Thin Ice

by Renée Jaggér

  “I’m fine. Callie is taking good care of me.” He crossed the kitchen, making sure to walk around the other side of the island rather than in front of Mab.

  “Yes,” said Mab. “I heard she intervened at the factory. That whole mess could’ve been avoided if security at Kloud9 had been in order. You let a vampire walk in and assault my son.”

  I took the steaming cup from him and tried to shrink into a corner while the fae queen stared me down. “I didn’t know I should be watching out for vampires, and no offense, Your Highness, but I’ve saved Ronan’s life twice this week. I think I’m doing pretty well.”

  “It’s ‘Your Majesty,’” she corrected and sipped her tea. “Handling a crisis with dignity doesn’t excuse being the cause of said crisis, my dear. Though you’ve done well for yourself, haven’t you? Came out of it on top.”

  Ronan lowered his teacup and squinted at her. “What are you insinuating?”

  “Stop it,” I growled with more force than I intended.

  Both of them stared at me.

  I sighed. “Listen, it’s almost three o’clock in the morning. I’m tired. I’m sore. I just learned that vampires are a thing and had magic thrown at me. I chased an assassin through a building, and I’ve barely eaten or drunk anything all day. No offense, but at this hour, I can’t deal with drama.” I turned to Ronan and placed the tea on the kitchen island next to him. “Thanks for the tea. I’ll check the rest of the house before I go. It was nice meeting you, ma’am.” I gave the queen my best approximation of a curtsy and removed myself from the kitchen.

  “Callie, wait. Don’t leave mad.”

  I stopped when Ronan chased me as far as the front room. “I’m not mad. Just…overwhelmed, and a little insulted.”

  He sighed and shook his head. “Don’t let her get to you. She’s just like that. Why do you think we don’t talk?”

  “Because you delight in torturing your poor mother?” Mab had followed him.

  Ronan had enough and went to take his mother by the arm. “I’m glad you came, Mom, but it really is late. We can catch up over breakfast in a few hours. How’s that?”

  “As long as you’re not cooking,” Mab said as he opened the door. She turned to whisper to me, “His cooking is dreadful.”

  “Goodbye, Mom.” Ronan half-shoved her out the door.

  Mab clearly wasn’t ready to go. She gripped the doorframe and held on to give me one last glance. She smiled and turned to her son. “Win this one for us, my dear.”

  “Good night.” Ronan swung the door closed, forcing her to step back or get smacked in the face.

  She took the first option.

  Ronan locked the door and turned the security system back on. “I’m really sorry about her. She means well, but she’s awful when she gets like this.”

  I frowned at the closed door. “What did she mean, ‘Win this one for us?’”

  He sank into the closest chair with a sigh but didn’t answer my question. “Callie, I’m tired. Let’s do this another time.”

  “Oh, no. You’re not getting off that easy.” I turned on him. “You’ve been hiding something from me since the beginning. What did she mean? And why did you believe I already knew you were a fae prince?”

  “I think you know the answers to those questions, Callie.”

  “You can’t keep treating me like I know things, Ronan. I don’t. You’ve got to stop hiding stuff from me if you want to do my job effectively.”

  He sighed again and pushed up from the chair, going to the door. I expected Mab to still be out there, waiting on the front porch when he pulled it open, but there was no sign of her. “Look, we can talk about this later, but right now, I think we both need to get some sleep. I’ll see you around noon. Don’t worry about coming in until then.”

  “But—”

  “I’ll call one of the part-timers,” he offered and gestured to the door.

  I clenched my fists. He wasn’t going to listen to me, no matter what. “Fine,” I growled and pulled out my phone. “But I’ll call someone in. At least let me do my job.”

  “Whatever.” He threw his hands up and walked away, leaving the door open. “I’m going to bed. Do whatever you want. I don’t know why I thought you’d do anything else.” He walked away, grumbling to himself.

  That’s a funny way to treat the woman who saved your life twice in one week, I thought and shut the door.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I stayed until David showed up. It must have been the other guard at the factory, since I didn’t recognize him. As it turned out, Mab had indeed called and told him not to bother coming to work. After a brief introduction and instructions to keep Ronan in the house until I got back no matter how much he complained about it, I left.

  The sun was on the verge of coming up as I drove across town, suppressing yawns with every mile. At least Ronan had told me I didn’t have to come back in until noon, which meant I might get five glorious hours of sleep. If Sam went to class, that was. Dammit, it was Wednesday, wasn’t it? Sam didn’t have class on Wednesdays until the afternoon. That meant they’d be hanging out, expecting me to be personable. I was sure Sam would have a plethora of questions to ask me about my first full day on the job, but I was too tired to answer them.

  Sam, being the insane insomniac they were, was already up when I arrived and waiting by the door with coffee.

  “Bless you,” I muttered, taking the mug. The coffee wouldn’t keep me up, but maybe long enough to drag myself through the shower.

  Sam hung out near the door to the bathroom, sipping coffee while I took a hot shower. “So, tell me about it. Where’d you go? What’d you do?”

  “Stuff and things,” I answered with a grunt, resting my head against the shower wall.

  Should I tell Sam someone took shots at Ronan? That’d just make them worry, but then again, Sam had a right to know, especially since the vampires didn’t seem to be limiting their attacks to Ronan. I’d already had one run-in with them, and if Sam hadn’t taken off when they did, they’d have been right there with me when the vamps attacked. It was only a matter of time before Sam figured out what was going on. If I’d been more alert, I might’ve spilled everything, but it took all my energy to get through the shower and put on my sweats.

  Sam must’ve gotten the hint when all my answers were grunts or variations thereof. They left me alone and let me crawl into bed. I thought I was tired enough I’d fall right asleep and stay that way until the alarm went off, but I woke up after two hours and couldn’t get back to sleep. With nothing to do, I went out to the living room and joined Sam, who was watching some idiots be really bad at a game show. While Sam ate cereal and yelled at the contestants for bidding too much on wrong answers, I dragged out the book Ronan had given me to read.

  He said all the answers I wanted were in that thing. Too bad it was so dry, I almost fell asleep again while reading it. Walter might’ve been paranoid enough to do his job well and had decent taste in guns, but he wasn’t a writer by any means.

  Sam picked up the remote and turned the volume way down on a commercial break. “So, where’d you go? I want to hear all about it.”

  I finished skimming a paragraph on the importance of situational awareness in the restroom before I answered. “Photoshoot in New York.”

  “Oooh, sounds exciting.”

  I shrugged. “Not really. It was mostly me being a third wheel while everyone gawked at him. I was bored out of my mind.” I shut the book. “Actually, no. Something did happen. Some asshole shot at us.”

  Sam’s eyes doubled in size. They froze with a spoonful of cocoa balls halfway to their mouth, milk dripping back into the bowl. “Shut. Up!”

  “And there was someone in the house when we got back. Turned out to be his crazy mother, of all people. Still, I saved his ass. You’d think he’d be a little nicer to me. Instead, he gives me this.” I picked up the book and let it fall to the floor with a loud thud. “This is torture.”

  “You should
try taking Spinesta’s Theories of Modern Art.” Sam snorted and crunched their cereal. “You’d think a course about art would be mostly visual, but no! He had us reading biographies and watching this God-awful biopic on this artist in San Francisco. It was two hours of some Boomer whining about how millennials are killing performance art.”

  I pulled my legs up to sit cross-legged in the chair. “It’s not even the reading. It’s that he’s so blasé about everything. The guy gets shot at, and his biggest care in the world is how his hair looks when he gets off the plane. Here I am, trying to do my job, and he’s taking selfies and tagging locations. I’ll tell you what. If I was a would-be assassin, the first thing I would do is follow him on Instagram. That way, I’d know exactly where he was and what he was up to all the time. I swear he must’ve made twenty posts yesterday.” I pulled out my phone and held it out to them. “And look, two already today. Does this guy even sleep?”

  “Do you?” Sam got up to take their bowl to the sink, where they rinsed it out and dropped it in the dishwasher. “That’s the pot calling the kettle black, Callie.”

  “I suppose.” I frowned down at the screen and scrolled through everything he’d posted the day before. “I just can’t shake the feeling that he’s lying to me about something. Something important. No matter how much I push him on it, he won’t tell me, and it’s driving me crazy.”

  Sam grabbed the phone out of my hands as they passed by and hopped up to sit on the arm of our worn-out sofa. Their thumbs slid over the screen, scrolling over all the pictures I’d just looked at. “This is why you should be hitting that.”

  “He’s my boss, Sam.”

  “So? Look at this.” They turned the phone around, showing me an underwear ad campaign Ronan had featured in last year. “He’s hotter than lava. He’s rich. Bet you fifty bucks he’s got an off-limits room in his house he calls a playroom.”

  “This isn’t Fifty Shades, Sam. That’s not how it works in real life.” I grabbed the phone back. “Even if it was, that movie is awful.”

  “Fine. Let’s compare him to a movie you like. You like Rambo, right?”

  “Screw you. You know I hate that movie.”

  “Okay, then, Miss Film Critic. What movies do you like?”

  I tried to think of the last movie I’d seen. “Wonder Woman?”

  Sam wrinkled their nose. “Of course that’s what you’d pick. Is there even a romantic subplot in that one?”

  “Is that what we were talking about?”

  Sam finally picked up the remote and shut off the TV, which neither of us was watching. “My point is, if you want a guy to spill a secret, that’s the best way. Works every time. People are more likely to tell secrets after sex.”

  “I don’t think that’s ‘people,’ Sam. I think it’s you.”

  “True.” Sam put a finger to their chin. “No wonder you never tell me any secrets.”

  “Besides,” I continued, bending over to pick up the book I’d dropped, “Ronan’s not my type. He’s…”

  “Charming, sexy, and filthy-rich?”

  “He reads Dickens and plays the violin. The guy is a nerd girl’s dream.” I flipped through the pages, absently looking for an interesting section to read. “Never mind that it would compromise my ability to do my job effectively if there were any sort of romantic attraction between us. And don’t even get me started on how complicated my life would get if I were any more involved with him than I already am. His personal life seems to be a mess. Plus, the minute things stop being professional between Ronan and me, he’ll lose respect for my abilities as a bodyguard.”

  “I hear you,” Sam said, nodding. “But nowhere in there do I hear ‘I don’t want to bone my boss.’”

  I looked up from the book and said firmly, “I can’t guard a body I’m sleeping with, Sam. That’s final.”

  Sam was about to make another rebuttal when my phone went off. I picked it up. Anything would be a welcome reprieve from the current conversation, even the unexpected email I’d just gotten. “Huh. That’s weird. It’s from Jax.”

  “Jax?”

  “Guy from my unit.”

  Sam snorted and giggled. “Sorry. You said ‘unit.’”

  I ignored Sam’s chuckling since they found humor in the oddest things and opened the email. It’d been months since I’d heard from him, and I had been starting to worry that he might not be okay. Poor guy’d had it much rougher than me. His wife had divorced him almost as soon as he came back, taking their daughter to Iowa, where she was from.

  The last time we spoke, he’d just been evicted from his apartment and was having trouble finding steady work. While I’d gotten out of the military mostly unscathed, he’d been badly hurt. Jax had been the only one to survive the attack on our unit, myself excluded. Unlike Jax, though, I hadn’t gotten hurt. He’d spent almost a month in the hospital before they discharged him. Looking at him, you could barely tell he’d been attacked, thanks to all the skin grafts, but in the right light, you could still see the scars on his neck and chin. He’d always been self-conscious about how he looked.

  Jax had lost everything, and I worried about him a lot. Sometimes it seemed the only thing keeping him sane was our weekly chats. Over time, those turned into monthly chats, then just the occasional email. I hadn’t heard from Jax in almost four months now.

  The email he sent sounded positive. Apparently, he was back in town after some time away and wanted to meet for drinks tomorrow night before he had to leave again. I sent him a quick reply, saying that sounded great, and suggested a venue.

  “Setting up a date?” Sam made kissing sounds.

  I snorted and put the phone down. “Dating Jax would be like dating my younger brother. I’m going to go see if I can get another hour of shut-eye before I have to go back to work. I think the reading has convinced me I need it.”

  I took the book with me to my bedroom and slid it under the bed. If there were any answers to my questions hidden in there, I hadn’t found them. Ronan was just going to have to suck it up and explain things to me the old-fashioned way.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I went back to bed but couldn’t sleep. For some reason, the only thing I could think about was the weird flashback I’d had at Ronan’s photoshoot—if it had been a flashback. It hadn’t felt like one; it had felt like a bad dream. I just couldn’t figure out why I would start having them now after so long. PTSD was a common affliction among soldiers, and it wouldn’t be unusual for me to have some of the symptoms, especially after everything I’d seen.

  Except it shouldn’t have taken years to manifest. Those things were supposed to happen when you got home. I’d watched Jax disintegrate when he started having flashbacks. He and I had even talked about it, and I’d helped him find a good therapist so he could get through his messy divorce. Flashbacks, PTSD, visions—those things didn’t happen to me.

  All this worrying is giving me a headache. I sat up in bed and rubbed my temples. It was ten thirty, only fifteen minutes before I was supposed to be up and getting ready for work. Might as well go caffeinate.

  I left the bedroom, expecting to find Sam where I had left them, on the sofa watching television. Instead, the apartment was eerily empty. The skin on the back of my neck prickled. I put a hand to it and told myself it was the lack of sleep. “Sam? You here?”

  Silence answered.

  Something moved in the kitchen, and I sighed. “Sam, you ass. Why didn’t you answer me when I…”

  My voice trailed off when I came around the corner and found the kitchen empty of everything except another shimmering portal. What the hell is happening to me? What are these things? I let go of the wall to back away, but as before, the portal rushed toward me.

  The next thing I knew, I was sitting in an uncomfortable chair in a hot room under a bright light. Two officers sat across the table from me, their hair perfect and eyes cold and calculating. Practically inhuman. The back of my head ached in that special way only concussions hurt, and the
pressure around my skull told me there were bandages in place.

  “Private Hart,” said the officer on the right, adjusting his glasses. “Do you read a lot of books?”

  “No, sir.” I shifted in my chair. “The occasional paperback when things are slow, but everyone does that.”

  He looked up from the paper he was holding. “Your report sounds like one of my wife’s romance novels.”

  The other officer read some of it aloud. “Private Xavier and I came around the rock formation while on patrol. I heard Private Jensen call out, then a burst of gunfire. By the time I arrived, he was already bleeding out. I attempted to apply first aid while Private Xavier kept watch, but was unsuccessful. Private Xavier called out a warning, and I turned in time to see something attack him. The perpetrator was bipedal and moved faster than I was able to perceive. It bit him in the throat and the side of the face before either of us could react. I believed Private Xavier, as well as the rest of my unit, to be DOA.” He lowered the paper and folded his hands. “This thing attacked and bit everyone else in your unit, but all you got was a bump on the head. Makes it a little hard to believe, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know why it didn’t attack me, sir. I thought…”

  “Go on, Hart,” encouraged the first man with the glasses. “We’re here to get to the bottom of this.”

  I swallowed and nodded. “I am, or I was, the only female in my unit, sir. I thought maybe that was why. This thing wasn’t human, even if it looked like it. It had to be an animal, right? No human could move that fast.”

  The two officers exchanged a look.

  I leaned forward, placing one hand on the table. “What about Jax?”

  “Private Xavier’s condition is none of your concern.” The second officer picked up his papers and tapped them against the table, straightening them before he stood. “Just one more question, Private Hart. Who else have you told? Who else knows what happened out there?”