Cursing

by Lynne Murray

  Wade’s voice settled into an even deeper tone. “You seem upset,” he said to Helen. “You need to settle down.”

  Helen stared up at Wade in awe. “Who are you? The thug boyfriend?” The note of hysteria in her voice was draining away, but she rallied for another try. She poked her hand at my chest, but Wade pulled me back out of her reach before she could connect. “This woman killed my father.”

  “Clearly, this is a difficult time for you,” Wade said in a voice that was calmness distilled. “Do you have someone, a relative or friend who can be with you right now?”

  As if on cue, Mrs. Caine, Call-Me-Clara and Francine came bustling out of the building.

  “Mom!” the daughter threw herself into her mother’s arms but not to cry. Instead, she turned back to yell, “This woman killed Dad.”

  Wade stood silent as Mrs. Caine embraced her daughter. Settling his aviator shades on its nose and examining all the women carefully. After a moment he spoke with a tone of authority that sent several of the phone camera spectators on their way. “Your daughter is overwrought. She needs your comfort. We’ll leave you to it.” He put an arm around my shoulder and walked me away. None of the women followed.

  “Thanks for rescuing me from the bereaved daughter back there.”

  His arm around me felt very good. “Glad to help. So that was Carroll Caine’s family?”

  “Yeah, with encouragement from my co-worker Francine.”

  “And your co-worker accused you as being responsible for his death.” Wade’s voice was though.

  “That’s what Helen said. Francine seems to have told his relatives that I was involved.”

  “That’s odd.” Wade stopped and I did too. He took his arm off my shoulder and looked down at me, his mouth quirked a little. “How could Francine get such an idea?” When I looked up into his amber eyes everything seemed okay again.

  “I don’t know. Everyone at the staff meeting saw that I never laid a hand on him.”

  “Interesting. Carroll Caine was on our radar. But Francine bears further examination.”

  “I didn’t see anything on my eyeglasses readout about her having alien DNA.”

  “No, I didn’t either,” Wade said. “Chad said Carroll Caine showed up as fully human, but with some kind of extraterrestrial implants. Combine that with the fact that Chad witnessed him clearly goading you to lose your temper, and we’re starting to wonder if Caine was reporting back to an alien organization with an interest in the type of power that killed him.”

  “So there are other alien groups here?” Hmm, aliens looking for someone like me who could kill without touching. The thought made me shiver. “You guys are the good guys, right?”

  “We like to think so.” He smiled more broadly.

  “So these others, are they criminals?”

  “Technically, yes. But we’re a small force and it’s a big, bad galaxy out there. Believe me, you don’t want to meet that kind of agent. They’re not exactly picky about what kind of consent they ask for when they grab someone.”

  I fell into step beside him. He smelled of cedar and cypress. His solid presence made me feel protected.

  “Everybody seems to know more about this stuff than me. Kirby didn’t mention anything about a rival group last night.”

  Wade said nothing for a minute. We kept walking through the late afternoon sunshine, dodging other pedestrians were headed for the Market Street buses and the commute home. Wade seemed to be considering saying something, but unsure. I kept quiet, not wanting to make him decide to keep something back. Plus I just liked being next to him and watching him think.

  “Kirby had a lot to tell you last night, so he covered the most vital things first. Not everyone we recruit is able to believe everything we tell them, so we reveal it in stages. But I think it’s time you knew everything for your own safety. I think it’s more dangerous not to know what the threats are. I grew up not knowing what to believe, so I figure people deserve the facts if there’s no strategic reason to keep them in the dark.”

  Now I was curious about his background. I shelved that question, maybe I’d never get close enough for him to share that. Did I want to? Probably, but what if he was crazy. What if all of them were deluded?

  “What if I didn’t believe what you and Kirby are saying?”

  “At least you were warned. If these guys were monitoring you as we suspect, Caine’s death has probably redoubled their interest. The way he singled you out, it looks like he was set up to push you into revealing your talents. It’s rare for anyone without training to be able to kill in answer to a threat. They probably expected you to throw enough energy at him to knock him over. That would give him a threat to use on you and an excuse to get you alone and offer you a deal from his organization.”

  “Is that why you’re keeping an eye on me?” I asked.

  “You’re on my list for the day.”

  “Don’t you have a job or something?”

  “Today my job just happens to be where you are, which is a good thing don’t you think? That little raptor could have got violent and you don’t have any training in how to handle that. Let’s go to Sophie’s cafe. My truck is parked near there.”

  “I’m impressed that you found a parking place downtown.”

  “One of my skills.” Now he was grinning.

  I liked that too.

  We got to the cafe more quickly than I remembered. Wade was easy to talk to, even about non-life-and-death or alien conspiracy stuff.

  Sophie was behind the counter. A couple sat at one of the tables with cups of coffee in front of them, staring their cell phone screens. I asked to use the restroom. I needed a minute to settle down. Fifteen minutes with Wade after a confrontation with Helen, Francine and company made me feel almost dizzy. I took off my glasses and put them on the counter to wash my face. I was doing a lot of that lately. The glasses showed the red letters of a readout. I tapped the center to freeze the display and held them up to read it.

  In front of me was my image in the mirror.

  The red display on my glasses read:

  Death Dealer Hybrid of Human and Unknown Composition. Immature. Unlicensed. Dangerous. Approach with caution.

  My image in the mirror didn’t look any different than usual. I blinked. Still the same. The glasses had been pointing at me when I set them on the counter. I wrote the words down in the notebook in case the display disappeared.

  I came out of the restroom. Wade and Sophie fell silent. I held out the glasses so they could read the red lettered display frozen. “Is this what you see when you look at me with those glasses? Immature. Unlicensed. Dangerous. This is what all of you think of me?”

  “How did you get that readout?” Wade said, moving his body to block anyone but himself and Sophie from viewing them.

  “I put them on the counter. I guess they faced me.”

  Sophie cast a quick, urgent look at Wade. He pulled out his phone and took a shot of the glasses. “I’m sending this to Mr. Kirby.”

  The response was immediate.

  “Angie, you need to talk to Mr. Kirby right away,” Wade said. “Sophie, I wanted to give you and Chad a ride too, but Kirby said to bring Angie immediately.”

  “I have to stay another hour till the evening shift comes on,” she said. “Chad will be back soon. We’ll take the bus, you go ahead.”

  Chapter 7

  Feeney led us into the same room where I’d met Kirby. He came to the door as if he was impatient to get started. ‘Please sit down,” he said, going behind the polished antique table and leaving Wade and me to sort out the chairs facing him.

  “I saw the readout on your glasses based on your reflection, Angie. Wade indicated that you might feel we were withholding information about your powers from you. That wasn’t our intention. So let me be clear. We had some readings that someone of your power was in the area, Angie. I wish we could have been more direct in recruiting you, but we were afraid you might think we were working some kind of
con on you.”

  “Well, weren’t you?” I demanded.

  “Not in the criminal sense,” Kirby sat back in his chair looking a little miffed. “Even with Chad’s charm—”

  Wade snorted, “Because of his charm, you mean.”

  “Chad has had women suspect him of trying to trick them into unsavory situations.” Kirby’s expression halfway between amusement and exasperation. He is very good at breaking the ice, a natural born salesman,” He turned to me. “Once you met Sophie, you felt more trust in our intentions, right?”

  I heard the hesitation in my own voice. “Yes.”

  Wade’s expression softened at the mention of his sister-in-law. “My brother doesn’t deserve Sophie,” he said.

  “The reason we were keeping an eye on you was to protect you,” Kirby said. “And yes, whenever you get really angry you’re visible on all of our scans. Sorry Angie, but you get angry a lot.”

  “So Chad was following me around?”

  “We had a general idea of your routine and we wanted to intervene before the other side captures you to use you as a weapon.”

  “Which is different from your side, how?”

  “We have ethics, we follow the laws of the galaxy and most of the laws of Earth. We protect our people. The other groups who would want to use have no such limits. They have plans. Some of them only have appetites. They simply want to consume the power you have. We can’t let that happen.”

  His words send a wave of fear over me. “How can you prevent that? Am I supposed to kill them too, or do you do that?”

  “Let’s start small. Frankly, we’re learning about Death Dealers ourselves. Their profession is assassination. They don’t share information about how their genetic gifts interact with their training. It seems to me that when you refine your skills you should be able to defend yourself without needing to kill them.”

  “My boss wasn’t threatening me with physical harm, he was just yelling at me when I killed him.” My voice shook. I was close to tears. “If the police ever connected me with his death, I couldn’t have argued self-defense.”

  “You don’t need to worry about the laws of this planet, but you’re right to want to find out what triggered you and how to harness that power. Your destructive capacity is larger than usual, but you weren’t on any registry.”

  I sat there in shock. “You’re saying there’s a list of Death Dealers on the planet?”

  Kirby shrugged. “Not exactly. We keep track of any information we can get on Death Dealers. Technically they don’t claim any planet. They’re more like a freelance group, but yes, they did not originate on Earth. Not much is known about the other genes in your make up. Do you remember anything about your parents?”

  I stared at the wall. The voice from behind the fog of memory surfaced as if the speaker was there in front of me.

  Kill it, or I will kill you.” There was no anger in the voice, simply iron resolve.

  “I don’t care.”

  “You defy me?” the man said in a wondering tone.

  A woman’s voice asked. “You killed mosquitoes, why not this.”

  “They were biting me. This one—never. I will never...?” Now the girl in the mirror started to cry just as I had back then.”

  “She is weak, the man said.

  “She’s strong enough to stand up to you,” the woman said.

  “There are only two choices. You want her to be prey?”

  “No, but she is tougher than you think.”

  “You will not always be here to defend her.” The man’s voice faded.

  “Angie, are you okay?” Kirby said.

  The vision faded away and I found Wade and Kirby staring at me. I wasn’t going to share the contents of what I had just seen with them.

  “I don’t remember much about my parents. Just brief flashes.” All those memories seemed to be connected with death. I didn’t mention that. “My earliest memory is my aunt telling me my parents died in a car wreck. But I can’t recall their faces.”

  The door opened. Feeney stood aside to let Sophie and Chad come in. It seemed that Feeney personally escorted people to the rooms in his establishment. I couldn’t blame him for that. He probably knew about threats I couldn’t even imagine. The universe seemed to be a much more dangerous place today than I thought it was the day before.

  “You arrived at a good time,” Kirby greeted Chad and Sophie. He gestured them to chairs and they sat together with Wade between me and them. A wise idea.

  “I just learned you were following me,” I couldn’t keep the accusatory tone out of my voice as I glared at Chad.

  “It was for your own protection.” Chad’s unrepentant smile irritated me even more. Sophie put a warning hand on his arm. He patted her hand.

  “What others did you see besides Angie in the room before her boss died?” Kirby asked Chad.

  “All the rest were human. No other human-alien hybrids. Two had alterations that might have been alien implants.”

  “That did not appear in your report, Chad. Who were those two?”

  Chad nodded. “The man who was yelling at Angie and a woman who seemed to be enjoying it a lot.”

  “That would be Francine, she works with me in Accounting.”

  “The man was bending over Angie, verbally attacking her. The woman looked harmless.” Chad concluded.

  Kirby frowned. “And yet today Wade found that very same Francine encouraging Caine’s daughter to attack Angie. I’d like to have had that information.” He shared a significant glance with Wade. “She may be affiliated with a group outside the treaty, watching her.”

  “I was concentrating on reeling in the Death Dealer, which you must admit I did.” Chad took a step toward Kirby.

  “Do you mean reeling me in?” I demanded.

  “The attack on Angie’s place last night suggests that they almost stole her from right under our noses,” Kirby said to Chad, ignoring my question.

  “Stole me? What the hell is going on?” Suspicion gripped my gut, I rounded on Chad. “You were following me before—um before the thing with Mr. Caine?”

  “We were expecting it,” Chad said. “The amount of power you were kicking out was bound to explode.”

  “You were stalking me!” I couldn’t keep the anger out of my voice. I took a breath and broke out of the rage cycle as my aunt had taught me. I didn’t know if I could harm Chad and I didn’t want to find out.

  “Not exactly...” Chad started to say before Kirby cut him off.

  “That’s enough, Chad.” Kirby stood up. “Chad, why don’t you and Sophie stay here and check in with the rest of your team by phone. Angie, let’s talk in my office. Wade, you can come with us if Angie has no objection.”

  “No objection. I just want to know what’s going on,” I said.

  Chad seemed offended to be left out of Kirby’s next conference. Sophie winked at me and looked significantly at Wade and back at me. I ignored the glint in her eye. True, I did feel closer to Wade, maybe because he had comforted me when I was desperate. I wondered if Kirby had invited Wade into his office to protect himself from me.

  Kirby opened the door and we walked into an office that took an abrupt leap from Victorian furniture to low end office. The space was barely large enough to hold a metal desk with a wheeled task chair, a data screen and two straight chairs. Hiromi Quarry stood off to one side of the desk, her arms folded, ignoring the chairs.

  Kirby nodded to her. “Weapons Expert.”

  “Sir.” She nodded back but didn’t move.

  Kirby sat behind the desk.

  Before I could settle in one of the straight chairs, my phone buzzed with a message.

  “Angie’s office is dangerous,” Wade said. “We have to get her out of there.”

  “I think we won’t have to worry about that anymore,” I said. I held up my phone. “I just got fired. By text message.”

  Wade raised an eyebrow. “Classy,” he said with a deadpan expression.

&nbs
p; “Did they give a reason?” Mr. Kirby asked.

  “The grounds they gave were ‘threatening a client.’” I pointed to the last sentence of the text. “There’s a follow-up text saying not to return to get my personal effects. They will be delivered via messenger to my home address along with hard copies of the paperwork.”

  “They don’t want you back there,” Kirby commented, with a half smile. “It almost sounds as if they’re afraid of you.”

  “I don’t like them sending a messenger to her house,” Wade said. “That could be an ambush.”

  “They can keep my stuff,” I muttered. “I never bring anything important to me to work.” A habit formed in a childhood spent picking up and leaving with little or no notice. Relief at not having to go back was mixed with fear about how this was going to force me to accept the ETPA job offer just to make a living.

  “Grandmother already knows Angie’s apartment,” Wade said. “She can hang out and receive the messenger.”

  “I’ll probably be okay.” A sudden fear gripped me that they might ask Grandmother to protect me. I was more scared of her than of anything the law firm might send after me.

  “So let’s do it the other way,” Kirby said. “Send Angie along on Wade’s assignments tomorrow.”

  “With so little training?” Hiromi frowned.

  “Working with Wade will be a lesson in itself,” Mr. Kirby said.

  “If that’s your decision.” The Weapons Expert opened a file on the corner of Kirby’s desk nearest her. She pointed to the piece of paper on top. “Are you okay signing a release?” she asked me.

  “What? In case I get hurt working with Wade?” I cast a cautious look at Wade and then at Kirby and the solemn woman standing beside him. She and Kirby answered simultaneously.

  She said, “Yes.”

  Kirby said, “A mere formality.”

  Hiromi handed me the sheet of paper. It was a generic release, stating that I would keep what I saw confidential and would follow my supervising agent’s instructions, and the ETPA wouldn’t be responsible if I failed to do so. It also said the organization would cover any medical expenses if I were injured in the line of duty.