteriorated to forceful demands by the time they left the courthouse for the drive back to her house.
"For the last time, no!" she shouted, for at least the fifth time, as they got into the car. Heads swiveled in their direction.
"Shit," Gray muttered. For a man who wanted to avoid gossip, he'd been pretty blatant today. His Jaguar wasn't a car that was easily overlooked, and Faith was a woman who turned heads. A lot of people would have noted that he had driven her into town, gone with her into the courthouse, and then left with her, not to mention the fact that she was yelling at him. Well, there was nothing he could do about it now. Given the same set of circumstances he'd been faced with today, he'd do the same thing again.
Faith jammed the two ends of the seat belt buckle together. "I know you didn't have anything to do with the cat, or either of the notes," she said, anger seething in her voice. "But you aren't above using it to your own advantage, are you? You've wanted me gone from day one, and it sticks in your craw that you can't make me do what you want."
He gave her a hooded, dangerous look as he negotiated the traffic in the square. "Don't believe that for a minute," he said quietly. "I could have you gone in half an hour if I wanted. I decided against it."
"Really?" she drawled, infusing the word with disbelief. "Why pull your punches?"
"For two reasons. One is that you didn't deserve what happened twelve years ago, and I wasn't inclined to treat you that way again." He took his gaze from the street long enough to sweep it down her body, lingering briefly on her breasts and thighs. "You know what the second reason is."
The truth of that simmered between them, just below boiling point. He wanted her. She had known that... oh, almost from the first, certainly since that incendiary kiss in New Orleans. But he wanted her on his terms; he wanted to set her up in a little house somewhere away from Prescott, completely out of the parish, so his liaison with her wouldn't upset his family. Those circumstances would be perfect for him, because he would be accomplishing both his goals with one fell swoop.
"I won't let you hide me away as if I'm something shameful," she said, her eyes hot and bitter as she stared fixedly out the windshield. "If you can't associate with me out in the open, then stay the hell away from me."
He slammed his fist against the steering wheel. "Goddamn it, Faith! That cat wasn't from the Welcome Wagon. I'm thinking of your safety! Yes, it would please the hell out of me if you moved to another town. My mother drives me crazy, but that doesn't mean I want to hurt her. Am I supposed to apologize for loving her, despite everything? You know how to roll with the punches, but she doesn't. I'm a greedy bastard; I want to do what's best for her, and have you, too. If you moved, we could have a damn satisfying relationship, and I wouldn't have to worry that some maniac is stalking you!"
"Then don't. Let me do the worrying."
He made a sound of muffled anger and frustration. "You won't budge an inch, will you?"
Again, she had to fight the urge to tell him that she had reasons for staying right where she was, reasons that went beyond their personal entanglement. The mood he was in, he wouldn't believe her anyway.
They were out of town now, and there was very little traffic on the road. Soon he turned off on the secondary road that led to her house. She had never really noticed before how isolated her house was, at least not from the viewpoint of her own vulnerability. She had enjoyed the peace and quiet, the sense of space. Damn the unknown, unseen enemy, for destroying her pleasure in at last coming home.
She didn't speak again until he turned in to her driveway. It was late afternoon, and the setting sun bathed the little house in a golden glow. In only a short while she had settled in here, surrounded by her own things, her own walls, covered by her own roof. Leave here? She couldn't imagine it.
"Answer something for me," she said, one hand on the door handle. "I don't want to have an affair with you, no matter where I live. Does that lessen your concern for my safety?"
He stopped her, wrapping his fingers around her wrist and holding her in the car. His eyes were black with anger, but he didn't answer the insulting question, merely replied to the statement. "I can change your mind," he said softly. "We both know it."
She opened the door and he let her go, content that he'd had the last word. He often did, she thought. He had a knack for pushing the conversation further than she wanted it to go, so that her only recourse was silence.
She was aware of him sitting in the driveway, watching until she was safely in the house. He was right, damn him. He could change her mind, with little or no effort. Her statement had been a bluff, but not a lie. She didn't want to have an affair with him, but that didn't mean she would be able to resist him. If he had insisted on coming in with her now, after one kiss she would probably let him lead her straight into the bedroom. Afterward was when the regret would begin.
"Gray, what in hell were you thinking of?" Alex asked irritably. "Driving around town with her, arguing with her in front of the courthouse. My God, half the town saw you, and the other half heard about it within the hour."
Monica's head came up, and she turned stricken eyes on Gray. He felt like throttling Alex for bringing up the subject in front of her.
"I was trying to convince her to leave," he replied shortly, and even without looking directly at her, he could see the tension ease in Monica's body. "Someone's playing nasty tricks on her. Today a dead cat was left in her mailbox."
"A dead cat?" Alex made a face. "That's disgusting. But why was she in your car?"
"She called me when she found it—"
"Why call you?" Monica demanded resentfully.
"Because." Gray knew his answer was blunt and uncommunicative, but he didn't care. "I called Mike, and he came out to her house. He wanted both of us to go to the courthouse for fingerprinting—" Monica gave a sharp cry "—and Faith was still shaky, so I drove her there."
"Why did you have to be fingerprinted?" Monica asked, incensed. "Did she accuse you of doing it?"
"No, but I handled the box. If Mike didn't know which fingerprints were ours, he couldn't tell if there were any belonging to the son of a bitch who left the box."
Monica chewed on her lip. "Did he find anything?"
"I don't know. When she was finished filing a report, I drove her home."
"Is she going to move?" Alex asked.
"Hell, no." Gray shoved an agitated hand through his hair. "She turned stubborn about it." Turned stubborn, nothing. She'd been born stubborn. He pushed away from the desk and got to his feet. "I'm going out."
"Now?" Monica asked, startled. "Where?"
"Just out." He was as restless and fractious as a stallion who could scent a mare in season, but couldn't get to her. His blood was throbbing through his veins, urging him to action, any action. He felt as if there should be a violent thunderstorm brewing, but the weather was calm, and the lack of thunder frustrated him. "I don't know what time I'll be back. We'll get to those papers tomorrow, Alex."
Baffled, worried, Monica watched him stalk out of the room. She chewed her lip some more. It sounded as if Gray was getting increasingly involved with the Devlin woman. She couldn't understand how he could do it, after all the misery her family had caused. And Michael had been out to her house! Monica didn't want him anywhere around Faith Devlin; those Devlin women were like spiders, spinning sticky little webs that trapped the men unwary enough to wander into their vicinity.
Alex shook his head, his own eyes worried. "I'll go say good night to your mother," he said, and went upstairs. Noelle had retired to her own sitting room not long after dinner, pleading fatigue, but the truth was that she was simply more comfortable upstairs.
He stayed up there for half an hour. Monica was still sitting in the study when she heard him coming down the stairs, his step slower than when he had gone up. He came to the door and paused, looking at her. Monica's head came up and she stared at him, stricken. His hand went to the light switch. Monica froze in dread, her breath clogging in her lungs, as he turned out the light.
"My dear," he said, and she knew the words were spoken to the woman upstairs.
Faith prowled the house, unable to interest herself in either reading or television. Despite her insistence on staying, she was more disturbed than she wanted to admit. She had to force herself to go into the kitchen, the memory of that box on the table was so strong. It was a relief to see the table bare, to find that the association faded as she made herself a skimpy meal. Skimpy or not, she could only eat half of it.
She called Renee again. She knew it was too soon, but some faint, long-buried instinct made her reach out to Mama, not so much in search of comfort but because there was a link between them beyond kinship: the Rouillard men.
To her relief, Renee answered. If her grandmother had answered, Faith knew that Renee never would have come to the phone.
"Mama," she said, and was disconcerted to hear her voice shake a little. "I need help."
There was silence on the other end of the line, then Renee said warily, "What's wrong?" Motherly concern wasn't a natural response for her.
"Someone left a dead cat in my mailbox, and I've gotten a couple of threatening notes, telling me to stop asking questions or I'll end up like the cat. I don't know who's doing it—"
"What kind of questions?"
Faith hesitated, afraid Renee would hang up on her. "About Guy," she admitted.
"Damn it, Faith!" Renee yelled. "I told you not to be nosing around, but would you listen? No, you have to stir shit up, and now the stink's gettin' too bad for you. You're going to get yourself killed if you don't shut up!"
"Someone killed Guy, didn't they? You know who did it. That's why you left."
Renee's breathing sounded over the line, harsh and rapid. "Stay out of it," she begged. "I can't tell, I promised never to tell. He has my bracelet. He said he'd blame the killing on me if I ever told, he said he'd put the bracelet where it would look like Guy and me had had a fight, and I'd killed him."
After the weeks of suspicion, of sifting through old rumors and continually coming to dead ends, to suddenly hear the truth was startling. It took Faith a moment to recover from the shock, to absorb it.
"You loved Guy," she said, her own conviction ringing in her voice. "You couldn't have killed him."
Renee began to cry. It wasn't noisy sobs, designed to gain sympathy. Her tears were betrayed by the sudden thickness in her voice. "He's the only man I ever did love," she said, and Faith knew that whether or not Renee really had loved Guy, she believed she had, and that was enough.
"What happened, Mama?"
"I can't tell—"
"Mama, please." Desperately Faith searched her mind for a reason that would mean something to Renee. It would take a lot to overcome her mother's basic self-interest, and in this case, Faith couldn't really blame her for looking out after number one. The only thing that had ever been greater than Renee's self-absorption had been her greed... "Mama, as far as everyone is concerned, Guy is still alive somewhere. He hasn't been declared dead, so that means his will hasn't been read."
Renee sniffed, but the word "will" caught her interest. "So what?"
"So if he left anything to you, it would be in his will. You could have had a lot of money coming to you all these years."
"He always said he'd take care of me." A whining note of self-pity entered Renee's voice. She took a deep breath, as if to calm herself, and Faith could almost hear the decision being made.
"We met at the summerhouse, as usual," Renee said. "We'd already... you know. Done it. Anyway, we were lyin' in the dark talkin' when he drove up. We didn't know who it was, and Guy jumped up and grabbed his pants, afraid it might be one of his kids. He didn't never worry about his wife none, because he knew she wouldn't care.
"They went out to the boathouse to talk. I could hear them yellin', so I put on my clothes and went down there. Guy opened the door and came out just as I got there. He stopped and looked back, and I'll never forget, he said, 'I've made up my mind.' That's when he was shot, right in the head. He fell on the grass, there in front of the boathouse. I was on my knees beside him, yellin' and cryin', but he was dead when he hit the ground. He never even twitched."
"Was it Gray?" Faith asked, agony in her tone. It couldn't be. Not Gray. But she had to ask. "Did Gray kill his daddy?"
"Gray?" A startled note sounded through the tears. "No, not Gray. He wasn't there."
Not Gray. Thank you, God. Not Gray. No matter how she had told herself that he couldn't have done it, there must have been a hidden reservoir of doubt, because she felt a sudden relief, a lightening of spirit.
"Mama—Mama, no one would believe you shot Guy. Why didn't you go to the sheriff?"
"Are you kiddin'?" Renee gave a sharp laugh, which ended in a sob. "People in that town would believe anything about me. Most of 'em would've been glad to see me arrested even if they knew for certain I was innocent. Besides, he had it all figured out—"
"But you didn't even have a gun!"
"He was goin' to kill me, too! He said he'd put the gun in my mouth and make me pull the trigger, his hand over mine, if I didn't promise to leave and never come back, and never say nothing about it to anybody. He's strong, Faithie, strong enough to do it. I tried to fight him and he hit me, I couldn't get away—"
"Why didn't he kill you, then?" Faith asked, trying to make sense of why a murderer would deliberately let a witness go.
Renee couldn't answer for a moment, she was crying too hard. Finally she gulped, and regained shaky control of her voice. "He—he didn't mean to kill Guy, he was just so damn mad, he said. He didn't want to have to kill me too. He told me to go away, and he t-took my bracelet. He said if I ever came back, he could make it look like I'd killed Guy, and I'd get the death sentence. He can do it, you don't know him!" Her voice rose shrilly on the last sentence, and she dissolved once more into wrenching sobs.
Faith felt her own eyes burning. For the first time, she felt pity for her mother. Poor Renee, without education, influence, or friends, with all her wild living and lack of responsibility, had been a prime target for anyone who wanted to make her a scapegoat. She had seen the one man she cared for, the man she was depending on to make her life easy, shot to death, and then been threatened with having his death blamed on her. No, the killer had gauged her well; there was no way Renee would have gone to the sheriff. She would have believed everything he said, probably with good reason.
"It's all right, Mama," she said gently. "It's all right."
"You—you won't say anything? This has to be our secret, or he'll have me arrested, I know he will—"
"I won't let anyone arrest you, I promise. Do you know what he did with the body?"
Renee hiccuped, caught by surprise. "His body?" she asked vaguely. "I guess he must have buried it somewhere."
That was possible, but would the killer have wasted time digging a grave, a grave that might be noticed, with the lake right there? Weight the body, and the problem of disposal was solved.
"What kind of gun did he use? Did you see it?"
"I don't know anything about guns. It was a pistol, is all I can tell you."
"Was it a revolver, like the ones used in Westerns, with the round chamber that the bullets fit into, or was it the kind with the clip in the handle?"
"Clip in the handle," Renee said after a moment's thought.
An automatic. That meant the shell casing had been ejected, somewhere inside the boathouse. The killer had had a body to dispose of, and a witness to terrify into fleeing. Had he thought about the casing, gone back to pick it up?
What were the chances that a shell casing would still be there after twelve years? Almost none. But the place had fallen into disuse after Guy's disappearance, so it was likely only the minimum upkeep had gone into the boathouse. The casing could have landed in the boat, or even in the water, to be lost forever.
It could also have landed in a corner, or behind something. Stranger things had happened.
"Don't say anything," Renee begged. "Please don't say anything. You never should have moved back there, Faithie; now he's after you too. Leave before you get hurt, you don't know him—"
"I might. Who is he, Mama? Maybe I can do something—"
Renee hung up the phone, the connection breaking in the middle of a sob. Faith slowly replaced her own receiver. She had learned so much tonight, and still not enough. The most important thing was that Gray was innocent. The most frustrating thing was that she still had no idea who was guilty.
The killer was a "he." That eliminated Andrea Wallice and Yolanda Foster, even if Faith hadn't already decided they likely weren't guilty. Supposedly Lowell Foster hadn't known about his wife's affair with Guy until afterward, but the way gossip moved through the town like fat through a goose, it was possible some self-righteous busybody had taken it upon himself to enlighten the wronged husband. Never mind that the wronged husband had been screwing around with his secretary; that was different. So Lowell had to remain on her list.
Who would have been arguing with Guy that night, and why? A business associate, upset at some financial wheeling and dealing? The way Guy got around, an enraged husband was more likely. Who else had he been sleeping with that summer?
Faith couldn't find the answer to those questions tonight. She could, however, see for herself whether or not a stray shell casing was still lying overlooked in the boathouse.
She glanced at the clock. It was nine-thirty. If she was going to do it, night would be the best time, with much less chance of running into Gray and a much better chance of avoiding him if she did.
Faith wasn't one to tarry once she'd made a decision, though this time she paused long enough to put on sturdier shoes. She grabbed a flashlight on her way out the door.
She started to drive right to the summerhouse, on the private road, but changed her mind at the last minute. Someone might see her turn onto the road and notify the Rouillards, which she definitely didn't want. And if the god of misfortune smiled on her twice, and someone was at the summerhouse, she didn't want her headlights to give advance warning.
So she drove instead to the same place she had parked before, even though it meant walking a mile through the woods at night. It wasn't a problem for her. She had never been afraid of the dark, or of snakes and the other denizens of the forest, though she did pick up a stick to be on the safe side, if she did come upon a snake before the shy creature could slide away.
The woods at night were noisy, filled with rustles as the nocturnal animals went about their business. Possums and raccoons clambered in the trees, owls hooted, frogs croaked, insects zinged, night birds called, and crickets chirped frenetically. The breeze added its own whisper to the cacophony, the pine trees swaying gently. Faith took her time, making certain she didn't wander off track; when she came to the little creek, in exactly the same place she had always crossed, she smiled at the accuracy of her old instincts. She paused to shine the light around the creek to make certain no water moccasins were enjoying a swim, then stepped onto the flat rock in the middle of the water and from there onto the other bank. From here, it was only a couple of hundred yards to the summerhouse.
Five minutes later she stopped at the edge of the clearing, taking stock before she left the cover of the trees. The house was dark and silent. She listened, but heard only the normal night sounds. The lake murmured, slapping against the dock pilings, its glassy surface rippling occasionally with a breeze and disturbing the reflection of the three-quarter moon. Night-feeding fish added their own ripples and the occasional quiet splash to the subtle commotion.
Faith walked down the slight slope to the house, her steps soundless.
She didn't know what she would do if the boathouse was locked, which, of course, it probably was, though the house had been open the other day when she'd been here. But Gray had also been here; he could have unlocked the house, gone inside to make certain nothing had been vandalized.
If she were a truly adventurous type, she thought wryly, she could swim under the wall of the boathouse and come up in the boat slip. To hell with locked doors.
Not bloody likely.
Nighttime underwater swimming wasn't her cup of tea. The thought of stripping down to her underwear and sliding beneath the surface of that dark water was enough to make her shiver. If the boathouse had been closed all these years, it was probably inhabited by mice, snakes, squirrels, maybe a raccoon or two, all of which would be startled by a visitor suddenly popping up from the water. No, she would much rather give any boathouse occupants sufficient warning to skedaddle, by jiggling door locks or maybe breaking windows, if the boathouse had a window. She had never noticed.
The boathouse loomed over the shiny black water, the white walls ghostly in the moonlight. As Faith crossed the graveled drive, she flicked the flashlight beam across the front of the wide doors, and stifled a groan of disappointment. A thick, shiny padlock was looped through both hasps, securing the doors with stainless steel. She might have jimmied or broken a normal door lock, but she couldn't do anything with that big padlock. Her only recourse now was a window.
There wasn't one on the side facing the dock, only smooth blank wall. She walked around to the other side, and stared with mixed feelings at the window that sat like a black eye in a pale face. The good news was that it was a window, with breakable glass. The bad news was that solid ground ended about a foot shy of being directly underneath it. The window was also high enough that it would be difficult for her to hoist herself through; not impossible, not if she set her mind to it, but definitely difficult.
A very warm, very solid hand closed over her bare arm and whirled her around, bringing her against a hard, muscled body. "I told you what I'd do if I caught you here again," Gray said softly.
|
After the Night - Linda Howard.txt
| 18 |
He carried her onto the porch, where the screens would protect them from the mosquitoes and other biting insects. Frightened almost out of her wits by his abrupt appearance, a panic that wasn't much relieved by recognition, Faith could do no more than cling to his shoulders as he lifted her in his arms and carried her swiftly across the grass, to the house.
She was submerged almost at once by a dark tide of desire, sucking her below the level of reason or will. Protest wasn't an option; the needs of her body, so long suppressed, surged to the forefront and pushed thought aside. She was shaking by the time he released her legs and let her body slide down, all along the front of his, the sweet friction almost painfully arousing. It was time. Dear God, it was past time. She wanted him with a blind, ferocious need that could no longer be delayed, and she clung to him, her body pliant, willing.
He backed her up against one of the square columns supporting the porch, pinning her against the wood. Despite the bright moonlight, it was dark there on the porch, dark and warm, scented with the perfumes of summer and his own hot, musky smell. His breathing was fast and urgent as he leaned heavily against her, pushing himself into the yielding softness of her body. He thrust his fingers into her hair, holding her skull cradled between his big, powerful hands, holding her head still for the deep thrust of his tongue into her mouth. He was fully aroused, his erection as hard as marble, straining against her belly.
Faith whimpered into his mouth, squirming hungrily against him, trying to lift herself enough so that she could cradle that thick ridge in the yielding notch between her legs. She was aching and empty, so empty, growing moist with the need to have him there.
His shirt was hanging open. The flesh where her fingernails dug into his shoulders was covered by cloth, but his chest was bare. She could feel his skin, slick with sweat, and the roughness of curly hair. Her breasts grew taut, her nipples rising hard and tight, throbbing with the need to be touched.
He tore his mouth away from hers, gasping for air, his chest working like bellows with each breath. Faith licked her bruised lips, tasting him on them, and tugged on the back of his neck to bring him back down to her. He obliged at once, his mouth hard and biting, the primal force of it exciting her beyond what she had ever known before.
He cupped both of her breasts, roughly kneading them, and the relief was so acute that she made a small keening sound of both pleasure and want, but in only seconds that wasn't enough. He knew her need, or perhaps his own was the same, for he jerked at the front of her blouse and sent buttons flying, the small popping sounds loud in the bubble of silence that surrounded them. With one hand he released the front clasp of her bra and shoved the cups aside, baring the firm rise of her breasts to his hungry, demanding mouth. He wrapped one arm under her bottom and lifted her, his open mouth sliding down her chest, a damp path marking where his lips had been. A taut nipple popped into his mouth and he sucked hard at it, making her breast prickle with a sharp sensation that had her arching against him as if to throw him off. He responded by holding her tighter, gripping her bottom and grinding his erection into the soft notch between her legs. The blatant sexuality of his movements let loose the firestorm of her response, and helplessly she felt herself sliding down the dark, slippery tunnel toward climax.
She fought it; she didn't want this wild fever to end so soon. She shrank back against the wood, trying to pull her hips away from that hard ridge. She couldn't; his arm around her bottom kept her molded to him, allowing her so little movement that she couldn't even close her legs. A heavy coil tightened in her loins, the tension pulling tighter and tighter –
He set her on her feet again and jerked at her skirt, pulling it to her waist. Faith leaned weakly against the column, her senses whirling with the speed and violence with which this was happening. Dimly she thought of that time she had watched him making love, so slowly and tenderly, his smoky voice soothing and cajoling, crooning love words. She had thought it would be like that, but instead she was caught like Dorothy in a whirlwind, being hurled dizzily into uncharted territory. They were going at each other like animals, unable to slow down or inject any tenderness into the act, and she didn't care. The urgency was too strong, too immediate.
He wound his left hand in her skirt, holding it up and to the side, while with his right one he stripped her panties down. The night air washed over her naked buttocks, making her feel excruciatingly exposed, and she quivered in his grasp. He forced the panties down to her knees, then lifted one booted foot and set his toe in the crotch of the garment, pushing it down the rest of the way. She heard fabric separate with a faint sibilant protest, then the cloth fell around her feet and he lifted her out of the ruins of her underwear.
He braced her against the column, pulling her thighs wide and pushing himself between them. Faith's head fell back; she heard her own panting breath as she waited in agonized anticipation for the hard thrust that would fill her emptiness, ease the deep ache of desire. His hand worked frenziedly between their bodies, fumbling with his belt, tearing at the fastening of his jeans, and the brush of his knuckles against her moist, yearning flesh was enough to make her cry out with longing. He managed to open the zipper and his straining flesh sprang free, pushing upward into the folds between her legs.
"I want to fuck you," he muttered indistinctly, the sound low and harsh as he hoisted her a bit, adjusting her position. "Let me in. Now." His hand was still between their bodies, his fingers moving with sure knowledge over her slick flesh. He found her soft, damp opening and sank one finger deep into her, drawing the moisture out to prepare her for his entry. Faith shuddered, her arms wrapping tight around his head as that long finger rasped exquisitely sensitive tissues and set off subterranean explosions of pleasure. Her inner muscles eagerly clasped the intruding finger, tightening, subtly caressing, and Gray swore with savage arousal. Unable to wait any longer, he withdrew his finger and guided the broad head of his penis into place.
Faith went still, frozen by the enormous pressure between her legs as he began pushing into her. The fever of desire faded, banished by alarm. In a flash of clarity she remembered Lindsey Partain's startled, panicked cry at his entry, and now she knew why. Then all thoughts fled, her mind focused only on the massively thick shaft that each short, powerful thrust of his hips forced deeper into her body. He grunted at the difficulty of penetration, his entire body taut and straining.
She writhed in his arms like a worm caught on a fishing hook, sharp little cries of distress breaking from her throat. Gray stopped, sweat dripping off his face to trace tiny paths down the slope of her bare breasts. Desperately he fought for control, the effort tearing at his guts.
"Shhh, shhh," he whispered, his lips pressed against the delicate curve of her jaw. The sound was a mere rustle of reassurance, wafted away in the night breeze. "It's all right, baby. You can handle it. Just be still now, and let me get it in. I won't hurt you, I'll be real slow and easy." As he spoke he began rocking his hips back and forth, slight movements that coaxed her taut muscles to relax, allowing the next forward rock to slide him deeper into the hot, wet, incredibly tight clasp of her. She moaned, shuddering in his arms. He felt her body arch convulsively, in an instinctive effort to accept and adjust to him; he tried to control the movement, but he was too late. The sharp, twisting movement impaled her on his rigid shaft, seating him to the hilt, and the hot gloving of her body made him feel as if his entire body was exploding.
Shock reverberated through her. She sagged weakly in his arms, her head falling back like a daisy on a broken stem. His hard-won control splintered. His hips jackhammered, driving in and out of her. She hung there, supported only by his driving body and the wooden column at her back. For a measureless length of time her senses narrowed to the thudding of her heart and the hard pounding of his body into hers, relentlessly battering. She clenched her hands on his shirt, twisting fistfuls of the fabric as she tried to endure, tossed helplessly about in the violent upheaval of his lust.
Then he stopped, a growl rough in his throat, as her physical and mental withdrawal registered through the demanding throb of his body. "No," he said with furious frustration. "I won't let you pull back from me. Come for me, baby. Let me feel it."
Faith tried to speak, to say anything. I can't do it, she thought, but no words would form on her lips. Climax, which had shimmered so maddeningly near a short while ago, now seemed totally out of reach. She felt painfully stretched, impaled, beyond pleasure.
But he adjusted his position, hooking his arms under her thighs and holding them wider apart, the weight of his torso pinning her to the column. She felt herself open completely, unable to either control or react to his thrusts. He briefly freed one hand, reaching down to find the small sexual bud at the top of her sex, using his finger and thumb to open the protective fold and expose it. He adjusted his position again, moving deep into her so that he pressed hard against the little nub, and then he began again to thrust.
Lightning speared through her body, gathering between her legs. She had no defense against the rush of sensation, ruthlessly intensified with every inward thrust. He had known exactly what he was doing, inexorably forcing her toward orgasm. In seconds she was moaning with the return of desire; in less than a minute the fury was upon her, and she screamed with the force of her release, her body arching and shuddering in his restraining arms. It went on and on, so strong that she knew nothing else, reduced to a completely physical being.
Her spasms had barely slowed when his began, and he bucked heavily under the lash of it, his head thrown back and his neck corded as he shook and pulsed. A deep, harsh groan rumbled up from his chest, repeated again and again in rhythm with his pumping hips.
The aftermath was silent, punctuated only by the rapid harshness of their breathing and the occasional, involuntary little moan or grunt as laggard nerve endings twitched in the remnants of pleasure. Faith was dazed, her head drooping forward to lie against his shoulder. He sagged heavily in her arms, the column supporting them both. Where naked flesh touched, sweat glued them together. Their clothes were damp and twisted. She felt as numb as if she had just been through a battle.
His breathing slowed and he gathered himself, as if every movement was an effort. His heart was thudding against her breast, each beat slow and heavy. He withdrew carefully from her body, holding her steady when she tensed, for even with the slickness of his climax easing the way, her swollen tissues released him with almost as much difficulty as she had accepted him.
Gray was stunned, rocked to the foundation by the intensity of what had just occurred. That wasn't sex. He'd had sex before, more times than he could count. Sex was a pleasure, sometimes gentle, sometimes raunchy; an appetite, persistent but easily satisfied. What he'd just had with Faith was as powerful and unstoppable as an avalanche, a fire that left him scorched and already needing to feel the flame again. He could feel her lithe, tender body trembling in his arms, and he wanted to lie down with her, comfort her, and then thrust himself deep into her again. He wanted it with a violence that twisted in his guts. Because he didn't trust himself not to do it, he let his arms drop from around her.
Shaken, only one thought came to his mind. "My God," he said, his voice still harsh from his wrenching climax. "If fucking Renee was like that, I understand why Dad couldn't stay away from her."
Faith froze, the delicious heat of their mating turning cold under the bite of his words. She didn't respond to his insulting crudeness, though it had been effective. If he had set out to make her feel cheap, he had succeeded admirably. Humiliation and misery pooled in her stomach, forcing her to clench her teeth against a sudden rise of nausea. She had felt as if her heart were leaving her body, but to him it had been—what? A measure of revenge? Renee was beyond his reach, so take it out on her daughter?
She didn't look at him as she fumbled her clothing back into order. Her bra was twisted, but she finally managed to secure the clasp. There were no buttons left on her blouse, so she tied the shirttail into a knot at her waist. She bent to pick up her panties, intending to put them on, but they were ripped beyond wearing. Color burned in her face, but thankfully the darkness hid that bloom of shame from him.
Silently she slipped the ruined, flimsy underwear into the pocket of her skirt and turned away, walking with as much dignity as possible, under the circumstances. It wasn't much. How could a woman have any dignity when she had just been taken, standing up, with all the grace and tenderness of a sailor just off a six-month cruise nailing a whore in an alley? Her legs trembled like noodles, her loins ached from the battering, and, even worse, his semen was wet between her thighs.
She opened the screen door and wobbled down the steps. The flashlight lay where she had dropped it, the beam illuminating blades of grass and the darting insects attracted by the light. She retrieved it, and collided with him as she straightened. He moved like a ghost, she thought; she hadn't heard him leave the porch. She stepped around him, and he caught her arm, dragging her to a halt.
"Where the hell do you think you're going?"
"Back to my car."
He snorted. "If I wouldn't let you walk back alone during the daytime, you can sure as hell bet you won't do it at night."
She could feel an angry tension in him, but she was too exhausted and sick to worry about it. Gently she disengaged her arm, still not looking at him. "I grew up roaming these woods. I don't need an escort."
"Get in the car," he said, that soft, steely edge in his voice that said he'd made his decision and wasn't going to change it. "I'll take you back."
Car? Bewildered, Faith looked around. Until now, she hadn't had time to wonder how he'd gotten to the summer-house. She saw the Jaguar now, parked by the side of the house rather than in the drive. As always, she had approached from the other side, so she hadn't seen it. What evil genie had prompted him to park there, instead of in the drive? If she had seen the car, she never would have left the safety of the woods.
He was propelling her toward the car, and Faith didn't waste her time arguing. She simply wanted to get away from him, and the fastest way to do that was to give in and get it over with.
He opened the car door and urged her inside with a hand on the small of her back. Faith sat down, sighing shakily at the relief of being off her trembling legs. He walked around and slid under the steering wheel, his powerful hands sure and competent as he started the motor and put the transmission into gear. "Are you parked the same place you were before?" he asked, that muted anger humming through his tone.
"Yes," she murmured, then lapsed into silence. Maintaining that silence seemed to be both the safest and easiest thing to do, so she concentrated on staring at the dark trees sliding past the car window.
The road looped around the lake, entered the highway, and then he had to take another turn onto the rutted track that had once led to her home. Getting there didn't take much less time than if she had walked, but for all the tension, she was grateful she hadn't had to put her shaky limbs to the test. She probably would have stumbled over every root and rock in her path.
The Jaguar purred around a curve and her car came into view. She felt for her keys, and her searching fingers patted an empty pocket. Panic twisted her stomach. "I've lost my keys," she said thinly. Of course she had. Her skirt had practically been over her head. It would have been a miracle if the keys had stayed in her pocket.
"Here." A small, jangling heap landed in her lap. "I picked them up."
Her cold hand closed over the keys as Gray stopped the Jaguar beside her car, and she had her door open before he could let out the clutch and turn off the ignition. She stumbled out, ignoring his demand to wait, and frantically sorted through the keys in her hand, looking for the one to open the car door. She found it, and turned it in the lock. Gray was out of the car, coming around the front of it toward her. She jerked open the door and slid inside.
He said, "Faith," but she jammed the key into the ignition and started the engine, then pulled the gear lever down and started moving with the door still open. She leaned out and slammed it, wrenching it away from Gray's hands, and left him standing as she reversed too rapidly down the track until she reached a spot wide enough for her to turn around.
Gray stood in the middle of the road, watching her headlights veer crazily as she maneuvered the car, followed by the red dots of her taillights disappearing. His hands were knotted into fists, tight with the effort it took not to get in his car and chase her down. She was too shaky, drawn so tight, any more pressure could make her shatter. If he chased her, she was likely to drive headlong into a tree.
He turned back to the car, cursing viciously under his breath. If he could reach his own ass, he'd have kicked it. God, of all the stupid, boneheaded, downright cruel things to say! The irony of it wasn't lost on him. He had smooth-talked more women than he could remember, and none of them had meant a hill of beans to him. But with Faith, who tied his guts in knots, he managed to say exactly the worst thing possible. She had immediately withdrawn into herself, all of that wonderful fire reduced to ash, her face as smooth and blank as a doll's. He had seen that expression once before, on another night he'd never forget, and he hoped to God he never saw it again.
The tumultuous events of the day had left him more than a little shaken himself. First there was finding that damn mangled cat on Faith's table, then the frustration of trying to convince her that she could be in danger, damn it, and it would be in her own best interest if she moved away from Prescott. Telling her that was like talking to a fence post, except the fence post at least wouldn't argue back. She just got that stubborn look, her chin went in the air, and she dug those dainty heels in deeper than the Grand Canyon. Then Alex had gotten huffy about Faith being in the car with him, as if she were contaminated somehow, damn it, and Monica had looked as if he'd slapped her in the face with a fish.
He'd driven out to the lake for complete solitude, and he'd been sitting on the porch with his back against the wall, watching the moonlight on the water and sorting through the day's irritants, when Faith had drifted by, as silently as a ghost. He'd stared, not trusting his eyes, fighting the surge of fury that she'd evidently walked through the woods at night, because she sure as hell hadn't driven there. She'd headed straight to the boathouse, the beam of her flashlight flickering over it. What in hell was she looking for? This was twice he'd caught her prowling around.
And then the lust had hit him, washing away everything else. He'd warned her, and the fact that she was here meant she was willing to pay the price.
He wanted to believe he could have stopped if she'd said no, but he was glad he hadn't been put to the test. She hadn't said no, she hadn't said anything. Instead she had squirmed against him as if she were trying to get inside his skin, and the top of his head had damn near come off. She had been sweet and hot, her body arching into his touch, her mouth tender and wild. At that moment, nothing and no one could have kept him off of her, and he was still shaking from the results.
He had called her a Puritan, and been right on target. He shook his head, still trying to come to grips with what he'd learned about her tonight. Faith Devlin Hardy, the daughter of a drunk and a whore, didn't drink, didn't smoke, and didn't screw around. He'd had virgins who weren't as tight. She had probably been a virgin when she'd married, and Gray was abruptly certain that he was the only man she'd been with since her husband had died. For all the searing sensuality with which she responded to him, she was a bit of a prude. Not judgmental of others, but certainly holding herself to strict standards.
It was because of her parents, of course. Growing up the way she had, Faith was determined that she would never be like them.
That was fine with him, as long as she didn't try to retrench and keep herself from him. He had a feeling that was exactly what she would do, and no way in hell was he going to let her get away with it.
Don't think about it. Don't think about him.
Faith woke early from a restless sleep, her eyes heavy, feeling as tired as when she had gone to bed. She had shut thoughts of Gray from her mind last night, ignoring the lingering throb from his use of her body, even blanking him out while she showered away the evidence of that use. But for all her will, her subconscious had betrayed her, admitting him into her dreams so that she had awakened to find herself reaching for him, her flesh trembling with eager need.
For four years, the needs of her body had been so firmly repressed as to be nonexistent, but she had no control where Gray was concerned. She might as well admit it. Last night he had ruthlessly aroused her, forcing her to a completion that had eluded her, and now her body wanted more. It didn't seem to matter that she was sore and stiff, or that he had battered her mind with hurtful words; physically, she wanted him. She wanted more of that violent, shattering pleasure. She hadn't known it could be like that, and the discovery left her both stunned and humiliated.
He had treated her like a whore. He had seduced Lindsey Partain with patience and tender care, and Faith had seen it, so she knew the difference. He had murmured French love words to Lindsey, and raw Anglo-Saxon sex words to herself. Evidently only his social equals rated consideration. Her soul writhed with shame, but her body was already craving more of that rough treatment. Maybe he'd been right in the way he'd treated her. Maybe her heritage had only been dormant all these years, and was now coming to life.
He wouldn't leave her alone. She knew that as well as she knew her own name. He had tried to get her to move away from Prescott so they could be together, but perhaps the opposite tack would be more effective. She would try, but she wouldn't be able to avoid him completely, and she didn't know how many more encounters with him her self-esteem could take.
She still had to find out who had killed Guy. Not so much for herself now, but for Gray. Guy's family deserved to know that he hadn't run out on them. She hadn't been able to get into the boathouse, and she needed to do that. She needed to check with Detective Ambrose and see if he had found Mr. Pleasant. She needed to ask more questions, prod a killer into action, for only if he moved would she be able to see him.
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After the Night - Linda Howard.txt
| 19 |
The telephone drove her crazy that day. Faith thought about unplugging the damn thing, but reminded herself that she still had a business to run. She didn't have a separate line for the fax, so the phone had to stay in operation. She did let the answering machine screen her calls. Unfortunately, most of them were from Gray.
His tone in the first message had been both exasperated and soothing. "I wanted to see you today, but I had to go to New Orleans first thing this morning. I'm there now, and it looks like I won't get back until late tonight." Well, that was a relief, she thought. Now she wouldn't be on edge, afraid he would show up on her front porch at any moment.
The message continued, his voice sliding into a deeper, more intimate tone. "We need to talk, baby. Do you want me to come by tonight when I get home? I'll call you back later."
"No!" Faith shouted at the phone as he hung up and the answering machine clicked oif.
It was about half an hour later when realization dawned on her. Gray was in New Orleans. She wasn't anxious to return to the summerhouse, but at least if she went now, she knew she would be safe from detection. This might be the best chance she'd ever get, and she wouldn't even have to walk through the woods.
If she broke out the window, Gray would immediately suspect she had done it, since he had caught her slipping around the boathouse the night before. Besides, climbing through the window would be difficult without a ladder, and she didn't own one. But it wasn't night now, and she was a good swimmer. What had been unthinkable the night before was very doable under a bright morning sun.
The phone was ringing when she left the house with her supplies in hand. Not normally prepared for this kind of adventure, she made do. She had changed into her old swimsuit, and covered it with slacks and a blouse. In a bag she carried two towels and her flashlight, which she might need for searching dark corners. The flashlight wasn't waterproof, so she had sealed it in a Ziploc plastic bag. For her safety, she also carried the longest butcher knife from the kitchen. She didn't know what use she would have for it—she hoped she wouldn't be close enough to an angry snake that she had to stab it—but carrying it made her feel better, so she did.
She was almost gleeful as she drove out to the summer-house. Twice before she had tried to search the place, and twice Gray had caught her. The third time was the charm.
When she reached the lake, she resolutely refused to look at the summerhouse, but she couldn't entirely escape the memories of what had transpired there on the porch. How could she, when she felt the soreness between her legs with each step she took? But she also felt a faint throb of desire, and she hated herself for it.
Hurriedly she undressed, and beat on the door to the boathouse to roust any inhabitants. She didn't hear any scurrying, or the plop of anything into the water, so perhaps the place was clear. Nevertheless, she beat on the door again, and rattled the chain for good measure. Satisfied that she had done all she could in that regard, she walked out onto the dock until she was even with the garage door that sealed the boathouse on the lake side.
Gray and Monica and their friends had swum here often during the summers; Faith had sneaked into the water for a swim on more than one occasion herself, but never when anyone else was present. She wasn't afraid of being in the water alone, and she knew how deep it was around the dock. Clutching the plastic-enclosed flashlight in one hand, she entered the water with a shallow dive, and surfaced with a gasp at the coldness. By July and August, the water would be pleasantly warm, but this was the end of May and it still held some of the winter chill. She swam briefly back and forth, acclimatizing herself to both the water and the activity, and in a moment the temperature felt much better.
It would be dark under the boathouse. Fumbling through the plastic, she switched on the flashlight, then didn't give herself any more time to think. Taking a deep breath, she dove beneath the edge of the door.
Visiblity was poor, even with the flashlight, and beneath the boathouse it was almost stygian. Above her was a rectangle of light, thankfully unoccupied by a boat, which would have made climbing out more difficult. Faith kicked for the light, and her head popped out of the water almost before she realized she had broken the surface. She reached out and grasped the edge of the boat slip to steady herself, and placed the flashlight on a solid surface. Only then did she brush her hair out of her face so she could clearly see her surroundings.
The interior of the boathouse was dim and mostly empty. She hauled herself out of the water and stood dripping, looking around and letting her eyes grow accustomed to the dimness. Once the boathouse had been littered with air mattresses and inner tubes, with life jackets festooned on wall hooks. The ski boat had rocked gently against the padded edges of the slip, and cases of marine oil had been stacked in one corner. All of that was gone. The boathouse had been emptied and cleaned; all it held now was a lawn mower, of the push variety, a yard rake, and a worn broom. There was no chance a single shell casing would have remained in place for twelve years.
Knowing it was useless, she looked anyway. She shone the flashlight into every corner, got down on her hands and knees and looked from that angle. Nothing, Well, it had been a long shot anyway, she consoled herself. She had tried, and had enjoyed a nice morning swim.
She dove back into the water and under the door, surfacing into bright sunlight. This time there were no surprises waiting for her. Uneventfully she climbed onto the dock and stripped off the wet swimsuit, then toweled dry and dressed, having also had the foresight to bring along dry underwear. Except for her wet hair, she looked perfectly normal as she drove back to her house.
The answering machine held two more messages from Gray.
"Where are you, baby? Are you sleeping late, and have the phone turned off? I'll call back."
She buried her face in her hands. The machine beeped, and played another message. "You can't put it off forever. You have to talk to me sooner or later. Pick up the phone, baby."
She went to shower the lake water out of her hair. She heard the phone ringing even with the water running, and tried to ignore the sensation of being hounded. It wasn't easy. The calls continued all day long, each message becoming more and more irritated. He stopped cajoling, and started demanding.
"Faith, damn it, pick up the phone! If you think I'm going to let you ignore me—" He hung up without finishing the threat.
In between calls from Gray, she placed one to New Orleans, but Detective Ambrose wasn't available. She left a message for him, and waited for him to return her call.
It was late afternoon before he did so. She snatched up the receiver as soon as she heard the detective's voice. "This is Faith Hardy, Detective. Have you found Mr. Pleasant yet?"
"Nothing, Mrs. Hardy. I'm sorry. His car hasn't been found, either." His voice gentled. "Frankly, it doesn't look good. He doesn't fit the profile of someone who would disappear voluntarily; he had nothing to run from, and nothing to run to. He could have lost control of his car, had a heart attack, gone to sleep... If the car left the road and went into a bayou or river..." He let the sentence trail off, but Faith didn't need it spelled out. He thought a fisherman would eventually find Mr. Pleasant.
"Will you let me know?" she whispered, blinking back tears.
"Yes, ma'am, just as soon as I hear anything."
He wouldn't hear anything, though. Faith replaced the receiver in its cradle. Guy Rouillard had been murdered. It wasn't just a theory now; her mother had witnessed it. Mr. Pleasant had been asking pointed questions about Guy's disappearance. Would the murderer just have sat tight, figuring there was no evidence to be found, or would the fact that Mr. Pleasant was an investigator make him nervous? Nervous enough to commit another murder, perhaps?
That sweet little man was dead, and it was her fault.
No sooner had the thought registered than she rejected it. No, it wasn't her fault, it was the fault of the murderer. She wasn't willing to absolve him of one iota of blame.
Finding proof of Guy's murder would be extremely difficult, after twelve years. Mr. Pleasant had been missing less than two weeks. It would be smarter to concentrate on finding Mr. Pleasant. The evidence wouldn't be destroyed by time.
If she had killed someone, where would she hide the body? In Guy's case, the most likely answer was the lake. At the time of the murder, the boat had been right there. What would have been easier than to take him out to the deepest part of the lake, weight his body, and push him overboard? Such a convenient means had been lacking in Mr. Pleasant's case. For one thing, he probably hadn't been at the lake, and for another, there was no boat. So where would the killer try to dispose of the body?
Someplace where he wasn't likely to be seen. There were plenty of woods around for a hasty burial. Every so often, hunters would stumble across a body that had lain hidden for months, even years. But the killer had already successfully concealed one murder, so wouldn't he be likely to use the same method to dispose of a second body? If she thought so, and she did, then the Rouillard private lake was the place to search.
She couldn't do it by herself. She was willing to tackle almost any job, but she had sense enough to know when she needed help. The lake would need to be dragged. That required boats, people, equipment. The sheriff could order it done, but she would have to convince him there was cause, and that the lake was the place to look. She couldn't do that without telling what she knew about Guy.
And she couldn't tell what she knew about Guy without first telling Gray. She couldn't let him find out from someone else, couldn't let his family be dragged into this mess without warning. Despite the hurt that still compressed her chest, despite the fact that she was too ashamed of herself to face him, she would somehow have to bring herself to tell him his father had been murdered, and she didn't know if she could do it.
Right on cue, the telephone rang. Faith closed her eyes.
"Goddamn it, Faith!" The muted fury in his voice came through loud and clear. "If you don't pick up the phone and tell me you're all right, I'm calling Mike McFane to come out there—"
She grabbed the receiver. "I'm all right!" she yelled, and slammed it back down. The persistence of the man!
The phone rang again, after just enough time for him to have redialed the number. "All right," he said when the machine answered, his voice under control now, though the anger still seethed in every word. "I shouldn't have said what I did. I was an asshole, and I'm sorry."
"I'm sorry you're an asshole, too," Faith muttered at the phone.
"You can kick my ass or slap my face tomorrow, whichever you want," he continued. "But don't think you're going to avoid me forever, because I'm not about to let it happen."
The line clicked as he hung up, and she sent up a hopeful prayer that he would stop calling now.
The phone rang again. She groaned. The machine picked up.
"I didn't wear a rubber last night," he calmly informed her.
"I noticed," she said sarcastically.
"I'd bet my ass you aren't using any kind of birth control, either," he said. "Think about it." The line clicked off again.
"You fiend!" Faith shrieked, her face turning red with rage. Think about it! How was she supposed to think about anything else, now that he'd so kindly brought the matter to her attention?
She stomped around the house, angry at both Gray and herself. They had no excuse; they weren't irresponsible teenagers, operating on hormones instead of brains—but that was exactly how they had acted. How could they have been so careless? She should have thought of the possibility of pregnancy before, but she had been so upset and miserable that consequences hadn't occurred to her.
Well, they were occurring now, with a vengeance. As if she didn't already have enough to worry about!
She was so panicked that it was half an hour before she thought to consult the calendar and count days. When she did, she sagged with relief. Her period was due to start in a week, and she had always been very regular. Nothing was certain, but the odds were on her side.
The next morning there was another note. Faith had been careful to keep her car locked since the first one, so this one was secured under the windshield wiper. She noticed it when she glanced out the window, and went out to investigate. When she saw what it was, she didn't touch it. She didn't want to know what it said. It had evidently been there all night, because the paper was wet with dew, the ink smeared.
She hadn't heard anything last night, even though she had slept restlessly once again. At least it was just a note, rather than another mutilated animal.
She was still in her pajamas, having just finished breakfast. Leaving the note where it was, she returned to the house. Within fifteen minutes she had dressed, put on her makeup, brushed her hair, and was on the way out the door.
She unlocked the car door and dropped her purse into the seat. Being careful not to tear the soggy paper, she lifted the windshield wiper and retrieved the note, holding one corner between thumb and forefinger. Then she got in the car and drove straight to the courthouse.
She parked in front of the square and, holding the note exactly the way she had before, marched up the three long, shallow steps. There was an information desk stationed just inside the doors, and she paused to ask a blue-haired little woman exactly where the sheriffs office was located.
"Just down this hall, dear, and to the left." The little woman pointed to her own left, and Faith obediently turned.
The smell of the courthouse was surprisingly pleasant, settling her jangled nerves a bit. It was composed of paper and ink, cleaning compounds, the ever-changing mix of people, and the cool gray scent of the marble floors and halls. The courthouse had been built fifty or sixty years before, when buildings had individual character. It had, of course, been "updated" several times over the years, with fluorescent lights replacing the original incandescent ones, so the clerks could have headaches to go along with the cheaper lighting costs. Window air-conditioning units were attached like barnacles to the building, growing randomly from office windows. In some places, though, particularly the hallways, ceiling fans still whirled lazily through the workday, keeping the air moving and fresh.
She reached the end of the hallway and turned left, to find another hallway stretching before her. Five doors down she came to an open set of double doors, with sher depar stenciled on the left half and iff's tment on the right, so that they made whole words only if the doors were closed. Inside was a long room with a high counter running the length of it; behind the counter were several desks, the dispatch radio, and two offices, one of which was slightly bigger than the other. The biggest office had Sheriff McFane's name on the door, which was half-open, but Faith couldn't see into the office from where she was standing. Photographs of past sheriffs hung on the wall, the extent of the parish's efforts at decoration. It wasn't a cheerful effect.
A middle-aged woman in a brown deputy's uniform looked up as Faith approached the counter. "What can I do for you?"
"I want to speak with Sheriff McFane, please."
The deputy peered over her reading glasses at Faith, obviously recognizing her from her visit the day before yesterday. All she said, though, was, "What's your name?"
"Faith Hardy."
"Let me see."
She went into Sheriff McFane's office with only a perfunctory knock, and Faith heard the murmur of voices. The deputy came out, said, "Come through there," and indicated a half door at the end of the counter. She hit a buzzer located under the counter, and the door clicked open.
Sheriff McFane came to the door of his office to greet her. "Good morning, Mrs. Hardy. How're you doin' today?"
For answer, Faith held up the note. "I got another one."
The good humor faded from his face, and he was instantly serious. "I don't like this at all," he murmured, plucking an evidence envelope from a desk and holding it open for Faith to drop in the note. She released it with the air of one disposing of smelly trash. "What does it say?"
"I haven't read it. It was under my windshield wiper this morning when I got up. I've only touched one corner, so I wouldn't smear any fingerprints, assuming any are left. The paper's wet," she explained.
"Dew. That means it had been on your windshield for several hours. Actually, we have several good prints already, from the other note and the box. The problem is, we won't be able to find a match unless the note writer has been fingerprinted before." He ushered her into his office and dumped the note out onto his desk blotter.
"Since you haven't read it yet, let's see what it says." He opened the lap drawer of his desk and pawed through the contents, finally coming up with eyebrow tweezers. Using the tweezers and the tip of a pen, he carefully unfolded the damp paper. Faith angled her head to read the block letters:
|
After the Night - Linda Howard.txt
| 20 |
"Same person," Sheriff McFane said. "No punctuation."
"A deliberate signature?"
"Maybe, but could be it's just a departure from his usual style, sort of camouflage." He frowned at her. "Mrs. Hardy—Faith—Gray and I both told you the other day, living out there all by yourself could be dangerous."
"I'm not going to move," she said, repeating a sentence she must have said twenty times when she had been here to fill out the report on the dead cat.
"Then how about getting yourself a dog? It doesn't have to be a guard dog, just one that will set up a racket if it hears anything outside."
Surprised, she stared at him. A dog. She'd never had a pet of any kind, so that option simply hadn't occurred to her. "Why, I think I will. Thank you, Sheriff. That's a good idea."
"Good. Get one as soon as possible. Stop by the pound and pick out a young, healthy one. A half-grown youngster would be good, still young enough to take to you real quick, but old enough that it can bark, not just make puppy yaps." He looked down at the note on his desk. "About all I can do right now is have my deputies drive by your house a couple of times each shift. We just don't have much to go on."
"And a few notes and a dead cat aren't exactly the crime of the century."
He gave her a quick grin, full of Huckleberry Finn charm. "Can't even get 'im for cruelty to animals. If it makes you feel any better, the cat wasn't tortured. It was a road kill. Somebody just scooped it up, is all. It makes me feel a little better about the danger of the situation. A real psycho would have enjoyed killing a cat."
It did make her feel better. The memory of that mangled little corpse had made her feel sick every time it came to mind. The cat was still just as dead, but at least if it had been hit by a car, it had probably died instantly. She couldn't bear to think that it had suffered.
She left the sheriffs department and retraced her path. Halfway down the long corridor, she saw a tall, powerfully built man with long, dark hair stop to speak to the little blue-haired lady.
Faith's heart almost stopped. Without missing a step she whipped around to go back toward the sheriffs department, panicked at the thought of facing him again after the rawness of their last meeting. It was a purely instinctive reaction; her mind knew she needed to talk to him, but her body fled.
She heard the low rumble of his voice, recognizable anywhere, and speeded her steps. As she reached the end of the hallway and turned the corner, she glanced back and saw him striding rapidly toward her, his long legs shrinking the distance between them at an alarming rate. His dark eyes were locked on her.
She whisked around the corner, and the women's rest room was right there, on the left. She saw the sign and darted inside, then pushed the door closed and stood with one hand pressed to her chest in an effort to calm the thudding of her heart. She glanced around. She was alone in the tiny, two-stall facility, and she waited, frozen, for the sound of his footsteps passing by.
The door swung abruptly inward, forcing her to jump back to avoid being hit. Gray filled the doorway, big and muscular and threatening, a dark scowl on his face. His eyes glittered like black ice.
Faith tried to back away, but she bumped against the wash-area counter. There was very little room for maneuvering in the tiny rest room. "You can't come in here!"
He stepped forward and shut the door. "Are you sure about that?"
She took a deep breath, reaching for calmness. "Someone will come in."
"Maybe." He moved closer, so close that only inches separated them and she had to tilt her head back to see him. "Maybe not. You chose the place, I didn't,"
"I didn't choose anything," she snapped. "I was trying to avoid you—"
"I noticed," he said dryly. "What are you doing here?"
There was no reason not to tell him. "I found another note on my car this morning. I brought it to Sheriff McFane."
His scowl grew darker. "Damn it, Faith—"
"He told me to get a dog," she said, interrupting the sermon. "I was just on my way to the pound."
"That's a good idea. Don't bother with the pound, though; I'll get one for you. Why didn't you answer the phone yesterday?"
"I didn't want to talk to you." She glared up at him. "I'll get my own dog, thank you. And I'm not pregnant."
His dark brows arched. "How do you know? Did you start your period?"
"No, but it isn't the right time of the month."
He snorted. "Honey, I'm Catholic. I know a lot of kids who got their start at the wrong time of the month."
"Maybe you do, but you can take my word on this." As she spoke, she tried to slide sideways.
Gray put his hands on her waist, trapping her. "For God's sake, stand still," he said irritably. "You're always trying to run away. What do you think I'm going to do to you?"
"The same thing you did the last time I saw you," she retorted, then blushed. As much as she had dreaded meeting him again, now that it had happened, she felt the usual rush of excitement. No matter what, she could never be matter-of-fact about being with him, whether in battle or anything else. Gray wasn't a man who elicited boredom in the people around him. He was too big, too vital, too overwhelmingly male and sexual. Even as a child she had responded to his presence, and now that she was a woman, the effect he had on her was painfully magnified. She would try not to let him know it, but she couldn't lie to herself. Already her body was tightening, growing warm and moist with response. It was instinctive, and totally separate from the dictates of her mind.
His brows lowered over those midnight eyes, which began to glitter. "You liked it," he said softly, dangerously. "Don't try to pretend you weren't willing. I felt every little ripple, baby."
Faith felt the color intensify in her cheeks, and not just from embarrassment. If only he hadn't touched her, if only he weren't so close that she could smell him, hot and musky and deliciously male. "No," she said just as softly. "I wasn't saying that." She paused, gathering herself for the lie of her life. "I just don't want to do it again. It was a mistake, and—"
"You're lying." His gaze was on her breasts. Slowly his eyes lifted, and his expression changed again, tightening with lust. "Your nipples are puckered," he whispered, "and I haven't even kissed you yet."
Her breath caught. She didn't have to look down to see if he was telling the truth; she could feel the heavy tightness of her breasts, feel her nipples rasping against the lace that covered them. Warmth was gathering in her body, seeping down to pool in her loins. She stared helplessly at him.
Color darkened his high cheekbones, and his breathing deepened. "Faith," he murmured.
The tension was like a cord between them, thrumming with awareness. She felt as if the cord were being reeled in, inexorably pulling them together. Panicked, she flattened her hands on his chest and pushed, with a total lack of results. "We can't," she said weakly. "Not here, for God's sake!"
He wasn't listening. His eyes were fastened on her mouth. He said, "What?" in an absent tone as his hands tightened on her waist and pulled her against him. She moaned aloud at the feel of his hard, vital body pressed all along her. He bent his head to kiss her, and she automatically lifted her mouth. His lips were soft, his mouth hot. Response thrilled through her, as irresistible as the tide, and her hands stopped pushing against him to clench fistfuls of his shirt. He urged her even closer, and slanted his head to deepen the kiss, his tongue thrusting into her mouth. She made a little "hmmm" of delight and sucked at it, curling her own tongue upward to stroke his.
He shuddered as if struck, and cupped her buttocks to lift her hard against his thick erection. The heat of desire exploded into a wildfire, melding them together. He tore his mouth free and groaned, "Jesus," as he jerked up her skirt and roughly shoved her panties down her thighs.
The sink counter was cold against her bare buttocks, and she blinked at the shock, surfacing a bit from the dark tide. "Wait," she blurted.
"I can't." His voice was rough, shaky. He gripped her hips with one arm as he bent to strip her panties completely off. Before she could react, he straightened and hoisted her onto the counter. Pushing her thighs apart, he moved between them, then began jerking frenziedly at the zipper of his fly. He grunted as he freed his erection, and then guided himself to her. Faith dug her nails into his heavy shoulders as she felt the heat of his naked flesh pressing against her soft folds, burrowing between them, searching for the opening to her body. He found it, and she moaned at the pressure as that heavy invasion began. He pushed into her, stretching her almost unbearably. She was still a little sore from the first time, and he felt even more massive than before.
Then he was in her to the hilt, and he paused, resting his damp forehead against hers. "God, you're tight as a fist," he gasped. She was trembling violently, and he gathered her closer, stroking her back, comforting her. After a moment he moved experimentally, restrained little thrusts that set oif spasms of painfully intense pleasure and made both of them shudder wildly.
"Just putting it in you makes me ready to come." His voice was thick, his breath warm in her ear. He thrust a little harder, a little faster. She felt the thick ridge of his penis head moving back and forth inside her, and her inner muscles clamped down in frantic pleasure. She moaned again, digging her nails into him in an effort to control that wild rush. He cursed, the words low and shaky with delight. Putting his hand on her bare bottom, he pulled her to the edge of the counter, positioning her so that every thrust ground him against her exposed, straining little sexual nub. It was what he had done before, and she had no more defense against it than she'd had the first time.
He began thrusting heavily into her, pounding toward orgasm. She felt on fire, arching helplessly to meet his hips, the ecstatic tension in her loins coiling violently, out of control, her body taken over by and intent on this swelling, ungovernable pleasure.
The door creaked as it began to open.
Gray moved like lightning, slapping his left palm against the door and slamming it shut before it had opened more than a fraction of an inch. "Hey!" a woman squawked indignantly from the other side.
"This one's occupied," he said hoarsely, not missing a beat with his plunging hips. "Go somewhere else." Faith couldn't say anything. Her eyes widened with alarm, but all she could do was look helplessly up at him.
Gray's lips drew back over his teeth and his head dropped forward as he began hammering faster. His face was flushed, satisfaction only a few moments away.
Faith shuddered wildly as the coil of tension suddenly released and the fierce, pulsing flood of sensation swept through her. Shivering and pushing hard against him, she buried her face against his chest and bit his shirt to muffle her gasping cries.
He kept his hand flat against the door, gripping her bottom with his right hand to anchor himself. He shoved hard into her, twice, three times, again, then bucked violently. His head fell back and a harsh, guttural cry rumbled up from his chest.
There was an insistent banging on the door. "What are you doing in there?" the woman said in shrill, grating tones. "That's the lady's room! You aren't supposed to be in there!"
Slowly Gray's head came up. The expression in his eyes was indescribable, as if he couldn't believe what was happening. He took a deep breath, and exploded. "Goddamn it, woman!" he roared with furious indignation. "Can't you tell I'm busy?"
Faith dissolved into laughter.
|
After the Night - Linda Howard.txt
| 21 |
Faith had never been more embarrassed in her life. When she got home, she dashed into the house and locked all the doors, as if that would do any good. She had no clear memory of the drive home, but she could recall in excruciating detail every step she had made through the courthouse, with her face flaming and her thighs sticking together, and every curious look had made her want to cringe. She hadn't, though; she had walked out with her chin in the air and an "I dare you to say anything" look on her face. The bluff must have worked, because no one had stopped her.
She had jumped off the counter as soon as Gray released her, and locked herself in one of the stalls. Uncontrollable giggles shook her as she tried to tidy herself. The arrival of her panties, tossed over the top of the stall, sent her into absolute whoops. "Would you shut up?" she heard Gray mutter fiercely, and she all but collapsed in hysterics. He said something else, but she didn't understand him, and a moment later the door squeaked as he left. It swung open immediately, and a pair of navy pumps took up residence in the stall next to Faith. The owner of the pumps was also the owner of the shrill voice, and she was extremely indignant.
"I ought to tell the sheriff," she said huffily, loud enough that Faith could hear her over the sound of her own giggles.
"Carryin' on in the ladies' rest room! No telling who might have walked in, maybe a mother with her little kids, and just imagine children seein' something like that. It's sinful and disgusting, the way people don't have no shame anymore—"
The tirade was delivered to the accompaniment of a steady stream of urine splashing into the toilet bowl. Evidently part of the lady's wrath was due to the fact that she had been in desperate need of a bathroom. Trying to control her giggles, Faith took advantage of the woman's preoccupation and dashed out of the stall. Once in the hallway, she tried to assume a normal air, and walked quickly to her car. Gray hadn't been anywhere in sight, but then she hadn't exactly looked for him. Probably he'd ducked into the men's room.
Faith sank down in a kitchen chair and covered her face with her hands, groaning with mortification. What was wrong with her, that she couldn't manage to say no to him even in a public place? The courthouse rest room! Even Renee had used more discretion than that.
The telephone rang, but she didn't move to answer it. The machine in the office picked up, and she heard Gray's deep voice, but was too far away to understand what he was saying. He hung up, and a few minutes later the phone rang again. This time, however, Faith recognized Margot's voice. She knew she should pick up, but she didn't. She simply couldn't carry on a normal conversation; her nerves were still jangling, and she was physically shaking from the aftereffects of an adrenaline rush. She didn't understand how risk junkies got addicted, because the crash was making her sick.
When she thought her knees would support her, she got up and headed for the bathroom. What she needed right now, more than anything, was a shower.
Gray shook his head in disbelief at himself as he drove to Faith's house. He was sure she was there, even though she hadn't answered the phone. He couldn't believe what they'd done, or the force of the attraction that had made it irresistible. He hadn't done anything that stupid even as a teenager, and God knows he'd been wild as a buck.
He snorted with suppressed laughter. That damned old biddy! Faith had jumped up and hidden in a stall, laughing like a maniac, and he'd been left there with one hand on the door to keep it shut, and his pants down around his knees. Quickly he'd shifted position, moving to stand with his back against the door while he pulled up his pants. Faith's panties had been lying on the floor, so he'd scooped them up and tossed them over the stall, and she'd shrieked all the louder despite his order to be quiet. The old bitch outside wasn't going away; she kept beating on the door, getting louder and louder. Between her and Faith, he was almost deafened.
Finally he told Faith he'd meet her out front, but he wasn't certain she'd heard him, the way she was whooping hysterically. There was nothing to do but brazen it out. After glancing down to make certain everything was zipped and fastened, he opened the door and stepped out, glaring down at a plump, red-faced woman who was all but squirming with indignation. She sputtered furiously at him, but Gray cut her off". "The men's room was full," he snapped. "What did you expect me to do, piss in the hallway?" Then he stalked into the men's room, which was right next door, and leaned against the wall until his shoulders stopped shaking with silent laughter, because the old biddy had snapped right back, "Then what did you piss in, the sink?"
Oh, Jesus. He began laughing helplessly again. He knew the old biddy, at least by sight. She worked in the tax assessor's office. The tale that he'd been fooling around with some hussy in the women's rest room would be all over the courthouse by lunch, and all over the town by tomorrow morning.
His grin faded. Faith would be mortified.
She probably was anyway. She hadn't waited for him out front, but had probably driven home with all possible speed, and barricaded herself in the house. His little Puritan would be sick with embarrassment.
He sighed with relief when he saw her car in the driveway. He pulled in, but didn't stop behind her car. Instead he steered his car around to the backyard, and circled behind the open tool shed where she kept her lawn mower. Honeysuckle vines grew over the shed and part of the way up a steel cable bracing a power pole, forming a nice screen to hide the car. He nosed the Jaguar forward until the hood was just touching the honeysuckle, then got out, checking in both directions. The road wasn't visible in either direction, so that meant the car wasn't visible from the road. He felt like an idiot, but he hoped Faith appreciated the concern for her reputation.
He went to the kitchen door and rapped on it, waiting impatiently. She didn't open it, and he knocked again. "Faith, open the door."
Faith halted on the other side of the door, her hand hovering at the curtain. She had just been about to twitch it aside and see who was pounding on her kitchen door. She had almost jumped out of her skin at the sounds of a car pulling into her driveway and behind the house. She was relieved that it was Gray, but of all the people she didn't think she could face right now, he headed the list.
"Go away," she said.
The doorknob rattled. "Faith." Her name was spoken softly, calmly. "Open the door, baby."
"Why?"
"We have things to talk over."
Undoubtedly, but she didn't want to do it. She wanted to be a coward about the whole thing, and hide until she was over the embarrassment. "Maybe tomorrow," she hedged.
"Now." There it was, that gentle, inflexible note that said her door would be kicked open within the next ten seconds if she didn't open it herself. Helpless and resentful, she unlocked the door.
He stepped inside and immediately turned the lock again, his gaze never leaving her. She had just gotten out of the shower, and hadn't had time to dress before she heard the car pulling in. She had grabbed her thin robe from the back of the bathroom door, and put it on. There was nothing seductive about the robe; it was plain, white cotton, belted at the waist. But she was acutely aware that, beneath it, she was damp and bare. She clutched the lapels together over her breasts. "What do you want to talk about?"
An incredibly gentle smile spread over his face as he looked down at her. "Later," he said, and swept her up in his arms.
Two hours later, they lay sweaty and exhausted amid the tangled sheets on her bed. The noon sun forced its way through the closed slats of the blinds, throwing thin lines of white across the floor. A gentle breeze from the ceiling fan wafted across her bare flesh, raising tiny goose bumps. Her body was so acutely sensitive that she imagined she could feel each fine, downy hair lifting at the slight chill. Her heart was beating in slow, heavy thumps, her veins and arteries pulsing with each beat. Gray lay sprawled on his back, his eyes closed and his chest heaving, while she was curled against his side with her head pillowed on his shoulder.
It was a long time before she felt as if she could move. Her limbs were heavy and limp, utterly boneless. In those two hours he had taken her three times, with as much ferocity as if the time in the courthouse hadn't happened. And as demanding and immediate as his hunger had been, her response had matched it. She had clung to him, her nails digging into his back, her hips lifting eagerly to meet each thrust, and it seemed as if her fire had only fed his own. She didn't know how^many times she had reached satisfaction; this last time had felt like one long swell that crested, then refused to subside, so that she had been awash in sensation, drunk with pleasure.
As his breathing slowed, Gray stirred beside her and tried to lift his head, only to let it fall back with a groan. "Oh, God. I can't move."
"Then don't," she muttered, opening her eyes a slit.
A couple of minutes later, he tried again. With a great deal of effort he raised his head and slowly surveyed the tangle of their nude bodies lying amid the wreckage of the bed. His gaze settled on his penis, lying soft on his thighs. "You damn fool," he barked. "This time, stay down!"
The whimsy startled her, and she began giggling helplessly. She buried her face against his shoulder, her entire body shaking.
Gray let his head drop back to the pillow, and cuddled her closer. "Easy for you to laugh," he grumbled. "The damn thing's trying to kill me. It never has had much stopping sense, but this is ridiculous. It must think I'm still sixteen."
"It can't think," she pointed out, her giggles increasing.
"You're telling me. You can reason with something that thinks." Her giggles escalated even more, and he tickled her in revenge. "Stop laughing," he ordered, though a smile teased his mouth. "Do you know what it's like to have a prominent body part that won't listen to either common sense or orders?"
"Well, no, but I know what it's like to be in the vicinity of one."
He chuckled and lazily rubbed his hand across his chest. "Do you know why men name their cocks?"
"No, why?" she asked, trying to stifle her laughter.
"So most of the major decisions in their lives won't be made by a total stranger."
They shook with laughter, and Faith grabbed a corner of the sheet to dry her eyes. She had never seen this playful, bawdy side of Gray before, and she was charmed down to her toes.
He heaved himself up on his elbow, holding her head cradled in the crook of his arm as he smiled down at her. "It's all your fault, anyway," he told her, smoothing a tangle of dark red hair away from her face. His hand continued in a slow stroke down her throat, over the delicate sweep of her collarbone, to close over her breast.
"Mine?" she asked indignantly.
"Sure." Gently he cupped her breast, lifting it. He lightly rasped the pad of his thumb over the puffy pink swell of her nipple, and watched in fascination as it immediately puckered and turned red. "Your nipples are like raspberries," he marveled, and leaned down to take that particular raspberry into his mouth, circling it with his tongjie, rolling it back and forth.
Faith quivered in his arms, alarmed by the immediate swell of desire. She didn't think she could stand it again. "I can't," she moaned, but he noticed that her other nipple had also puckered.
He drew back and admired his work, the red nipple glistening wetly. "That's good," he said absently, "because I sure as hell can't." Faith's breasts were pale, with the sheen of satin, and her skin so translucent and fine that the blue tracery of veins seemed just under the surface. They were firm and full and upright, and he couldn't keep his hands off of them. Hell, he couldn't keep his hands off of her, period. "Just think how pretty these will be, when they're full of milk."
She slapped his shoulder. "I told you, I'm not pregnant!"
"You don't know that," he teased.
"Yes, I do know that."
"Your timing could be off."
"My timing is never off"
"This once it could be."
She glared at him, then returned to what he'd said before. "How is it my fault?"
"It must be," he said reasonably. "Every time you're near, I get hard."
"I'm not doing anything. It has to be your fault."
"You're breathing. Evidently that's enough." He collapsed back on the bed and pulled her so she was lying half on him. His free hand smoothed over her slender back, and down to stroke the round curves of her bottom. "Part of it's the way you smell, like honey and cinnamon, all sweet and spicy at the same time."
Her head lifted and she stared at him, startled. "I've always loved the way you smell," she confessed. "Even when I was a little kid. I thought you were the best smell in the world, but I've never been able to exactly describe it."
"So you've had a crush on me since you were little?" he asked, pleased.
To hide her expression, she tucked her head back into its resting place in the hollow of his shoulder, and inhaled the delicious male scent she had just mentioned. "No," she said softly. "It wasn't a crush."
He grunted and settled himself more comfortably, pulling her thigh up to ride across his hips. She felt his penis twitch warningly against the soft inside of her leg, then subside. "I used to worry about you," he murmured, his voice becoming sleepy. "Running around alone in the woods the way you did."
She was silent a moment. "How often did you see me?"
"A couple of times."
"I saw you," she said, gathering her courage.
"In the woods?"
"At the summerhouse. With Lindsey Partain. I watched through the window."
His eyes shot open. "Why, you little sneak!" he said, and swatted her bottom, hard. "I guess you got an eyeful."
"I sure did," she agreed, rubbing her bottom indignantly. She retaliated by twisting her fingers in his chest hair and pulling.
He yelped and rubbed his chest. "Ouch!"
"Revenge is sweet," she said. "And prompt."
"I'll remember that," he said ruefully, squinting down at his chest. "Damn, there's a bald patch there."
"There is not."
She rubbed her cheek against him, her eyes closing as she luxuriated in the feel of him, so warm and solid and vital. She had been in paradise from the moment he carried her to bed. Lying here like this with him, so relaxed, all hostility gone and desire thoroughly sated, was more than she had ever dared hope for in her life. None of their problems were solved and the hostility would undoubtedly return, but for right now, this moment, she was happy.
So happy, in fact, that there was only a little hurt mixed in with the curiosity when she said, "You made love to Lindsey in French."
His eyes had closed drowsily, but they popped open again. "What?"
"I heard you. You made love to her in French. Lots of love words and compliments."
Gray was too experienced not to notice how she felt about that, and immediately discerned the reason. He gave her a disbelieving look, then put his head back on the pillow and shouted with laughter. Faith's lower lip trembled and she tried to turn away, but his arms tightened and he held her right where she was.
"Oh, Jesus," he said, wheezing with the effort it took to control himself. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. "You little innocent. I'm fluent in French, but it isn't my first language." It was plain by the mortified expression in those green eyes that she didn't understand, so he explained. "Baby, if I can still think clearly enough to speak French, then I'm not totally involved in what I'm doing. It may sound pretty, but it doesn't mean anything. Men are different from women; the more excited we are, the more like cavemen we sound. I could barely speak English with you, much less French. As I remember, my vocabulary deteriorated to a few short, explicit words, 'fuck' being the most prominent."
To his amazement, she blushed, and he smiled at this further evidence of her charming prudery. "Go to sleep," he said gently. "Lindsey didn't even rate a replay."
God only knew why she found that reassuring, but she did. She went to sleep as easily as a child, exhausted by the events of the morning, and woke to make love again. He was more leisurely this time, and, with a positively wicked gleam in his dark eyes, whispered French love words to her. Then he had to grab her hands to protect his chest hairs, roaring with laughter at her indignation. That was how they passed the afternoon, sleeping, making love, and murmuring drowsily to each other afterward. If the lovemaking was wildly exciting, it was in the pillow talk that a deeper kind of intimacy was forged, a quiet sharing of secrets and thoughts, a linking together of their pasts.
"Tell me about the foster home you were in," he said once, and was relieved when she smiled.
"The Greshams. They gave me the first real home I'd ever known. I still keep in touch with them."
"How did you wind up in a foster home?"
"Pa took off not long after... after that night," she said, faltering a little. "Russ, my oldest brother, wasn't far behind him. Nicky tried to earn enough to feed us, I'll say that for him, but he was relieved when the social services people found us. We were in Beaumont at the time. Jodie was put in one foster home, and Scottie and I in another. It wasn't easy to find someone who would take Scottie, too, but the Greshams agreed if I would take care of him. As if I would leave him behind," she said softly.
"What happened to him?"
"He died the next January. At least he was happy, the last six months of his life. After we moved in, the Greshams were wonderful to him. They bought him toys, played with him. He had so much fun at Christmas, but he faded fast after that. I sat up with him," she said in a quiet voice, her eyes liquid with tears as she stared down the years. "I held his hand while he died." She brushed her hand across her eyes. "I used to wonder if Guy was his father."
He'd never thought of that. He stared at her, disturbed both by the idea that his father might have sired other children, and by the horrifying thought that he might have thrown his little brother out into the dirt.
Faith groped for his hand. "I don't think he was," she said, compelled to comfort him. "Your father wouldn't have left one of his children to live the way we did. If Scottie had been his, he'd have taken care of him. There's no telling who Scottie's daddy was; I doubt it was Pa."
Gray blinked, his own eyes shiny with tears. "Yes," he said hoarsely. "He'd have taken care of him."
Later, he asked, "What happened to the rest of your family?"
"I don't know. I think Jodie's living around Jackson, but I haven't seen her since she turned eighteen. I don't have any idea what happened to Pa and the boys." She carefully didn't mention Renee.
So her family, such as it was, had been shattered by his actions. He held her tight, as if he could shield her from the pain of the past.
"I hated Dad, for a while," he admitted. "God, when I found out he'd left—he was our rock, not Mother. It hurt so much, I couldn't stand it."
Faith bit her lip, thinking of what she had to tell him, and soon.
"Monica tried to kill herself," he said abruptly. "She cut her wrists right after I told her Dad was gone. She almost bled to death before I could get her to a hospital. When I came to the shack that night, I'd just left the hospital in Baton Rouge."
He was trying to explain his rage, she realized, why he'd done what he had. She kissed his shoulder, forgiveness in the gesture. Actually, she had forgiven him long ago, understanding the pain and sense of betrayal he must have been feeling.
He stared up at the ceiling fan. "Mother withdrew completely. She stopped talking, even stopped feeding herself. She didn't come out of her room for two years. She's the most self-centered person I've ever known," he said with brutal honesty, "but I don't ever want to see her that way again."
And that was why he was so adamant that neither Monica nor his mother be upset by anything Faith said or did. She had experienced some of his overprotectiveness herself. In some ways, he was like a feudal lord in Prescott, his influence touching almost every aspect of parish life, and like a feudal lord, he took his responsibilities seriously.
He rolled on top of her, entering her with a gentle insistence that nevertheless made her catch her breath, for she was sore from all the other times. He braced himself on his elbows and cradled her head in his hands. "That night is a link between us," he whispered. "Ugly as it was, we share the memories. And it wasn't all ugly. I wanted you that night, Faith." He began moving slowly inside her, his eyes darkening with the slow build of passion. "You were only fourteen, but I wanted you. And when I saw you again, in the motel, it was as if the twelve years apart didn't exist, because I still wanted you."
Then he began to smile. "Do you want me to say it in French?" he asked.
When she woke the next time, she lay quietly and watched him sleeping. His black lashes were dark smudges on his cheekbones, and black beard stubbled his lower jaw. His lips were softly parted as he slept, his powerful body relaxed. The beauty of him shook her. With his long hair tousled around his shoulders, he looked like a pirate taking his rest in a lady's bed after a long day of ship-boardings and sword fights. The tiny diamond in his left ear didn't do anything to detract from the image.
She was too sore to possibly make love again, she thought, but still his body drew her. He was wonderfully made, all long bones and hard muscle. One arm dangled off the side of the bed, but his other hand lay relaxed on his chest. He had big hands, his fingers lean and well shaped, but his little finger was as thick as her thumb. She thought of those hands on her body and shivered with delight.
She leaned over him, delicately inhaling the warm scent of his skin, rising off him on waves of heat. This was Gray. The realization stunned her anew. He was actually here. She could touch him, kiss him, do all the things she had spent most of her life only dreaming about.
His flesh drew her like a lodestone, making her breath come a little faster, and her skin flush. There were no restraints on her natural sensuality now, and the freedom to touch him, and be touched by him, was intoxicating. She laid her hand on his thigh, feeling hard muscle under the roughness of hair, then slipped her fingertips, in a dreamy, sensual sampling, down to where the flesh was smooth and hairless, trailing her fingertips across it. His scrotum hung low, his testicles like two small eggs in their soft sac. She turned her hand and cupped it, feeling it cool and heavy in her palm. He stirred restlessly, his legs falling apart, but he didn't wake. He was a wonderfully male animal, and, for the moment at least, totally hers.
She leaned over him even closer, letting the tips of her breasts drag through the crisp, curly hair on his chest, and sucked in a quick breath at the sharp tingle of sensation that drew her nipples erect.
His eyelids fluttered and opened. "Ummm," he said, a low hum of pleasure, and automatically reached up to circle her with his arms.
She nuzzled her face against his throat and slid all the way onto him, her entire body squirming sinuously as she rubbed herself over him, feline in her enjoyment. "You feel so good," she whispered, nipping his earlobe, then licking it. "All three of the H factors."
"What are the H factors?" he asked. "Or do I want to know?"
"Hot, hard, and hairy."
He chuckled, and stretched languidly beneath her. It was a startling sensation, like being on a lumpy raft tossed about by the ocean. She hung on to his shoulders to keep from falling off.
His hair brushed her fingers, and when he had settled, she thrust her hand into the black mass of it. It was thick and silky, with just a hint of curl. Most women would have killed to have hair like that. "Why do you wear your hair long?" she asked, picking up another strand and pulling it around to tickle his nose with the end of it. "And why the earring? That's pretty dashing for a man who sits on several corporate boards."
He obligingly made a face, then began to laugh. "Promise not to tell?"
"Promise—unless you say someone scared you with a picture of Sinead O'Connor; I'd have to tell that."
His white teeth flashed as he gave her a faintly embarrassed grin. "It's almost as bad. I'm afraid of hair clippers." She was so astonished that she slipped off his chest. "Hair clippers?" she echoed. This six foot four, over-two-hundred-pound pirate was afraid of hair clippers?
"I don't like the noise," he explained, turning onto his side and curling one arm under his head. His eyes were smiling. "Gives me the willies. I can remember when I was four or five years old, howling my head off as Dad tried to hold me still for old Herbert Dumas to give me a haircut. Evidently holding me down made Dad feel like a traitor, so he started trying to bribe me to be good, but I just couldn't do it. I'd hear that first bzzz and nearly jump out of my skin. By the time I was ten, we had negotiated our way to scissor cuts. The older I get, the further apart the hair trims are. As for the earring—" He laughed out loud. "It's sort of camouflage. Wearing the earring makes it look as if my hair is long on purpose. A style, rather than a phobia."
"Who trims your hair?" she asked, too fascinated to laugh. She was still trying to deal with the image of a grown man avoiding barbershops the way some people avoided the dentist.
"Sometimes I do. Sometimes I'll get it trimmed when I'm in New Orleans. There's a salon there with a standing rule not to turn on any hair clippers while I'm there. Why? Do you want to take over the job?" He laid his hand on the side of her neck, his thumb brushing her earlobe. He was smiling, but she sensed he was serious.
"You'd trust me to cut your hair?"
"Of course. Wouldn't you trust me to cut yours?"
Her reply was swift. "Not in this lifetime. But I'd let you shave my legs."
"It's a deal!" was his reply, just as swift, as he grabbed for her.
It was almost twilight the next time he stirred awake, and groaned as he rubbed his hand over his face. "I'm starving," he announced in a rumbling voice. "Damn, I need to call home and let someone know where I am."
Faith rolled onto her back, cautiously stretching. Though she had spent most of the day in bed, she was as tired as if she had been up all night. Being in bed with Gray Rouiliard was not restful. It was a lot of fun, it was wonderfully exciting, but restful, it wasn't.
Now that he had mentioned it, she realized how hungry she was. The idea of lunch hadn't occurred to either of them, and breakfast had been many hours ago. Food was just what she needed.
He sat up on the side of the bed, giving her a wonderful view of his buttocks. She reached out and stroked them as he picked up the phone, and he tossed a quick grin over his shoulder. "Feel free," he invited, punching in his own number.
His back was just as marvelous as his front, she thought dreamily. Thick with muscle, bisected by the deep groove of his spine, tapering from those wide shoulders down to a taut waist.
"Hi," he said into the phone. "Tell Delfina I won't be home for dinner."
Faith heard the indistinct murmur of a voice, evidently asking where he was, because he calmly replied, "I'm at Faith's house."
The voice was still indistinct, but considerably more agitated. She watched his back muscles tense and immediately felt uncomfortable, as if she was eavesdropping. She had to get away, she thought distractedly. She couldn't bear to listen to him make an excuse for his presence here. She sat up and swung her legs off the bed, wincing at the unexpected stiffness of her back and legs.
"Monie," Gray said patiently, and sighed. "We have to talk. I'll be home in the morning—no, not before. In the morning. If anything important comes up, call me here."
Slowly Faith stood up, straightening with difficulty. Every muscle in her body seemed to be protesting. Her legs were ridiculously weak, her thigh muscles trembling. She desperately wanted to leave the room, but nothing was cooperating. She took one hobbling step, wincing with pain, then another.
"I said, we'll talk tomorrow." His voice was firm. He looked over his shoulder at Faith, started to glance away, then his attention focused on her like a laser beam. " 'Bye," he said absently to Monica, hanging up and cutting her off in midprotest. Then he was on his feet, coming around the end of the bed to where Faith wobbled.
"Poor baby," he crooned. "Muscles sore?"
She scowled at him.
"I know just the thing," he promised, stripping the top sheet from the bed and snaking it out.
"So do I. A hot shower."
"Later." He wrapped the sheet around her and picked her up. "Just be quiet and enjoy."
"Enjoy what?"
"Being quiet, what else?" he replied maddeningly, and she couldn't even hit him, because her arms were wrapped up in the sheet.
She found out soon enough. He carried her into the kitchen and carefully laid her on the table, unwrapping the sheet to spread it out beneath her. "I had some great ideas about this table the first time I saw it," he said, with more than a little satisfaction.
Startled, she said, "What are you doing?" She had been naked in his arms for hours, but somehow, lying naked on top of her kitchen table made her feel unbearably exposed, as if she were a human sacrifice lying on a stone altar.
"Massage," he said. "Stay there." He left the room, leaving her lying there. The hard surface was uncomfortable, but the promise of a massage kept her in place. He returned to the kitchen with a bottle of baby oil and a washcloth in his hands. "On your stomach," he ordered. He turned on the hot water in the sink and let it run until steam began to rise, then filled a bowl and dropped the bottle of oil into it.
Stiffly she obeyed. He hadn't turned on any lights and the kitchen was deeply shadowed, twilight only a few moments away. The air conditioning was on, and though she had been perfectly comfortable in the bedroom, the cold of the table seeped through the sheet and chilled her. She shivered, wishing he would hurry.
"Close your eyes and relax," he said quietly. "Go to sleep if you want."
Her sore muscles were adjusting to the hardness of the table, allowing her to relax fractionally. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the sounds of what he was doing. She could hear water splashing, and sighed in anticipation of feeling that warm oil being rubbed into her skin.
His voice was low and soothing, little more than a murmur. "I'm going to wash you, so you'll be more comfortable," he said, just before she felt a wet, very warm washcloth between her legs. The heat felt wonderful on her sore, swollen flesh. He was incredibly gentle, but just as thorough as he cleaned away the evidence of his lovemaking. He took the cloth away, and she heard water running again. "It's going to be cold this time," he warned, and the cold pad of the washcloth was pressed between her legs. He repeated the compress several times, soothing the ache. Then he reached for the oil.
He began at her shoulders, his powerful fingers digging deep into her muscles. She automatically tightened in resistance, then relaxed as the strength and tension seemed to flow out of her. The heated oil made his hands slide over her skin, leaving it slick and fragrant. He worked down each arm, even massaging her hands, and between her fingers. And everywhere his hands went, they left behind loosened tendons, limp muscles, and total contentment. Faith purred her pleasure as he returned to her back, starting at her waist and moving his hands upward in long, powerful sweeps that compressed her rib cage and made her groan aloud with each stroke. He relentlessly searched out every stiff muscle, and kneaded it until it was pliant beneath his hands.
Her legs were next. He kneaded her hamstring muscles, her calves, her Achilles tendons, the bottoms of her feet. He rotated her ankles back and forth, pressing his thumbs hard into her arches, and a startlingly sexual pleasure made her toes curl.
"Oh!" she said involuntarily.
"Like that, do you?" he asked, his voice soft and muted in the growing darkness of the room. He did it again, and she moaned in response.
He moved back up her legs, spreading them apart and massaging the stretched, sore tendons on the upper insides of her thighs. Her moan this time was of pain, and she gripped the sides of the table. He murmured reassuringly, moving his attention to her buttocks. She relaxed again, closing her eyes. She was feeling pleasantly warm now, and not just from the oil; his stroking hands were having another effect entirely. Desire was curling lazily, heating her blood, totally without urgency.
"On your back, now," he said, and helped her to roll over. He looked with interest at her peaked nipples, and smiled. His big, oil-slick hands covered her breasts, gentle there, smoothing the oil into nipples sore from vigorous sucking and the rasp of his stubbled face. "Your skin's as delicate as a baby's," he observed. "I'll need to shave twice a day." Faith didn't reply, too caught up in what he was doing. By the time he was finished with her stomach and thighs, she was in an agony of anticipation, her body arching under his hands. The room was almost completely dark now, the lavender shadows of twilight giving way to the night. He paused to turn on the light over the sink, isolating them in a small glow.
The sore muscles on the insides of her thighs received more attention, and this time he didn't relent until her groans had turned to purrs. His oily fingers slipped higher then, gently stroking and probing, and she shook with delight.
"Gray." Her voice was smoky, drugged with desire. She reached out for him. "Please."
"No, baby, you're too sore for another round," he whispered. "I'll take care of you."
He dragged her to the end of the table, sheet and all, the fabric slipping easily over the smooth surface. "What –?" Faith began, then fell back with a moan as he draped her thighs over his shoulders. Gently he opened the swollen folds between her legs, and she felt his warm breath wash over her. She barely had time to catch her breath before his tongue delved into her painfully sensitive flesh with a lightning bolt of sheer sensation that made her cry out. He was very tender, and very thorough, reducing her to quivering, screaming ecstasy within minutes.
Afterward, he carried her into the bathroom. She stood sleepily in the shower with him, her arms around his waist and her head on his chest. A lot of the soreness was gone, but now her muscles felt like mush.
When the hot water began to go, he lifted his cheek from the top of her head. "Food," he murmured.
Reluctantly she released him and let him turn off the water. She sleeked her wet hair back from her face, and looked up at him with diamonds of water clinging to her lashes. He seemed so ruthless and strong, but he was very human, with desires and fears and quirks, and she loved him all the more deeply for those qualities. Just for a while, though, she would have wished he were more impervious, because she couldn't put off much longer telling him about his father.
The least she could do was feed him first.
He wolfed down two ham and tomato sandwiches, then took his time on the third while she polished off one. Afterward, they remade the bed with fresh sheets, and he flopped down with a sigh of exhaustion. The sprawl of his arms and legs took up most of the room, but she crawled into one of the niches and burrowed her damp head into its accustomed place on his shoulder. She put her arms around him, holding him tight as if she could shield him from the pain. "I have to tell you something," she said quietly.
|
After the Night - Linda Howard.txt
| 22 |
Monica cried for a long time after Gray hung up, her arms folded on top of his desk and her head resting on them. Hot, salty tears dripped onto the polished surface and she rubbed them away with her sleeve, not wanting to mar the finish of his desk. She had never felt more lost and confused, even when Daddy had left.
Nothing was working out right. She hadn't managed to tell Alex she wouldn't let him screw her anymore; when he had come down from Mama's room the other night and stood in the doorway, staring at her, her heart had stopped. She had tried to get the words out, but her throat had been too dry, and then he had been bending over her and it was too late. She squirmed with shame every time she thought about it. How could she have let him touch her? She was going to marry Michael. She felt dirty, felt as if she were dirtying him by going into his arms after having been with Alex. And she still hadn't told Gray that Michael had asked her to marry him, much less telling Mama that she was even dating him. She had been so careful to keep her life under control after the stupid stunt with her wrists, but now it all seemed to be spiraling away again.
Gray was with Faith Devlin. Another man she loved and depended on had been seduced away by one of those whores. How could he do that, Gray, of all people? Monica rocked back and forth, hugging herself and moaning with pain as tears streamed down her cheeks. He was spending the night with her, uncaring of what people might say, of the gossip that would eventually reach Mama no matter how hard they tried to keep it from her. Family hadn't mattered to Daddy when he was in bed with Renee Devlin, and now it looked as if Gray was following in his footsteps with Renee's daughter. Just give them sex, and they didn't care who they hurt.
Monica sobbed until her eyes were sore and almost swollen together, until her chest ached with the effort of breathing. Then, finally, a sort of terrible calm came over her.
She opened Gray's desk drawer and stared at the revolver he kept there. The Devlin bitch hadn't paid any attention to the warnings Monica had given her, so it was time to stop being subtle. In her furious hurt, it didn't matter that Gray was with Faith; it might do him good to be shaken up, she thought, reaching for the pistol. This time, she was ridding the parish of a Devlin.
"What is it?" Gray asked, stretching to turn off the lamp. In the sudden darkness, he cradled Faith against him. "You sound serious."
"I am." She blinked back the sudden burn of tears. "I've put off telling you this because I—I can't bear to hurt you. And I—I want you to know something else, first." She gasped for breath, and seized her courage with both hands. "I love you," she said in a low voice, aching with tenderness. "I've always loved you, even when I was a little girl. I lived for glimpses of you, and the chance to hear your voice. Nothing has ever changed that, not what happened that night, not the twelve years when I was gone."
His arms tightened and his lips parted, but she laid her fingers on his mouth, stopping the words. "No, don't say anything," she begged. "Let me finish." If she didn't get it all said in a hurry, she might lose her nerve.
"Gray, your father didn't run away with Mama." She felt his body tense, and she hugged him closer. "I know where Mama is, and he isn't with her. He never was. He's dead," she said as gently as possible. The hot tears leaked out of her eyes to slowly trickle down her cheeks. "Someone killed him that night. Mama saw who did it, and was scared he'd kill her too, so she ran."
"Stop it," Gray said harshly. He pulled her arms away from him and gave her a hard little shake. "I don't know if this is your lie or Renee's, but I got a letter from him that was postmarked the next day, in Baton Rouge. If he was killed the night before, then a dead man wrote it."
"A letter?" she asked, stunned. Of all the things she'd thought he might say, this wasn't one of the possibilities. "From your father? Are you sure?"
"Of course I'm sure."
"It was in his handwriting?"
"It was typed," he said, his annoyance rapidly escalating into anger. He sat up and swung his legs out of bed. "The signature was his, though."
Faith flung herself at him, wrapping her arms around his shoulders to hold him, though she was well aware he could have shaken her off as if she were no more than a pesky mosquito. Desperately she said, "What did the letter say?"
"What does it matter, goddamn it?" He caught her wrists, trying to free himself without hurting her. She clung all the harder, pressing her body against him.
"It matters!" She was weeping now, her tears hot and wet on his back.
He muttered another curse, but sat still. Despite how furious he was with her for even bringing up the subject, much less trying to convince him of such a ridiculous lie, she was crying, and he had to fight the urge to drag her around onto his lap and comfort her. Roughly he said, "It was a letter of proxy. Just that, no explanation. Without it, we likely would have lost almost everything we owned."
His chest expanded as he took a deep breath. "If it hadn't been for that letter, I'd have tried to find him. But he didn't even say he was sorry, didn't say good-bye. It was as if he was taking care of a minor detail he'd forgotten."
"Maybe someone else wrote it," Faith said, aching with the pain he must have felt then. "Maybe the murderer did.
Gray, I swear, Mama said she saw him get shot! They were out at the summerhouse that night when someone drove up. She said that Guy and the other man went into the boat-house and she heard them arguing—"
He erupted off the bed, breaking free of her grasp. He whirled around to catch her arms and pin her to the mattress. "That's why you were sneaking around the place," he said incredulously, and reached out to turn on the lamp so he could see her face. He glared down at her, his eyes burning like coals. He shook her again. "You little witch! That's why you've been asking all those questions about Dad! You think he was murdered and you've been trying to find out who killed him!"
He had seldom in his life been more furious; his hands shook with the effort of controlling himself. He didn't believe his father had been murdered, but it was obvious that Faith did, and the foolhardy woman had been trying to find a murderer all by herself. If there really had been a murder, she would have been putting herself at enormous risk. He was torn between snatching her up in his arms to kiss her and turning her over his knee. Both choices held enormous attraction.
While he was still trying to decide, she said, "I knew I likely wouldn't find anything, but I searched the boathouse for a shell casing—"
"Wait a minute." He rubbed his hand over his face, trying to get a handle on this latest confession. "When did you search the boathouse?"
"Yesterday morning."
"It's kept padlocked. Have you added breaking and entering to your repertoire?"
"I swam underneath the door and came up in the boat slip."
Gray closed his eyes and counted to ten. Then he did it again. His hands twitched, and he balled them into fists. Finally he opened his eyes, staring down at her in appalled disbelief. Foolhardy wasn't the word for her. She was too intrepid for her own safety, much less his sanity. The net beneath the boathouse, designed to keep out unwelcome guests of the reptile variety, had come loose over the years and he hadn't had it repaired, but it was still there. She could so easily have become entangled in it and drowned. He would have lost her forever. Clammy sweat formed on his brow.
"I didn't find anything," she said, eyeing him uneasily. "But I'm making someone nervous. Why do you think I got those threatening notes?"
It was like being punched in the stomach. He hung there, his mind reeling. Then his knees sagged, and he sat down heavily on the bed. "My God," he said blankly, as horrified realization began to form.
"I hired a private detective," she said, reaching for him again, desperately needing to touch him. She pressed close, and this time his arms came up to wrap around her, hauling her against his chest. "Mr. Pleasant. He searched credit card records, Social Security records, tax files—there was no trace of Guy after that night. Gray, there was no reason for Guy to walk away from you and Monica, or from all that money! He wouldn't have left you for Mama; why should he? It didn't make sense that he would disappear like that, unless he was dead. Mr. Pleasant thought he must be, too, and he was going to ask some questions in town." A sob rose in her chest. "Now he's disappeared, too, and I'm afraid the same person killed him!"
"Oh, God," Gray said, his voice tight. "Faith—don't say anything else. Be quiet for a minute. Please."
She pressed her face into his chest and obeyed. Despite everything, his arms were around her, and she began to hope. He rocked her gently back and forth, comforting himself as well as her.
"Alex sent the letter," he finally said, his voice muffled in her hair. "I should have guessed. He was the only other person who knew Dad hadn't left a letter of proxy, and he knew what a mess we were in without it, if Dad didn't come back, so he didn't take the chance. He was almost as upset as I was, and he said the same thing you did: What reason did Dad have for running away with Renee? He already had her, and Mother turned a blind eye to his affairs, so he wouldn't have... He's dead. He's really dead." He choked, and his chest heaved beneath her cheek.
Faith held him tight, guiding him down onto the bed. He clutched at her, his hands desperate. "Turn... turn off the light," he said, and she did, understanding how a strong man could need darkness for his tears.
He shook in her arms, his wet face buried against her breasts as harsh sobs tore up from his chest. She cried with him, stroking his head, his back and shoulders, not speaking but offering him the comfort of her body, of not being alone. Without the intimacy of the day they had just passed binding them together, she doubted he would have allowed her to see him so vulnerable. But they were linked, as he had said, their lives inextricably woven together by the past, and cemented by the long hours of intense pleasure.
Something he had said jarred, but the significance of it escaped her. She pushed it aside, for the moment intent only on holding him.
Gradually he calmed, but his desperate grip on her didn't relax. She smoothed his hair back from his damp face, her fingers gentle.
"All these years," he said in a hushed, choked voice. "I've hated him, and cursed him... and missed him... and all the time he's been dead."
Something else needed to be said, something hurtful. "Have the lake dragged," she suggested, and felt him flinch. He had swum in that lake, fished in it.
There were other things to talk about, decisions to make, but his head was heavy on her breast and she sensed his utter exhaustion. Her own fatigue, mental and physical, was dragging her down. "Go to sleep," she whispered, stroking his temple. "We'll talk in the morning."
She must have dozed, but for all her tiredness, something kept dragging her back to semiconsciousness. She shifted restlessly, feeling Gray's heavy weight against her. What was it he had said? Something about the letter of proxy...
His body was like a furnace, pouring off heat in waves. Sweat dewed her body, despite the efforts of the ceiling fan. She didn't open her eyes, but her brow furrowed as she tried to bring the thought into focus. The letter of proxy... Why would Alex have sent a bogus letter of proxy so quickly, when no reasonable person would expect Guy to completely walk away from his family and business? Surely he had expected Guy to get in touch...
Unless he had known that it was impossible.
Alex.
Her eyes flew open, and she stared in confusion at the strange red glow that suffused the room. The heat was more intense, and the air was acrid, burning her eyes and nose. Realization exploded in her head.
"Gray!" She screamed his name, shaking him hard. "Get up! The house is on fire!"
Monica stopped the car where she had both times before, pulling off the road onto a pasture access, out of sight of the house. She wore dark clothes and soft-soled dark shoes, for moving quietly without being seen. It was so easy to sneak up to the house on foot, leave her messages, and depart undetected. Leaving the package had required more planning, since it had been daylight, but Faith had simplified things by not being at home. It had just been a matter of slipping the package into the mailbox and driving away.
She got out of the car, pistol in hand, and stepped into the dark road. There wasn't much traffic on this road even during the daytime, and if a car did come along, she would be able to both see and hear it in plenty of time to hide. In the meantime, the road was the easiest walking, and left no footprints.
There was a strange reddish glow in the night sky, just visible above the trees. Monica stared at it, puzzled. It was a few seconds before she realized what it was, and her eyes widened with alarm. The house was on fire, and Gray was there! Her throat closing on a moan of terror, she began to run.
Gray rolled off the bed and dragged her with him, down onto the floor where it was easier to breathe, though the acrid smoke still burned her throat and lungs with every breath. He grabbed her robe from the chair and thrust it at her. "Crawl into the hall, then put this on," he ordered, "and some shoes." He snagged his pants and shoes, jerking them on with three fast motions. "I'll be right behind you."
She obeyed, glancing back several times to make certain he was there. Coughing violently, she pulled the robe around her.
Once in the hallway, they could see flames licking outside the bathroom window, too. Gray ignored it, crawling into the bathroom and snatching towels from the rack. By some miracle, there was still water pressure, and he soaked the towels in the sink. He was coughing and gagging as he tossed one sodden towel at her. "Put it over your face," he said hoarsely.
She did, holding the dripping material over her mouth and nose with one hand and crawling as best she could. The towel helped, and she breathed a bit easier.
The fire seemed to surround them, the wicked orange flames dancing every way they turned. The thick smoke filling the house reflected the glow, so that it seemed to come from all directions. How could it have spread so fast, so completely engulfing the house? The cackle of licking flame had become a roar as it grew stronger, consuming more and more of her home. The heat seared her skin, and sparks showered down like thousands of tiny glowing knives, pricking where they landed. The boards beneath her hands felt as if they were breathing, growing hotter and hotter, and she knew that soon the floor would combust. If they weren't out before then, they would die.
Gray could feel the same thing. Faith wasn't moving fast enough; her robe tangled around her legs, slowing her. Roughly he shouldered her aside so he could move in front of her. He gripped the collar of her robe and used it to pull her along, all but dragging her, forcing her to a faster pace. He could feel the floor getting hotter and hotter beneath them, and knew they had only a minute at most to get out, or it would be too late. He strained his eyes to see through the swirling smoke, and the relative darkness at the front of the house gave him a glimmer of hope. "The front door!" he roared, trying to make himself heard above the din of the inferno. "It isn't burning yet!"
Her house was so small, but the front door seemed so far away. Faith's lungs ached and burned, desperately pumping for air, but the fire was consuming all of the precious oxygen. Her sight dimmed, and she felt the world sliding sideways. The wood floor scraped her knees as Gray dragged her, and the pain roused her to greater effort. Gathering herself, she forced her muscles to keep moving as she silently repeated a litany of desperation: Don't stop, don't stop, if you stop Gray will too, don't stop. Terror for his safety, above all, kept her moving.
Abruptly he staggered to his feet and hauled her upright, holding her clasped tightly to him. She stared dimly up at his beloved, smoke-blackened face. "Get ready!" he bellowed, and used his towel to cover the heated doorknob as he jerked the door open.
He ducked as flames licked in with a deep, whooshing sound, then just as quickly subsided. Picking Faith up, he tucked her under his arm as if she were a football, and ran through the burning portal.
His speed carried them off the porch, and they pitched into the empty darkness. Gray twisted in midair, trying to put his body between Faith and the ground, but he only partially succeeded and they sprawled on the grass with a bone-jarring impact. He heard her soft, gasping cry, but they were still dangerously close to the house and he couldn't take the time to see if she was injured. He caught her under the arms and began pulling her. "Move! Get away from the house!"
"No," someone said hoarsely, with horror in the tone. The crackle and roar of the flames almost drowned out the words. "Gray, what are you doing here?"
Gray straightened slowly, pulling Faith up with him and automatically tucking her behind him. They were caught between two dangers, the fire at the back and the rifle in the hands of the man who had been his honorary uncle, and lifelong friend and advisor.
"No," Alex moaned, his eyes white-edged with panic. He shook his head in denial of Gray's presence. "I thought she was alone! I swear, Gray, I would never have put you in danger—"
The heat on Gray's naked back was intense, scorching his skin. Deliberately he moved forward, never taking his eyes away from Alex but desperate to get Faith away from that heat. He stopped as fits of coughing racked him. He could hear Faith coughing and gasping, and he kept a hard grasp on her arm, forcing her to stay shielded behind him.
Several ugly suspicions were crowding his mind, and all of them made him sick. When he could talk, he straightened and wiped his streaming eyes with a grimy hand. "You're the one who's been sending those notes, aren't you?" he rasped, his voice so raw as to be almost unrecognizable. "And the cat—"
"No," Alex denied, his voice filled with ludicrous indignation, under the circumstances. "I wouldn't do something like that."
"But you would set fire to a house and try to kill an innocent woman?" Gray asked coldly, the harshness of his voice making the words even more jarring.
"I hoped she would leave," Alex replied in a frighteningly reasonable tone. "But nothing you did made her leave, and neither did the notes. I didn't know what else to do. I couldn't let her keep asking questions, and upsetting Noelle."
Gray gave a rasping crack of laughter. "You didn't care whether or not Mother was upset," he snapped. "You were afraid she'd find out what happened to Dad!"
"That's not true!" Alex said furiously. "I've always loved her! You know that!"
"Did you love her so much that you shot my father so you could have her?"
Gray bellowed the accusation at him, so infuriated by the danger to Faith and the realization that Alex had killed his father that it was all he could do to keep from leaping at Alex and strangling him with his bare hands. The only thing that held him back was the knowledge that, if he failed, Faith would die.
They still stood dangerously close to the burning house, the hellish light enveloping them in a red circle beyond which nothing else existed. Alex's face twisted with pain. "I didn't mean to!" he screamed. "I just wanted to stop him—he was going to divorce Noelle! The humiliation would have killed her! I tried to make him see reason, but he was determined. My God, how could any man prefer that slut over your mother? I think he was crazy, he had to be."
The irony of Alex calling Guy crazy wasn't lost on Gray. Then, to his horror, Faith wrenched loose from his grasp and stepped out from the protection of his body. "So you shot him," she said, her own voice so raspy, he could barely hear her over the roar of the hungry flames. "And told my mother that you'd say she'd done it if she ever said anything. There wasn't any doubt who would be believed in this town, was there?"
Alex glared at her with such hatred and fury that the rifle trembled in his hands, and Gray reached out to pull her close. He wasn't afraid for himself; Alex's horror at having endangered him had been genuine. But Faith—oh, God, even now, Alex still intended to kill her. Gray could see it written plainly in his eyes.
"I didn't mind your moving back," Alex told her. "You didn't have anything to do with what happened. But you wouldn't keep your mouth shut, you kept asking questions, and you hired that old bastard to stick his nose into things—"
"Did you kill him, too?" she interrupted, her face twisting with rage. "Did you?"
"I had to, you stupid bitch!" Alex howled, beside himself with fury. "He got too close... he asked me if Noelle had had any affairs... She wasn't like that—"
"Did you dump his body in the lake, the way you did Guy's?" Faith spat, her entire body quivering. But it wasn't fear Gray felt running through her, it was absolute fury, a mirror of his own, and he had a sudden nightmare vision of her going for Alex herself. There wasn't much Faith wouldn't dare, when she had made up her mind to do it. She had deliberately tried to stir up a killer and bring him out into the open, even though she'd known she was putting herself at risk.
Her plan had worked like a dream, he thought viciously. Now if he could just keep her from getting killed. Holding her with bruising force, he jerked her behind him again, trusting that Alex wouldn't shoot through him to get to her.
She immediately began twisting, fighting to get away from him.
Alex stared at them as they struggled, Faith trying to get away from Gray so he wouldn't be hurt, and Gray desperately trying to hold her close for the same reason. Alex's handsome face twisted. "Let her go! She isn't worth it, Gray. I'll take care of her, and everything can go on the way it was. She's only a Devlin; no one will care. She's ruined everything! Guy was my best friend, damn it! I loved him! But he was dead... I had to do something."
"You could have turned yourself in," Gray pointed out, trying to keep a reasonable tone in his voice as he finally wrapped his arms around Faith and crushed her in his embrace. If he could lull Alex, then get close enough to knock the barrel of the rifle upward... He was much stronger than the older man, he could subdue him. "If it was an accident, you wouldn't have—"
"Oh, please. I am a lawyer, Gray. The charge would have been involuntary manslaughter, not murder, but I still would have done time." Alex shook his head. "Noelle would never have spoken to me again... she wouldn't associate with someone who had been in jail. I'm sorry, but it has to be this way." Lifting the rifle, Alex sighted along the barrel, and Gray knew he was going to fire.
He shoved Faith away, and charged Alex. He saw the rifle barrel track to the side, following Faith, and he plowed into Alex with more force than he had ever used playing football. The sharp crack of rifle fire split the night, and the hot casing hit his cheek as it ejected. He caught the rifle, shoving it upward as they hit the ground, but the impact broke his grip. With surprising speed Alex rolled away, springing to his feet and grabbing the rifle again. Gray got to his feet and began advancing on Alex. He didn't dare glance at where Faith lay, couldn't bear to see... The thought of losing her clawed at his gut with unbearable pain. Terror and rage combined in his chest, and Alex's death was written on his stark features as he moved forward.
"Don't," he pleaded, backing away a few steps. "Gray, don't make me shoot you, too—"
"You bastard!"
The shriek came out of nowhere. Blinded by the fierce glare of the fire, Gray couldn't see anything at first. Then Monica materialized out of the night, dressed head to toe in dark clothing that had cut down her visibility. His sister's face was dead white, her dark eyes wild.
"You bastard!" she shrieked again, advancing on Alex like a Fury. The firelight gleamed on the barrel of the revolver in her hand. "All these years... you've been screwing me... pretending I was Mama... and you killed my father!"
Maybe Alex saw her intention to fire in Monica's eyes. Maybe he was simply startled by her appearance, her screaming attack. For whatever reason, he swung the rifle around toward her. Gray leaped for him again, a roar of protest on his lips, knowing he couldn't reach him in time any more than he'd been able to a moment before.
Monica closed her eyes and fired.
|
After the Night - Linda Howard.txt
| 23 |
"The bastard," Monica kept whispering in a drained, lifeless voice. "The bastard."
Faith sat in a county patrol car with Monica, holding her when she cried, letting her talk as she would. The door on her side of the car had been left open, while the one on Monica's side had been closed; a subtle splitting of hairs on the part of the parish law enforcement. Monica didn't seem to care that the door beside her didn't have any inside handles. She was in shock, shivering occasionally despite the heat of the night, added to that from the fire, and Sheriff McFane himself had carefully spread a blanket over her.
Faith stared out the open door, feeling more than a little numb herself. It had all happened so quickly... The house was gutted, a total loss. Alex had poured gasoline all around the house and tossed a match to it, intending that she be trapped inside with no clear way out. Had she somehow managed to get out, he had been waiting with a rifle. It would have been assumed that she'd been killed by whoever had been sending her the notes, and since he was innocent of that, he'd felt safe. But Gray had hidden his car behind the shed, and in the darkness Alex hadn't seen it. When Gray had come stumbling out of the burning house, Alex's careful plans had been shattered. He had been shocked by Gray's presence—Gray, whom he loved like a son. All they could do now was guess what Alex would have done, faced with that dilemma.
Her car, sitting so close to the house, was also a total loss. Without the key to crank the engine and pull it away, she had watched as a section of wall fell on it and set it afire. Gray's Jaguar had been pulled away from the shed and now sat safely on the side of the road. The shed still stood, though. She stared at it through the smoke. Maybe she could sleep there, she thought with ghoulish humor.
Her small yard swarmed with people. The sheriff and his deputies, the volunteer firefighters, the fire medics, the coroner, the sightseers. God knows what so many people had been doing out that time of night, but an inordinate number of them had evidently followed all the flashing lights.
She watched Gray's tall body, silhouetted against the dying blaze. He was talking to Sheriff McFane, a few yards away from Alex Chelette's covered body. He was shirtless, his long hair flying around his bare shoulders, and even from here she could hear him coughing.
Her own throat felt like fire, and she could feel the stinging of several burns, on her hands and arms, her back, her legs. It hurt to cough, which didn't stop her lungs from periodically trying to clear themselves, but all in all she felt lucky to be alive and in relatively good health.
"I'm sorry," Monica said abruptly. She was staring straight ahead. "I sent the notes... I just wanted to scare you into leaving. I never would have—I'm sorry."
Stunned, Faith sat back, then immediately straightened her sore back away from the seat. She started to say, "That's all right," then changed her mind. It wasn't all right. She had been frightened, and sickened. She had known there was a killer out there. Monica hadn't known, but that didn't excuse her. She hadn't killed the cat, but that didn't excuse her either. So Faith said nothing, leaving Monica to find her own absolution.
Faith watched as a medic approached Gray and tried to get him to sit down, tried to put an oxygen mask on him.
Gray shook him off, gesturing angrily, and pointed him toward Faith.
"I'm going to tell them," Monica said, still in that expressionless voice. "Gray and Michael. About the notes, and the cat. I won't be arrested for shooting Alex... but I don't deserve to go unpunished."
Faith didn't have time to respond. The medic brought his equipment over to the patrol car, and squatted in the open door. His penlight flashed in her eyes, making her blink. He took her pulse, checked the burns on her hands and arms, tried to put the oxygen mask on her. She pulled away. "Tell him," she said, indicating Gray, "that I will when he does."
The medic stared at her, then gave a little grin. "Yes, ma'am," he said, and jauntily returned to his first reluctant patient.
Faith watched as he repeated what she'd said to Gray. Gray wheeled around to glare at her. She shrugged. Annoyed and frustrated, he grabbed the oxygen mask and with ill grace clapped it over his nose and mouth. He immediately began coughing again.
Because she had promised, she had to submit to treatment when it came her turn again. The medics agreed that her lung function was good, meaning that her smoke inhalation wasn't critical. Her burns were mostly first-degree, with a few second-degree blisters on her back, and they wanted her to see Dr. Bogarde. Gray was in much the same shape. Both of them were extremely lucky.
Except he had lost a friend, and she had lost every possession except the robe on her back and the shoes on her feet. And an open shed, a lawn mower, and two rakes, she reminded herself. She had insurance on both the house and car, but it would take time to replace everything. Her tired mind began trying to catalogue all the things she would have to do: have her credit cards replaced, get new checks, buy new clothes, get a car, find a place to live, have her mail rerouted to somewhere.
So many things to do, and she was so tired that she felt incapable of accomplishing a single one. At least nothing was irreplaceable, except for the few photographs she'd had of Kyle. There were no other family mementos.
Alex's body was eventually taken away. Monica stared at it being loaded in the hearse, for transport to the parish morgue. Because he had died by violent means, there would be an autopsy. "For seven years he used me," she whispered. "He pretended I was Mama." She shuddered. "How do I tell Michael?" she asked bleakly.
"Who's Michael?"
Monica gave her a puzzled look. "The sheriff. Michael McFane. He's asked me to marry him."
Faith sighed. The tangle just kept getting worse. "You don't," she said, and touched Monica's arm. "Put it behind you. Don't hurt Michael by telling him. It won't make you hurt any less, and it'll give Alex just one more victim. Pick up from here and go on."
Monica didn't reply, to either agree or disagree, but Faith hoped she took her advice. She had picked herself up enough times to know the value of going on.
Eventually both she and Gray were taken to Dr. Bogarde's clinic and put in separate examining rooms. The dapper little doctor checked Gray first; Faith could hear them talking through the thin walls. Then he came bustling into the tiny room where she sat uncomfortably on the table. He cleaned and dressed her burns and checked her breathing, then gazed at her with a sympathetic eye.
"Do you have a place to sleep?"
Faith gave him a rueful smile and shook her head.
"Then why don't you stay here? You look out on your feet. There's a rollaway bed that we use sometimes, and you're welcome to it. I can give you a set of scrubs to wear—don't tell, but I sneaked them from the hospital in Baton Rouge." His eyes twinkled at her. "A few hours' sleep will do wonders for you. My nurses get here at eight-thirty, and then you can call your insurance agent, buy clothes, handle all those things. Trust me, you'll feel a lot more capable after you've had some sleep."
"Thank you," she said sincerely, accepting his offer. The difficulties of being virtually naked, without transportation, cash, or credit cards, were almost more than she could deal with at the moment. In the morning she could have Margot wire her some money, and she would begin the process of picking herself up again, but for tonight she simply couldn't cope.
Dr. Bogarde left, and in a few minutes Gray came in. His torso and face were still streaked with black smoke, but the doctor had cleaned some patches and applied bandages, giving him the look of a large calico cat. Figuring she looked much the same, and not wanting to look in a mirror to verify it, she smiled at him.
His tired face moved into an answering smile. "Dr. Bogarde said you're okay, but I wanted to see for myself."
"I'm fine, just tired."
He nodded, then simply put his arms around her and folded her against him, sighing deeply as he absorbed her nearness. Until he had seen that she was okay, merely stunned from her fall when he'd shoved her, he had lived in a hell of fear. The events of the night were still catching up with him; part of him felt numb, while another part was still aching with almost inexpressible grief. It didn't matter that his father had been dead for twelve years; he had just learned of his death, so the pain was fresh. If anything had happened to Faith, too –
"Come home with me," he said, pressing his lips to her temple and smelling the smoke in her hair. He didn't care.
Shocked, she drew back and stared at him. "I can't do that," she blurted.
"Why not?"
"Your mother... No."
"Leave Mother to me," he said. "She won't like it—"
"That's an understatement if I've ever heard one!" Faith shook her head. "You can't spring me on her at a time like this. Everything that's happened tonight will be enough of a shock at one time. Dr. Bogarde offered to let me sleep here tonight, and I accepted."
"Forget it," he growled. He hated to admit she was right, but he could see that she wasn't going to budge. "If you won't come home with me, then I'll take you to the motel."
"I don't have any money or credit card—"
He set her away from him, and temper sparked in his dark eyes. "Damn it, Faith, did you think I'd charge you for the room?"
"I'm sorry," she apologized. "I'm used to paying my way, so I just didn't think." A motel room would be more comfortable, and more private.
He sighed, and reached out to cup her cheek. The anger died out of his eyes. It was amazing how flowers could grow in the damnedest places, but the Devlin weed patch had sprouted quite a wildflower in Faith. "Come on," he said, helping her down from the examination table. "Let's tell Dr. Bogarde you're going with me."
Ten minutes later, he drove up to the motel office and wearily unfolded his long length from the Jaguar. There was still a lot to be done this hellish night. Uncaring how he looked, he went inside and got a key, returning in less than a minute to escort her to room number eleven. He unlocked the door, turned on the light, and stepped aside to let her enter. Tiredly Faith moved past him, and looked longingly at the bed. She would love to just lie down and sleep, but couldn't bear the thought of getting the sheets filthy with soot.
Gray followed her inside, closed the door, and pulled her to him. She laid her head on his chest, shutting her eyes as she reveled in the feel of him, so hard and strong and vital. Death had been so close...
His fingers gently encircled one of her wrists, and he lifted her sooty fingers to his lips, then folded his hand around hers. "We start dragging the lake tomorrow," he said abruptly.
She rubbed her cheek against his hand, aching for him. "I'm sorry," she said gently.
He took a deep breath. "There's a lot to be done. I don't know when I'll have a free minute."
"I understand. I have a' lot to do myself. All of the insurance claims, things like that." It would have been nice if they could have leaned on each other during the coming ordeals, but necessity was pulling them in different directions. Because the dragging of the lake would be done under law enforcement authority, access to the process would be limited; she knew that without having to have it explained.
Gray would be there, but no other civilians not directly involved in the dragging operation would be allowed.
"I don't want to leave you," he murmured, and indeed he seemed incapable of making himself move, despite everything else that had to be done before this long night was over.
"You have to. My problems are mostly paperwork and shopping; I can take care of them. You have more serious problems."
He tilted her head up with his fingers, dark eyes boring into hers. "We'll talk when this is over," he said, the promise somehow sounding ominous. He kissed her, the pressure of his mouth warm and hard. "Call if you need me."
"All right."
He kissed her again, and she sensed his reluctance. She stroked his hair in comfort. "I don't want to go," he confessed, resting his forehead against hers. "Twelve years ago I had to tell Mother that Dad had left her for another woman. Now I have to tell her that he was murdered, instead. The hell of it is, I know this won't upset her as much as the first did."
"You're not responsible for what she feels or doesn't feel," Faith replied, touching her thumb to his lower lip. "You and Monica loved him, so he won't be unmourned."
"Monica." Gray's mouth tightened, and his eyes turned flinty. "She confessed what she did, about the notes and the cat. Michael's all torn up about it. She broke several laws with that little caper."
"Let things settle down before you do anything," Faith advised. "Family's family, after all. You don't want to do anything rash and cause a breach. Remember, she's been through a lot, too." Her own family was scattered to the four winds, and her life was littered with loss, so she knew what she was saying. She saw the swift acknowledgment of that reflected in Gray's eyes.
A huge yawn overtook her, and her head dropped against his shoulder. "That's my last piece of advice for the night," she said, and yawned again.
He kissed her forehead and eased her away from him. He had to force himself to leave her, but he knew if he didn't do it now, he'd collapse on the bed with her. "Get some sleep, baby. Call if you need me."
She had one friend in town, Faith realized over the next few days. Whether Halley Johnson had learned from town gossip where Faith was staying and volunteered her own services, or Gray had called her and asked her to help, Faith didn't know and didn't ask. Halley knocked on the motel room door at ten o'clock the next morning, and put herself at Faith's service.
Faith had already called Margot and arranged for money to be wired to her, but she still needed some means of getting to the bank to get the money. She also needed, quite desperately, to do some shopping, and she didn't know if any of the stores in town would sell anything to her. The situation between herself and Gray had altered drastically, but no one in town knew it.
"First things first," Halley announced, when Faith said she had to go to the bank. She looked Faith over with a critical eye as she carefully walked out to get into Halley's car. The burns weren't all that uncomfortable, but Faith felt as if she'd been hit by a truck, probably the result of the two bone-jarring collisions she'd had with the ground. "I'll take you to my house," Halley said. "Feel free to use my makeup, do your hair, pamper yourself a little. And while you're doing that, if you'll tell me your sizes, I'll do some quick shopping for you. Nothing fancy," she said, holding up her hand when Faith opened her mouth to protest. "Just underwear, a pair of slacks and a shirt, so you can get out of that robe. You can pay me back when you pick up your money."
With it put to her like that, Faith couldn't refuse. "Thanks," she said, smiling at Halley. "I was wondering if I'd be able to buy clothes in town."
"You will," Halley said with complete assurance, "or I'll call Gray Rouillard myself, and tell him to straighten out his mess. Besides, the whole town's buzzing with the news that his daddy didn't really run off with your mama, that you figured he'd been killed and came back to town to try to prove it. We're all just flabbergasted about Mr. Chelette. Imagine getting in an argument with his best friend and accidentally killing him, and trying to hide it all of these years! It must have driven him crazy, for him to burn down your house like that. Is it true he tried to shoot you, too, and Monica Rouillard managed to shoot first?"
"Something like that," Faith said faintly, wondering what the official version was. She didn't want to contradict whatever was being told. As far as she knew, only she, Gray, and Monica knew about Monica's unwilling seven-year affair with Alex.
Halley dropped her at her house, and Faith enjoyed another long, soaking shower, shampooing her hair twice with strawberry-scented shampoo before the stench of smoke was completely gone. She took Halley at her word and indulged in moisturizer from head to foot, after which she began to feel almost human again. She used a minimal amount of makeup, just enough to put a bit of color in her face, and blow-dried her hair. By the time she was finished, Halley was back with her packages, which blessedly included a new toothbrush.
The clothes were simple, cotton panties and bra, and a lightweight knit pants and tunic outfit. Just having underwear again was wonderful. She had been acutely aware of being naked beneath the robe and scrubs. Halley had a good eye for color; the knit outfit she'd selected was a flattering pale pink. A carroty redhead couldn't have worn the color, but Faith's hair was a dark, almost wine-colored red, and the knowledge that she looked good in the pink perked up her spirits.
Halley stayed with her most of the day, driving her where she needed to go: the bank, first and foremost. Having a thousand dollars in cash did wonders for her sense of security, and the first thing she did was reimburse Halley for her clothes. Next visit was to the insurance office, which thankfully was one-stop shopping, because the same company insured both house and car. Faith had recovered enough to be amused by the sympathetic, almost deferential treatment she received in the insurance office; the line between celebrity and notoriety was a very thin one, but evidently she was now on the celebrity side.
As the morning wore on, she was grateful for her new status. Because she was totally without identification, the insurance agent had to step in and verify everything before she could get replacement credit cards, credit card companies not being inclined to blithely send out cards to everyone who called. New cards were being expressed to her in care of the insurance agent, and would be there the next day. The insurance company also took care of a rental car for her, and one would be there that afternoon.
Next was shopping, and Faith needed so much that her mind boggled at the enormity of it. Even when she'd been run out of the parish, she hadn't lost all her possessions, meager as they'd been. This time she was starting from scratch, but this time she also had resources.
Emcient Halley suggested they make a list, and that helped Faith get her thoughts organized. Suitcase, purse, wallet; shampoo, soap, deodorant, toothpaste, tampons; makeup and perfume; razor, brush, comb, hair dryer, travel iron; underwear, hosiery, shoes, clothing. "My God," Faith said, staring at the list, which kept getting longer and longer. "This will cost a fortune."
"Only because you're buying it all at one time. Everything on there is something you would have bought anyway, eventually. What would you leave off, anyway? The makeup?"
"Get real," Faith said, and they laughed. It was her first laugh of the day, and it felt good.
They descended on the local Wal-Mart, and filled two carts. Even keeping her purchases to a minimum of the necessities, she was accumulating major stuff. None of the shoes fit, however, which meant another stop. Halley was so cheerful about the entire process, though, that Faith found herself enjoying the expedition. She had never participated in that rite of American girlhood, shopping with friends, and this was a new experience for her.
Halley unwittingly echoed her thoughts. "Wow, this is fun! I haven't done this in a coon's age. We need to do it again—under different circumstances, of course."
The total tally put a sizeable dent in her cash fund. That accomplished, Faith realized she was exhausted, and an observant Halley drove her back to the motel.
Gray called her that night, and he sounded as exhausted as she still felt. "How are you, baby?" he asked. "Did you get everything done today?"
"I'm fine," she said. "Functional, at least." She had taken a two-hour nap, but it hadn't helped much. "The insurance company is handling the details with the rental car and credit card companies, so everything is working out. Halley took me shopping, so I have clothes now."
"Damn."
She ignored that comment, but a smile flirted with her mouth. "How do you feel?"
"As if I'm three days older than dirt."
She hesitated, not certain if she wanted to hear the answer to her next question. "Have you found anything yet?"
"Not yet." His voice was strained.
"How's Monica?"
He sighed. "I don't know. She just sits with her head down. She and Mike will have to work this out themselves; I can't run interference for her on this."
"Take care of yourself," she said, tenderness vibrant in her tone.
"You, too," he said softly.
As soon as he hung up, Faith called Renee. She felt guilty for not having thought of it sooner, knowing how upset Renee had been.
Her grandmother answered the phone. When Faith asked for Renee, the old woman said in a fretful voice, "Guess she's gone. Took her clothes and lit out, night before last. I ain't heard from her."
Faith's heart sank. Renee had probably panicked after confessing what had happened at the summerhouse, and now she was running again, for no reason.
"If you hear from her, Granny, there's something I want you to tell her. It's important. The man who killed Guy Rouillard is dead. She doesn't have to be afraid anymore."
Her grandmother was silent a moment. "So that's why she was so jumpy," she finally said. "Well, maybe she'll call. She left some stuff, so she might come back for it. I'll tell her, if she does."
Mr. Pleasant's car was pulled from the lake the next afternoon. Mr. Pleasant was in it.
Probably on Gray's orders, a deputy came to the motel to tell Faith. The young man was uncomfortable and respectful, twisting his hat in his hands. He couldn't say how Mr. Pleasant had died, but the body was being taken to the parish morgue, where he would lie in the same room with his killer. Faith had to bite back an instinctive protest, knowing it would be useless.
After the deputy left, she sat down on the bed and had a good cry, then called Detective Ambrose. Poor Mr. Pleasant didn't have any remaining family, but the detective promised to find out what he could about any arrangements Mr. Pleasant might have made for his own funeral, given the state of his health. There was red tape to go through, of course, since his death was a homicide, but with his killer already dead, gathering forensic evidence for a trial wasn't an issue.
Guy Rouillard's Cadillac was found the next morning, not far from where Mr. Pleasant's car had been found. The long skeleton in the backseat was the only earthly remains of Gray's father. Alex Chelette's method of disposal had been simple: put them in their cars, prop a brick on the accelerator, and put the car in gear. Sheriff McFane was the one who had thought about finding the cars, and there were only three places on the lake where the water was deep enough to hide a car, and it was possible to get a car there. With their search locations narrowed down, it hadn't taken them long to find the bodies.
Faith didn't get to talk to Gray, but information flew around the town, and she knew he was ruthlessly using his influence to get Guy's remains released as soon as possible, for a funeral twelve years delayed. Noelle Rouillard appeared in town for the first time since her husband's disappearance, looking tragic and unbelievably beautiful in a black dress. Gray's cynical assessment of his mother's reaction had been on target; being a widow was far preferable to being abandoned. Now that everyone knew her husband had not left her for the town whore, she could hold her head up again.
The funeral was held four days after Guy's remains were found. Though she knew people would whisper about her presence, Faith bought a black dress and attended the service, sitting on a back pew beside Halley and her family. Gray didn't see her there at the church, but later, after the funeral procession had transported Guy's body to the burial site, his dark gaze was drawn by the sunlight on her flaming hair.
He was standing with a supporting arm around Monica. Sheriff McFane was on her other side, so Faith supposed the engagement was still on. Noelle was bearing up with the sympathetic support of all her old friends, the ones she had refused to see for a dozen years. Faith was some ten yards away, separated from him by a group of people, but their eyes met and she knew he was thinking about what she had said. Guy was sincerely mourned by his children; what Noelle felt didn't matter.
She stared at him, drinking him in with her eyes. He looked tired, but composed. His mane of hair was pulled back and secured at the back of his neck, and he wore a beautifully fitted, double-breasted black Italian suit. Sweat gleamed on his forehead in the noonday heat.
She made no move to go to him, and he didn't gesture her closer. What was between them was private, not for public display at his father's funeral. He knew he had her support, for he had cried out his grief in her arms. It was enough that she was there.
It was as they were leaving the grave site that Faith saw Yolanda Foster, standing by herself; Lowell was nowhere in evidence. Yolanda had been crying, but now her eyes were dry as she stared at the grave, an open look of heartbreak on her face. Then she gathered herself and turned away, and Faith felt all the pieces of the puzzle click into place.
It had never made sense that Guy would leave everything for Renee, not after all the years they'd been having an affair. Alex had said that Guy had been planning to divorce Noelle, and that had made more sense, but abruptly Faith knew that it wasn't Renee Guy had been planning to marry. After all his years of tomcatting around, Guy Rouillard had fallen in love that summer, with the mayor's wife. He had protected Yolanda's reputation, not even telling his best friend about her. Gossip about them had leaked out, or Ed Morgan wouldn't have known, but their affair hadn't been common knowledge. It was even possible Renee had told Ed that Guy was seeing the mayor's wife.
Yolanda and Guy had made secret plans. And now, after all these years, she knew that her lover hadn't deserted her. Guy was sincerely mourned by someone other than his children, after all.
It was late that night before all of the sympathizers ran out of excuses to stay any longer, and Gray had a private moment with his family. He sipped his Scotch as he studied Noelle, who was infinitely more cheerful now after burying her husband than she had been during the twelve years he'd been missing. He needed Faith, he thought. He wanted to be with her. Seeing her at the cemetery had made the hunger even sharper. Sexual hunger, emotional hunger, mental hunger. He simply wanted her, in all the ways possible. He remembered the way his heart had swelled in his chest when she'd told him she loved him, remembered the moment of blinding joy. Like a fool, he hadn't yet told her that he loved her, too, but that was an oversight he intended to rectify as soon as they could be alone.
Right now, he had something to say to his mother and sister.
"I'm getting married," he said calmly.
Two startled pairs of eyes looked back at him. He saw Monica's dismay, saw it quickly change to acceptance, and she gave him a tiny nod.
"Really, dear?" Noelle murmured. "I'm sorry, I haven't been keeping current with your social life. Is it someone from New Orleans?"
"No, it's Faith Devlin."
Calmly Noelle set her glass of wine aside. "Your joke is in extremely bad taste, Grayson."
"It isn't a joke. I'm marrying her as soon as it can be arranged."
"I forbid it!" she snapped.
"You can't forbid anything, Mother."
Though he said it calmly, Noelle reacted as if he'd slapped her. She rose to her feet, holding herself as erect as a queen. "We'll see about that. Your father may have associated with trash, but at least he never brought it home and expected me to associate with it!"
"That's enough," he said, his tone soft and dangerous.
"On the contrary, if you lower yourself to marry that slut, you'll find it's just beginning. I'll make her life here so miserable—"
"No, you won't," he interrupted, slamming his glass down so that the Scotch sloshed over the rim. "Let me make your position plain, Mother. I know what's in Dad's will. He left you enough money to keep you in style, but he left everything else to Monica and me. If you behave yourself, and treat my wife with every courtesy, you may continue to live here. But make no mistake, the first time you upset her, I'll escort you out the door myself. Is that clear?"
Noelle shrank back, her face pale, her eyes livid as she stared at her son. "Monica," she said, her voice abruptly frail. "Help me to my room, darling. Men are so uncivilized..."
"Put a sock in it, Mother," Monica said tiredly.
"I beg your pardon." The words were freezing.
Monica visibly braced herself. She was as pale as Noelle, but she didn't back down. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that. But Gray deserves to be happy. If you don't want to come to his wedding, fine, but I'll be there with bells on. And while we're on the subject, I'm getting married, too. To Michael McFane."
"Who?" Noelle asked, her face blank.
"The sheriff."
Disdain curled Noelle's lip. "The sheriff! Really, dear, he's—"
"Perfect for me," Monica finished firmly. She looked both scared and exhilarated at finally having stood up to Noelle. "If you want to come to my wedding, I'll be pleased, but you can't stop me from marrying him. And, Mother—I think you'll be happier if you move to New Orleans."
"Good idea," Gray said, and winked at his sister.
The next morning, Faith drove down to New Orleans for Mr. Pleasant's funeral. She had hoped Gray would call her, but understood why he hadn't. She had pestered Sheriff McFane mercilessly about doing what he could to get Mr. Pleasant's body released, and he had told her that Gray was embroiled in the process of having Guy's will probated, using his influence to hurry the process. The legal difficulties of a forged letter of proxy, under which he had been governing their financial holdings all these years, were mostly negated since Guy's will had left everything to Gray and Monica anyway, but there were still problems to handle.
Margot flew down to New Orleans to be with Faith, somehow discerning over the telephone that she was more upset about Mr. Pleasant than she had let on. The brief funeral service was attended by only a handful of people: some neighbors, herself and Margot, the little blue-haired lady from Houston H. Manges's law office. To her surprise, Detective Ambrose came by, wearing what looked like the same fatigued suit. He patted Faith's hand, as if she were Mr. Pleasant's family, and all the while his cynical cop's eyes never left Margot's face.
Too tired to drive home, Faith got a hotel room for the night. Margot decided to stay overnight too—no surprise there—and went out with Detective Ambrose.
"I don't sleep with men on the first date," Margot said the next morning, chattering nervously. "I mean, I just don't. It's too dangerous, and tacky besides." She couldn't sit still as they ate their breakfast at the room service cart in Faith's room; she fidgeted with her napkin, her silverware, her clothes. Her gaze flitted around the hotel room; hers was connecting, and virtually identical, but she seemed to find everything of immense interest. "I may be old-fashioned, but I think sex should wait at least until there's a commitment, and waiting until marriage would be even better. Women risk too much by sleeping with men who aren't their husbands—"
"So was he any good?" Faith interrupted, sipping her coffee.
Margot clapped her hand to her chest and rolled her eyes dramatically. "Oh my Gawd, was he!" She jumped up and began to pace the room. "I couldn't believe what was happening, I just don't do that, but that man had made up his mind and it was like being on a roller coaster, there was just no way to get off. Well, that's not exactly what I mean. About getting off, that is, because I did—" She stopped and turned dark red. Faith almost choked on her coffee, she was laughing so hard.
"He wants to see me tonight, but I told him I have a flight back to Dallas, and he should call me at home if he wants to see me again." Margot looked anxious. "Do you think there's any way I can slow this down and get back on the right track?"
"Maybe," Faith said, but she had seen Margot in love before, and doubted anything could slow her down.
They spent the morning shopping, replenishing Faith's wardrobe from the chic New Orleans boutiques. She left the city about two o'clock, giving Margot both the privacy and time for another meeting with Detective Ambrose.
She arrived back at the motel, her temporary home, at four. Reuben waved to her, and came out to help her carry in her purchases. Then, hungry from the exertion, she drove downtown to Halley's cafe.
She chatted with Halley for a while, then ordered the chicken salad sandwich that had become her usual supper. She was sitting in a booth with her back to the door, and her sandwich had just been placed in front of her, when she heard the door crash open behind her, and an abrupt silence fell over the cafe.
Startled, she looked up and found an enraged Gray Rouillard towering over her. Reuben must have called him, she thought absently. His black hair was loose, tangled around his shoulders. "Where the hell," he barked, "have you been?"
"New Orleans," she replied in a mild tone, though she was acutely aware of the breathless interest of everyone in the cafe.
"Would it be asking too much of you to let me know where you're going to be?" he snapped.
"I went to Mr. Pleasant's funeral," she said.
He slid into the booth opposite her, some of the fury fading from his face. Beneath the table, his long legs clasped hers, and he reached across to take both her hands in his. "I was scared sh—spitless," he confessed, quickly adjusting his first word choice to something more socially acceptable. "You hadn't checked out, but Reuben saw you put a suitcase in the car. I even had him open your room to see if any of your things were still there."
"I wouldn't have left town without telling you," she said, secretly amused that he thought she might have left town at all.
"You'd better not," he muttered. His hands tightened on hers. "Look," he began, and stopped. "Ah, hell, I know this isn't the best place to do it, but I've still got tons of paperwork to wade through and I don't know how long it'll be before I see daylight. Will you marry me?"
He had succeeded in surprising her. He had gone beyond surprising her. She sat back, stunned into speechlessness. Gray wanted to marry her? She hadn't dared let herself even think of it. With their tangled pasts... the thorny situation with his mother and sister... well, it just hadn't seemed to be an option.
Evidently he took her reaction as rejection, and his dark brows drew together. Being Gray, he immediately took ruthless measures to get what he wanted. "You have to marry me," he said, loudly enough that everyone in the cafe could hear him. "That's my baby girl you're carrying. She'll need a daddy, and you need a husband."
Faith gasped, her eyes rounding with horror. "You fiend," she shrieked, scrambling out of the booth. She wasn't pregnant and she knew it, her period having arrived right on time, three days before. She had a confused, dizzying impression of a room full of avid faces, staring at her, and Gray wore a ruthlessly satisfied look on his face as he smiled at her, enjoying her sputtering, incoherent fury. Maybe he saw something in her eyes, a split second of warning, but it wasn't enough. Her hand shot out for her glass of iced tea and she dashed it full in his face. "I am not pregnant!" she yelled.
Gray climbed out of the booth, wiping tea from his eyes with Faith's napkin. "Maybe not now, but if you want to be, we'd better get married."
"Marry him," Halley advised, leaning over the counter. She was grinning hugely. "And make his life hell. He deserves it, after this stunt."
"Yeah," he said positively. "I deserve it."
Faith stared up at him. "But—what about your mother?" she asked helplessly.
He shrugged. "What about her?" Faith opened her mouth to yell at him again, and he grinned, holding up his hand. "I told her and Monica that I intended to marry you. Mother went into her acute disapproval syndrome, but Monica told her, literally, to put a sock in it. Funniest thing I've ever seen. Well, except for one." His eyes glittered at her, outrageously reminding her of the courthouse. "Monica gives us her best wishes; she and Michael are getting married next week. She strongly suggested to Mother that she move to New Orleans, which she's always liked better than Prescott, anyway. So, baby, I'm going to be rattling around in that big house all by myself, and I need my own personal redhead to keep me company."
He meant it. Faith swallowed, once again unable to speak. Gray's head tilted as he smiled down at her, dark eyes full of desire and tenderness. "There's something else I've been meaning to tell you," he murmured. "I love you, baby. I should have told you sooner, but things started happening."
She thought of hitting him. She thought of snatching someone else's tea to toss in his face. Instead she said, "Yes." He held out his arms, and she walked into them, to the accompanying spatter of applause from the cafe patrons.
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The One Who Eats Monsters - Casey Matthews (Part 2).txt
| 2 |
Casper knew better than to conference Burns and Wilkins again, so he contacted them separately. Wilkins reported—disappointingly—that the guardian was only at Natalie Bradford's house on Fridays. Casper knew that wasn't true, so it meant the guardian was too stealthy to be noticed unless she meant to be.
Not good.
Wilkins' next job was to set up electronic surveillance near the Bradford home. Maybe it would help pinpoint the demon, but Casper doubted it.
Burns connected with him a few hours late, and when he came on screen his eyes were bloodshot and ringed in red. He was drinking a tall glass of water. "Are you hung over?" Casper asked.
Burns shook his head. "Negro woman maced me."
"Maybe you shouldn't call her that word."
"Not like I said—"
"Or that one."
"I can't keep track of what they like."
If I have a spare bullet when this is over... "What happened?"
"Found that hoodie chick's bitch of a caseworker. Got her name drinking with this burnt-out teacher. She gave me the lowdown on your little beastie. Enya Miller. Stays at a group home off Oakland in commie town—sometimes—and she's fresh from the nuthouse. Anyway, tried to lift the caseworker's phone on the train; figured she'd have appointments. You believe that black bitch pepper-sprayed me?"
"Yes."
"I mean, she thought I was copping a feel, but still. She was a five—a six, tops—so it was practically a compliment."
"I'll let you know what our next move is." He cut off the video chat and drank a beer, digesting the information, finally typing it into an email for the benefactors:
You won't like it. Wilkins never spotted the guardian except for when she wasn't hiding, so we can't identify her patterns. Burns couldn't figure out her routine either. She's a ghost.
Still, he included the guardian's name and address. The benefactors could use that, surely.
He clicked "send."
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The One Who Eats Monsters - Casey Matthews (Part 2).txt
| 3 |
Ghorm's email dinged on the monitor to his left. With a pneumatic hiss, the chair spun and his hollow's greasy hands worked the mouse over its distended lap. Reading the email, he felt cold fear fill his vast center. "Mr. Saxby," he said in dulcet tones to his cabal-mate. "Oh, dear Mr. Saxby, did you realize—there is a tiny monster staying near Oakland Avenue?"
Mr. Saxby appeared at his side, the asura's middle-aged, balding, boringly average hollow dressed in a finely tailored suit, fingernails clipped to a level of impeccable symmetry. "Fascinating. Out of curiosity, do you remember who else fancies that neighborhood?"
"Dust," Ghorm ground out.
"Yes. Dust, with his long memory and loose lips." Mr. Saxby rubbed at a speck of dust on his sleeve. "Perhaps I should eat him."
"No," Ghorm said. "Dust is protected."
"By whom? A monster?" Mr. Saxby scoffed.
"No, not her; by someone who matters. A rival of our own paymaster, in fact. But I want to know what Dust is saying to our uninvited monster, and why precisely she is meddling in our work. I'll tell my peons to surveil Dust's haunts and we'll have a listen."
Mr. Saxby read the email carefully. "Enya Miller, they call her. Why-oh-why does that name put the slightest shiver between my shoulder blades?"
"Might she cause you indigestion?"
A chortle, though Mr. Saxby's face didn't change. "What she did to Splat was special. She cut not the flesh, but the essence of him. That is something I'd like to study."
"And the gun you lent my peon—will it kill her?"
"That is no mere rifle," Mr. Saxby said. "That weapon has taken a hundred forms, suiting itself to the age. It's a... machine... and it came from my allies across the stars. The Hidden One said it would kill any god weaker than he." There was something malicious in his thin-lipped smile. "Though perhaps it would work against him too."
"You mustn't kill the one who pays us," Ghorm cautioned.
"Taking money from the Hidden One, who fights a cold war against another god—that was dangerous enough. But now he wants us warring with a monster. Our arrangement rather leaves us the pawns, and I prefer the space behind the board to being on it."
"Suggestions?" Ghorm asked.
Mr. Saxby removed his spectacles irritably and polished the lenses to banish nonexistent smudges. "I will need one of your toy soldiers. As well some tarp."
"Oh?"
"I'll have him war ready. We let them take their crack—my twisted lovely with tooth and claw, and your pet Bible-thumper with weapon from alien world. We eliminate Enya Miller, then move on to Natalie Bradford. No two-front wars. And believe me," he smiled mirthlessly, "I would know."
Ghorm waved his chubby hand in the air. "Fine. Take one of my toys. I only have the three ready—still chipping away at the fourth. Which would you like?"
"Someone violent. Unhinged. I'm feeling... inspired."
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The One Who Eats Monsters - Casey Matthews (Part 2).txt
| 4 |
Enya had evaded Ms. Cross too long and agreed to meet her at the beginning of March. Outside, a heat spell had turned New Petersburg into a city of slush, and runoff trickled down the exterior brick walls of the office. They sat opposite one another, Enya perched on the sofa's edge. Ms. Cross had populated a coffee table with stress balls and trinkets meant to distract patients.
Stacking cards in the style of the Eiffel Tower from Natalie's bedroom, Enya understood from Ms. Cross's stare that she was upset.
"Good to see you at least read some history this month," Ms. Cross said. "A shame you weren't there to take the exams."
"I need no examination," Enya said.
"I want you to get your GED."
"Meaningless."
"It means something to employers," she said sternly.
"You think without this thing I will starve?"
Ms. Cross firmed her mouth. "Listen to me very carefully. We both know that at your age, there is precious little I can do to punish or reward you. But we also know a girl like you will—eventually—get into some kind of trouble. I know this city, I know how it works, I know police, prosecutors, and public defenders. When that day comes, I can be your greatest ally. Or: I can be your worst enemy. So what I want from you matters."
Enya scowled, leaning two cards against one another. "What I do is important."
"Can you do it and study too?"
"Yes."
"Then study. And show up for your exams. And we'll take it from there."
Yet even now, Enya vibrated with the need to fly across the city, to where Natalie had track practice at this hour. She loved watching her friend's pole stick, loved that instant as she soared over the bar when she seemed to float, body bending as supple branches in a windstorm. It was also a dangerous moment, where sabotage might snap the auburn-haired girl's life away.
"Enya," Ms. Cross said. "Study. Take your exams."
Enya relented and nodded. "As you will it." The words tasted bitter.
"Eiffel Tower." Ms. Cross nodded to the card tower. "Do you want to go there someday?"
"No."
"Why not?"
She shrugged.
"You don't like to try new things, do you?"
"I try new foods," Enya said.
"With the girl. Natalie?"
"She shows me new things."
"Do you trust her?"
Enya realized she did.
"What if she took you to Paris? Or I did?"
"I don't want to go to Paris."
"Why not?"
Because even if she weren't banished from their lands, the Fates lived in Europe. Because they would hunt Enya, and because she couldn't protect Natalie there. The gods in America were fewer and younger. "I don't want Natalie to get hurt."
"She's the girl people are threatening?"
"Yes." Enya fidgeted, irritable.
"You want to help her. That's interesting. What do you see in her?"
"Who cares?" she snapped.
"There's no need to be defensive. It's healthy to form emotional attachments to people. It means you're making progress. How would you characterize your relationship with Natalie?"
"We meet on Fridays." The rest of the time Enya just stalked her.
"Friends then."
"Yes."
"Nothing more?"
"No," Enya said firmly.
"You seem very certain of that."
"Friends."
"Enya. It's not uncommon for a woman who's seen abuse at the hands of men to form her most intimate relationships with other women."
"We are not... intimate."
"I'm just saying. For some women, it's a natural part of the healing process. For others, it's always been a part of them, and their abuse just leads them to discovering it."
"I'm not healing."
"Do you want to talk about the men who hurt you?"
"Why?"
"It might have—"
"It's done. They died; I lived."
"Sometimes the wounds go deep. They affect our ability to trust people. Were those the only people who ever hurt you?"
Enya batted the tower she'd built, sending a cardstock cloud fluttering to the carpet. By the time they settled, she'd crossed to the window, her back to Ms. Cross as she stared at trickling runoff from the roof. "I've fought worse."
"You couldn't have beaten them, Enya. There were too many. You shouldn't blame yourself."
"I was weak."
"You're not weak."
"I was weak in that moment. The moon was dark." She remembered the weariness, the girl screaming; how loud they'd made her scream. "It was empty, but for her voice and those monsters and the terrible things they did to her."
"You tried to save someone."
"She died." Her body hadn't yet cooled, though. "Her spirit was gone. It is... difficult to drag a spirit back through the gates. Your God doesn't like us poaching her works, but I do as I please. It's difficult; your souls are small but heavy as worlds. Pulling her back into ours nearly broke me."
"I've lost the thread of this metaphor." Ms. Cross had that doubtful look Natalie had worn after Enya showed off her speed.
"I was weak. Made so by helping her, and also her brother. It was then, when my power was expended, that their knives came out."
Ms. Cross leaned forward. "They cut you?"
"Cut me. Shot me. Burned me. One of them urinated on me. They taunted me."
"Did they do other things?"
"What other things?"
"Did they rape you, Enya?"
"No."
"All right."
"I said no."
"It's all right."
Enya smashed her fist through the window frame, strong enough to shatter the glass pane. Tinkling fragments dropped down the building side. The sounds of traffic and whistling air filled the small office. Turning, she found Ms. Cross had stood and stepped back. "I said no," she hissed.
"You don't think I believe you?"
"I don't know what you think!" she roared. "I don't know what any of you think!"
Holding both hands up, Ms. Cross nodded slowly. "That must be frustrating."
Enya bowed her head, containing her wrath in bunched-up fists. "I know you're afraid of me now."
"That's not true."
"It is. Your heart races. Fear comes off you like waves. I don't know faces, when you are happy or sad, joking or serious, lying or confessing, or what half your strange habits do. But I smell your fear." She stared Ms. Cross down. "So now I know you lie. Why should I trust you?"
Ms. Cross expelled a breath and lowered her hands. "You're right. I did just lie to you. So from this point forward, I won't. Could we both sit?"
Not knowing what else to do, she lowered herself to the sofa.
Ms. Cross eased into her chair. "That's the most you've ever said at one time."
"I know."
"You expressed yourself."
Enya said nothing.
"And that's progress," Ms. Cross urged.
"Progress broke your window."
"Progress is always a little destructive, a little painful. Building new things always breaks down the old things. Tell me more about how you can't understand faces. When did you realize that was a problem?"
"With Natalie. Because I can understand her face."
"Why is that?"
"Because..." She struggled for the words. They came haltingly. "She has... a larger soul."
"Pardon?"
"Her soul isn't just heavy as worlds, it's large too. It spills onto her face. It's in her scent and eyes and face; it cannot be ignored."
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The One Who Eats Monsters - Casey Matthews (Part 2).txt
| 5 |
[ Muse ]
The March thaw had been a feint, all that water transformed into ice by a frigid cold front next afternoon. New Petersburg was a beautiful, crystal city, the guardrails, cars, and lampposts glistening. Stray snowflakes tumbled from the sky and melted on Natalie's cheeks where Enya met her after school to walk her home. She wore too few layers and shivers racked her vulnerable human body.
Stripping her kanaf, Enya folded her friend into it as they walked.
Natalie smiled back at her in a shy way, that spicy-strange scent on her skin again. "How are you never cold?"
"This isn't cold."
"Siberia. You were there, weren't you? The Russian you speak, the borscht, the cold—it had to be Siberia, right?"
Enya mentally compared her many homes to maps from school and nodded. "For a time."
"I hear it's beautiful. Hundreds of miles untouched, unsettled."
"You could walk forever and never see or smell a person." Once, nearly all places were like this.
"Do you want to go back?" Natalie asked.
"There is no 'back' for me. My home is gone."
"What do you mean 'gone'?"
"Changed. Time makes us all homeless—eventually." She'd known this land before it had been paved. And yet, time unmade my home so that it could build yours. Enya frowned, as this thought made her profoundly sad: a reminder of the distance between not just her and her friend, but between their two species.
Natalie put fists deep into the pockets of Enya's hoodie, spinning to walk backward as she faced her. "I wish you could take me there."
"I could." There are still places without the flavor of man.
She laughed. "You're supposed to tell me, 'No, it's too dangerous!' "
"All places are. Except those next to me."
"God!" Natalie's eyes twinkled. "Your arrogance—why do I like it so much?"
"It isn't arrogance."
Natalie clapped her mouth shut, dipping her face low with eyes lifting, though the smile remained. "Then what is it?"
Something in that expression invited Enya, propelled her forward not as mortals walked, but more fully what she was—her locomotion fluid, silent. "My strength. The truth of me." You like my power because I show it; because you've been trained not to notice your own.
And the way her scent had changed—it was delicious. The auburn-haired girl examined where her hands stretched the kanaf's pockets taut, her pulse skipping and body warm, all felt through the conduit of that mystical fabric. "Take me to Siberia someday and prove it." There was a challenge in her tone; the way she invited it while scrunching into the hoodie, backing away, and grinning all made Enya want to... chase her.
What would I do once I caught her? She didn't even know.
But Enya would have swept her friend off to Siberia and away from asura, deva, and mankind itself if she'd thought there was the slightest possibility the teenager wouldn't feel imprisoned. Natalie was wild in her own way.
That night, while Natalie slept fitfully and her father's soldier patrolled, Enya hopped the train across the city to a Palisades museum just off the bay, sandwiched between the water and Commonwealth Plaza. She'd discovered it weeks ago while tracking Natalie during a day trip and had realized Dust haunted it on occasion.
She broke in through the skylight and descended upside down on a single, bright gossamer cord from her kanaf. Dust roused awake in an exhibit of old instruments in a display case, the spirit occupying a recently donated violin of aged and sweet-smelling wood, the only sign of his presence a slight accumulation of his namesake on varnish that otherwise would have been pristine. When he moved, she could hear him in the way a hiss shot through the instrument's taut strings.
"Come to hang out, Erynis?"
"Where did you learn that name?" Enya growled.
Dust hesitated. "Heard it around. Had no idea my baby monster was quite so... discussed. Shame on you, though, big famous beastie wakin' a humble spirit from his rest—disrespectful."
"I need to find Splat and his cabal. Now."
"I don't keep tabs, and nobody wise does either. They don't let on where they bed down their hollows."
"Then who. I want to know about his cabal."
"Hold on. There's no love lost between Splat and me, but why would I wanna upset so many hungry spirits?"
"If you know my name, you know I will not be denied."
"There's nothing to say, goddamn it. They ain't friends of mine."
Enya approached, purring: "You know—or you know who does."
"Ah." There was an apprehensive hitch in his voice. "Suppose that's the question, ain't it?"
"You're stalling." She fanned her fingernails, let him see the glint of their sharpness.
"Don't rush me! Can't give you nothing if you gut me, so just—back up! Not gonna be kicked around by no one, least of all some short beastie with sharp teeth."
Enya stopped at the case holding the violin, dragging one nail along the glass enclosure until she'd carved a neat circle. Removing it, she reached through, stroking the instrument's skin. "Tell me."
"You wouldn't dare. It's a Stradivarius, you bitch!"
"You like these man-schemed things." This museum was thick with them—instruments, baseball cards, pictures of the city in its infancy. "Yet I lived when the Earth was rock and mineral, and I have seen every wild and beautiful thing shattered, remade for mortal souls. Do you think I care for your violins?" She let her nails graze it, close enough to scrape off a few atoms and no nearer.
He hissed at the razor kiss. "You know how many masters have touched this wood? Any clue what it's like to taste the passion of every fella who ever worked it?"
"You have ten seconds." Enya tasted her fingertips—to her, just the flavor of old wood.
Dust waited nine seconds. "Muse. Muse knows." Then, his voice harder: "And here I thought we were getting chummy."
"I don't play games."
"Then you're gonna love Muse."
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The One Who Eats Monsters - Casey Matthews (Part 2).txt
| 6 |
The email was priority flagged and held an audio file, curtailed to the interesting parts. Listening sent a shiver through Ghorm's hollow. He hit an icon on his screen to dial his second-in-command and on the eighth ring, Mr. Saxby picked up.
"I have you on speaker," Mr. Saxby intoned. "Afraid I'm elbow deep in your peon at the moment."
"The electronic surveillance picked up our monster."
"Ah! She's with Dust, then." Mr. Saxby shushed a pleading voice. "Fortuitous. Send the other mortals to kill Natalie Bradford while she's elsewhere. I'll nudge my latest masterpiece along shortly—just need to put in a handful of stitches and sign my work." There came a sob, cut off by the sound of Mr. Saxby tut-tutting.
"No. We have to send them after Muse. Dust—the blasted idiot—he told the monster about Muse."
"Muse? That adorable little empath we almost recruited? I remember how she went all wide-eyed when she realized what we were about; so charming! Why should it matter? We met her in the Palisades. She has no idea where the nest is."
"It matters because she knows our names."
"And? It's not as though she's the only one."
"I heard the name of the monster. Erynis."
Mr. Saxby sucked in a breath. "My, what a complication," he muttered. "I daresay, I'd love to pry her open to see how she ticks."
"Maybe. Or maybe she opens you. But she cannot be killed for long, and she won't rest until we're destroyed. The Fates named her the Implacable One. When the oldest, most vengeful deva call you that, it's a clue that maybe this monster holds a fucking grudge. She'll remember our names. She'll hunt us."
"What about Splat?"
"What about him?" Ghorm tapped a few keys.
"If Muse doesn't surrender our names, he will."
"Splat has been a convenience for us. If he's no longer convenient, I regard him as expendable. But let's wait until after we leverage him against Miss Bradford." Ghorm typed out a new message. "I'm sending our peons after Muse; the one named Wilkins has a mirror box to trap her with. Hopefully they bring her to us before Erynis finds her."
"And if not?"
"If Erynis learns our names, then Bradford is no longer our sole target. We'll have to kill Erynis, too, buy ourselves some time while she regenerates. There are rumors of magic in Europe that can alter an asura's name, change our scent—maybe the Fates would help us if we brought them tribute. There will be no appeasing her, no stopping her. What about you? Did you finish work on Burns?"
"Patience! He's nearly perfect. Stitching in one more heart and I'll clean up the hotel room."
Ghorm sighed. "By 'clean up' do you mean 'incinerate'?"
"Of course. He had three degenerate friends when I got here—plenty of extra parts to work with, but no amount of bleach is getting them off the walls."
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The One Who Eats Monsters - Casey Matthews (Part 2).txt
| 7 |
Following Dust's instructions, Enya took the train to Whitechurch and walked toward Graystone University, sniffing around the bars for asura. She caught the scent outside one called Pandora.
Inside, the tall ceilings made it less claustrophobic than Enya had anticipated. One side room had a number of televisions anchored to the walls, patrons drinking and hollering at sports competitions—the rest featured a polished wooden bar, decorative lighting and shelves for brightly colored liquor bottles, and stairs leading to an upper floor where she detected the asura's scent.
The patrons seemed a blend of young and middle-aged, and Enya picked up on the way men would chat more closely or kiss; the women, too, she realized were engaged in mating rituals with one another. Upstairs was a dance floor presently empty, duos and trios drinking at a second bar, and a billiard table in back. An older pair of women at the bar leaned into one another, whispering comfortably, so perfectly at ease it pinched Enya somewhere deep.
"Look what the cat dragged in," purred a feminine voice behind her.
Enya turned, facing a woman with an asura flesh-riding her. She wore a black suit with a thin tie of the same color, contrasted with her cream dress shirt; her spiked black hair matched exactly the tie and jacket. The caustic odor or her cigarette seared the insides of the deva's nostrils, and when she drew on it, Enya saw the tattoos that gloved her wrist, hand, and the two innermost fingers. She strode past Enya to the billiard table. She was tall and androgynous, casting an over-the-shoulder grin that showed some teeth.
"Muse," Enya said.
"The one and only." She leaned on the billiard table and blew smoke from her nostrils like a dragon. "Play me?"
"I don't play games."
"I'd be happy to pop your cherry. Come on over, half-pint. I'll show you what you're missing."
Enya scowled and approached the table, a foot shorter than Muse.
"Looking for trouble?" Muse held out a pool cue.
She snatched it. "Usually." Glancing the stick over, sensing its purpose, she added, "Not with you."
Muse gathered bright pool balls into a wooden triangle. Enya examined a game played on one of the video screens nearby.
"You're here for information. And you're old. A new player in New Petersburg? Admission to the great bazaar of secrets and lies will cost you a name."
"Enya."
"That's not your name. Or at least not your only name. But that's fine. I didn't specify."
"How did you know—"
"Empath." She tapped her temple twice and lined up her cue to strike the white ball. "Not good at faces?"
"No."
"Faces are my thing." The cigarette jounced on her lower lip when she spoke, a pinprick of fire smoldering in front of her face. "Can do downright beautiful things with bodies, too. I get a look at you, I look straight through. I see your heartsick glances at those two women holding each other; I see the rage bunch your shoulders when I come too close."
Muse paused to explain the rules of the game to Enya—having apparently noticed her glances at the video screen—and then continued. "Can't see everything, of course." She cracked the cue ball into the racked balls and knocked a solid into a pocket. She proceeded to the other side of the table and brushed her finger across Enya's waist as she glided past.
Enya straightened. "Don't."
"So you're heartsick, but for someone in particular."
"Don't do that."
"Touch you? Or ferret out your secrets?" she teased.
"Either."
"Someone hates flesh riders."
What was there to like? "You push yourselves on them."
"Got that one wrong." Muse ashed her cigarette. "This girl's name is Mel. We're long friends. I take the weekend, she takes the weekdays. We split the memories down the middle."
"She... lets you?" Enya had to shake off a wave of psychic claustrophobia.
"Hell of a deal. Smoke a pack a day, drink every night, fuck like a tigress—and Mel never gets tired, old, or sick. She's thirty-six, still gets carded. Then there's my empathy. Has its... uses." She winked, then leaned in deep for her third shot. Enya noticed the curve it produced along her body and how well the suit was tailored to her. Does she do that on purpose? Muse snapped her cue and the ball missed its target by a hair. "Shit. Your turn."
Enya chalked her cue. She went perfectly still, studying the table. "Tell me about Splat."
"Fuck. That why you're here? Not happening."
"Why?"
"Because he'd eat me, sweetheart. And I have to look out for Mel—what he'd do to a mortal woman is worse by a mile. All asura come from great moments. We're born from passion, obsession, sin. Splat burst into existence decades ago from a snuff-porn ring—spawned from the sadistic boner-rage of a hundred of the sickest humans to own a VCR. I steer clear."
"He won't bother you."
"It's not in you to stop him. He's fatter every year. All he does is eat and grow, and he's bigger now than some deva."
Frustrated, Enya squeezed the cue tighter but still hadn't budged. "Tell me more."
She leaned on her own stick, closer. "What'll you give me?"
"Life."
"It's not in you to kill Mel—or me. You can't bluff an empath."
"Then what?" Enya growled.
Muse took her time, eyeing the monster curiously from head to toe. "Old but inexperienced. Heartsick for someone else. And even though you flip out when I get too close, you're attracted."
Enya bristled.
"It's like I said: can't bluff an empath." She pointed with the ember of her cigarette. "You're a monster. Can't pass for human, so you live in the wilds. Who the hell let you back into civilization? Whoever fucked it up, I should thank them—I've never met a monster before. You're my first. Bet it's lonely out there. Lonely and cold."
"I enjoy it."
"Not me. I need to touch. To be touched. Got to feel the beat of a heart beneath my ribs; got to feel someone else's race against me. Ever felt that?"
Enya glanced away.
"Chin up, half-pint. Tell you what I want. I want to bed a monster. Want to show you the ten thousand things you've missed living outside the cities for—what, a hundred years? More? I want to see how much I can make a two-hundred-year-old virgin twist in the sheets."
Enya bared her teeth. "No."
"Easy, put the chompers away. I'm a creature of delights—I only get pleasure from giving it. And your pleasure is guaranteed. There's not a rough bone in my body. Not unless you need it rough, and even then—I'd make you beg."
The outrage came alive, uncoiling inside her until she knew the shine of her eyes glowed through blue-tinted lenses. "No."
"Whatever you say. But I hope you're a billionaire or something, because I'm no saint. I don't risk my neck for free."
Enya finally glanced from the pool table. "Then a wager."
She screwed out her cigarette in an ashtray. "Loving your confidence. You've never shot pool in your life. But all right, if this is your game: I win, I want you. Not for a night—too skittish, you'd need more time. A month. Never further than you can handle, but on your honor, you'd give me a real shot at... teaching you." Her gaze was too bold. "And I want you on the full moon—want to see how it makes you move underneath me."
"When I win, you tell me what I want to know."
"Deal."
They both crossed their hearts. The bet couldn't be rescinded.
Enya glanced back at the table, examining it once more.
"You going to shoot?" Muse asked. "My beer buzz is fading." She waved her hand for another round and lit a fresh cigarette.
"Soon." By the time Muse's drinks came, Enya had finished studying the table, searching for whatever trick was meant to make this game challenging—it dawned on her there wasn't one. It was exactly as it appeared, and the fact irritated her. Everything in this realm is clumsy—this game can only be enjoyed by the clumsy. She'd won before she'd even shot and all that remained was to show Muse that truth, so she raised her cue and did so.
She fired the cue ball into a single stripe and knocked it clean to the pocket, shifted to a new table side, and lowered her cue to the precise spot where the white ball coasted to a stop, shooting again. It bounced over two solids, pocketing another stripe. Rounding the table, she sank two stripes with a shot, and finished by sinking three more in one go.
"There." She pointed at a corner pocket and cracked the eight-ball home. Straightening, she laid her cue on the conquered table. "I win, yes?"
A thick column of ash fell off Muse's cigarette. "Fuck me."
"No. Now tell me about Splat and his cabal."
Muse nodded, her face pallid. "You going to kill them?"
"Yes."
"Can you?"
Enya narrowed her eyes.
"All right. I'll tell you everything."
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The One Who Eats Monsters - Casey Matthews (Part 2).txt
| 8 |
They sat in a shadowed booth, Muse burning down another cigarette and swallowing two shots of whisky before she explained.
"Two years back, my friend Drake tells me there's a flesh-riding cabal that's recruiting. Never been in one, and with the asura population in New Petersburg going up, I figure, 'Why not?' Could use the protection. They needed an empath. I met them over in the Palisades on top of a parking deck and found out why they needed one: to mark fresh targets; sniff out the vulnerable. It wasn't the kind of cabal I thought it was."
"Their names," Enya said.
"According to Drake, Ghorm leads it. Born out of a cult—maybe it was nine hundred people drinking poisoned fruit punch, maybe it was something older. He's a deceiver. He can worm into a mortal's head and move all the furniture around."
"He controls them?"
"Tugs their strings. It's gradual, a kind of gravity that pulls people further and further into madness. He can do more directed stuff with effort, especially under a full moon. He doesn't control, he perverts. It's his specialty. Used to work with religion, but nowadays in this part of the world, politics is easier—it's like he can twist an idea until it's turned back on itself.
"Ghorm's number two is Mr. Saxby. Don't let the suit and funny name fool you. They say he was birthed from a Nazi experiment on twins. Strongest shifter I know. Bends the mortals he flesh-rides, molds them. He can add six hundred pounds of muscle to his hollow in under three seconds. Unnaturally strong, poisonous, and he can grow fangs, claws, stingers—biology's his arsenal. And his work on mortal bodies, what he does to their skin, to the symmetry of their form—it's unnatural. Between him and Ghorm, they can remake a person, body and mind."
"And Splat?"
"Strong and durable. Weaker than Saxby, but more sadistic by a mile. Addicted to hurting women and he hates them. Didn't even like me for flesh-riding one. I can't look at him, can't think of looking at him, without..." Her cigarette trembled in her hand and she stabbed it out, drinking another whisky from a row of glasses and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. "I could see what he's done in his eyes. He's worked on women, on kids. The less said about that, the better."
"Is that all?"
"No. There's a fourth—a new one. Tooloo's the empath they got when I turned them down. I know her through Drake. Most empaths can't work with those guys—we can't stand suffering. We feel every piece of it. That's why we're all such fucking hedonists." She circled her thumb over the shot glass's lip. "Way more fun to watch pleasure than pain. But Tooloo's wired wrong. She's got a mind like a supercomputer; she can see all a person's inner workings, but she doesn't actually feel them. Feelings are just clockwork to her, and bodies are just sacks of blood, and... well, she's born of the digital age. People are just things to her on the other side of her eyes, the same way the internet is just a bunch of things on the other side of a screen."
"Where can I find them?"
"I'm not supposed to know, and if they knew I did, they'd eat me. But they think empaths are about reading minds. We're not. It's a kind of perception; it's about noticing things. So I could see the concrete powder on Saxby's penny loafers, I could smell the kerosene from a heater on Splat. They piped Ghorm in through a web connection, because he's basically immobile, and his voice had an echo, like from an empty space. They were in a housing project. My guess is Primrose—supposed to be a residential highrise on Park Ridge, but it's been delayed and half-built for years."
"Do they all stay there?"
"No, just Ghorm. But it's their nest, and they'll meet on the full moon. Best time for Ghorm to work his magic on a new hollow. Splat ruined his a few months ago and Drake says he's burning through the new ones too fast—he's sick, broken. Something's the matter with him and he can't keep them from rotting."
"He's wounded."
Muse snorted. "That's not possible. We exist or we don't. There's no 'wounding' an asura. We're spirits. We don't work like that."
"A sharp enough edge will cut anything. Even a soul."
"So someone cut Splat's soul?"
"You're the empath. Am I lying?" Enya stood.
"Holy shit." The next shot glass shook in Muse's hand and she gulped it down. "You serious? You can cut an asura?"
"I can cut anything."
Muse breathed out a curse, but her fear gradually changed into something else. "You wouldn't cut me. I can tell. Have a drink with me. Or five. Bet you'd be a fantastic drunk."
"No."
"Who's the other woman?"
Enya hesitated.
"Go on," Muse teased. "Ask me what you've wanted to all night."
Damn her. "There is no question to ask. She isn't... interested. Not like that."
"Let me tell you something a monster might not know. I've been in men and women, straights and gays, closeted and open, and everything in between. From where I've been sitting, you'd be surprised who wants what. Some people play their desires close as a hand of poker, and some won't even look at their own cards. Bring her by sometime and I'll have a closer look. Maybe she's more interested than you know. Maybe I'll see something you can't."
Enya glared.
"Hey. Relax. I'd be respectful."
The glare continued.
"Well. Respectful-ish."
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The One Who Eats Monsters - Casey Matthews (Part 2).txt
| 9 |
Muse proved persuasive enough to draw Enya into a conversation—or, at least, to sit and listen to Muse's end of one. The asura expounded elaborately on her experiences with humans and their drinking rituals—it involved a lot of waking up in distressed or mysterious circumstances. But whatever else Muse could do, she couldn't withstand a half-bottle of whisky, and she begged Enya to help her to a cab.
"I will, but you won't... touch me."
"No, no, all the touching will be you—strictly carrying-me-related touches," Muse slurred from her half-cocked position in the booth seat. "Honest! I'm not sneaky. I attack head-on."
Enya sighed, easing one of Muse's arms over her shoulders and assisting her out of the bar. "We are not friends," she growled.
"Not even slightly," she agreed, touching her mouth to hold back a wet belch.
The cold air of the street licked her skin and Muse groaned her approval.
An explosion transformed a line of twenty windows to Enya's side into glittering shards of glass. She snapped her hand up and caught the bullet in her palm before it could tear the asura's body in half.
The force threw Enya and she adjusted her stance. Concrete scraped underfoot. It kicked her four yards before she regained traction. Smoke poured out of her open palm, which was on fire, and she clutched in her right hand a dense, alien metal intended to murder gods.
Her gaze zeroed in on the distant smoking speck of the rifle's barrel.
"Stay." Enya eased Muse into the crevice of a storefront, concealed from the sniper. He fired a second time, air pulsing from the bullet's passing—it would have broken through both sides of a bank vault, but instead the unearthly metal struck Enya's palm and flattened.
The force only kicked her back half as far, but the shockwave ripped the doors from four cars and whisked them down the street. Car alarms went off up and down the avenue and the streetlights had shattered, casting the neighborhood into darkness.
Muse clutched her bleeding ears and shouted, too loud, "Shit, what is that!"
"A dead man." Enya vaulted to the wall, gripped brickwork, and ascended to the rooftops.
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The One Who Eats Monsters - Casey Matthews (Part 2).txt
| 10 |
[ Achilles' Heel ]
Enya flew across the city's uneven roofs. The distant muzzle flashed, a flicker of warning before its thunderous shot struck her outthrust palm. The force hurled her backward, feet planting into a building side; the mortar popped, bricks cracking in a dusty spiderweb of fractures. Enya's calves tensed, and she pounced forth again with hands shedding burning powder like twin contrails behind her.
Another flash. She deflected the stinging metal with the back of her hand, the bullet sparking white from the collision and hurled into the heavens.
A third flash, and she batted it over the bay.
It never broke her stride.
He's less accurate than at the rink. Different shooter or is he nervous?
Then she sensed it. Risking a glance over her shoulder, she spotted another figure sneaking from a van on the street near Muse. He wore dark-rimmed glasses and carried a shotgun and something on his back.
A mirror box.
Enya was caught between the sniper and another mortal intent on capturing Muse, equidistant between the two. Deciding, she bore down on the sniper. Do it. Shoot me.
The rifle clapped. Lightning erupted from the barrel's mouth, another wave of thunder and alloy tumbling through the air. She stretched the thread of time thin until the bullet was visible and caught the angry metal between both hands. She twisted her body from its path and arced the freight-train force off its tracks, casting it to the street where it bore down on the bespectacled man hunting Muse.
It struck him center mass. The bullet obliterated most of him, rending what remained into two great, uneven pieces sundered clean apart. The top parts slapped onto a car hood like wet laundry.
Enya completed the spin she'd started to evade the bullet, flitting to another rooftop, and rocketed toward the sniper. She angled her approach from his side, forcing the barrel to waver and track to follow her, but the firearm's size made it hard to reorient.
She ate the distance. Her snarl was a long, vicious sound that grew in volume across her final leap. He fired one more time, point blank.
Enya's claws glinted, cutting the bullet in half. Its two neat segments wobbled through the air above and below her shoulder and she traced her claws along the length of a Deep One artifact disguised as a rifle. Unnaturally cold metal casings, rune-inscribed plates, and hissing fluid filled the air—no sign of bolts, pinions, or springs, as it wasn't built from those things in its true form. The Kl'thunian weapon screamed its death rattle, its remains falling to the rooftop in a rain of viscid blood and tinkling metal shards.
Transitioning fluidly from claw to kick, Enya cracked the mortal's jaw and tossed him into a brick smokestack. It cratered and he hung limp in the indentation.
Enya traced her fingers across the tarpaper and sniffed where he'd lain. Different mortal. Then where was the one from the ice rink? This one was ugly. In fact, she wasn't sure he was human. He was... lumpy. His face didn't look right. His skull bulged out like he had a grapefruit under his scalp and his swollen shoulder was hunched, one arm a foot longer than the other. Saxby's work. But to what ends?
"I know you're conscious." She crouched, ready. "Where is the other shooter?"
His eyelids peeled open, but only one held the eyeball—the other was ringed in hooked teeth, a tiny mouth. Both his regular mouth and the second one in his eye socket smiled sickeningly together. "Look-it you, you're just a little girl. I could take you home in my pocket." He fell out of the crater and coughed out a molar. His neck was two vertebrae too long. "You're the reason they did this to me. You're the reason I haven't got half my working parts, you're the reason for the pain, for the fact I got Cody's brain stitched into mine and can't stop hearin' him scream about his missing face. I kill you... and maybe they let us die."
She fixed him with a stare. "Death is here now. Come closer. It sleeps in my hands."
He flicked his elongated arm her way, as though making a shooing gesture, but instead a spike of hardened bone squirted from a pucker in his wrist. Enya batted the glistening spike aside, pouncing on him.
She struck his chest knees-first, claws out, intent on his throat.
His neck inflated to twice its size and blowfish spines puffed out. Flaps behind his ears had sucked in the air, so she clubbed the vents with her fists. He seemed to gag, the inflated skin protecting his windpipe sagging.
Flipping off his chest, she dropped and swept his legs.
There were no bones in his legs. They slapped wetly from under him, and though he collapsed in a thrashing pile, both legs wriggled on the tarpaper. Abruptly, his pant legs bulged and tentacles shredded through the fabric—dozens of them, bristling with claws or very human eyes with some teeth mixed in. The root of one tentacle patch held what seemed to be half a flesh-covered skull, no jaw but a tongue, screaming gibberish.
"See? Don't you see?" the creature said from the mouth in its head but not its eye. "It's crowded in here," he sobbed.
Barbed tentacles slapped the rooftop, dragging their mass closer to Enya, so she kicked the bricks from the bottom of the chimney stack beside them. Brick powder clouded the air and the heavy stack leaned toward the fallen creature. She slipped behind it, giving it a shove that dropped a ton of rubble on the aberration's mewling flesh.
The air filled with choking, abrasive dust, and she heard him worming that slimy, near-boneless body from beneath the weight, crying and screaming and blubbering from four different mouths. She didn't even know where the fourth mouth was—didn't want to know, really. She could hear the beating of three hearts.
Something orange glowed in the fog of brick dust. Enya thought of bombardier beetles and their chemical ignition system.
Fire roared through the air, but to her side. The blistering-hot film spewed a wet trail of flames, covering the tarpaper rooftop. Children live here. She had to take that weapon out, or the building would burn.
Enya hefted a loose brick, flicked through the cloud, and launched a flying kick that planted both heels into the creature's torso. It knocked him stumbling out of the debris cloud, burning oil thrown into the air, spattering down in fat drops. It hissed against Enya's cloak and clung to her forearm. She ignored it.
Out of the cloud now, she saw how his fire worked: his puffer throat filled with fluids from chambers in his guts and when he spat the flaming gel, it sparked on contact with oxygen.
She chucked the brick into his gaping mouth where it lodged firmly between his teeth. His puffer throat swelled, but couldn't contract. The fluids backed up, dribbling weakly from the corners of his mouth.
Enya's claws flashed through his throat and she booted him off the building. He fell into an alleyway.
About halfway down, the glass-clean cut in his throat forced the chemicals from his guts to mix and let just enough oxygen seep in. The explosion started inside him, roaring out of his throat, mouth, and eye sockets, finally erupting like a wet bomb from his center. He landed in a dumpster and Enya lost track of him as he detonated twice more in geysers of liquid fire.
Her cloak shivered, smothering the fire she carried on her shoulders and forearm. The rooftop still burned, and she launched a tether from her cloak to a water tower one building over. It smacked a wooden strut and she gave it a mighty pull. The strut bowed and snapped, the tower crashing down, overturning its contents on the adjacent flames. Water surged up to Enya's hips and she had to anchor with three more tethers to keep from being carried over the building side with the deluge.
It made a waterfall into the alley where she'd dropped the creature, the torrent filling the dumpster and extinguishing the flames.
Enya dropped down to finish him. He lay blackened with his throat split open and vertebrae exposed, but he'd half regenerated from the wounds already. He screamed and cried and cursed from his many mouths, but all of them a chorus of pleas for death.
Obliging, she ripped the first of his sinful hearts from the screaming corpus and wolfed it down. The meat slid into the center of her, a place not her stomach but nearer to her wrath. That dark furnace was buried deep, folded parallel to normal space so that it was tucked away from the world—necessary because its heat was like a star's. It was called gehenna, and the moment wet flesh touched that pocket of space within her, the organs burned to black ash. A scream vibrated through her, her inner fire so hot it ate his soul next, burning until that too was obliterated.
Digging for the other hearts, she sent speckles of blood to the alley wall, dissecting the monstrosity Saxby had stitched together. The second heart she slurped down in four snaps of her bright teeth, that one's soul stickier, the vagaries of their individual evil modifying the flavor. Coming to the final heart, she tightened her fist around it, stared down into the mangled face of her quarry and asked one more time: "Before I release you, you will tell me: where is the other shooter?"
"Kill me," rasped the bloody head. He was little more than severed spine, a cobweb of blood vessels, heart, and brain, but the unholy work done to his biology kept his soul rooted, and might for days yet. In a way, the eternal end of gehenna was a mercy, and the only one she knew. "Please... kill me."
"The ice-rink shooter," she insisted. When she spoke, glowing cinders from annihilated souls floated from her mouth.
"...Casper wouldn't come. Casper said it wasn't the mission. He went to finish it."
Tearing his heart out, she sprinted for the train at full speed and ate him as she went, ripping into hard muscle a bite at a time until his screaming soul joined his friends, first shrill, then silent forever.
Yet there was no satisfaction, no warm glow at her center knowing the world was cleaner for her efforts. There was a hard lump, and a rising, terrifying knowledge she might not be fast enough.
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The One Who Eats Monsters - Casey Matthews (Part 2).txt
| 11 |
Casper had studied details of the Bradford security system emailed to him by the benefactors; studied Sgt. Mark Brody's dossier and patrol patterns using Wilkins' surveillance. Brody wasn't his idea of an easy fight, but at least he wasn't some kind of hell-spawned demon.
The backyard had three motion detectors. Casper scaled the outer wall and then walked carefully through an inch of snow, using a blind spot between their sensor ranges. Reaching the house, he stood flush to the wall and dusted the snow from his body as best he could, not wanting to leave a trail of slush in the house that could alert Brody.
Near his place on the wall, he found a disconnected hose. It was cold, but the water ran. Screwing it in, he set the sprinkler timer for fifteen minutes.
He worked a gap in the window just wide enough to insert a small magnetic strip meant to fool the alarm—the only trick was figuring out where to insert it, and he'd brought a compass to show him. It made him think of his daughter. Julie used to do this to our windows at night. Sneaking out to see that asshole boyfriend. Sneaking out ran in the family, he supposed. Sure surprised her when I installed that backup sensor, though. He smirked at the memory and jerked the window up. No alarm sounded. So far, so good.
He pulled off his boots before ducking into the darkened house. Would there be motion detectors inside? No idea. They don't have a dog, so almost no reason not to.
With the shrug of a man who realized he had no real options, Casper padded on socked feet across the floor and slid the taser from his hip. No alarms, no flashing lights. Could be silent alarms.
Ignoring the thousand what-ifs, he stationed himself in a shadowed nook, observing the hallway Brody would take if he left Bradford's office. Brody was sharp, almost restless in his patrols. A good soldier. He wasn't a bad man, but he'd fallen in with the devil. Been there, done that. Better not to kill him, though. Natalie Bradford was enough; no one would die tonight except the ones who had to.
The sprinklers hissed and he heard no alarm, so it must have triggered in the office. Brody pushed out his chair on the other side of the door and Casper tensed.
The office door slid open and Brody patrolled briskly through the home, his pistol readied in a two-handed grip.
Casper slipped from his nook behind him and planted the taser into the back of the soldier's neck. It emitted a series of sharp, staticky clicks and Brody crumpled to his knees. Casper followed him to the ground, device held flush until he'd snatched the pistol and tossed it over the sofa.
An elbow cracked into Casper's ribs, absorbed by his armored vest—but the soldier threw his weight back, twisted, and flipped Casper onto his back.
Brody was quick, wound up on top and landed a series of shots. One to the throat set off alarms in Casper's head.
His training kicked in. Tucking both arms close, shielding his neck and face, he weathered the attacks until he could club back with either fist. Their foreheads knocked together, and he had no idea who threw the head-butt. They rolled, exchanging positions, and then did it again in a struggle for chokes, arm bars, punching any time he had a fist free.
Brody's knife flicked out, but Casper locked down the arm, straining it almost to the point of breaking. The knife clattered to the floor.
With a snarl, Brody threw them into another roll that freed his arm, but Casper found his taser on the floor, wedged halfway under the sofa. Planting it into the soldier's ribs, the electric charge hit them both together. Every muscle snapped taut—it was like being shaken in a paint mixer. His finger tensing on the trigger, he tased them both until it slipped from his sweaty palm and a stray kick sent it skating away.
It had stunned Brody harder, so Casper threw himself behind the soldier and wrapped the crook of his elbow around the man's throat. He hoisted with all his strength, Brody elbowing his armored vest, kicking over a lamp, slapping his hands across the floor in a vain search for weapons and, at last, gagged and went deadweight.
It wouldn't last. Casper rolled the unconscious soldier to his belly, zip-tying him by wrists and ankles, then hogtying them together before he could recover from his daze.
Only need a minute, he knew. His pistol had—miraculously—stayed holstered at the small of his back, and he drew it now. Easier to shoot the man, but glad I didn't. Turning, he was just in time to witness a willowy girl exit her bedroom and cross the upstairs balcony, stretching sleepily without quite looking down. "Mark," she yawned, "I heard a noise. Is everything—"
She froze. Casper did too. He was at the bottom of the stairs in black face paint, wheezing through a sore nose that bubbled snot and blood, his gun dangling from one exhausted arm. Brody groaned, coming to beneath him. Natalie Bradford, the daughter of the Apocalypse, stood at the top of the stairs and registered all this.
"Oh God," she whispered.
"I'm sorry." He lifted the pistol, knowing what had to follow—resigned to it, but without the heart he'd once had for killing. Just a fucking girl. Disgusted, he opened fire.
She sprinted across the hall—his heavy arm hadn't been steady enough, and the slugs spanked into the wall behind her, one shattering the glass on a family portrait. "Shit." Stupid to one-hand my gun—half-assed, sloppy. Don't care if you don't want to, Casper, this is the fucking mission.
He pounded up the stairs. It's fine—she's got nowhere to run. Odd that she'd gone into her father's empty room and not hers. "I'm going to make this easy," he called, pistol now in a sturdier two-handed grip, leveled on her father's door. "I'm not like the other one. I'm not going to rape you." Just the bullet, he thought grimly. I wonder if we'll both laugh about this after we're dead.
He shook it off and approached the closed door to Tom Bradford's bedroom, where she was cornered.
"Are you still there?" she sobbed. It sounded so goddamn pitiful. I wonder what I would do to a man who tried to kill my daughter.
"I am," he said. "It doesn't have to be hard. I know how to make it easy. You won't feel it." Like flipping a light switch.
"You don't have to do this," she said through the door. "No one has to get hurt."
He shook his head. "Wish the world worked like that."
"Then you won't leave?"
He shut his eyes. "Afraid not."
Three shots ripped through Bradford's door and the first hit him square in the chest. It knocked him flat to his back. Five more shots penetrated the door, all over his head. He picked the slug off the cracked plate in his vest. Of course he has a fucking gun in his room, you dipshit. He's a Republican.
Casper fought to his feet, breathless like a hippo had sat on his chest, and kicked the door open. No Natalie Bradford—just an open window and spent pistol on the floor with its slide ejected back. He peered out the window. There was a narrow section of roof to one side, dusted in snow so that he could see footprints from where she'd jumped.
Casper hoisted himself into chilly air and leapt for the roof, almost skating off. He scaled to the apex and leveled his pistol at Natalie Bradford's retreating figure. "Don't move," he gasped. "Don't move."
He had her—nowhere to go, she stopped running. She lifted her hands in the air and collapsed to her knees, facing away. Head bowing as though in supplication, the wind whipped her gleaming auburn hair. Casper's mouth was tacky with drying spit as he approached, licking chapped lips. Snow crunched softly underfoot. "I wasn't lying." He swallowed. "You won't even feel it. I promise."
Her shoulders shook with another sob. "Did you kill Mark?"
"No. He'll live."
"So you just want me. Why?"
"It's complicated."
"For money? Are you being paid?"
"No."
Her hands trembled above her head and she panned her gaze, perhaps looking out at all those slumbering, snowcapped homes and quiet sidewalks where she'd grown up. Somewhere in the distance, sirens—but none would make it in time. He felt for her, felt the helpless knowledge that in four minutes cops would arrive and find her body.
And him. He wasn't leaving here a free man.
"Tell me why," she whispered.
"I said it's complicated." He stared down the barrel, a peace settling over him. The urgency was gone. All that's left is the trigger, and I have minutes to do it. Just... squeeze it off. Do it while she's talking, when she won't expect it.
"Uncomplicate it." She wiped at her face with one hand, the other still over her head. "I want to know why."
His finger closed over the trigger, tightening until he felt that tiny hitch of tension before it usually popped off. His heart had never been steadier. "The world ends if I don't."
She started to turn.
"Don't. Don't you fucking move." Don't look at me.
She froze. Their warm breath spilled into the air, misty and bright from the streetlights below. She turned again, so he jumped forward, putting the gun almost to her temple.
"I said don't!"
Yet she turned still, all from her knees, so that their eyes met and the muzzle was suspended in front of her nose. Some part of him knew he shouldn't stand within arm's reach of someone he meant to shoot—he ignored it. He knew from her eyes that the fight had gone from her.
More than that, when the wind caught her hair, streamers danced over her cheek and mouth. Her eyes were almost black, reflective, and they could have been Julie's. The way she looked at him was absent hate, anger, even fear. There was a roundness in her eyes, concern— Shit. It's pity.
"I said," and his voice caught, "turn the fuck around!" He ratcheted the hammer back.
"What if you're wrong?" she whispered.
"I'm not." He'd studied, he'd prayed, he knew. "I'm not wrong." But seeing her face made the words hollow. When he went over the evidence and the signs now, it looked different—like an old cellar exposed to daylight, the shadows gone and shapes all unfamiliar. The story, scriptures, it was all... bent wrong—or maybe bent right for the first time.
"I'd be dead if you believed that."
"I have faith. It brought me here."
"Conviction brought you here. Faith is the reason you haven't finished it. You're so sure you have to, but it's faith that's telling you: no, don't do the bad thing. Even if you're certain it'll make things better, trust God. Trust you don't have to do anything bad."
Something hot blinked out of his eyes, ran down his face. "You think the world works like that? What would you do? If the world were ending and you could stop it with a bullet? Because that's our world. It's falling apart, it's always falling apart, and it's held together by... willpower. By laws and the armed men who make them real. You think any of this shit—any of it—" He waved all around them. "—exists unless someone will pull the trigger? Everything, all around us, it's all here because hard men do mean jobs."
She kept her voice steady. "I think the point of dangerous things is to protect people who aren't."
"And when it's gone to hell? When God takes you to account at the end of days, what then?"
"Look up and say, 'You gave me hope and a bullet. I come before you with hope and an unfired bullet.' "
He snorted and tapped the scar on his armored vest where she'd shot him. "We both know it doesn't work like that."
Her smirk was nearly playful, surreal from a kneeling girl held at gunpoint. "In my defense, that was Dad's bullet, and you're way scarier than I am." Mentioning her own father seemed to bite her like a snake, though, and a sadness filled her. She no longer looked up at him.
"He's the reason—can't kill him without doing you first. He's the Antichrist."
"No, just a regular, old libertarian." Still frowning, she stared off into the distance—the sirens were two blocks away. "You're right about one thing, though. After Mom... if you kill me, I don't think he'll make it." She blinked up at him. "You're a dad too, aren't you?"
"Shut up."
"How old is she?"
"Shut up!"
"Can I ask you a question?"
"No." The gun felt heavy. He was so damn tired.
"You knew about that other one—Banich. The one who wanted to torture me. Rape me. Someone's convinced you to hurt me, but they keep telling all of you different stories. What if you've been lied to?"
He'd seen the rapist in the news. He'd met Wilkins and Burns firsthand. Shaking his head at fresh doubts, he wasn't sure why it had never occurred to him before. It was like she'd cast a spell; or lifted one. The rising fear that he was crazy swept over him. What was this new voice—his inner critic or his conscience? "What about the demon girl?"
Her brow furrowed. "Enya?"
"She's not human."
"She's exactly what you should be. Dangerous—but good."
Casper's barrel wavered. The sirens were almost to the street. He had to do it now: there was no more time.
Natalie stood and he backed off a step, keeping the muzzle centered on her chest. Without flinching, she wrapped her hand around the top of the gun, stepped closer until it pushed against her, and looked over the gun as though it weren't there, meeting his eyes. "Tell me your name."
"Why?"
"We're familiar enough to talk about God and politics and to shoot at each other. You could at least tell me your name. It's etiquette."
"Casper Owens."
"Casper. It's cold up here. Let me have the gun and we'll go inside. We can make sure Mark is okay. Maybe sit for a while. You look tired. Like a man with a lot on his mind. Like maybe this isn't the time to decide whether to take my life."
"I have to. No time left." The sirens were close, flashing blue on the pale snow. But his finger wouldn't squeeze, not while she looked him in the eye, and when she tugged at the gun, he released it. "I have to kill you."
She put her hand on his shoulder. "Let's go inside."
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The One Who Eats Monsters - Casey Matthews (Part 2).txt
| 12 |
Enya tore across Commonwealth Plaza and sprinted the rooftops in Garden Heights, cutting through backyards and taking risks with being seen. She didn't care. The sight of flashing lights at Natalie's house made her heart lurch.
They were parked out front and Enya froze atop a house across the street.
An ambulance sat in the driveway but didn't move. In the back of a police car was a middle-aged man who smelled of the ice-rink shooter. Her animal mind refused to piece it together, processing only what was before her: the shooter caged, blood in the air, the noise and bustle of authorities. Enya dropped from the roof and approached the police car, fingers curling. She'd peel the car's chrome shell to get the meat inside.
"Enya!"
Natalie's voice. It cut Enya in half, doubled her over with relief. She caught her balance against a van in their drive. Gods and beasts and alien bullets could not bow her, but one look at Natalie stole all her strength.
Natalie ran straight into her and threw both arms around Enya, forcing the monster back a step. The girl's entire body trembled and Enya could feel terror radiating from her. "I'm glad you're here," Natalie gasped. "Have you heard what happened?"
Enya's hands wrapped around Natalie's shoulders, the only thing she knew to do, and she inhaled the citrus of her friend's precious hair, a needed reminder: She's still here. Still here, and I don't need to fight her God to take her back. "You're unharmed?"
"He couldn't do it," she whispered. "Thank God, he couldn't do it."
Then he almost did. Bitter, hard feelings contracted in the pit of Enya's stomach, hit a flashpoint, and burned hot. She'd let the asura fester too long. They will gather next on the full moon, when I will visit a reckoning on them all.
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The One Who Eats Monsters - Casey Matthews (Part 2).txt
| 13 |
Kessler spun a full circle to survey the scale of the disaster: all down the Whitechurch street was shattered glass, not a storefront, car window, or light left intact; the doors to four cars were torn off their hinges; the strobe of crime scene technicians' cameras highlighted gore plastered to a hood; a small media circus reported live, their shots framing a horde of angry college students hemmed in by police tape, all screaming about hate crimes. Down the street, a smoldering dumpster contained unidentified remains—some human, some just bizarre. The building above had flooded and its denizens were out on the street, an old man holding three cats in his arms wailing about his ruined apartment. At the center of it all was a tall woman in a business suit with spiky, black hair. She chain-smoked and hit on a female uniform.
To Kessler it was a natural disaster. To her it was a Saturday night.
"So," Kessler said as O'Rourke tapped on his electronic tablet. "How much of this—exactly—is black binder?"
"Say what you will about this town, but it's not dull." O'Rourke pointed to a van on the street. "See the panel van? The one that looks like it's rented from Rapists 'R' Us? Front door was open when we arrived. The perp on the car hood over there—and a little more of him in that sewer grate and on top of that awning—came out of the panel van. Registered to a Trevor Wilkins. Bet our perp turns out to be Wilkins, soon as they find out where his teeth landed. He also matches a profile for one of the anti-Bradford lunatics posting online—username 'Gaia_Warrior.' "
Kessler blinked. "So this isn't just some nut shooting up a gay bar. It's Bradford related?"
"Or the hate crime's incidental. Let's talk to our witness."
They approached the dark-haired woman. O'Rourke nodded. "Melony Wiercinski."
"Call me Muse."
"Muse, then. How do you know Tom Bradford?"
"Who?" she asked. "The senator?"
"That puddle of human remains over there had a hard-on for Bradford and his kid. Now I don't know your business, but if the puddle was gunning for you—and I think he was—it means your path crosses with a senator's. Not to presume anything, but there's a typical reason for that."
"What, like I'm a campaign contributor? No thanks."
"Prostitution."
She arched an eyebrow. "You see the bar I'm at, right?"
"Maybe you're open-minded."
Her grin was all-knowing. "Insulting me and hoping it gets a rise—using that to make me blurt the truth. You have a thing for the classics, old man." She wagged a finger. "But you pronounced my last name right, which means you looked me up. What was it? My TED talk, right?"
O'Rourke shrugged.
"Wait, she's a professor?" Kessler asked.
"Senior professor. Biochemistry. God, I love how earnest you two are. It's adorable. I feel as though I ought to throw you a bone. But this is one of those crimes you don't want to look at too closely. Trust me."
"That what you did?" O'Rourke asked. "Got too close to something?"
"You could say that. Then again, I'm not the one lying in pieces, so maybe it wasn't my fuck-up."
"What do you mean?" O'Rourke pressed.
But she buttoned up.
Kessler tried another tack. "Enya Miller."
That got Muse's attention, and O'Rourke's. But Kessler had only been guessing.
"What about Enya?" Excitement danced in her eyes.
"She's woven into this every step of the way. And... sorry to say, if you don't give us a lead, she's our suspect. She's already attacked one of these anti-Bradford assholes. She's violent. And, I don't like it, but she's the obvious choice. Unless you give me another."
Muse nodded slowly. "Surprisingly honest for a cop." Tilting forward, she whispered: "I could give you suspects. More than one. There are layers to this, more than even Enya knows."
"What kind of layers?" Kessler asked.
"That splatter of blood over there was street level. Some dupe. He's got puppet masters pulling his strings. But the puppet masters themselves have a paymaster."
"What sort of paymaster?"
"The highest of the high. Sort who might want a senator in his pocket—or to influence him any way he could. And everyone who isn't working for him is working for his rival. Except me, of course; I don't work for anyone." She smirked. "I've got tenure."
O'Rourke rubbed his bushy beard. "A conspiracy?"
"These two entities don't conspire—they despise one another. They're at war. We're all just caught between them, made into pieces on their board. It's hard to know whose piece you even are, but mark my words, if you don't even know the game's being played, that's how you know you're in it. And this whole thing? It ends in a place so high up we're all just ants eating dust."
"How do you know this?" Kessler asked. "What evidence do you have?"
Muse shrugged, stuck a fresh cigarette in her lips, and lit it. O'Rourke ground his teeth in the fashion of an ex-smoker who badly wanted one, and she blew the first cloud into him. "No evidence. But if you're friends of Enya's, you're not my enemies. So I'll do a wicked thing and send you in the right direction. Look into Orpheum Industries, for one. And the Ostermeier Trust Fund scandal for another. Then have a little peek at Zmey-Towers Consolidated."
"And what are we looking for, exactly?" O'Rourke asked.
Muse ashed her cigarette on O'Rourke's shoes. "For history's real villains. For gods and kings."
|
The One Who Eats Monsters - Casey Matthews (Part 2).txt
| 14 |
[ Gazing Long into the Dark ]
Enya scouted the Primrose construction site. The partly finished residence highrise was nine floors, nothing but skeletal girders on the top five, and surrounded with dirt mounds and rusted trailers. It had the faint odor of an asura and Enya's claws ached to murder it, but she needed to wait for the full moon at the end of March.
The asura would gather then for the creation of a new hollow. If Enya struck during the ritual she might slay them all. If she attacked just the one, the rest might scatter to places she couldn't yet follow. It might take centuries to hunt them down.
She suspected they had swept most of Ghorm's mortals off the board. The one called Casper Owens was in prison, repenting his crimes. For daring to hunt what was hers, Enya ought to have gutted him—except the way Natalie spoke about him made her want to do it less. A little, anyway.
The droning humans who reported news showed pictures of Pandora, talking about body parts on the street and in the alleyway.
The Veil—a powerful deva enchantment that ceaselessly lapped at human memories of magic until it was sipped clean—did its work by fogging minds and burying whispers. By the time it came to light that the assault was committed by anti-Bradford fanatics, the media had moved on. Natalie remembered, though, and one day read a description of the second gunman's remains, of how he'd been ripped to pieces and half devoured. She'd cried.
That bothered Enya.
Even with the brief relaxation of threats against her, Natalie wasn't at peace. The auburn-haired girl tossed in her sleep more than ever. She vocalized soft cries for help, pleas for phantoms in her dreams to stay back. Her voice floated through the roof. She would wake gasping, face wet with tears. Once, her scream pierced the rooftop and stabbed Enya so deep that her nails—the only thing sharper than her palms were hard—cut the skin until her immortal blood dripped.
Thus, when Natalie announced an upcoming double date with Horatio and Wes a week later, Enya agreed—anything, if it put her friend's mind on mortal things and not the nightmare creatures of her world.
After agreeing to the date, Enya overheard Natalie on the phone with Horatio. She explained Wes had to avoid wearing scents, because Enya had a sensitive nose. "She always wags her head at strong odors, especially cologne. So none of that, and none of that rank shower gel either. She hates it." Enya should have been offended that they talked about her, but part of her kind of liked that Natalie had noticed.
The afternoons became a pleasure because they consulted every day after school. Enya savored every minute in her friend's presence, in her bedroom, appreciating its warmth and general superiority to the roof. Natalie explained dating things, though she rambled and bumped around, the sleepless nights taking their toll.
Examining her ashen face and heavy eyes, Enya interrupted one of her dating-related lectures. "If it is important to—as you say—'look nice'... perhaps you should rest."
Her smile was only half-lit. "That obvious? Maybe I need a prescription." She scrubbed at her face. "I'd hoped to sleep easier after talking to Casper. But when I heard about what happened to his friends in Whitechurch, how one was butchered— I don't understand how someone could do that to another human being. It's twisted."
Her words struck like a blow and Enya's gaze flinched down. "But those men wanted to hurt you."
"Someone who kills like that, who mutilates, is still out there. Who knows what he wants? That's terrifying."
A cold space opened inside her, yawning wider, chilling her. "Is that why you can't sleep?"
Natalie considered it. "Not really? I don't even have nightmares about Casper getting into our house. I only ever dream about the parking garage. Like my brain is trying to tell me something." She shuddered.
Enya nodded, soothed that the cause was Banich's grotesquerie and not her own murderous touch. She could almost digest that cold bubble now.
Natalie also insisted Enya dress differently, for reasons unclear to the monster, so two days before the date they met at Center Square Mall.
"What is the matter with my clothing?" Enya asked.
"I love your clothes. They're very... tomboy-mystique. But you need to dress special on a date."
"Why?"
"To feel awesome."
"I feel fine."
"Fine, by definition, is not awesome. Fine is a notch below awesome. Let's do better—I want to make jaws drop."
As usual, Natalie's enthusiasm was bulletproof.
"So, I know you like the pants look, but I was wondering if you would maybe try on a skirt?"
Enya looked dubiously at the clothing rack. Her friend shuffled various skirts from the rack, skirts of every color and length, holding each to Enya's waist. None interested her as much as the closeness and attention from Natalie. Truth told, in another era, she'd worn something like a skirt. But the men had worn them too. Since then, pants had been widely regarded as a technological advancement, one of the few Enya personally enjoyed. There were times she believed pants to be humankind's most worthwhile achievement. That women didn't reap the full benefits was somehow typical.
"This would look good on you. It'll show some calf, you won't trip over it, but it's still kind of conservative."
"It's... frilly."
"Those aren't frills. They're pleats. These are frills." Natalie showed her and Enya hissed.
"O-kay. No frills. But do you want to try this one on? For me?"
Enya tried to say no, but to her horror found herself changing anyway. The "for me" had done it. That wasn't fair.
She toed out of the dressing room. Natalie beamed and clapped her hands together at chest level. "Perfect!"
Examining her bare calves, Enya felt uncomfortable with the drafty sensation. When she turned to glance in the mirror, her spin flared the skirt just so.
"Wow, look at you," Natalie said. "I like seeing your calves; it shows off your grace."
It kind of did show off her grace. Her chin tilted up.
"You couldn't be more of a cat if you tried."
"Will you wear one?" Now she wanted to see Natalie be graceful in a skirt.
"No, I'm going in cargo pants and a hoodie." She was teasing again. She came up behind Enya in the mirror, winked, and started tugging and pulling the skirt in places.
The touch sent a startling thrill through Enya's body. She'd never been touched that way, not along her thighs and hips. She'd never imagined it would feel so nice and yearned for it to happen again, just once.
Natalie stilled, met her gaze in the mirror, hands dropping away. "The fit's perfect. Let's look at blouses next. And shoes."
Enya wavered. Something bothered her. "I don't have money."
"Don't worry about it."
"I should steal it, then?"
"No! No, no. I'll pay."
Normally Enya didn't care, but there were more numbers on these particular clothes, and she'd gathered lately that the size and quantity of numbers was significant to people. "It's a lot, isn't it?"
"I'm the one begging you to dress differently. I'm being weird and pushy, so I don't mind paying. Besides, I'm a socialist. Just ask my dad."
"What is a 'socialist'?"
"Someone who flagrantly redistributes her father's money."
Enya insisted on a blouse with sleeves, because she didn't like to show people the scar on her wrist where the men had pounded in a tent spike. The shoes, though, proved contentious. Natalie wanted Enya to at least try on high heels, but Enya regarded them as she might one of a Gorgon's vipers, and refused to stray too near. They appeared specifically designed to slow her down and would twist her feet into unnatural contortions.
"Just try them on," Natalie said, pursuing her through the shop, shoes in hand. "You're short."
Enya retreated behind a display and kept it between her and the shoes, realizing they weren't what scared her. It was her friend's relentless desire to put them on her. She mirrored every step the taller girl took.
Natalie soon realized she would make no progress getting Enya and the shoes into the same space without permission. "Please? They'll give you almost two inches."
She shook her head. If she'd wanted to be taller, she would be.
"They won't bite you."
But Enya feared her friend would work her basilisk magic and the immortal deva would find herself in another dressing room staring down those shoes. Alone. She growled at them.
"You are the most difficult person in the universe. Fine." Natalie disappeared down an aisle and returned. "Try these on. They're flats. They match the outfit. You realize you're not even up to Wes's shoulders, right?"
"He can look down."
"He'll have a crick in his neck by the end of the night."
"His problem."
"You're terrible."
"I prefer being small."
"Why?"
"Lighter, faster. Less targetable body mass. Easier to hide."
"Weirdo."
They paused outside a store that sold human undergarments. Natalie rubbed her elbow with the opposite hand and gazed up at the cursive sign. Enya paused too.
Natalie sucked in a breath. "What do you think?"
"About what?"
"I guess there's zero chance the boys would see us in them. I mean, set aside the fact I promised you it wouldn't get frisky, just the logistics. It's a double date. Not like it'll go there. So I guess we wouldn't need anything special."
Enya canted her head to one side, confused by some of the garments and their functionality. "Where does the string go?"
"Um. Use your imagination."
She did so. One eyebrow lifted higher than the other. "Why?"
"It erases the panty line in a tight dress. And some guys think they're sexy. Okay, most guys."
"They can wear it."
Natalie laughed. "I like dressing sexy. But Horatio isn't going to see my panties. That's what I meant—it doesn't matter. Betting Wes won't see yours either."
"I don't have any."
"Thongs?"
"Undergarments."
Natalie's face did the oddest thing. It reddened and her mouth and eyes opened wide. She gaped at Enya, away, and at Enya again. "You aren't wearing any?" she whispered, like it was a secret.
"No. It's uncomfortable."
"Ever?"
"Should I?"
"Holy shit in a hat, yes!" Natalie clapped her hands over her mouth. She whispered numbers, counting to five, head bobbing with each one. It was something she'd only done before with Denise. "Sorry. But yes, you should wear underwear, especially on dates with boys, who are easily confused and believe their presence or absence... signifies things." Natalie glanced at Enya's chest, eliciting a prickly feeling all over. "There's no way you don't have on a sports bra."
"I wrap it in a long cloth." One produced by her kanaf.
"That sounds so convenient. Come on, we're doing this." She seized Enya's arm.
"I— Natalie, I'm not—" Terror filled her.
"This is not like the heels. This is the thin line that separates us from the Hobbesian jungle. You will wear underwear on our date."
That sentence perked up heads in the shop, Natalie's face pinking in response. She tucked her head down while dragging the deva through aisles, finding a saleswoman who took them to a stall. She was tall, emaciated, with prominent cheekbones—much like the malnourished prisoners in the store's advertisements. Do they make her wear the perfume? It made Enya's head throb.
The saleswoman led her into the stall alone and uncoiled a tape measure. "Take your shirt off, sweetie, we'll get a better measurement that way."
Enya backed out, growling.
"I'll... come back later." The saleswoman breezed away, causing Natalie to glance up from her phone and register that it hadn't gone well.
"I want nothing here," Enya said firmly.
"You don't want a bra, or you don't want to take your shirt off in front of a stranger?" Natalie asked.
"Both."
Her expression softened. "Will you at least try it if I help instead?"
"I don't want it touching me."
"It's fabric. The only one who will touch you is me. And only if you let me. I— I know that's a big deal for you."
Everything in Enya despised the idea of human artifice constricting her body's most intimate regions, and yet something in the auburn-haired girl undid her. It was that she seemed to understand her, and while Enya had been many things—despised, worshiped, most of all feared—she'd never been understood.
"And listen, you know this is just for the date, right?" Natalie glanced sheepishly down at her own clasped hands dangling past her waist. "Forget what I said about Hobbesian jungles. I have these plans in my head. I just— I want that TV thing where we come downstairs dressed to the nines and the boys' faces light up. I've always wanted that."
But in her moment of uncertainty, biting her lip, she was already gorgeous; Enya had known beauty before as a kind of symmetry in form, but the familiar and kind lines of Natalie's face tightened the monster's heart, made her lungs draw shallower breaths, and everything in her craved to touch her friend's cheek and promise her whatever she wanted. That was the power of her. Unable to look her in the eye, Enya bowed her head. "As you like it."
"Thank you for this." Natalie cleared her throat. "Go into the changing room and take off what's wrapping your chest. I'll be right back."
Once inside the stall, Enya unfurled the slip holding her bust, the cloth dissolving and untangling from beneath her shirt with ease. It rewove in her grip and she wound it nervously around one fist.
A knock sounded. "Just me," Natalie said.
Unlocking the door and letting her friend into the cramped space, she shied at the tape measure.
"We'll do it over your shirt and keep the weirdness to a minimum," she assured.
Enya felt ticklish in the confines of the stall—it might be the absence of the slip over her breasts, feeling exposed even through the hoodie. She wanted more than usual to look away from Natalie.
"Take off your jacket and turn around."
Remove your armor and present your back. A more submissive thing could not be requested, and yet Enya shed the jacket. She couldn't shed the lump pinching off her voice, though, nor conceal her loud heart. Hanging her coat, she rewound the loose slip of kanaf around her opposite hand.
"Is that what you wrap your chest with?" Her voice sounded close to Enya's ear.
"Yes."
"It's pretty."
Enya kept the black slip as soft and smooth as her magic could make it, and when Natalie reached to stroke it, she marveled.
"What is this? It feels like a cloud."
She wanted to yell, See? My ways are fine.
Sensing her chagrin, Natalie giggled. "Yes, you are wise and I'm a fool. But I like that you humor me. Put your hands up, you doink."
Lifting her arms intensified the exposure, Natalie's tickling breath at the nape of her vulnerable neck setting every fine hair straight as a razor. It should have evoked a warning growl, but instead, she shut her eyes and her breath stilled. The measuring tape smoothed around her ribs—she tensed.
"Relax," Natalie whispered, extending the word, saying it in some magical way that made Enya's body obey. Just one word—one little word—and the monster exhaled, the coiled predator inside lounging like a cat. She felt as safe as she'd ever been, and so didn't understand why her heart galloped, why her blood pumped hot, why her knees threatened to buckle.
The tape measure tightened beneath her bust, unlooped, and constricted twice more at mid-bust and above. It felt good in a way that embarrassed Enya, electrified her flesh, sharpened her senses to the point she felt Natalie's body heat and scent wrap her up, the fragrance having developed her favorite spicy-sweet edge.
"All right. I've got your size," Natalie said. "The good news is you won't need an underwire."
"Underwire?" Enya crinkled her nose.
"You don't want to know. Arms down."
Enya folded her arms around her middle.
"You can turn around. We're done."
No, she couldn't. It would mean looking at Natalie.
"Are you okay? Oh no. I pushed too far, didn't I?"
Enya shook her head and turned, but there was nowhere to look that wasn't her friend, so she ended up looking into Natalie's eyes. A current seemed to pass between them, and Natalie's eyes dilated even as her face softened. She bit her lower lip, which seemed as full as it had ever been, and Enya suppressed a wild desire to taste it.
"You did great." Natalie's voice broke and she glanced to one side, rubbing the back of her own hand with her thumb. The edges of her ears went pink. "I'll, uh, go get you some bras to try on."
She left the stall and Enya stood in silence, listening to her own quick heart, and then to Natalie's. Her friend paused outside the closed door, relaxed against the wall a moment, breathed out, and wandered off.
Their hearts were both beating normally when Natalie finally returned with an armful of bras. Though she'd chosen every color, Enya knew her preference immediately and pointed. "That one."
"Black. This is my surprised face." Natalie presented the bra. "And look: no frills, no lace. Do I know you or what?"
Enya studied the satisfaction in her friend's smile as she picked through the rest of her selections, and realized something: several were too large. It dawned that they'd fit Natalie just fine. "What are those for?" she blurted, though she knew.
"For me. I do like lace," she teased.
For the first time, Enya imagined the undergarment on her friend instead, and was so flustered she bolted for the exit, worming past the auburn-haired girl.
"Where are you going?" she laughed.
To hide. Her flight was wholly instinct.
Natalie fortunately let her go, shutting the door to try on her choices, but it did the deva's imagination no favors. "You should at least try yours on," she called.
Hearing her friend talk while presumably in a state of undress was frighteningly intimate.
It did do a small amount to alter her appreciation for the undergarment, and when Natalie purchased a red one, she couldn't look at her for the last hour of their excursion.
Together they left the mall, and their footsteps echoed through the parking deck. They passed beneath a broken light and a pungent fear odor wafted from Natalie's pores. Alerted, Enya's senses scraped through the shadows for danger, but there was none. It was a reaction to the parking deck itself.
"Your tormenters aren't here," Enya said.
"I know."
"Only us."
"I know." Natalie walked faster, outpacing her.
"Wait." Enya stopped, forcing Natalie to do so.
"What? What's wrong?" Turning, Natalie glanced around the cavernous space, large eyes centering on the plink, plink of water drops into a distant puddle.
"Look into the shadows," Enya whispered.
"I know! They're empty. Can we just go?"
"This matters. Look at them."
"I don't care. I want to go. This is— Seriously." Natalie shook and there was no color in her face. "Please."
Tucking their bags against a pillar, Enya advanced—Natalie retreating step for step, until the deva closed the space in a startling instant, hand extended between them. "Take it."
"I don't want to do this."
"As you told me before... the only one who will touch you is me."
Her eyes tensed with indecision, bright with building tears, hands cupping around mouth and nose as she wrestled her fears, seeming again to bob her head in a silent count. At last, she took Enya's hand, her fingers trembling like leaves in a high wind. "What now?" she asked.
Enya pointed to the darkest corner. "Look there."
Setting her jaw, she followed Enya's finger with her eyes. "Can we please go now?"
"Soon." Enya led her friend into the shadows a halting step at a time.
Natalie's pulse hammered through their connected palms, fear-scent bleaching her palate and burning her eyes. On such bright-souled skin, the smell was obscene.
"You see?" Enya asked once they stood in the pool of darkness. "It's empty."
"I see." Her voice wasn't quite as high or thin as before. "But how do you know before you're in it?"
"Because I'm from places where shadows aren't empty. I know the difference." Enya guided her deeper, to the blackest part of the deck. "What do you see from here?"
"The garage." The reckless tempo of her heart had steadied.
"There is no shadow here darker than ours."
"I guess."
"I like it," she whispered.
Natalie licked her dry lips. "Why?" Shadows had a way of tugging voices lower, lower, until they were carried on small currents of air.
"Because nothing is cleaner than the heart of a shadow. It washes away their staring eyes and leaves nothing but me." Us, she realized. Nothing but us.
Natalie's heart relaxed to a normal rhythm. "You like that?"
"You asked once to see my home." She gestured. "Here it is."
"I'm afraid of the dark," she admitted, eyes shutting. "I never was until that night." Glancing sidelong at Enya, her pulse spiked—an explosion of fear rolled through her and she jerked, trying to escape. Her mouth widened in a frozen scream.
Snapping a look over her shoulder for the threat, Enya realized then—
I'm it.
Natalie squirmed her hand from the deva's grip, flailing out of the corner and into the brightness of the deck lighting. Covering her mouth, she gaped into the pool of black, fixed on the gleam of Enya's sunglasses.
"I won't hurt you," the monster whispered from her hideaway.
The words startled Natalie to her senses. With more control, she said, "I— I know, but please come out."
Stepping into the light, the monster bowed her head. A cold reality had dawned.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to freak out. It's just—"
"It's the thing you saw that night," she said.
A nod. "Not Banich, either." Natalie folded herself in her arms, as though a chill had crept over her. "No one would believe me if I told them."
"I would."
Nodding, she whispered, "Banich wasn't the only monster in the parking garage. There was something else. Something that came from Hell. Sometimes when I walk through my house at night, I know it's close. I can feel it out there, creeping between shadows. I sleep with my lights on because even though it can't be, I know it's there, and I— I don't know if I'm crazy."
Enya tried to breathe, to inhale around the skewer through her center, more painful than knives, bullets, and tent spikes, more painful by far. Every beat of her own heart cut her.
Natalie rushed forward, throwing her arms around the monster, holding her tighter than Enya had ever been held—and yet she couldn't feel it. She could only listen as her friend, her victim, whispered, "I'm so sorry. For a second, I saw you in the darkness and the way you blended into it, I thought you were it." Her laugh was too manic. "Thank God you're here. You're probably the only thing that makes it go away."
|
The One Who Eats Monsters - Casey Matthews (Part 2).txt
| 15 |
[ Those Who Fight Monsters ]
Her friend's nightmares had never hurt Enya as completely as after she'd learned she caused them. Once being close to Natalie had been electric; what remained was a crippling hole in the deva's center, one that introduced her to a unique torture every time the girl whimpered in her sleep.
Enya guarded her still.
On Friday, date night, Enya brought her new clothing to the Bradford home.
"You didn't even wash anything?" Natalie gasped, incredulous the tags were still in place.
"No," she snapped. How was she supposed to know that? Her wings required no laundering—how was she supposed to know any of this?
"Not a problem. I'll throw them in the wash. Are you okay?"
No. Every glance and word was a reminder she was alien and unwelcome in the warm halo of her friend's bedroom lamp. "All is well."
"It's not." Natalie reached to touch her shoulder. "You don't have to—"
Enya flinched from it—and hissed. She didn't mean to.
Startled, the auburn-haired girl froze, confusion knitting her brow.
What the deva wouldn't give to explain. I have quills. She stared into Natalie's eyes, willed her to understand. They're on my inside. Every little brush massages them deeper. She locked onto that image and tried her best: "Inside-out porcupine."
Maybe it somehow clicked, because Natalie eased back a step and said, "Go clean up. I'll try not to prick you again."
That she understood made this worse—she could reach into Enya in ways no one else could, but whenever the monster reached back, she infected her friend's life with some new horror.
She retreated to the bathroom, where soon cold water needled her body and soaked her hair. She stood beneath the water, regaining her composure. My world poisons her. From now on, I am only her guardian; never her friend. But she couldn't bring herself to vow it.
Water sleeked down her kanaf as she unwove it, retracting the countless fibers into six slits on her back, which closed and appeared only as thin scars. She donned a bathrobe, still naked without her wings, and padded to Natalie's room with arms around her middle.
"Your clothes are in the dryer. Let me braid your hair and I won't say a word about makeup. Promise." She started to cross her heart.
Enya seized her hand before she could.
Natalie arched an eyebrow.
"Do not vow. Unless you mean it." She despised when mortals made vows so lightly. It reminded her that humans were capable of breaking them.
"Your hand is freezing." She ushered Enya in, shutting the bedroom door.
"I showered."
"In cold water?"
Why wouldn't I?
"No one explained hot showers to you?"
No one had, and no one needed to. Because when this task is done, and you are no longer around to ask, I will take them cold as the mountain stream and no one will care. She eased onto Natalie's bed, wishing to make her face a placid mask and let time skitter ahead to their date.
But she couldn't, because Natalie slammed a chair down opposite her, sat to face her, and Natalie's face always made time stretch out. "I'm going to guess what's wrong," she said with steely determination. "I'll guess until I'm right, and I'll know I'm right because the only way you can lie is by not saying anything."
She was right, and her stare and her rightness only made Enya more naked.
"It gets worse." Natalie frowned. "My guesses are going to be super embarrassing. For us both. I don't want to do it this way, but there's something you need to tell me; something you won't. Plus, not sure if you realized, I'm sorta nosy."
Even though this mortal girl made Enya feel small, she also made her smile some.
"The more badass I figure out you are, the cuter your smiles get," Natalie beamed. Then her expression became more severe and she added, "Last chance to come clean."
No words came. What was there to say? I'm a monster. I'm the shadow you fear. I have memories from before the quickening of history.
Natalie hesitated, nibbling her lip. "You're not ready to go on this date."
Of course not.
"It's because of what someone did to you," Natalie said. "Bad things."
She bristled. "What things?"
For once, Natalie floundered. "You're just... angry, and you know a lot about sexual violence." More quietly: "Has someone hurt you?"
Enya's ire rose, heating her limbs and face. "As when they raped me?"
The auburn-haired girl had no words, gaze sinking to the floor.
She'd lied once to Ms. Cross, but the truth was out now. It was less horrid said than it was unsaid. "That means nothing."
Natalie tried to cut in.
"It means nothing," Enya growled. "You think my quills are because beasts did wicked things to me? They're not. It's because I am the wicked thing, and I happen to them."
The human girl stared, perhaps sensing for the first time she was talking to something old and cruel. "You don't have to hide," she said at last, dispelling her worry with a shake of the head. "I won't hate you for your past. There's nothing to be ashamed of."
The answers came too easily. "You understand nothing." Only thin lenses concealing Enya's eyes separated Natalie from a world of gods and monsters.
"Then explain," she demanded. "Explain, and I promise I won't hate you."
"Don't," Enya snarled. "You promise things beyond your power—you don't know enough to fear. You are untouched by darkness."
"What the hell does that mean?"
"Nothing in you is bloody, howling, or mad. Don't ask for truth. You are unprepared." I'm your nightmare. I'm the shadow who rips mortal flesh. "In ten words, you would break your vow and despise me always."
"You want to bet?"
Enya scoffed. "Your vows are noise."
Offended, she straightened. "Oh really, Miss High-and-Mighty?"
"Yes," the deva ground out.
"Try to do it. Try to make me break a promise." Natalie tilted her chin up.
Enya narrowed her eyes. "A barter. If my words make you doubt, never pry into my secrets again."
"Fine. But if I can still hug you after, you let me braid your hair. And! I'm going to put something pretty in it. Maybe even a bow." She folded her arms.
That was the flashpoint that made Enya stand in challenge, angrily crossing her heart. "So be it!" She snapped her mouth shut, having almost exposed her teeth.
They both fell silent.
"So," Natalie urged. "What's the dark secret?"
Anger had so knotted Enya's heart, she wanted to tell it all. She was filled with an inexplicable need to lash out, to see revulsion in her friend's eyes, so she resorted to facts: "I've murdered."
Natalie's eyes widened, but she was otherwise still. "Killed people?"
Enya's heart caught. "Often."
"But, I mean... how many?"
"I didn't count."
"Why did you do it?" she asked, reeling.
"To rid the world of them!"
A bang downstairs brought her to attention. "Dad's home. We, uh— we can finish this—"
"No," Enya hissed, stepping forward until they nearly touched, until they could taste one another's breath. "Finish what you began." She needed an end to these feelings and sensed one was close.
But no, it didn't go right—not at all—because in a heartbeat Natalie's arms wrapped her up and she came in so tight Enya's mouth was nearly on the girl's ear. "I know. Okay? I know you have."
Stunned, she stood rigid in the embrace. As she realized what had been said, she trembled.
"You've seen war. Of course you've killed. I never said so before, but I knew it, and it doesn't change anything." She squeezed. "I trust you."
Enya choked on the swell of feeling rising in her chest. "It was more blood than you can—"
"I can't imagine." She pressed her lips to Enya's temple, would have leveled her had she not been holding the deva up. "That's why you're an inside-out porcupine. It's guilt."
Impossible.
"You want me to hate you because you're looking for a way to punish yourself. It won't work; you won't feel better."
But guilt was a mortal emotion, derived from their inability to hit a mark. Deva suffered, if anything, the reverse of that problem: Enya could never be anything except an eater of monsters. Guilt in a deva was beyond absurdity—it was close to heresy.
Natalie squeezed her ribs harder. "You're my friend. And guess what?"
"What?" Something hot burned at the corners of Enya's eyes and her chest felt strangely, wonderfully tight. It was all too much and at last she wrapped her arms around Natalie's back, leaning into her and swallowing against a crease in her throat.
"I get to do your hair," she whispered. "And I'm gonna add a cute flower."
Enya nodded into her.
"We're going to get dressed up, knock the socks off Horatio and Wes, and have the most amazing double date ever. Know why?"
Enya shook her head.
"Because everything we do together is amazing. You're my friend."
Friend. It sounded so good and, even as the embrace ended, she realized at once it was all still a lie—Natalie believed she'd killed in war, believed it in the most benign and abstract of ways. But Enya had mauled sinful men and devoured their souls; what if her friend learned how much she'd enjoyed it?
"Now sit—I'm going to finally do something with this gorgeous hair. Relax, just a French braid." Stationing her in a chair facing the dresser's large mirror, Natalie stood behind her. Sight of the reflection eased the prickle of having someone at her back.
Enya had never worn braided hair, though she'd of course seen it often. What she hadn't anticipated was how the braiding felt: grazes from Natalie's trusted fingertips, gentle tugs that were almost sharp, the sensation of fingernails tracing lightly over her scalp. It settled her pulse, lazed her thoughts into a pool at the base of her skull until her eyes shut. She lost herself in what—were she that type of God—she'd have made a sacrament. Never before had she given someone such freedom to touch her. It was the first sustained, compassionate contact of her life.
It was bliss.
"Done," her friend announced.
Enya's eyes opened wide and she was unready for "done." Natalie could have unbraided and braided her hair for a decade and she'd have never tired of it. "Thank you," Enya whispered, feeling for the life of her as though soft mortal hands had just... changed her. Yet she was adamantine, not clay, and that wasn't possible.
"How do you like your flower?"
Enya turned her head to see a plastic, white blossom threaded into the root of a braid. "It's fake."
"That's so you won't chew on it."
The braid felt heavier at the back of her head, loose enough not to constrict her, but secure—she tied her mane or trapped it in her kanaf's hood for combat, but locks always popped loose. This would keep a lot of blood out of her hair.
"It shows off your face," Natalie said. "Which I like."
The dryer dinged, and Natalie fetched their clothes—she changed in the bathroom and Enya felt wrong and excited at once, completely nude in her friend's bedroom. Unsure what to do with such feelings, she hurried into the outfit. The panties applied unwelcome tightness, the bra stiff and forcing her chest into a shape she wasn't accustomed to.
The blouse and skirt weren't so bad. It was hard to tell what humans liked, but she enjoyed the lines of her own body in the mirror and it was possible she was attractive. I should be humiliated. Compelled by the strange reflection staring back at her, she spun instead—just once. She could be humiliated later.
Natalie knocked before entering, wearing leather boots, tights, and a belted earth-tone dress with shorter sleeves that accentuated her long arms. "How do I look?" Her smile was more nervous than she had a right to be.
Releasing a held breath, Enya murmured, "Beautiful."
Her friend's smile bloomed sincere and she slipped close to tug the edges of Enya's blouse. "You're perfect."
"Girls!" shouted Natalie's father from downstairs. "There are two young gentleman callers who claim to be your dates. Should I have them shot?"
"No, Dad!"
"Are you sure? They look really handsome. Just a warning shot over their heads."
"I said no, Dad, now let them in and be nice. Give us five minutes."
Enya heard the front door swing wide. "The girls will be down shortly. Have a seat. I want to get to know you boys. You both drink scotch, right?"
Natalie shut the door and bustled to her desk, kissing a photograph of her mother, then settling on another long look into the mirror, where her eyes met Enya's. "I'm nervous."
"Why?"
"Other than school dances, this is my first date. Do you think we'll get food? I'm kind of hungry."
Being at the mercy of two juvenile males irritated Enya deeply. "Next time, we plan. They dress up." Though if Natalie did too, she wouldn't complain.
Natalie summoned her courage and they left the bedroom, pausing in the hall to spy from the balcony.
Tom Bradford swiped through his tablet's screen while Horatio and Wes sat stiffly on the sofa opposite his chair. "And what do we have here? Horatio went from 'in a relationship' to 'single' just six months ago. Frowny face!"
"Sir, I promise this is not a rebound thing."
"Of course not, my daughter is much better than anyone else you could have dated. It concerns me you haven't unfriended this ex, though—"
"We have friends in common."
"And you're certain it's over with her?" Natalie's father tilted in, a maneuver that silenced Horatio's attempted reply. "You're certain she knows it's over?"
Struggling for a response, the boy merely shrugged.
Tom Bradford swiped a few more times. "You 'like' a lot of memes about marijuana legalization, Wes."
Wes's knee bounced so quickly it shook his voice when he talked. "It's not like—"
"I, too, support the legalized use of cannabis, though I don't condone it under my roof or as a parent. I'd rather not see young people's lives ruined for toking."
"Oh," Wes exhaled, relieved.
"But if you smoke it around Natalie, I might still ruin your life."
"Oh, no, never," Wes insisted. "I never smoke it in front of people who don't— I mean, I don't—"
"Of course you do. What else do you do?" Tom Bradford tilted his head to one side. "Too smart and cleaned-up for meth or heroin, but I'll bet anything you've tried at least one amphetamine. What was it—friend's ADHD medication?"
Wes's knee vibrated faster now, bullets of sweat working down his face. "I don't think—"
Horatio blew out a sigh. "His sister's meds, just once to study for a test, and he just sat in a corner writing sonnets to techno music all night."
"Still got an A on the test," Wes whispered in defeat. "On the bright side, I don't drink."
"That's because kids these days don't have the fortitude for proper scotch," Tom Bradford observed. "They want everything in a nice, neat pill."
Horatio snorted, opened his mouth to retort—but stopped himself just short of saying something.
"Dad!" Natalie hollered, going from lurking at the balcony to hustling downstairs with Enya in her wake. "You did not make our dates friend you on social media."
Tom Bradford clapped his tablet shut, standing. "Gentlemen. Please remember, this is why you want to protect your data from the government. Someone's always watching." He pointed at his eyes, then at both boys. "Post lots of pictures from tonight. Adieu." On his way to the study he told the girls, "You both look nice. No babies, enjoy, and... Enya... keep her safe."
Enya nodded.
"He's unbelievable," Natalie said to the boys, even though she'd spied on it happening and giggled at parts.
The boys stood, reflexively wiping their palms on their thighs, eyes widening at the sight before them. Their hormones raged, but Enya scented no aggression.
"You look fantastic," Horatio breathed.
No one else spoke until Horatio elbowed Wes, who jumped and added, "Yeah! I mean, Enya, you look... different. I mean great! Not that you don't always look girl— er, great. Wow." He tugged his collar, scanning for an escape route, and Enya was pleased at the way he twisted—it reminded her she was still the predator. "From the top." He flexed his mouth, as though to limber it up. "I like how you look."
Unsure what to say, she told the truth. "You smell harmless. I like that."
Horatio offered his hand to Natalie and they chatted on their way out the door. When Wes offered his, Enya stared at it.
"Oh, I got you this." He removed from his pocket a thin, black metal object sharpened on every edge.
"What is it?"
"A batarang."
That didn't clarify anything.
"You throw it. To disable bad guys." He made a tossing gesture and a sound from his lips, like air swishing. "I figured after the club... just figured you'd probably like a batarang."
It was thoughtful. Enya hefted the weapon, testing its weight. "Sharp," she complimented, fingering its edge.
"It's totally not a toy. I bought it online and tried throwing it a few times. The less said about that the better." He rubbed a fresh scar on his chin.
Horatio's battered, four-door sedan had a recently placed Bradford campaign sticker on the bumper and he turned the radio down while driving.
"Where are we headed?" Natalie asked.
"Big surprise," Horatio said, sharing a cryptic grin with Wes.
"Holy smokes, your dad's intense," Wes said, changing the subject. "Was he serious about ruining my life?"
Natalie chuckled. "Joking. I think. He called the president's drug czar a 'scrofulous snorter of...' well, I won't finish that. You can ask him someday."
"C'mon, you can't leave us hanging," Horatio cheered.
"Rhymes with 'paint.' "
Everyone laughed but Enya.
Swiping through his phone, Wes muttered, "Crap, still got memes posted about term limits. How far back on my wall you think he'll go?"
"How about you cut the cord?" Horatio said. "New date rule: no phones."
It was agreed and they turned them off.
"What's your read on Natalie's dad?" Wes asked, pulling Enya unwillingly into the conversation.
Natalie half turned in her seat. "Why do we have to talk about my dad?"
"My mom manages a department store and never called the president of her own party a 'chucklehead' on live TV," Wes pointed out.
"Fair." Natalie relaxed back into her seat.
"You follow that stuff?" Wes asked Enya.
She shook her head, staring out the window into the dark.
"Got to be something you care about," he pressed.
"I care about the things her father does." Enya stared at the passing houses. "I hate flags, prisons, laws, schools, and self-important fools with badges or titles telling me 'go here,' 'do that,' 'don't think.' But that is the end of our similarity."
"Sounds close enough," Natalie grinned.
"No. He thinks humans are... bigger... than they are; that they can fend for themselves."
Wes seemed confused. "What do you believe?"
She'd never put words to it, but she believed most humans wanted laws—to feel safe from people with the wrong amount of money, the wrong color skin, the wrong religion or thoughts or words, and so they begged for them. They worshipped laws, because laws were how they puffed themselves up and pushed their foes into the mud. In one blink of Enya's eye, though, the laws turned around like tigers and mauled the ones who made them. It was idiotic, and she felt bad for Natalie's father, because he had a principle; but there weren't many like him. Most of their kind loved flags. Most deserved to choke on them.
"What's going on in that head of yours?" Natalie asked.
Not knowing what to say, she mumbled, "I don't care what senators do, as long as they leave me alone."
They took highways beyond the city, where countryside whisked around them. An ache worked through Enya, her limbs burning with the need to climb trees of hard bark, to sink into snowy litterfall and disappear into the wind that wove between trunks. She wanted to smell sap and lick it and hold the bitterness on her tongue, to drink the forest and be swallowed by it.
Natalie yawned and slackened into the car door, breath fogging the window, and the deva finally realized that the moment she dealt with all threats to Natalie's life, she would do exactly that: disappear into the wilds. That would end the nightmares, the quills—all of it.
"This is some drive," Natalie murmured. "How far are we going?"
"Like I said—it's a surprise." Horatio kept his eyes on the road.
Enya had a mind to demand answers, but Wes recommended they stop for food.
Off the highway, they parked at a brightly lit restaurant next to an odorous gasoline station, climbing out of the car beneath a backdrop of tall trees. They flooded the deva with a need to slink into the shadows. Snow drifted in thick flakes, the smell of March's last storm in the air. "It will blow cold tonight," she said, and Natalie shivered without a heavy jacket.
Flakes stuck to the teenager's gleaming auburn hair, and Horatio hastened to wrap her in his coat the way Enya wished to. "There are blankets in the trunk if you get too cold," he said.
"Blankets?" Natalie's eyebrow rose.
"No spoilers." Wes offered his coat to Enya, and she waved it off.
"Give her a minute," Natalie said, wisely assessing the way Enya stared at the trees. "Think she needs a break—and she won't freeze, she's never shivered once while I've known her." She and the boys went into the restaurant.
Slipping off her flats, Enya strode barefoot across the snowy lot, past the perimeter of lights, and deep into the slender black wood at the edge of the buzzing illumination. Once there, everything inside her uncoiled, a warm glow in her heart because Natalie had been reaching into her again, assessing her moods and needs in ways that were no longer uncomfortable.
She knows me. Not every dark corner, but enough. Yet how she would scream if these glasses slipped even an inch. That put an end to the warm glow.
Between the trees, she let the elder things stretch from her and touch the snowy boughs, the sky—everything in civilized lands tasted wrong, but in places without pavement, electricity, or shaded from artificial light, she could still feel the cold, unworked earth. Extending one hand east, she let the wind shiver through trees and unsettle flakes from her hair. Another hand west, and a second gust swept that direction.
Her laugh was a cold, high noise carrying far. The city's layer upon layer of brick and steel had not quite beaten this out of her. Savoring her comfort in the tiny patch of wild, she returned at last to the diner, refreshed.
Natalie had ordered for her. They ate, and the boys paid. It was all too familiar, the mortals treating her like someone to be looked after. The date tasted different, the wood having reminded her who and what she was.
Merging back onto the highway, Wes and Horatio kept the conversation afloat while Natalie slumped into her side window, dozing, a victim of restless nights and the rhythm of dark highways.
Her pulse quickened in her sleep. Realizing why, Enya's hands balled into fists at her knees.
They turned onto narrower roads, lines masked by fresh snowfall. Natalie's head rolled fitfully to one side and she jerked awake with a shout. "No!"
She panted and everyone refused to look at her except Enya.
Horatio rushed to fill the silence. "C'mon, my driving's not that bad."
"Where are we?" Natalie coaxed a stray lock of hair behind her ear, head bowed.
Enya had no answer. The boys had driven them far from New Petersburg.
"Just wait—it's up the next rise," Horatio said.
They crested the hill and Natalie shot forward in her seat. "Is that what I think it is?"
"Yup." Horatio pulled into a gravel lane behind a line of cars working through the ticket booth.
"A drive-in?" Natalie asked. "They still have these? I've never been to a drive-in before."
"Real piece of history," Horatio said. "My family used to go all the time. They open earlier and earlier every year trying to spin a buck." He peered into the black-clouded sky. "Hope the snow holds back, or we won't make it through both features."
With only a few other cars out in the weather, they found a prime spot in the middle and Horatio left the engine running, the heater pumping warmth into the interior. He tuned the radio to a station broadcast from the theater. "Going to turn the engine on and off to save gas," Horatio said. "Hence the blankets."
He retrieved them and passed two back to Enya and Wes. Then he unfurled a large one up front.
"Just so happens you only have three blankets, hm?" Natalie asked.
"I can go without if that's a problem," Horatio said.
"Just making sure you know that I see through your machinations," Natalie grinned. She scooted under the blanket and folded her feet beneath her.
The screen rose like a cliffside of white, and she furrowed her brow at images projected onto it—the noise and flashing pictures captivated the mortals. She'd never watched anything on their screens more than a few minutes, but it startled her how their mouths closed and their eyes subtly opened wide. The pictures were jouncy, garish, but something visceral in them held the mortals' attention, and she couldn't blame them: mortals couldn't control the speed of their perception, couldn't make an hour disappear or stretch a moment to infinity. These moving pictures did that for them: she'd seen how they erased hours by cutting suddenly between two scenes, or how they distilled a moment with music and held onto it; in a way, a hint at how the divine saw the world.
This film started with text insisting the events were based on a true story. Eerie piano music played and the picture swooped over a small, coastal town amidst trees and hills.
"Is this a scary movie?" Natalie asked anxiously.
"Yeah. Uh. Is that a problem?" Horatio asked.
"No. No, it's fine." But Enya could tell it wasn't, and that feeling—guilt, Natalie had insisted—twisted in her belly, too real now to deny. This is my fault.
In the film, a family moved into a house against the pleas of a menacing, elderly man with a leathery face. As the story unfolded, ever-less-plausible horrors befell the family.
Natalie slid into the nook of Horatio's body. Whenever something popped out on the screen—first it was just a cat, then later an eviscerated doll—she jumped, almost into his lap. Her fingers dug into his arm, his other wrapped over her shoulders.
Enya wished she could guard Natalie instead of sitting by Wes. Guard her from what? Yourself? The thing in her gut squeezed harder.
"That little girl is creepy." Wes shifted closer, then when she glared, further away. "Bet she's possessed."
"She isn't the ghost," Enya said. "It hides in her mother."
"You seen this one?" Wes asked.
Enya shrugged. "If I were an asura, I'd be in the mother."
"A what?"
"A spirit," Enya said.
Wes rubbed his chin. "I feel you. The girl's got that psychologist, and they're trying to make the shrink look evil, because she hates the mom. Bet it turns out the shrink is the good guy."
"Would you two stop guessing the ending?" Horatio grumbled.
"What do you think's going to happen here?" Natalie asked, her voice small. She squirmed as the mother entered a corridor full of groping shadows.
"Ghost jumps out of the attic door," Wes said.
"No." Enya shook her head. "It's inside her. So it appears from the mirror in the bathroom, down the hall, to the left."
The woman rounded a corner and a black thing flew from the bathroom mirror. Shrieks sounded from other cars, the camera shook, and Natalie whimpered.
"Ha. Ten points to Enya," Wes said.
"Whoever talks next is walking home," said Horatio.
In the rearview mirror, Natalie's face drained of color, her shoulders tensed. That shadow—it had looked almost like Enya when swaddled in her kanaf. One more turn of the screw and the deva's fists trembled. She wished she could open Natalie's mouth and eat her fear, drag it into her gehenna and burn it to nothing.
The scenes grew darker, emphasizing the menacing shapes inside the family's house at night, until Natalie's hands shook. Horatio seemed concerned, but Wes—oblivious—whispered about potential ghost weaknesses.
"One spirit can kill another by eating it," Enya said, "because they're made of the same substance. For non-spirits, you must have Hell-fire or something sharp enough to cut a ghost. I only know one such thing."
"A plus-three vorpal sword?"
An odd piece of lore to know, for a mortal. "Two things," Enya allowed. She kept her gaze on the movie screen and the rearview, where Natalie's eyes were bright with fear. The smell was worse than the parking deck and Enya clenched her teeth.
Onscreen, the shadow creature pounced twice more, from a dark window and through water in a bathtub, where it drowned the family's patriarch. Each time it appeared, Natalie squirmed. Finally, the ghost sucked the little girl beneath a car in the garage.
Natalie threw her door open and bolted. Horatio sat momentarily stunned before following her.
Enya stayed put. What if she mistook me in the dark? But part of her wanted that—part of her wanted Natalie to scream and to see the truth of her.
The teenager fled to the concession stand and restrooms with Horatio's coat over her shoulders, disappearing between the lights, where her long shadow vanished.
"She okay?" Wes asked.
Enya unclenched her hands. Blood seeped from thin wounds in her palms.
Natalie's scream cracked the night like a gunshot. Enya threw her door wide. Wind bit her as she hurdled a car hood, forgetting her pretense of humanity, and slid to a halt at the concession stand. Horatio held his jacket, calling into the darkness: "Natalie! Come back!"
A blond boy of middle-school age with an impish face and backward ball cap laughed hysterically. Horatio spun and lifted him by his shirt, slamming him into the wall by the women's restroom entrance. "You shithead. Why'd you do that?"
"What did he do?" Enya's desire to harm the boy laced every word and for a moment, she didn't care that he was only a pup.
Horatio glanced at her, then lowered the boy an inch or two. "He jumped out. Scared Natalie." He nodded toward a mask matching the creature from the movie, discarded by the wall.
"I'll get her. Deal with the pup." Kicking off her flats, Enya jogged into the snow. She tracked footprints into a lightly wooded area beside the drive-in, where a copse of trees opened to a picnic area. Natalie sat hugging her knees on the picnic table in a ring of artificial yellow light from a single lamppost. Beyond the light, black trees hemmed her in.
Enya circled in the wood, looking in, a soundless presence that pricked at her friend's intuition until she looked up.
"Hello?" Natalie wiped tears and shivered, sensing the predator—sensing Enya.
A blanket of snow muffled every sound but the panting of hot breath from Natalie's fear-squeezed throat. She blinked through glassy tears. Enya stilled, her friend's gaze panning across her, failing to catch. The pulse in her jugular quickened.
"Stop following me," she pleaded. "Stop sleeping under my bed. Stop stalking through my house. Stop hunting me. Kill me or don't, but show yourself."
Enya stepped from the trees, into the light, and Natalie jolted back. Her mouth opened to let out a scream. The monster silenced her with one finger to her own lips. "Shh."
Recognition came next and Natalie sprang from the picnic table, rushing closer. It was the hardest part, because it made Enya's hope flare briefly to life. But there is only one way for me to end this. Natalie had to face her demon—they both did.
"Thank God it's just you." Her arms flew around the deva's slight frame.
Enya didn't embrace her back.
"I'm such an idiot." Natalie shivered against her. "So worn down, only ever half awake. I saw something jump at me, I just reacted—and I can't stop shaking because apparently I dropped Horatio's jacket."
"It's not the cold," Enya whispered. "It's the monster."
"I— I'm sorry you heard that. I thought there was a monster out there, the one I keep dreaming about. I was sure it was there, I could feel it, and I think part of me still does. Am I crazy?"
"No."
"Was it the fear, you think?"
"No."
"Then what?"
"You're right." Enya's voice was a ghost. Her chest tightened. The words were hard. Not hard to find, like usual—hard to say, as if each one was a mountain to be pushed over.
"What do you mean?"
Enya stepped back. "There's a monster out here. Tonight."
Natalie's face changed and something flashed in her eyes. "Don't even joke."
It wasn't exactly anger. Betrayal. The lash of her friend's gaze burned and felt good at once, replacing some of the guilt with pain. Enya far preferred pain. "Monsters are real. One has lived in your shadow for a while."
"No. You said you could tell. You said—"
"I missed one. It stood in the lightless parking deck with you. It moves through your home's dark passages. It stands here now looking at you."
"I don't understand."
"Yes you do."
Her soft face changed again, lips parting even as she accused with her eyes, a hurt so brilliant it burned through Enya—all the pain her words wrought, she inflicted on them both and couldn't stop.
Shaking her head, Natalie glanced back toward the distant concession-stand lights. "Let's go back."
"Look at me."
Natalie shook her head. "No, let's—"
"Look at me!" Enya growled.
The sound snapped Natalie to attention. She didn't turn right away, squeezing one hand in the other, her skin matching the color of snowflakes caught in her glossy hair. When at last she faced Enya again, her large brown eyes had dilated with prey-fear.
"Watch now and understand what I am." Enya took measured steps back, pausing after each. A stiff breeze tugged on Natalie's skirt, and she hugged her trembling body. The monster melted into shadow, wrapped herself in it like the wings of a bat. On the twenty-first step, Natalie's gaze unfocused, and on the twenty-second she lost the deva. Easing behind a tree, Enya slid from trunk to trunk, using not just the darkness but the blind spots produced when Natalie's eyes searched for her—pausing when the gaze neared, flitting silently when it focused elsewhere. From inside the dark wood, she circled the clearing and her friend.
The predator in Enya smelled her friend's rising panic, but Natalie couldn't quite see her, couldn't find the slippery movement. There was one human facial expression she could always read—a lurching fear at the realization one was being hunted. That expression crossed Natalie's face; she pivoted and fled.
Chase her! screamed Enya's instincts. Her blood sweet and muscles warm, she snarled—I shouldn't have done that. But the sound rose as though plucked from her depths by dark magic. She burst from the trees, cutting off Natalie's retreat while she was still glancing wildly back over her shoulder.
Natalie thudded into the monster, stumbling back and collapsing into the snow. "This isn't funny," she stammered, crab-crawling away as Enya advanced inch-for-inch, giving no quarter from the truth. "Why would you do this! Is— Is this some kind of test? Are you trying to prove anyone can do that?"
"Not anyone. I am shadow and wind."
"Stop it." Tears lanced down her cheeks. "You're not. You're my friend."
Enya knelt and her only mercy was in not removing her glasses. "I am a killer and a predator. I hunted Walter Banich in the garage that night; I saw his ruined face. Do you remember how he lifted you with one hand? I could do that, and more—as I did to that man I tore apart in Whitechurch. Do you remember pulling out Banich's stitches? Did it feel good? Because I think I was laughing when I broke his ribs. His femur? It snapped like tinder. I enjoy breaking things—breaking humans. It makes my spirit sing. And it is easy."
Natalie's breath quickened and her head shook.
"I am a monster. I am the one who lurks outside your bedroom at night, and I am the one haunting your nightmares." The gorgeous self-destruction flowing through Enya's veins crescendoed as she tilted down to whisper, "And when I kill, it has nothing to do with war. It's what I am."
There. It is done. Now she sees me—all of me.
"Please," Natalie whispered, her body curled into a ball and her arms shielding her head. She hid her eyes, voice barely audible. "Please."
"Please what?" Enya didn't like the pleading, and now the guilt returned—it didn't replace the searing pain of having betrayed her friend, simply added to it. "Please tell you I lied? Please go away? Please never speak to you again?" She needed to hear it, needed to remember it forever, to clutch it like a talisman in case she ever let a mortal make her feel this again.
Natalie's breath and body seemed frozen. "Please don't kill me."
"Kill you." The words echoed. Enya wanted to laugh. Kill... Natalie? Was it a human joke? No. She knew the position the other girl lay in now. She'd seen ten thousand mortal women like that before, kicked, spat on, beaten, raped. Enya flinched away, stumbling. Snow fell in the dark wood all around them and it made her dizzy. "Please don't kill me." The words stamped into the core of her and the deva had no answer.
She found herself wandering through the trees, Natalie sobbing in the distance. It was a while before she realized Horatio was shaking her. "What's wrong? What's the matter?" How was he so far away if he was shaking her?
Enya pointed to the distant speck of lamplight in the woods. Horatio ran off.
She wiped melted snow from her cheeks, where it seemed to have gathered, its taste too salty.
She hid. She didn't know what else to do, how better to shrink into nothing, than that. Eventually, Horatio carried Natalie to the car, where he wrapped her in a blanket. He and Wes seemed to argue by the light of a phone's LED screen, and the car turned on.
Natalie had convinced them to leave Enya behind. Good. Good and wise.
But the car hit black ice on its exit. The tires whirred uselessly, lost their grip, and the vehicle lurched into a slow spin that planted its back wheel in a ditch. Horatio and Wes got out and pushed in vain. Enya approached, uncertain, but decided to send Natalie along.
"Get in the car," she told them.
Horatio glanced over his shoulder from the bumper. "Oh, thank God. You disappeared. Natalie won't say a word, but... look, we had our phones off, and it turns out something happened at home. It's bad. We need to get her home now, there's people after her tonight, and there's a blizzard coming in."
Enya slammed her shoulder into the bumper with the boys at either side. It shot up onto the road.
"Got a good angle on it that time," Horatio said, dusting his hands proudly.
Enya strode past them. "Get in." She slid into the driver's seat.
They scrambled in, Horatio asking if she could drive, but Enya didn't answer. She adjusted the seat so she could reach the pedals and looked sideways at Natalie in the passenger seat. The human girl shifted into the door until she pressed the window glass. The deva lowered a console divider that had been lifted for the movie. Natalie glanced down at the divider, then at Enya, as if to ask if she was serious. They both knew it was barely more than a gesture, and gestures from monsters meant nothing.
"Seriously. Can she drive?" Horatio asked.
Enya stepped on the gas and pushed the vehicle over sheets of black ice. She manipulated the wheel, edged the rubber over clean asphalt, and the tires gripped. She smoothed them out of a fishtail and sped down the road.
"Apparently?" Wes said. "Yeah."
Enya drove through blackness and flying snow. Other drivers nailed their horns when she shot by. Horatio begged her to slow down, swore elaborately in Spanish, and Enya sped past two accidents.
Natalie never spoke, never moved.
They pulled up outside her house. Enya glanced back at the boys. "Get Natalie."
She went directly to the front door, pounded twice, and Mark answered. He had his pistol drawn. "Where is the senator?" she demanded.
Natalie's father stood from the sofa. "Is it her?"
Enya dodged past Mark. "She's here. Safe. What happened?"
"Police called us. Carol disappeared from the district office tonight. They..." His face was anguished. "They say someone pulled up in a van. Grabbed her. In front of her goddamn husband and kid. They saw it happen."
Wes and Horatio escorted Natalie inside, her father rushing to lift her off the ground in a crushing hug, and Enya used the moment to slip into the night unnoticed.
They had taken Carol. Their plan would be to break her, possess her, then use her to get close to Natalie. They would probably hope to bypass Enya, use Carol to sow doubt about her among the Bradfords, not that Enya hadn't done that job for them already. But turning Carol into a hollow would draw them all to their nest—all in one place at the same time.
That was fine. It was a good night for endings.
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The One Who Eats Monsters - Casey Matthews (Part 2).txt
| 16 |
[ A Reckoning ]
The blizzard's cold came in through every uninsulated surface of the metal trailer, came into Carol through knees pressed too long into the floor, wrists rubbed raw by shackles, her head clouded by the sour smell of her own vomit. If she lay down, the icy floor would suck the heat from her shivering muscles.
A television lit the stark chamber, playing horror movies featuring tortured captives—the kind that made an audience fidget when the drill went into a shrieking actress.
But this was no movie. He'd stripped her to underwear and left a workbench littered with things: carpentry tools, a book of matches, a coil of barbed wire, oily rags, and a single beer bottle.
He wanted her to guess. That was the purpose of the movies: to make her wonder which things in the room were just there, and which he would use.
Frozen hinges on the trailer door wailed, a horrid sound that made the skin along her spine tighten. His flashlight blinded her, forced her to glance away, clanking door and shuffling footsteps her only sign they were sealed in together.
"Hello dear," sang a man's voice—his tone was playful like a drunk's; it had no inhibitions. "Guess whooo?"
Carol straightened under the gaze of a monster, an old habit. "Remember General Gambari? Ever watched him on the news? War criminal. Had whole villages... cleansed." And she'd been surprised when his eyes hadn't seemed special: neither empty nor cold, just wrinkled like a father's. "He came to the States once. I got him coffee."
"Oh. That must have been nice," crowed that singsong voice. He kept the flashlight in her eyes, his silhouette examining the carpentry tools.
"I spat in his coffee. I'd say you're only the third-, fourth-scariest thing I've ever spat on."
"Ah, getting a little ahead of—"
Carol hawked and what was left of her spit flew above the flashlight. There came a satisfying smack, a short growl. Her courage liquefied at the sound.
His shadow knelt. "Did you know," he said with the clear enunciation of an instructor capturing the attention of children, "that a human can be addicted to anything? Isn't that fascinating? Why, I once met a man who liked to..." He yanked her manacled hands closer to the darkness masking his face. "...cut his fingernails."
Rather than biting, he play-chewed—loud lip-smacking noises dragging from Carol a squirm and a short shriek.
"He'd trim and trim and trim, down to bloody nubs. Then the roots. Do you know what the flesh looks like, that gooey stuff where fingernails nestle? He does. He'd hollow his fingernail holes into wet, red cavities, and poke poke poke—looking into his own body in horrified fascination, every electric current of pain as satisfying as an orgasm." Each of his words, a nursery rhyme to a child; and the shadows on his face weren't right—there were ridges in all the wrong places. "The right kind of addict will scrub his hands until they seep. Castrate a rapist and he'll rape with broken-off broom handles. Why do you suppose that is? What's he really want? Do you suppose for some people, they do these elaborate, bloody things for no other reason than... habit?"
Carol tried to speak. To say something flippant. To goad him. Nothing came.
"You know what I am." He shined the light beneath his chin and she flicked her gaze down. She didn't want to see.
He roared: "Look at me, worm!" All the singsong had turned upside down and animal.
"F-fuck you."
"It's almost like you want me to start with the barbed wire."
When she refused to look he bunched her hair into one fist, jerking her face upward. Through slitted eyes, she saw him: a patchwork face of jigsaw stitches stretching down to an emaciated, shirtless torso and, below that, a scabbed patch of bristly hair where a dick might have been. He'd cut it off, mailed it to her office. Not someone else's—his own.
Carol couldn't possibly throw up again, her body heaving nearly inside out with the effort. She gagged out, "Go to hell."
"We already did." He was back to the melodic instructor. "Probably some time ago. No one noticed." He frowned, uneven patches of his stitched face rumpling like a poorly made quilt. "We just kept trimming, scrubbing, fucking. Same thing, every day, and we'll keep doing it again and again until we've whittled the flesh off our bony fingers and walked until our feet turn black from gangrene. The last man alive will die humping the—"
He coughed. It cut off his words, thank God, but a second cough speckled his blood on Carol's face. Crimson oozed off his lower lip. His naked chest cracked like dry wood, producing a shudder, and something slick with black blood erupted through him. It appeared as though a girlish hand had just sprouted from his flesh—it flexed there, turned over, and drizzled. Then it sucked wetly back into him and he crumpled.
The flashlight bounced and rolled across the floor. It illuminated his heaped body, then a trailer door left open, and at last a figure who'd been behind him—oh God, what is that. At the briefest glance into its burning eyes, fear overrode her senses and Carol passed out on the icy trailer floor.
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The One Who Eats Monsters - Casey Matthews (Part 2).txt
| 17 |
Four kerosene space heaters blew warmly against Ghorm's flabby mass, keeping him comfortable in the cavern of Primrose's third floor. Bare wood frames separated the chambers, marking where someday contractors hoped to erect walls. Taped-down cables spread in elaborate webs of Ghorm's design and black tarp sealed every window. The darkest corner was for his monitors and the pneumatic chair holding him aloft.
Most of the remaining space featured a sterile operating theater and lab belonging to Mr. Saxby, as well a backroom caging his menagerie of rats, monkeys, and dogs, all silent in the face of an inevitable fate. Each animal's cage door was marked with a time, day, and experiment number, and all cages marked with a time and day prior to this moment were empty.
Ghorm squinted at his email while tapping at a keyboard set atop the great crest of his distended girth. "News from on high," he intoned. The pneumatics of his chair hissed and he spun his corpulent hollow to face Mr. Saxby and Tooloo both. "The Hidden One sends word. He understands our... reticence... to deal with Erynis. However, he offers us sanctuary and generous payment if we finish off the Bradford girl."
"I'm unconvinced we require such 'sanctuary,' " Mr. Saxby said. He removed a gold-chained watch from his waist pocket, waiting for the second hand before snapping on thick green gloves and reaching into a cage to extract a wriggling white rat. He held the thrashing animal down, calmly injecting it from a syringe. The animal squealed and curled into a ball, unmoving. "How about instead of begging for the protection of deva, I simply deal with the monster."
"Absurd," Ghorm sniffed. "You saw Splat. He came back broken. His hollows ooze from the pores—can't stitch them up fast enough to keep it all together. His flesh-riding days are numbered. She could do that to us all!"
Tooloo was sunk into her beanbag chair and staring into a large-screen television as she mashed the buttons on a controller, her gaunt face lit by periodic flashes of light and gore. Muting her headset, she spoke without ever facing them: "I've analyzed her attack patterns based on her fights with Splat and Burns. Two things."
Sighing, Mr. Saxby inserted the twitching rat into a jar where it withered, hair sloughing off in fat clumps and skin blooming open like a flower—what remained beneath was a pulsing cluster of eggs feeding off its tissues. "What, pray tell, do you have for us?" He sounded bored; bored with his experiments, frustrated with the ramshackle lab and animal subjects he was reduced to using.
"One: you underestimate her. You've killed two deva, both born in the last six centuries. This one is from the Long Ago; she remembers the time before history shattered. The eldest deva in this hemisphere, the Hidden One, and Set the Pretender? They're using you because to move against her is... dangerous."
"Oh please," Ghorm scoffed. "Deva? Frightened of a little monster? Who cares if she frightened a few Romans and Greeks."
"As well the Sumerians," Tooloo hissed, "depending on who you believe."
"Your second point?" Ghorm demanded.
"She can be defeated. There is a strategy."
Now even Mr. Saxby paused to listen.
"Her claws are death." Tooloo stared at her flickering screen. "Neutralize them, poison her, rely on brute force. You'll never be faster—but you'll out-heal her. It's all about those claws, though. They'll end you—end any of us." She unmuted her headset and went back to her constant stream of simulated violence, the opium that kept her mind relaxed enough to reason.
"We could just leave," Ghorm suggested. "There are more places she can't go than she can. And surely the Hidden One has bigger things to worry about than one measly mortal daughter of a senator."
"No!" Mr. Saxby snarled, the mask of pleasantry gone. "You think my research cheap? I'm no longer tinkering, Ghorm—what I'm planning will knit two worlds together! I am subsisting on rats and chimpanzees, but I need human skin and sinew and teeth, and..." He dashed a beaker into the corner, where it shattered. "...proper equipment!"
Ghorm sneered. "You think I don't yearn for finer things? I'm trapped in this dank cavern when I could be lounging poolside, or on safari."
"Spare me," Mr. Saxby moaned.
But Ghorm couldn't help reminiscing. "There is this lovely island, and they get the most exquisite prey shipped in—only the finest. Lithe, intelligent coeds; none of these hopeless indigents, no, they'll let you gun down a svelte little doctor or lawyer and their taxidermists do top-notch work. I had three trophies before I spent the last of my money. Had to sell them. I miss them; they were a matching set."
"Completely unreasonable waste of money," Mr. Saxby grumped. "I could organize a hunt in the Appalachians for a fifth of the cost, you extravagant fool."
Ghorm sniffed. "It's not a real safari unless it's hot enough to be served cold drinks and you're fanned by cabana boys."
"So at least it's settled," Mr. Saxby said. "We stay. For the money. If you're worried about the monster, we'll fetch some vicious dogs using what's left of the advance."
There were still a few dozen gold bars left, plus a little paper money. "You think hellhounds, then? Why not use one of your dogs?"
He snorted. "These are family pets—chosen for their docile attitudes. We'll start with something half mad. I'll rework the flesh, you program the... proper motivations. We'll store them in the basement and set them on our monster once it's time."
"And what, pray tell, do we feed them?" Ghorm demanded.
Mr. Saxby shrugged. "We've buried nine drifters and a federal investigator since we nested here." He positioned his camera, photographing the rat as it decomposed into more eggs, each wriggling with strange inner life. "The dogs will eliminate our drifter problem, and the drifters our dog-food problem."
"Truth," Tooloo said.
Ghorm tilted back, sucking his teeth. "Fine. Who cleans up their waste?"
"Splat," said Mr. Saxby and Tooloo at once. He was always given the messy jobs: disposing of bodies, washing under Ghorm's fat flaps.
"I accept," Ghorm said, magnanimously enough that Mr. Saxby rolled his eyes. "Tooloo, you have a knack for picking out vicious humans. Go see if your talent extends to dogs." Ghorm's chair hissed as he spun to face his monitor before she could protest.
Swearing, she turned off her console and opened the safe that secured their dwindling supply of gold one-kilo bars and cash. Swiping a stack of bills, she slipped through the steel fire door.
Ghorm sighed and glanced at the open door. "For the six-hundredth time, Tooloo, shut the door. You weren't birthed in a barn." Returning to his screens, he muttered, "That I know of." Tooloo didn't reply, nor did the door close, so Ghorm spun his chair. "I know you heard me, you unfeeling knob! Get back here and—"
But he didn't sense her. Only two asura inhabited the building: he and Mr. Saxby.
"Something's the matter," Ghorm whispered.
Mr. Saxby glanced from his jar of pulsating eggs, tilting his head to the side as one human ear sharpened to a dog-like point. "I hear something."
A drip, drip, drip plinked from the shadows beyond a yawning doorframe.
"And I smell blood," Mr. Saxby whispered. "A lot of it."
"Impossible." Ghorm's eyes searched the darkness. "She's stuck to the Bradford girl; she's always with her!"
Something oblong rolled awkwardly from the doorway, into the light—Tooloo's head. It emptied Ghorm of feeling, thought.
Mr. Saxby peeled off his gloves, unsnapping his collar. "Distract her while I change into something more comfortable."
"How?" Ghorm wailed.
A shrug from Mr. Saxby. "Die slowly, if you must."
Ghorm's frigid, syrupy blood pumped through an overworked heart the size of a cantaloupe, which at last convulsed and stopped from fear. Yet before his spirit could flee the dying body, a crack resounded from beneath his chair. "Oh dear." Something had undermined the floor, and gravity—ever Ghorm's harshest foe—seized hold, dropping him through the layer of crumbling concrete. He struck one level below, chair buckling beneath his mass.
There she was: perched upside down on the ceiling, the claws she'd used to cut away his floor gleaming in the dim. For eyes there were just two pinpricks of frosty blue light, a stare that was nothing but hate. When she dropped from the ceiling and bowed close, he saw how that light came from her irises. She had eyes of truest black, the rings of blue contracted thin—a sign she'd consumed psilocybin mushrooms, allowing her to spot him even if he fled his body.
"Wait," he pleaded, daring to catch her gaze. In so doing, Ghorm could stretch a moment into half a year. It was his gift, to hold his victims still while he whispered poison into their minds. Their stares fused. True, this moment would pass no faster or slower for Mr. Saxby, but Ghorm still had a chance. He could hold her hostage to time and plead his case, whittle her down with bargains and assurances.
The words flowed from his mind, modulated low and sweet, honeyed promises that he would not only spare the girl, but protect her—he could provide names of those who meant her harm and enlist defenses for her that Erynis could only dream of. But wait! There was more: she was the victim of a conspiracy, after all, a pawn in a war among deva, and if Erynis vowed to spare his life, he'd spill secrets, bind his will to whatever the monster desired. He said all these words, said them elegantly, in the time it took to blink.
"What is my name?" Her voice was deadly and thin. She'd seized control, ignoring the way he teased the seconds longer, and spoke with words, not thoughts.
"Why, it is Erynis," he said, mild as milk.
"No." Her fingernails fanned, each glinting with unnatural light, sharper than a mother's scorn. "What am I called?"
He tried again to hold her gaze, but time marched onward, steady as the beads of cold sweat trickling down his plump throat. "They— They say many things about you that are plainly false, else you'd—"
"Say it," she hissed, hand rising, "and you live one second longer."
Such truth in her words—and so he said it to buy himself one second, with which he might whisper a saving plea or be aided by Mr. Saxby. "The Implacable One."
"About that, they do not lie."
For a certain type of immortal, one second stretched nearly to the corners of eternity. Ghorm stole from it what felt like a month of contemplation, and at its end, he tracked the arc of her nails as they traced the air, so quick their gleam formed a crescent of light edging ever nearer.
Perhaps he could have used his last moments to brood on how it had all gone wrong, or to hope, or to mourn his three perfect trophies lost to him decades ago. Instead, he could think of nothing but the strange beauty of that crescent of light coming to end him.
The instant before she touched him, he surrendered—he let go of the moment, she split him in two, and he heard the great gush of blood from his body splash across the room's four corners, washing over her ankles.
The claws didn't stop until they sliced to the center of him, to the essence, which they also split in two.
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The One Who Eats Monsters - Casey Matthews (Part 2).txt
| 18 |
Enya sucked the last of Ghorm from her fingertips, swallowing him into the burning hell that had already ended Splat and Tooloo. It might have pleased her any other time. Tonight, their terror only reminded her of Natalie lying afraid in the snow.
She leaped to the hole above, struggling through because her limbs buzzed with numbness, an effect of the mushrooms. Crouching, absorbed in the drug's curious tunnel vision, she ignored Saxby's mutating body and stared instead at crimson staining her hands. Was arterial spray always so mirror-bright or was this also from the mushrooms? She thought she could see her image in them, a reflection of her hair in the blood and the blood in her hair. Natalie's braid had loosened.
"Have I failed to hold your attention?" Saxby asked.
Enya glanced up.
"Ah. Glad to see I have it now."
The room was faded white except for the asura's scaly black body—a great wyrm with coils thicker than ancient trees and a bull's horns pushing forward from his plated skull. His every breath was hot and billowed the fringes of her kanaf, all that mass coiled like a spring in the midst of a lab full of cages, workstations, and canisters of compressed gas.
When he spoke, his image vibrated and light zinged between his scales like electricity through a circuit board. "I've killed deva. I've tasted your kind's blood, and it is sweet."
Her head canted. "Then make me bleed." She wanted it. A disturbing, alien thought, so dreadful and backward she hardly noticed the blow from Saxby's tail.
A wall came from nowhere and cracked into her, shattering. A follow-up swipe from the tail's backlash beat her all the way through the dented cinder blocks and she blew through a second wall, smashing into the third amid spiderweb cracks.
Up lost its meaning. She tasted blood, could feel it seeping from fissures in her skull, and it felt good. All the pressure of her building rage vented from her broken scalp and soaked through her hair. She tossed the fraying braid over her shoulder, speckled blood on the wall, and centered her stare on Saxby.
"Again," she said.
His dark coils spilled like ribbons through the hole in the wall and he sneered with dagger teeth. In a flick of motion, his venomous tail opened three red gashes across her chest.
Yet the red-hot glow of pain didn't exorcise her demons.
Beneath the bleeding cuts, she felt the wyrm's searing venom thread into her veins, weakening her. Her body fought the poison, but it wasn't the thing slowing her down; it wasn't the thing dragging twisted desires from her soul—she'd ingested the psilocybin willingly, and whatever a deva consumed by her own will, whether alcohol or drug, affected her fully. She could see an asura, true, but now when the serpent licked her blood from his spiny tail and grinned, she could think only: To her, that is what I am. Bloody-mouthed, grinning.
He struck with the twin spears of his horns.
Enya caught the glinting point of one horn and stopped it an inch from her throat. The force bowed the cinder blocks she was pressed into and the crumbling wall swallowed her, spat her out the other side where she tumbled through wind and snow. Hitting the top of a cargo container, she skidded across slick steel and jumped to her feet.
On great and ragged wings Saxby descended, displaced air scouring whorls of snow from the broken ground where he alighted, just forward of the container. He rose, towering high.
Enya spread her hands to either side, cool air tickling between her fingers, the ache of poison and fractures not enough to slake her thirst. She met the wyrm's unfeeling gaze, finding nothing in his soul but hatred and arrogance; nothing that wasn't also in hers. "More."
He sneezed globs of ooze that smacked both her hands, viscous so that when she clenched her fists they wouldn't reopen. She could wriggle individual fingers, but her deadly nails were each secured to the only thing they couldn't cut: her palms. No more claws.
Saxby pounced, snatched her in his hind feet, and on wings as wide as city buses, carried her up, up, to the top of Primrose, where he broke her spine against steel girders. Feeling winked from her limbs. She slid off the girders, dropping to a worker's platform, helpless.
Saxby brought his spiny tail overhead for the killing blow.
But she still had cards to play. Threads from her kanaf pierced the back of her neck, shooting through her vertebrae and fusing a connection. Sensation woke throughout her—agony like black lightning—and she caught the tail's downswing. Spines ripped through her forearm and broke off in the wound, the impact shattering her platform and dropping her through space.
She caught an I-beam in the crook of her elbow, dangling over the building's metal skeleton while the broken-off spines pumped her other arm full of venom—worse venom than before, blowing through her veins like wildfire.
It was melting her arm.
Before, the poison had slowed her. This one bubbled her flesh inward in bloody honeycomb clusters. Cinching a razor-thin thread from her kanaf just below the shoulder, she bit and pulled the line taut with her teeth, slicing off the offending limb. It thumped onto the platform below and she stitched the stump closed.
Saxby thudded onto a steel strut below, slurping her arm into the back of his throat, gulping it down. "Lovely how my poison brings out your flavor," he purred. "When I tasted your blood before, it helped me tailor this venom just for you. This sampling will evolve it even further, sharpen it so that my next sting will end you—from now until the End of Days, every little piece of you I take makes me better at killing you. I have your scent, monster, and now it is I who will follow you through the ages, killing your every incarnation."
Wind whistled against Enya and undid her braid, the loose, whipping strands filling her with a sense of loss. Natalie's kind hands would never do that for her again.
"You hear me?" Saxby spat. "I am what you've always claimed to be—I am the thing that eats you."
She fastened her attention back on the dragon, its fury bunching all that killing power into a tight S-curve. It reminded her why she'd come: not to feel sick, not to mourn the phantom of a thing that never could have been. I came here only to kill.
"—and when you wake from this death decades from now, I'll bring you the girl's bones."
Yes, Enya decided. Too much time among mortals—I've forgotten what I am for. My purpose is simple. She tossed herself from the beam and flew past Saxby down the building side, sensing his mass behind her when he lifted his wings into a V and dived.
At the third floor where they kept the laboratory, she snapped a tether from her kanaf to the building side and bent her momentum through a tarped-over window, rolling to a stop amidst workstations. Saxby overshot, shaking the whole structure when he hit the earth.
Outside, Saxby threw a truck, roared, blew chemical fire into the sky. Inside, Enya mixed his chemicals into an acrid concoction using the limited dexterity of her glued hand and her feet.
He pummeled through the wall, dusted gray from concrete powder, all jaws and burning strands of spit. Enya stood atop his station and punted a smoking flask into his throat. She shoulder-rolled beneath him before he could chomp down and landed a blow to his tenders that forced him to aspirate the flask's acid.
With the serpent choking and thrashing, Enya dodged between his legs, bounced to the wall, the ceiling, and alighted on his spine. But his venom weighed her down and he bucked hard, sending her to the floor; he shouldered a workstation over and pinned her by the waist.
His laughter echoed, interrupted by a wet cough that brought up sizzling mucus; he laughed again, louder, as he leaned his tonnage onto the workstation. A loud pop and jolt of pain signaled the dislocation of Enya's hip. Reflexively, she snapped a tether from her kanaf around a distant stool, jerking it into her palm, swinging it in line as he made to swallow her. He snapped his teeth closed on the stool, and she twisted it, jamming his maw open.
But the metal bowed. The bolts strained. He had her.
Almost. Bracing the stool with her shoulder to keep him at bay, her kanaf opened to let Wes's batarang fall into a gap between two knuckles. She took aim and flung it, curving the whizzing steel around the room, to a stack of half-knocked-over gas canisters where it clipped off the stems of two pressurized tubes. They jetted like two steel torpedoes and one pounded Saxby in the ribs, setting off another hacking fit that teetered him, taking his weight momentarily off her.
Wriggling from the debris, she lashed her kanaf onto her right leg, using one sharp tug to sink the ball joint into its socket. She bit off a scream, rolling to her feet.
Saxby wheeled, mouth opening wide—he blew fire and the world turned molten.
Enya whirled her kanaf entirely around herself except for her remaining fist. Fire beat harmlessly off her cloak, and when it had passed, she snapped the burning cloth down, extinguishing the flames. Still wreathed in fire, Saxby's scales had a hellish glow and the room was flooded with barking dogs, shrieking monkeys, and the scurrying of escaped animals. In the midst of the pandemonium, she extended her invulnerable hand, which he'd bathed in that fiery expulsion—the hardened glue had turned black and polished like volcanic glass and, with a flick of her hand, it shattered and released her claws.
"My turn," she said.
She dove into the maze of his coils and cut him—cut off his tail, sent his lower jaw sailing, laughing as she took him apart a piece at a time. He lurched away, steering for the entry hole he'd made, but her nails clipped off a wing, so that when he escaped through it he helicoptered to the ground like a maple seed.
When he landed, he roared back at her while limping away. Enya returned a snarl and leapt after to finish what she'd begun.
But her killing blow never landed. With vision altered by mushrooms, she witnessed his spirit spread from a concentrated point near his heart, burn through the blood and separate into almost every cell of him, until he erupted. Flesh and spirit both split into ten million tiny pieces and Enya dropped through a cloud of snakes, centipedes, wasps, and scorpions, each carrying a piece of her quarry's soul.
Swaddling herself in the protective fabric of her cloak, she hit the ground and rose, stepping on a single beetle, crunching it underfoot as all the rest of him slithered through grates, buzzed up into the sky, or skittered into distant crevices—too many to count, or to stop.
Crushing the beetle had winked out that piece of Saxby's spirit. Transporting his essence into so many pieces left them vulnerable to something as simple as her heel, but battling him in this form would be like fighting the tides.
Soon they were gone and it was just Enya and the whistling wind, the darkness, and the descending snow. She'd killed three asura, badly mauled the fourth, but there was no "almost" to this task. Saxby had her taste—enough so that if he stung her again, it might end her present incarnation.
It wasn't finished. Natalie wasn't yet safe.
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The One Who Eats Monsters - Casey Matthews (Part 2).txt
| 19 |
She returned to the burning lab, knowing the asura could use mortal currency to purchase leverage against Natalie. Slashing the safe open, she shoved money and one-kilogram gold bars into it, slowed by poison and her missing arm.
Sirens wailed in the distance, a sound distorted by the swimming in her head. She zipped the bag shut, stumbling from the lab. Blood drops fell like beads from her fingertips, pattering a trail on the floor. It would reduce to black dust once parted from her body a while, but she wasn't confident she could slip past the police in her state—not while weighed down by the bag.
Shuffling past Tooloo's headless corpse and up a stairwell, she felt the chamber shift and slumped into a wall.
Blackness covered her vision like a ribbon.
When she came to, voices were rising up the stairwell, beams from their lights cutting through the precious darkness that hid her. I cannot black out again.
Teeth gritting, she ascended the stairs to a floor open to the elements, surrounded by skeletal beams. Wind brushed her loose hair, cooling her sweat-soaked face. Blood now drizzled from her wounds, which wouldn't clot—perhaps, like a mortal, she'd bleed until she died. The kanaf stitches in her wounds tightened, forcing a grimace, but staunching her blood loss to a drip.
Below, more police cars arrived. They seemed small like toys, but there was no way past them. To shake off this poison, she had to sleep.
Collapsing against a vertical girder and slumping to her knees, she scanned the work area and spotted a stack of unplaced cinder blocks. Too weak now to walk, she was reduced to crawling, leaving behind her a slick of blood and some of her pride. Lying parallel to the stack of cinder blocks, she pulled her remaining fist back, punching a critical block at the base of the heap. It powdered and the stack teetered, heavy blocks dropping atop her. They thudded into her hard, small body, an avalanche that covered her and the duffel bag.
Lying still in her concrete cocoon, she slept.
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The One Who Eats Monsters - Casey Matthews (Part 2).txt
| 20 |
[ Hollow ]
For the third time since Enya Miller had come out of the institution, Kessler stared at a New Petersburg crime scene reduced to chaos.
It took the fire department a half-hour to extinguish the third floor and the process frightened about a dozen soaked dogs, countless mice, and several monkeys out into the frigid night. Animal control were now attempting to round them up, having to bob and weave around firefighters and their hoses.
Kessler and O'Rourke sat on the hood of their unmarked car eating burritos in the flashing glow of emergency lights.
"Is this beef or mutton?" It tasted a little gamey.
O'Rourke shrugged. "Big mystery."
Examining the burrito's contents, Kessler frowned. "Where the hell you get these at this time of night?"
"Part of the mystery."
An explosion upstairs ripped an outer wall open and a pressurized gas canister whistled through the air, smashing through the front grille of a parked ambulance. O'Rourke took a large bite.
"If you told me," Kessler said, glancing from the empty ambulance to his food, "I wouldn't eat it, would I?"
O'Rourke nodded, chewing.
With a sigh, Kessler finished it off. Wadding up the foil wrapper, he asked, "Is this burrito some kind of metaphor for the city?"
"The burrito is a burrito." O'Rourke swallowed the last of his and glanced peevishly down at his bandaged thumb. "This city, on the other hand, is a pain in my ass. Monkey bit me before you got here."
Uniforms had interviewed Carol Metzler, the senator's legislative aide, who had woken a block from the scene, apparently carried to a stranger's car and left there. Kessler had also snagged an interview with a senile woman hooked to an oxygen tank, whose apartment overlooked the scene.
According to Metzler, someone dressed like the Grim Reaper had killed an anti-Bradford fanatic in front of her. As for the old woman? She was the reason animal control was already on scene, but she'd called them about the dragon.
"I sure hope they don't put it down," she'd said. "I think they're endangered."
After assuring her no one would put the dragon down, he'd excused himself. Now he was considering a second round of interviews, maybe getting a better description, like how many horns it had and if it looked like it was from around here.
Summoning the courage, he glanced at O'Rourke. "You... you think it could've been a dragon?"
"Firefighters are cleared out." O'Rourke pushed off the car hood, ignoring the question. "Let's have a look."
The bodies were upstairs. Kessler mistook the first for a beanbag stitched into clothing, but up close, he realized someone had neatly bisected a morbidly obese person. He nearly lost the burrito.
There was a headless one a floor above and a uniform found another without a heart in a trailer outside. They located the head in a room next door to the body, but no one ever found the heart.
The room with the head looked like a lab, maybe twenty surviving animals still locked in their cages, along with workstations and a massive computer set up with six monitors and a hole in the floor where someone might normally have sat—likely where beanbag-guy had been before someone dropped him down one level and did to him precisely what they'd done to Banich's gun a few months back.
"Huh." O'Rourke steered the monitors to the side and set the keyboard up on a desk. "Good thing it's stuck back in this corner, or the fire and water would've done all this in." He flipped the keyboard over, peeling off a sticky note. "And look at that. Passwords."
O'Rourke started to work at the computer, and when the uniforms shifted to another part of the room, Kessler leaned in to whisper: "This was Enya. Had to be."
The fat detective snorted. "If she did this, are you really going to arrest her?"
"You approve?"
"No. I mean... if a teenage girl did this," he motioned all around—to the shattered floor, howling animals, scorched room, and the severed head two detectives were delicately trying to roll into an evidence bag—"are you going to walk to her fucking door and read her rights?"
"Then what do you suggest?" he hissed. "This is a triple homicide and about seven figures of property damage."
"Keep your eyes on the prize. I believe that Wiercinski woman, the one who talked about this being a war between 'gods.' Or powerful men. Whatever. This place is a war zone, and I'm not interested in soldiers. I want the generals."
Kessler noticed how quickly and fluidly O'Rourke moved through the computer. "You think this helps?"
"Whoever that guy was," O'Rourke said, pointing down through the hole, "he was not overly worried about information security. Whatever he's up to? I think it's all here. The anti-Bradford site's in his browser, and I think he was an admin. These guys were the whole middle tier—maybe they got wiped out by Enya or, more likely, a team of Army Ranger fucking ninjas paid by someone rich. I don't know, but from the safe back there, it's clear these guys going after Bradford were mercenaries too."
"So maybe there's a connection in the computer?" Kessler asked. "Emails? A way to figure out who was paying them?"
"Maybe. And Wiercinski gave me a hell of a lead. Zmey-Towers, she said—did you know they lobbied in support of that security bill Bradford's fought all year in the Senate? And there's more, I can feel it. Just need to find all the pieces so I can make them fit." His attention was laser-focused on the monitor.
Shining his light on the safe, Kessler approached it and crouched. A small puddle of blood had gathered there and he leaned to get a closer look. It dissolved before his eyes into a patch of black dust. "The hell?" Swiveling the light, he spotted other drops dissolving a few feet away. He stood and followed the disappearing trail.
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The One Who Eats Monsters - Casey Matthews (Part 2).txt
| 21 |
O'Rourke copied files onto a portable drive, running a hand through his thinning hair. Sweat plastered his stiff shirt to his chest and his brain zinged over what he'd found, disassembling the pieces he had so he could fit the new information.
Yes, this computer held secrets—a tingle of excitement and fear electrified his skin, one that meant he was brushing closer to those parts of New Petersburg most folks ignored. It was not in O'Rourke's character or job description, though, to ignore a thing just because it muddied the prevailing theories of reality. He wanted to see the grimy insides; to pry open the casing and see what made his city tick.
He'd researched the Senate security bill Melody Wiercinski had hinted was center stage, which, though thwarted, had come close to passing after a series of suspicious defections. Four senators who'd opposed it had abruptly flipped sides. Two had been subject to harassment: one's dead son had had his memorial page vandalized online; the other's niece had slit her wrists after strangers passed around images her ex-boyfriend had sent to a revenge-porn site. Whoever operated this computer had coordinated those attacks, plus blackmail leveled at the other two defectors.
It had the whiff of Soviet-era psychological warfare and manipulation. While O'Rourke couldn't yet connect this computer to Zmey-Towers, they were involved. The company had formed after the fall of the Soviet Empire a decade ago, a corporate haven for oil oligarchs and former KGB. A member of their board had been implicated—but never tried—for war crimes in Yugoslavia.
On paper, he knew Zmey-Towers had lobbied hard for the bill. Now he knew they'd done more than lobby; how much more was the question.
O'Rourke paused by a rack of spilled gas canisters, picking up a dinged sliver of metal with his handkerchief. "You've gotta be shitting me." It was a shuriken in the shape of a comic-book batarang—the kind idiot kids bought online. O'Rourke owned four. He deposited the batarang in an evidence bag.
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The One Who Eats Monsters - Casey Matthews (Part 2).txt
| 22 |
Kessler tracked the disintegrating blood drops up a stairwell and into the blistery air on the unfinished fourth floor. It led to a streak across the floor where someone had crawled, disappearing beneath a heap of collapsed cinder blocks. Dragging a block from the stack, he aimed his flashlight into the crevices.
He spotted a limp, girl's hand.
"Enya!" He tore the blocks away two at a time. "Can you hear me?"
He uncovered her face, flashing back to finding her strapped to that post in the desert. But no—she lifted her gaze, eyes no longer swollen to slits and no longer empty of color. Irises of flaming blue lit her eyes in a way that seized his heart, stole his reason. There was power in her eyes that made him believe all her strange tales of ghosts and demons.
"No hospital," she said.
But blood covered her chest—his stomach lurched when he saw she had no right arm below the shoulder. "You're going to die if I don't." He reached for his phone.
She seized his wrist with an iron grip. He struggled to pull away, not wanting his hand anywhere near those eyes. "No. Hospital."
It was her burning stare that convinced him. Relenting, he nodded, unable to think until she at last collapsed and stopped looking at him.
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