by A. L. Tyler
“Neither have I,” I said. “That’s all I need to know. You shouldn’t have told me. It could get you executed, Agent Warren.”
“I would rather live with threat than the guilt,” he said without hesitation. “I didn’t expect to see you ever again. I can find somewhere else, and someone else, for you to stay with.”
I considered the offer. “You’re obviously better at your job than I am at mine, or I never would have trusted you to begin with. You are phenomenally talented. I’d like to stay here. Please don’t let Alex kill me. I’m sure we would both regret it.”
The walls, the smells, the sounds—it was all familiar, and so damn hurtful, as I turned to go to my room.
“Jette!” I heard Nick take a step forward, but then he stopped. “Did you mean it? Are we done?”
I’d trusted him. I’d believed him.
I kept walking, and I shut the door behind me.
I LISTENED TO THE SOUND of Nick’s voice for most of the night, calling his superiors, calling other handlers, calling connections in the grimy criminal world. He was asking favors and making deals, ringing the bell that Alex Mordley, someone else high on the Bleak’s list, was likely in the area.
After all, I had no doubt he would want to look in my eyes when he ended my life.
The irony of the whole thing raced through my brain that night, and I wondered if the magic of the Topaz was somehow harmonizing to punish me more harshly than the universe usually did.
I had emotionally manipulated Alex, and now he wanted me dead. On the eve of his great revenge, Nick had emotionally manipulated me. Now I knew what Alex had gone through when I’d stolen his share of the Topaz. If I wanted to survive, I had to trust the person who had jilted me. This was the kind of shit that Shakespeare and Greek poets wrote about, and it didn’t usually end well for those people.
Karma is real, and it’s a bitch.
A few people came and went, and most of them asked about speaking to me. They wanted details on what had happened. Nick knew better and said I was sleeping.
Around four the next morning he slid a new phone under my door. He must have given Marge the number, because I already had a dozen new messages.
RU okay?
Nick said ur fighting.
Glad you’re back, pls text me
And on and on they went. I sighed. There was no way to explain this over a few texts.
I’m back. I’m fine. We got in the pool.
My phone buzzed a moment later. If he hurt you, I will kick his ass.
Doubtful. I erased the word and tried again. I’ll explain later.
Not in writing. And not in full. No one could know about my father. Secrets like that put lives in danger, and I didn’t want to endanger Marge any more than she already was.
Which meant I needed to come up with a good reason for hating Nick with the burning passion of a thousand supernovas. Something that didn’t even remotely relate to the fact that he had brainwashed me with kisses and charms to the point that I could look at a picture of my own father and believe it was someone else.
And that he’d confessed while I was shirtless. And under him.
I am so stupid.
By six in the morning, the apartment was quiet. I was hungry. I walked out of my room feeling like a ghost. My eyes were dry and hurting, and the smell of coffee left in the sink by Nick’s numerous overnight visitors only made me think of the all-night breakfast diners that Alex so adored.
“I asked someone to bring breakfast burritos.”
Nick stood in the dim light of the hall, still wearing the same clothes from the previous day. He’d removed his tie. His collar and hair were untidy. His lack of shoes made me think he was planning to hole up with me for a while.
Nope.
“Is that okay? Because I can get—”
“It’s fine.”
He sighed. “You’re acting childish.”
“You’re treating me like a child,” I said, feeling a deadly calm settle within me. I wasn’t upset anymore. I wasn’t even angry. “I’m treating you like an agent. That’s our relationship now.”
He went to the refrigerator and pulled out a brown paper bag, tossing it on the counter instead of handing it to me. “You can’t pretend it didn’t happen.
“I’m not pretending.” I opened the bag and grabbed a foil-wrapped burrito. The delivery must have been recent because it was still lukewarm. “It didn’t happen. I heard you. You were doing your job.”
“I chose not to do my job.” He threw himself down in his favorite chair. The sky was starting to turn lavender over the mountains out the window. “For you. I did warn you that I would lie where my job required it.”
“And now I know what that means.” I got a glass from the cabinets and filled it at the sink. “I was a job to you. That’s fine. I can live with that. But you chose to put both of our lives in danger. You chose to hurt me when you knew I would have been happier not knowing.”
His eyes seared into me. “Would it have hurt you more if I’d told you this morning instead of last night?”
I might have gone full Alex Mordley on him. “That doesn’t matter.”
“It does,” Nick said. He pushed a hand back through his hair and his eye twitched. He wanted some blood. “I broke protocol for you. I broke the law for you, and as long as your immunity holds, that’s only a capital offense for one of us. I did it because I want you in my life. Completely. No lies. And I will wait for you, for as long it takes for you to forgive me. All I have is time.”
I probably should have been touched. Instead, I felt nothing. “I want you on my case. But I’m also going to request reallocation. I don’t want to work together anymore.”
BOOM!
Nick was on top of me, taking me to the floor behind the kitchen bar. A strange vibration ran through the building. It took a moment for me to process that the sounds in my ears weren’t some manner of apocalyptic spell.
Something had exploded.
Fifty car alarms sounded at once, and I stared into Nick’s eyes, but nothing happened inside the apartment.
I shoved him away. “I’m not a child. I can take care of myself—next time, go after the stalker that’s trying to kill me.”
There was smoke outside the living room windows. I frowned as I rushed over, nearly tripping over the coffee table. Nick was already there, and the look in his eyes said it all.
Yes, Alex had been following me. Yes, he had probably been there last night, watching us in Nick’s car.
And as we stared down at the twisted, flaming remains of Nick’s old, beloved Chevelle, I wondered if he was watching us now.
Chapter 31
I insisted on returning to my apartment later that day. I packed my bags and refused Nick’s help in cleaning up the kitchen. It was easier to cope with the mess on the table in the light of day. I cleared the table, and took out the trash, and loaded the dishwasher. I looked around, and so did Nick, but we didn’t find any traps or missing property.
I knew something was missing, though. Even if it was a single hair from my pillowcase. Now that Alex had me, he wasn’t going to let me go. He had something now to conduct a tracking spell.
Nick called in a protective detail of handlers, but it didn’t take much arm twisting. His car was a total loss. It was proof positive that Alex was in the area.
Sending a doll to make your ex breakfast is passive aggressive. Blowing up her new boyfriend’s car was the kind of irresponsible rage that could only be contributed to directly witnessing...whatever the hell had happened that night.
In any case, there was a big, fat reward on Alex’s head. The area was crawling with handlers now, and while Nick all but begged me to leave town for a while, I wasn’t inclined to listen to him anymore.
Alex was here, and he’d made his move. He wasn’t running. I was staying where it was easy for handlers to follow my every step. Either Alex or I would leave this town in a body bag. I wasn’t living with an ax over my head
.
“God, that is so fucking romantic.” Marge stood in the aisle between the evidence shelves, two large boxes stacked one on top of the other and her eyes and crazy tall beehive hairdo the only things I could see. “Did you kick him in the balls? You probably had a good angle to kick him in the balls.”
She carried the boxes out and set them on at the work table.
“I was preoccupied,” I frowned. After thinking it over, I’d realized that she was already due for a memory wipe and possible execution just for knowing me, and any secret I told her wouldn’t make a difference. I needed the support. “I got out of the car, and he went on about how he didn’t want to hurt me, and that’s when the whole thing with the demented doll happened.”
Marge chewed her lip, analyzing me. I knew what was coming.
“You know, you really hadn’t known him that long—”
Gods. “I know! Believe me, I know. It’s just, I’ve never been that comfortable with anyone. He talked me off the ledge. I thought, maybe...”
She raised her eyebrows and put her hands on her hips. “And that’s probably because he was creep-stalking you and knew how to push your buttons. I’m so sorry, hon. Do you want to break some shit with a hammer?”
Marge started to empty drug paraphernalia from the boxes, checking the evidence against her disposal manifest as she went.
“No, thanks.” Breaking things had never brought me anything but mild depression.
Marge, however, loved smacking glass bongs with a mallet. She laid her target on the work surface, leaving it in the plastic evidence bag to contain the shards. I barely had time to appreciate the fine craftsmanship and swirls of green and blue worked down the length of the neck before she’d lowered her safety goggles and started crunching it to dust.
“So what are you doing now?” she asked, resting the mallet over her shoulder. “What do we have to look forward to? Are you going to go looking for him?”
“Looking for... My dad?” Sadness welled up inside me. He’d made his choice, the same as Nick, and he’d chosen the job. Over me. “No. I’m not going to look for him. I asked to be reallocated. I’m not going to be working with Nick anymore.”
Marge’s eyes wandered. She pursed her lips.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“What?”
“Nothing!” She set down the mallet and started to remove her work gloves, sighing as she awkwardly maneuvered the goggles up and over her hair. “It’s just, there’s this case, and I thought—”
“Marge.” Most of the cases she brought me weren’t paranormal. Sometimes they ended with me, tied up, in a cabin in the woods.
She pointed a finger. “This is serious. Something happened while you were out of town, and it’s the kind of thing Nick would have loved. But if you don’t want to work my leads anymore...”
Marge went back to the box, pulling out some papers to shove through the shredder, a pair of butterfly knives that would go into our metal disposal box, and a laptop that would likely be auctioned.
“Fine.” I sighed. I needed the distraction. “Give me the file. I’ll tell my new partner I found it on my own, and we might be interested in pursuing it.”
Grinning with glee, Marge scampered toward our private front office. She opened her filing cabinet and dug to the bottom before producing a plain office folder and handing it to me.
About six newspaper clippings immediately fell out the bottom, and I ducked down to pick them up.
“So, you guys left, and all of a sudden there’s all of these weird break-ins being reported.” She held up her hands, and I was sure the word ‘aliens’ was about to come out of her mouth. “It started when I got a call from Melody up in Lynx County, because this guy called her to report that his house was broken into and only his medical suppositories were stolen. But that’s a whole different case—we started talking about people stealing weird shit, and the time that woman came in here to report that someone was stealing the dog crap out of her backyard. And Melody said that they recently had a medical marijuana break-in, and the only things taken were the personal effects one of the employees had left behind the counter. The thief dumped her purse and took a hairbrush and some makeup and her phone, but left the cash.”
Hair. Things that have touched the body. A symbol of loved ones, handled carelessly.
I shuffled through the articles in the folder. They were all articles from small local papers and printouts from online, and all concerning items stolen in that last two weeks.
Hens’ eggs from someone’s backyard coop. Neighbor kids.
Car keys from several cubes in a workplace. Office jackass.
A lamp, from someone’s bedroom. Yes, that’s weird. Drugs? And several pairs of underwear. Escalating peeping tom. Marge, you know better.
And then things started to take a turn for the dark.
An early 1800s chair, carved from oak, with a horsehair cushion was taken overnight from an antiques seller. Okay, but that’s still pricey. For resale?
Dogwood trees, stolen from a local greenhouse. That’s somewhat concerning.
A cobra, reported missing and suspected stolen by a licensed private collector. I paused, going back to the start of the file. Hens’ eggs. Shit.
I closed the file. “Do you mind if I keep this?”
Marge smiled. “I got another one, didn’t I?”
“Probably not,” I said stoically. “It’s possible someone wanted to landscape with flowering dogwoods for free. The snake might have escaped, and the collector reported it to save face when the situation inevitably goes south. Maybe someone just liked that chair, and some teenagers needed ammunition for a house egging—”
“Or?” Marge said expectantly.
I took a deep breath, reminding myself that the brain sees patterns where it wants to. I was looking for it, and I’d found it, and it was possible the pattern wasn’t there. “Or, my psycho ex is gearing up a torture chair and trying to breed a creature capable of providing me a prolonged and painful death.”
“Huh.” Marge bit her lip, looking away and nodding. “I’ll keep my fingers crossed for eggings and escaped cobras.”
I tapped the edge of the folder on the desk. Nick was running point on the whole Alex thing, and I should tell him. Every time I thought about talking to him, the horrible feeling of having been fleeced and abandoned washed over me.
Marge held out her hand. “Do you want me to—?”
“Yeah.” I shoved the folder back at her. “Thank you. If you could add a sticky note to research juvenile cockatrices and Civil War era interrogation practices, that would be great.” I paused. “Also, he might want to visit whoever reported those stolen eggs, because those chickens—”
Marge slapped a pen and notepad on the table. I sighed; even the thought of leaving him a hand-written note felt like a minor defeat of some sort.
“Cockatrice,” I repeated. “Civil War torture. Check on the chickens. That’s it.”
That wasn’t it. My mind was already exploding with information that Marge wouldn’t be able to fully convey, but this was my new reality. I needed space from Nick and the turmoil he had created in my life. I needed to figure out who I was, and where one went when her life’s purpose dissolved before her eyes.
Marge gave me a long look. “Okay. Sure. I’ll tell him.”
My phone rang. I dug it out of my bag before frowning at the unknown number.
Alex? “Hello?”
“That’s a very informal greeting. I always assumed you to be more professional, Agent Driftwood.”
My eyes went wide. I darted out of the room before my caller could overhear Marge saying anything damning.
His voice sent a tingling fear down my spine. I hurried down the hall and outside to the parking lot. “Agent Whent. Who gave you this number?”
“Your former handler provided it as a means of contact,” he said with a purring satisfaction. “I’m calling because you were reallocated.”
No. My heart dropped. This was bad—incredibly bad.
“It seems you’ve garnered a reputation for working well with vampires.” Whent gave a low laugh. “You’ve been reallocated to me.”
About the Author
I grew up in Broomfield, Colorado, reading and creating art. (But mostly reading.) I am a second generation trekkie, a fan of obscure anime and most science fiction and fantasy on television today, and I have dressed up to attend the conventions. I proudly have a time turner and a tribble sitting next to the VHS copies of Star Wars on my shelf at home—still seeking a sonic screwdriver to add to the mix.
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