by Zoe Chant
When he reached the area where he’d parked off-road, he examined his car from the shadows of the trees. Neither basic observation nor knowing warned him of anything, and the fine dust he’d scattered around the car was unmarked by footprints. He got in, feeling somewhat relieved and somewhat regretful. An ambush or a car bomb would have at least provided him with something concrete to fight and a battle he could win.
He drove along the coast, heading toward Refuge City and the Defenders office. As he approached the city, his power began to press upon his mind, throwing him scattered fragments of information he hadn’t asked for, didn’t want, and couldn’t use.
In 1936, a woman named Linda McDonald survived a plane crash that killed ten other people, including her boyfriend. She was the first sole survivor of a plane crash.
A car was crashing right now in Refuge City. All three people in it would survive. The worst injury was to the driver, who had a concussion and a broken ankle.
The woman in the car directly behind him was a professor of medieval literature. One of her students had plagiarized his paper. Her cat had gotten into her closet and was, right now, chewing on her most expensive pair of shoes.
The plants growing on the hillside he was driving past were ragweed, milkweed, pokeweed, pigweed, henbane, sheep sorrel, inkberry, cow parsnip, blue-stemmed goldenrod, seaside goldenrod, mountain phlox, mallow, candleflame lichen, pincushion moss, common haircap moss, spiky peat moss…
“Stop it,” he muttered aloud, pressing his knuckles into his forehead.
It will never stop, growled his hellhound. And it’s all your fault.
Ransom breathed deeply, letting the flood of information wash over him and past him. Fighting it gave him a headache and focusing on it would distract him until he couldn’t do anything else—such as drive. But if he did neither and simply let it happen without getting caught up in it, eventually it would stop.
The flood slowed to a trickle—it’s raining two counties over, the man looking out the window of the building over there is cheating on his wife, Dornberk is a village in Western Slovenia in the municipality of Nova Gorica in the Goritzian region of the Slovenian Littoral—and stopped.
Ransom, blinking as if he’d just woken up, registered that he was pulling into the Defenders underground parking lot. With wry humor, he thought, At least it distracted me from rush hour traffic.
Dali, the office manager, greeted him in the lobby, where she was reviewing a stack of files. “You’re here early. Hey—you’re tracking in sand!”
She whipped out a broom and handed it to him with a meaningful arch of her eyebrows, adding, “And shake your shoes over the trash can!”
“I remember a time when sand was the least of what was on the floor,” Ransom said.
“Yes, and that’s why you hired me,” Dali pointed out.
It was true. She had transformed the office from a trainwreck studded with booby traps to a professional-looking, pleasant space where everything was easily accessible and easy to find. And where the floors were always clean, except for a few stray hairs from his teammates’ magical pets.
As Ransom shook out his shoes and swept up the offending sand, Merlin bounced in from the kitchen with a coffee cup in each hand, a kitten with dragonfly wings perched on his shoulder, and a bright blue bugbear ambling in his wake.
Merlin gave Dali one of the coffee cups, followed by a kiss so enthusiastic that Ransom looked away. It wasn’t that it was embarrassing—Ransom was a man, not a boy still in the cootie stage—it was that their love and delight in each other made the empty places in himself ache. Like there was a black hole inside his chest, and it was sucking him in.
“Hey, Ransom,” Merlin said.
Startled, Ransom looked up. Merlin’s blue eyes were serious. Intent. Had he somehow found out about Natalie…?
“You’ll find your mate someday,” Merlin said. “And once you do, you’ll know she was worth waiting for.”
Why did people underestimate Merlin? Anyone who paid attention would know he was sharp as a tack. Or, in this case, sharp enough to cut.
“I don’t have a mate,” Ransom said, in a tone intended to end the conversation.
Merlin didn’t take the hint. “Sure you do. You shouldn’t believe what the wizard-scientists told us—”
Ransom gritted his teeth. It was nice for Merlin that he hadn’t been traumatized by the experience of being kidnapped and experimented on and made into a shifter, but it had ruined Ransom’s life. Talking about it did nothing but bring back painful memories.
“—about them having severed our ability to form the mate bond,” Merlin continued blithely. “It obviously didn’t work. Pete bonded with Tirzah, and I bonded with Dali. So you can definitely bond with your mate.”
Ransom didn’t underestimate Merlin, but that didn’t mean he never wanted to pitch him out a window. “That’s not what I meant. It’s irrelevant whether or not I can bond with a mate, because I don’t have one.”
“Of course you—” Merlin broke off with a yelp. “Ow! Dali, what’d you do that for?”
Dali gave him a bland shrug. “Me? I didn’t do anything. Must’ve been Blue. Ransom, how was the beach?”
Beautiful, he thought. But not as beautiful as the woman who left me standing on it while she walked away to die alone.
“It’s nice in the morning,” he said. “Peaceful.”
His teammate Pete came in, also from the kitchen, his muscular body briefly filling the doorframe. “You went for a stroll on the beach in your office shoes?”
His not-officially-a-teammate Carter stepped in through the front door and joined the conversation without missing a beat. “Sea water destroys leather. Even a sea breeze is damaging.”
“They’re not real leather,” Ransom said.
Carter himself wore extremely expensive shoes made of real leather, to go with his extremely expensive suit. He bent to inspect Ransom’s. “Hmm. Good soles. For the amount you paid for those, you could get much better shoes from an actual designer, so long as you don’t hold out for Italian leather. I could recommend—”
“I don’t want better shoes,” Ransom interrupted. If he took Carter’s shoe advice, he’d be a man in inexpensive, boring clothes with exceptionally good taste in shoes—an unusual circumstance that might attract attention. “Is Tirzah here?”
“Yep.” Tirzah propelled her wheelchair into the lobby. “Everyone’s here. Roland’s in the kitchen microwaving… something.” She gave a little shudder, which amused Ransom given that Pete was known to eat MREs if he was in a hurry. Or maybe whatever their boss was fixing himself was worse than an MRE.
His power helpfully gave him a flash of the inside of the microwave, which contained a plate of leftover macaroni and cheese topped with half a leftover hot dog. Bun included.
“Ugh,” said Ransom involuntarily.
A silence fell. He didn’t need his power to know he’d made everyone uncomfortable.
They’re thinking of everything they don’t want you to know about them, his hellhound growled. How long will they be able to stand working with someone who could find out all their dirty little secrets?
Hurriedly, to get them to stop thinking about that, Ransom said, “Tirzah, can I see you in your office? I need some computer help.”
“Sure,” she said.
But his hellhound wasn’t finished with him yet. As Ransom and Tirzah headed for her office, his hellhound growled, And that’s nothing to how they’ll react when they find out about your other power.
That’s not my power, Ransom said. That’s your power.
It was an argument that made no sense, and his hellhound knew it. Of course he knew it: the hellhound was a part of him, after all. The worst part of him, the part he hated, given a form and a voice. And a dreadful power.
“Ransom?” Tirzah was looking at him quizzically. “What do you need me to do?”
He glanced at her office door, making sure it was closed. He had his explanation a
ll planned out: he was trying to find Natalie because he knew Merlin was worried about her, but he didn’t want Tirzah to mention it to Merlin so he wouldn’t be disappointed if it turned out that she didn’t want to see him.
Ransom couldn’t break his promise to Natalie, but he hated to go behind Merlin’s back and lie to Tirzah. It wasn’t fair to them, and it made Ransom feel like he was betraying their trust.
Because you are, his hellhound growled. Do you think a good person would get a power like yours?
Ransom, trying to ignore his hellhound, said, “I need you to track down a phone number.”
“Sure,” Tirzah said. “Got a name?”
Before Ransom could speak, his hellhound stalked closer within his mind, black as midnight and with eyes of flame. What sort of man has the power to see the worst moment of a person’s life?
His hellhound’s power surged up, showing him a country road at night. Tirzah lay by the side of the road, battered and bleeding and covered in mud, both her legs shattered. But even worse than her injuries was her despair. She was alone in the middle of nowhere, dying, with no help in sight…
Furious, Ransom fought to push the vision away. Stop it! If she wants me to know, she’ll tell me herself!
But the hellhound didn’t relent. Ransom couldn’t see anything but Tirzah on that road, tears running down her face as she began to crawl, her legs dragging uselessly behind her…
“I have to go.” He stumbled out of the office without waiting for a reply, barely able to see where he was going.
The vision faded as he left Tirzah’s presence, leaving his head aching and his heart heavy. Caffeine would help with the headache, but he didn’t dare go to the kitchen. If Roland was still there, his hellhound might well decide to use his power again. Ransom had been forced to watch his boss’s worst memory before, and he couldn’t bear to see it again.
Instead, he hurried through the lobby, nearly colliding with Merlin’s bugbear. Blue’s tiny dragonfly wings, which were far too small to lift him, buzzed madly as the bugbear turned to lick Ransom’s hand.
“Tirzah give you a lead?” Pete asked.
“No, I—I’ll ask her later,” Ransom said. “I’m going out to get some coffee.”
“There’s some in the kitchen,” said Merlin. “I just made it. From my own stash, so you know it’s good.”
“I don’t want to go in the kitchen,” Ransom said. Everyone stared at him. Even the pets. He was trying to think of some reasonable explanation when he suddenly knew something was wrong with the machine Carter was tinkering with. “Carter, put that down, right now—not on the rug!”
Carter hurriedly set the little machine on his metal tool tray. A moment after he let go of it, there was a muffled explosion. Sparks flew, and the machine collapsed into a pile of gears and pieces, some of them glowing red-hot.
“Goddammit!” Carter moaned. “I was almost done!”
Since nothing was actually on fire, Ransom took the opportunity to flee. It wouldn’t do anything to make his teammates think he was less weird and unfriendly, but it wasn’t like he had a choice. At least he’d saved Carter from getting his hands burned.
It was odd how often things he worked on blew up. The man had built a billion-dollar empire off tech, and Ransom had seen for himself how clever his inventions were… when they didn’t explode or catch fire. What was especially strange was that Tirzah and Carter could work on identical laptops, doing identical tasks, and only Carter’s would short out. It was as if he was under a curse.
Ransom drove around the neighborhood, looking for a coffeeshop he hadn’t visited before. He tried not to patronize the same one more than once or twice—he didn’t want people to start recognizing him—but luckily, this stretch of Refuge City was full of coffeeshops. They tended to go out of business frequently, especially when they had put more effort into some gimmick than into their coffee, so it was easy for him to only visit each one once without having to drive too far away.
The bits of sky he could see between the skyscrapers were a robin’s egg blue, and the sun shone brightly but not too hot. The entire population of Refuge City seemed to be out on the streets, enjoying the weather and taking up all the parking spots. Ransom ended up parking in the first spot he could find. He’d find something if he walked long enough.
He regretted that decision almost as soon as he got out of the car. His hellhound stalked inside his mind, a dark presence with eyes of flame, showing him the worst moments of random passersby, whether they were of bad deeds or trauma or unhappiness.
A man in a business suit walked by talking on his cellphone, and Ransom saw him ducking into a hotel room with a woman who wasn’t his wife.
A woman tossed a handful of crumbs to a flock of pigeons, and Ransom saw her hiding an empty bottle of gin under her bed.
A boy jumped his skateboard off the curb, and Ransom saw him silently crying in a school bathroom stall while other boys jeered at him from outside.
Stop it, Ransom told his hellhound. I don’t want to know!
The world is terrible, growled his hellhound. I’m just showing you the truth.
Ransom exerted all his will, forcing his hellhound to submit. The visions stopped, but the effort left him exhausted. His hands were shaking, and his headache had gone from a dull throb to a spike of pain behind his right eye.
Ransom’s head hurt so badly that he could barely think. He made himself focus on his original mission: finding a coffee shop.
He didn’t have to search long. Three shops down, he spotted a banner.
Grand Opening!
Darker Than Black
MURDER MYSTERY CAFÉ!
The combination of a recent rainstorm and the placement of the awnings had dumped a stream of water over the word MYSTERY, washing it out so the banner seemed to advertise MURDER CAFÉ.
It reminded him of Natalie’s scribbled bucket list, with TALL MOTEL and RUSTPROOF FEMINIST. He had a feeling Natalie would love to go to a murder café—or even a murder mystery café.
Which reminded him that he’d failed to obtain her phone number. And she was heading for India the next morning. He either had to go back to Tirzah or show up at Natalie’s motel and explain that he’d had a psychic vision of her address but not of her phone number. That’d sure help with her confidence in him.
Ransom found himself rubbing at his forehead as if he could erase the pain with his fingers. He decided to put off the decision until he’d had coffee.
When he went inside the café, he found that it had gone all out on the murder mystery theme. The walls were lined with bookshelves filled with murder mysteries, a stuffed raven perched with a balloon in its beak painted with the word “Nevermore,” daggers and vials labeled “cyanide” hung on the walls, and the tables were painted with quotes from mysteries. The two close enough to read were emblazoned with Edgar Allan Poe’s “It was the beating of his hideous heart!” and Agatha Christie’s “You must use your little gray cells, mon ami.”
An ornate cabinet with a wooden sign reading “The Poison Cabinet” was filled with syrup bottles with labels reading C is for Caramel, H is for Hazelnut, R is for Raspberry, and so forth.
None of this gave him confidence in the quality of their coffee, but all he needed was the caffeine and something warm to hold in his hands, in a cup heavy enough to stop them from shaking.
He walked up to the register, catching in passing a table painted with a Raymond Chandler quote, “It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.”
I know a woman with stained glass hair, he thought. A woman to make a bishop go BASE jumping.
“Can I help you?” asked the barista. “Hey—I know you!”
Adrenaline surged through his veins as he realized that finally, finally his past had caught up with him. This woman had recognized him, and now the house of cards life he’d built for himself would come crashing down. But at least, now that the worst had already happened, he could stop dreadi
ng it. It was almost a relief.
“I do, right?” the barista said, a little uncertainly. “Don’t you work at Defenders?”
Then he recognized her. She was the barista they’d done a job for, retrieving some stolen property from an ex-boyfriend. “I thought you worked at Starbucks.”
“I used to. This place seemed like more fun. Anyway, I really appreciate what you all did for me.” The barista glanced behind her, at the older woman making another customer a cappuccino, lowered her voice, and said, “Your drink’s on the house!”
Ransom wasn’t sure whether she intended to put in her own money or not ring up his drink, but either way, the odds of her getting in trouble seemed high. “Thanks, but no. I like to support new businesses.” It was true, in a sense. “A large house coffee, please.”
He quickly moved away before she could try to continue the conversation, pretending to examine the pastry case. It continued the mystery theme, with pastries labeled And Then There Were Buns, Whodonuts, and Book ‘Em Danish.
Ransom was having serious doubts about the coffee.
“Large house coffee,” called the barista.
He turned to collect it, then spun back around when he heard a yell. The older woman behind the counter was pointing at the pastry case. “How’d it get in there?!”
A husky puppy was inside the pastry case, wagging its tail and licking the whipped cream off a Crime of Passion Fruit Tart. As Ransom stared at it, the puppy plunged its face into the fruit mousse, which seemed to not be to its taste. It jerked back its cream-dabbled muzzle, then turned an interested blue eye to a Death by Chocolate.
“Get that puppy out of there,” Ransom said to the older woman. “Chocolate is poisonous to dogs!”
She didn’t budge. Her mouth open, she seemed frozen with astonishment.
Ransom vaulted over the counter, banged on the glass to distract the puppy from the chocolate, and unlatched the sliding glass door. He grabbed the puppy just as it made a lunge for the nearest Death by Chocolate.