by Robin Hale
“Now drink that before it gets cold. I know how you are about your coffee.” The six and a half foot monument to the magic of science and good genes shot me a mock-serious look and pointed a stern finger in my direction. “And don’t worry.” Those blue eyes moved meaningfully to look at the web of photos, string, and handwritten notes on my cork board. “She won’t get her hands on you again,” he promised as he exited my office.
Well, it was still very sweet of him to bring me coffee, even if the rest of that interaction made me feel like an idiot.
After a moment, Kevin’s head popped back into the doorway. “Oh, and Molly, would you mind doing the quarterly audit for the department again for me this time? I’d do it myself, but I’m all tangled up in this university business.” The flash of his smile was blinding, almost enough to distract me from the awful favor he was asking.
I nearly said no. I should have said no. But standing there in my office, the feeling of his lips still on my forehead, the smell of the coffee he’d brought me filling the air…what were a few hours of tedious extra work for a…a friend?
“Sure, Kevin.”
The radiant grin he wore grew brighter, and it was like staring into the sun. “You’re the best.”
And like that, he was gone again.
‘You were very brave.’
I grimaced. That was not how I would have described my behavior during the Silhouette’s heist. In light of the Captain’s visit, my mind drew unfortunate parallels between the Silhouette’s easy flirtation and the frustratingly irregular attention that Kevin paid to me. Obviously, the Silhouette knew that she was beautiful. That she was perhaps the sexiest woman that I had ever seen, much less in person. I’d never been able to keep myself from blushing, and my artless stammer was a giveaway all on its own.
I’d thought, there at the end, that she might kiss me. Just as I’d thought that Kevin had been about to.
It was idiotic, really. The Silhouette was almost unearthly. Almost too beautiful to manage to seem real, even as I could still remember the precise scent of her delicate perfume. Why on earth would someone like that ever spare me a second glance? I’d gotten in her way, that was all. She was bored. Probably lonely, lying in wait to pull off her theft. It wouldn’t be the first time that some gorgeous woman had decided that flirting with me was just the boost they needed.
Jenna’s laughing eyes flickered across my memory and I shook my head to clear it. That phone call from my mother must have hit me harder than I had anticipated. I was over Jenna. I was. I hadn’t thought of her in ages, but suddenly she was on my mind again. The patron saint of everything I didn’t get to have in a relationship.
The thought brought me up short. A relationship. I wasn’t seriously thinking about a relationship with the Silhouette, was I? That would be absurd — I’d spent less than half an hour with her and I’d been tied up and babbling that whole time. It was just that I’d never been one for casual hookups or purely physical crushes that were easily forgotten. That was all. When I felt attraction, I was used to becoming attached or involved. Or at least wanting to be.
But a relationship with the Silhouette, aside from being ridiculous on the face of it, was also impossible. She was a criminal. The city’s most notorious thief. And if I was anything, I was the girl Friday for the city’s beloved hero. There was no way that I could indulge in something like that, even if she was attractive. Even if she’d clearly been flirting with me. Even if she’d listened to my inane rambling, engaged me on my stupid reminiscing about the fire opal.
I closed my eyes and swept a hand down my face. Get it together, Fawn. The last thing I needed was to get attached to someone else I couldn’t have. Hadn’t I learned anything? Didn’t I know perfectly well just how it hurt not to be good enough? Not to be attractive enough, interesting enough, desirable enough for the person I wanted?
I was background. Support. A useful nerd, but nothing to write home about. I was too soft and too shy to catch the interest of someone like the Silhouette. Like the Captain.
I scowled and picked at the lid of the coffee Kevin had handed me. I brought the rim to my lip and sipped cautiously, hoping to avoid a burn if he’d gotten it extra hot — and nearly spat out the first mouthful as soon as it touched my tongue.
Oh no. Oh, that was disgusting. I choked it down and hastily dumped the rest of the cup into the sink at the back of the office, rinsing the stainless steel bowl to get rid of the evidence.
What on earth had given him the idea that I took my coffee with what tasted like fifteen pumps of different syrups? Oh, that was vile. Coffee, I believed quite firmly, should be bitter. I took it black, the darker the roast the better, and I was moderately astonished that Kevin had managed to go quite so long without learning that.
I took a long pull of the coffee I had bought that morning and shuddered. It was still quite nice of him to bring it by, I would just need to remember that he had no idea what my tastes were.
The thought sent a sudden pang through my chest. Kevin drank decaf. Milky. Caffeine had stopped affecting him once his abilities came online, and he liked to use it as a gauge for whether or not a restaurant was paying attention to his order.
I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed the heel of my hand against my forehead.
Why did I insist on doing that to myself? Why couldn’t I just let myself be at peace, alone?
The sound of my phone chirping on my desk tore me from my moping, and I opened the text message gratefully, eyes scanning the contents. Huh. That was unexpected. I picked up a pad of sticky notes from my desk and scrawled a few words.
‘Consignment - Library - Donations?’
I tore off the sheet and added it to the mind-map of dates, locations, items, and people that had consumed my attention since the theft at the university. I was going to figure it out. I knew that I would.
6
LANA
The coffeehouse was in that mid-evening blur, the time when it transformed itself from a daytime coffee shop where aspiring novelists, screenwriters, programmers, and flustered stage managers agonized over the pile of catastrophe they found in their laptops, into a hip, comfortable bar where there might be folk singers one night and an alt-rock parody band the next. Where the lights were never too bright, but never so low you couldn’t see your drinking companion. Where there would always be people, and suggesting you meet there for a drink was never going to be the wrong thing to do.
I’d judged it too harshly at first. It wasn’t just some staged, theme-park interpretation of a place that might have character. It had a soul that I could feel in the vibrations of the building, even if those vibrations were less than ten years old.
It just wasn’t like the unselfconscious cool of my own bar, the Shady Dame. For one thing, there’d been a smoking ban in Opal City since before the coffeehouse was constructed, so it lacked the decades-thick musk of nicotine and regret that had seeped into the Dame’s wallpaper back when the previous owner had thought wallpaper was a good idea. But it had a personality all its own. And either I was wrong to think it had been thought up by hipsters, or I was wrong to think that I didn’t like hipsters.
I could practically hear Izzy in the back of my head, insisting it was the latter.
At any rate, the coffeehouse was comfortable and I was well on my way to becoming a regular there. I didn’t have a laptop with me; I didn’t particularly like them. Instead, I had a notebook, a graph-ruled thing in which I wrote my plans and observations in a shorthand another patron’s great-grandmother probably learned in school, but that would be inscrutable to the mass of curious eyes around me.
It was my fifth consecutive day spending my planning hours in the coffeehouse across from Ms. Molly Fawn’s apartment building, and I had practically nothing to show for it aside from an appreciation for properly prepared espresso. I sighed down at the notes I’d taken in the back of the book, separate from the future jobs I was planning, the carefully choreographed thefts and getaways.
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Molly Fawn was the most frequently thanked acknowledgment in scientific papers published out of her alma mater and had been for the past three years.
She really was as much of a homebody as my network had suggested she was, despite her rather thrilling day job.
Her best friend was one of the rising stars in the newsroom at the Opal City Enquirer and was the only person aside from Fawn to be admitted to the tasteful one-bedroom apartment since I had met the lab genius.
Ms. Fawn appeared in seven separate photos in the Enquirer, appearing in each in the truly excessive arms of Captain Colossal in the aftermath of a daring rescue.
That last, discovered when I’d scoured through the local library’s newspaper records by hand, had left a bad taste in my mouth. Colossal was a reprehensible show-off. It was professional distaste, of course. The over-the-top theatrics the man was given to were...tacky, especially backed up by superhuman powers. It was poor sportsmanship, that was all. The sort of sore winner than I’d never been able to resist taking down a peg or two.
And that had been a pleasure all its own, of course. That feeling when whatever opponent of mine, superior in rank or birth or wealth, had been made to acknowledge they’d been bested by someone like me. Someone without superhuman gifts. Someone who’d been born into nothing, had starved until she’d learned how not to. Someone who had clawed her way into a life she enjoyed and didn’t need a damn thing from them.
Didn’t need it, but I’d happily take it.
I hummed along with the radio, some alt-rock anthem that I’d heard for the first time nearly a decade ago, and scratched a few notes into the margin of my notebook. The Roscoe vault would be getting a new shipment in the not-so-distant future, and it was a distinct pleasure to plan just how I would relieve them of a few of their valuables. Precise timing, exact routes, and perfect knowledge of the nature of the security system in the vault meant that I could plan this one in public, in shorthand, without worrying about giving anything away through blueprints or incriminating reference guides.
I sat back in my worn wooden chair — surely acquired from another restaurant, unless there was a furniture supplier who specialized in providing chairs that had the feeling of having been used for ages — and indulged in a long stretch, arms held extended over my head as I pressed my spine against the rigid back. The self-satisfied hum I let out was interrupted as I opened my eyes and stared out of the plate-glass window of the coffeehouse and looked across the street.
There, on the fire escape attached to the side of Fawn’s building, was a masked figure dressed conspicuously in black. He knelt by the wall, the glint of something metallic in his hand the only indication that Fawn had the good sense to lock her windows, and an icy wave of fury roared through my gut.
That would not do at all.
I was out of my chair and halfway to the door of the coffeehouse before I caught myself. What the hell was I doing? I should phone an anonymous tip to the police if I was so concerned. Or drop a line to the Opal City Research Lab, tell them to get Colossal over to Fawn’s place as quickly as his sanctimonious ass could get there.
My eyes were caught on the figure on the fire escape like silk stockings on a hangnail. Every way I moved, it tore at me.
She wasn’t my problem. The last thing I needed to do was expose myself like that, rushing in like I fancied myself some kind of hero.
A scream split the evening air, and no one around me looked up.
God damn it.
I scowled and drew my hat lower as I darted into the street.
IT TOOK two hops up the side of the fire escape to climb to Fawn’s window, left open by the intruder who had been so lazy as to pull down the steps. I landed quietly, letting the momentum sink through my body, easing the energy away instead of letting the steel construction creak and scrape. From my careful crouch outside Fawn’s third floor apartment, I swept the inside of the living room on the other side of the window.
The sight inside set my jaw to clenching.
Molly Fawn was backed against the far wall, no phone in her hand, no weapon, just eyes wide and mouth opened on a sour note of surprise.
The intruder — a clumsy oaf obviously devoid of imagination — advanced across the room, and that metallic glint in his hand proved to be a knife rather than the pry-bar I had first assumed. Wide brown eyes flickered over the masked man’s shoulder, met my own, and blinked in dawning comprehension.
I pressed a finger against my lip and slipped over the windowsill. This would be easier if she didn’t alert him.
It was three careful steps to close the distance to the knife-wielding man, then my arm was around his neck, my knee was in his back, and he was on the floor, knife clattering against the nearby coffee table as he thudded to the rug. He went rigid, resisting just exactly the way these idiots always did, and I used the momentum of his wild flailing to drive his hips flat against the ground and rid him of the leverage he had gained pushing against his knees. His wrists came into my grasp as easily as lifting pocketbooks, and I had them in a set of ties immediately. One hand against the goon’s head was enough to twist his mask to cover his eyes and I retrieved the reel of line from my jacket with the other.
He was smaller than I’d expected he would be, and tying him in a weight-bearing series of knots was even easier than scaling the building had been.
Evidently, it was sending the bastard out the window that prompted Fawn to find her voice.
“No, don’t!” She cried, hand outstretched.
“He’ll be fine, darling.” I nudged my bound prize with my boot and began his controlled descent.
All in all, it was under a minute in between landing on the fire escape outside Fawn’s window and sending the bound and gagged intruder down that same way, a trussed and decorated gift for local law enforcement.
Once I was satisfied that he was neither getting away nor returning to finish whatever foul job he’d been sent to do, I whirled on the startled, bespectacled object of my recent descent into madness and heroism. My eyes traveled over her face, her body, looking for where he might have touched her, where she might be carrying injuries under her soft sweater and her delicately flushing cheeks.
“Are you all right?” I asked, throat uncharacteristically tight.
She nodded — a single, jerking movement of her head as her eyes stayed wide, shocked. “Why are you —”
“What happened?” I lifted a hand to trail gentle fingers along her jaw, watching for a flinch, for a retreat, for anything to tell me that I shouldn’t. Some of the tension leached from those soft shoulders, and I indulged myself in the feeling of her skin beneath my ungloved fingertips. “Did he disable your panic button? How did I beat Colossal here?” I tried to keep my tone gentle, but the knowledge that the man currently dangling from the window had brought a knife he clearly intended to use had fractured my normally icy self-control.
“He just came in,” Fawn said, wincing. “I don’t…when I need the — the Captain I just call the lab.” Brown eyes darted up to meet mine as though she were worried she’d just given something away.
“Don’t stress over it, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that you’re part of Colossal’s team.”
She nodded, hair falling from the bun on top of her head to curl invitingly around the exposed length of her neck. “Well, there’s no panic button. There’s just my phone. And it was in the kitchen, and he was coming at me with the knife and I just —”
The words were cut off by the ragged sound of something that might have become a sob if Fawn were to let herself go that far in front of me. I pulled her forward, out of the spiral of panic that would well after the danger had passed and into my arms. I tucked her chin against my chest, wrapped my arms around her, and pressed my cheek to the dark silk of her hair.
“Breathe through it, darling. You’re safe.” A hint of the annoyance I felt at the Captain crept into my voice. “And tell that self-righteous idiot that you need a panic button. You
aren’t a random target, and I won’t always be in earshot.”
A small voice came from the vicinity of my neckline. “You’re the Silhouette.”
“I am.” I nodded. No point denying it. She’d have to be an idiot not to realize, and if there was one thing I’d learned in my careful acquisition of information about Ms. Molly Fawn, it was that she was no idiot.
“You look different without the leather.”
I barked a short, surprised laugh and felt the body in my arms go rigid, as though she were embarrassed for having said that out loud. “Yes, well, you’d look different in it, Ms. Fawn.”
I stood there holding the ally of my most notorious enemy until I felt the tremors in her muscles begin to subside. Until I heard the hitch in her breathing gentle. Until she didn’t so much cling to my back as touch it cautiously. Reverently. I released my hold on her, stepping back and smoothing my features into a rakish smirk.
“Doctor,” she said, a fresh blush rising in her cheeks. “Doctor Fawn.”
“Oh?” I asked, raising a brow. “My apologies, doc.” I offered her a lazy salute as I backed toward the window.
“Why are you here?” Fawn’s brow was furrowed, but it wasn’t in fear or panic. She seemed confused. Almost…hopeful.
“I was in the neighborhood.” I winked, delighting in the way it seemed to renew the pink in her cheeks. I slung a leg over the windowsill, preparing to leave the way I’d come in, and paused at the threshold. “Get a panic button. And call the police. Have a good evening, Dr. Fawn.”
I slipped out into the gathering darkness and tried not to strain to hear if she had said anything in farewell.
She was fine. I’d been a good citizen, went above and beyond in helping my fellow Opal City resident.
I shoved my hands into my pockets and stalked away from Molly Fawn’s apartment like I could outpace the thought of her. Like I could physically abandon just how good it had felt to have a woman like that cling to me for comfort. One thing was certain, I needed to get back to who I really was before I became addicted to the rush of her gratitude. Her trust.