by Jenn Gott
Clair’s laugh filtered back through the open doorway. “There are worse ideas, Jane Maxwell.”
* * *
Thirty miles outside of Grand City, a shitty little bar faces the sunset with defiance.
It used to be a diner, and before that, it was a train car. It sits on a stretch of track not connected to anything, its wheels cemented in place like maybe if they weren’t, the whole thing would go racing off into that sunset in search of greater things.
Lou Gaines knows the feeling, though it’s money and not cement that ties her down. Or lack thereof, which, isn’t that the kicker? When she thinks about what her life could be like . . .
But it’s best not to go down that road. She’s seen that road, in the form of her brother, and while it looks pretty at the time, in the end it’ll only bite you in the ass. So here she is: no money, no options. Wiping down tables and mixing drinks and fending off wandering hands. Still, it’s not all bad. Or at least that’s what she tells herself, to keep from going crazy.
She’s wiping down the counter at the bar when the man walks in. He’s not one of her usuals, which in and of itself makes him interesting. He’s wearing dark jeans, and an expensive t-shirt from some popular sporting-goods company, which Lou recognizes but can’t ever remember what it’s called. Lou has never understood why some people spend fifty bucks or more on a tee, which in her mind is something to be worn until you can’t wear it no more, then used for rags until they disintegrate. No point in shelling out good money for something like that.
The man stands in the open door for a minute. A baseball cap obscures his face, though he doesn’t need to bother—with the sun going down, everyone stepping into the bar is backlit like they’re a Jesus painting.
Lou ignores him. Her boss is always telling her to greet people when they come in. (“A pretty girl smiling at customers can’t hurt business,” he says, though if that’s what he wants Lou for, he picked the wrong woman. “Then hire a pretty girl,” Lou tells him, and then he gets mad and protests, like Lou cares if he thinks she’s pretty.) She goes back to working on her counter.
A few minutes later the man walks over. He sits down at the bar, almost but not quite directly across from where Lou is working.
“Can I get you somethin’?” Lou asks.
The man takes off his cap, and rests it on the counter beside him. He’s shockingly handsome, like he just stepped out of a billboard. “Can I just have some water?” he asks. “I don’t have any money.”
Lou raises her eyebrow at his outfit, but she keeps her mouth shut. Someone wants water, hell, they got plenty of water. She turns away from him, as the TV on the back wall switches from commercials to what tries to pass for news these days. Lou glances at the ticker along the bottom. DELTAMAN STILL AT LARGE | MAYOR MAXWELL: CITY IS “SAFEST IT’S EVER BEEN” | PROTESTORS GATHER AT—
“Here you go,” Lou says, as she returns with the glass. “Fair warning, though: our water is nasty as shit.”
“That doesn’t matter.” The man is staring over Lou’s head, fixed on the TV. He takes a drink without even looking.
Lou doesn’t know what he finds so interesting. It’s the same crap that it’s been every day for the past couple of weeks. The Heroes fight a baddie, the Heroes defeat a baddie. People come on to argue about whether the city needs people “like them,” whether they’re doing more harm than good, whether their presence is the reason for all of these increased attacks, blah blah, cut to the next song please. She’s disappointed in the guy’s interest; he seemed better than that.
Though, probably, it was just his chin. He has a heroic chin, Lou decides.
She goes back to wiping down the counter.
“If people only knew,” the man says.
Lou looks up to find that he’s staring right at her. He points at the TV, glass still in his hand, just his finger extended at the screen.
“Knew what?”
“What they were really like. All of this pointless debate would die in an instant.”
Lou glances over her shoulder. “You mean the Heroes?” she asks. “Or just . . . Enhanced?”
It’s the new word that everyone’s using. Lou doesn’t like it. Enhanced means more, enhanced means that someone’s got something that other people would want. Lou’s cousin’s new iPhone is enhanced. Chocolate cake is enhanced by a splash of blackberry brandy. Powers are nothing to be jealous of.
The man doesn’t say anything at first. Lou fears that she’s gone too far, said the wrong thing somehow. But he smiles, eventually, and takes another drink of the shit-water.
“Just the Heroes,” he says, as he wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist.
Lou laughs. It’s relief, mostly, though she plays it off. “You’re fulla shit.”
“Oh?” He’s not offended, she can tell by his tone. Probably, he thinks she’s flirting, but she’s not.
Lou shrugs. “Acting like you know them.”
“Maybe I do.”
“Sure,” Lou says. She’s not going to argue—what’s the point?—but she doesn’t have to listen, either. She turns her back on him, heading for the dishwashing sink in the corner. Technically, it’s Carlo’s job, but he’s been skiffing off work every day for a week now, and Lou hasn’t said nothing cause it’s not really her business, though it pisses her right off. She turns on the tap, and the faucet spits twice, pipes rattling, before it pukes water all over the glasses in the sink.
Just the same, though . . . what if it’s true? If he actually does know them. Someone probably has to, after all, though what are the odds of that someone ending up in her bar, on her shift?
Probably not great, Lou tells herself. Probably one of those big numbers, like the odds of an asteroid crashing into Earth, or Lou getting struck by lightning, or winning the lottery. Though one of those has already happened.
She finds herself leaning on the bar across from him. Her chin is cupped in her hand, and the towel that she’s been using is thrown over one shoulder.
“Okay,” she says. “So tell me what they’re like.”
The man smiles. He’s got the kind of teeth that Lou never sees around these parts. City teeth. Dental-insurance teeth.
They remind her, uncomfortably, of a wolf.
It occurs to Lou now that the two of them are alone. That the last of her dayside regulars has shuffled off to start his graveyard shift, that the next wave won’t be coming in for another half hour or so. She hears her momma’s voice in her head, the fear that Henrietta Gaines tried hard to instill in her children. The man is a lot larger than Lou is, she notices this now.
Except Lou isn’t afraid. She has a shotgun tucked under the counter, which she hides behind bottles of Tabasco sauce when her boss is around. She doesn’t actually need the gun, anyway, but it seems like something a normal girl would do, when faced with a shitty job in a shitty bar in a shitty town. It keeps people from asking questions that she doesn’t want to answer.
“Oh, I think you already know what they’re like,” the man says. He reaches into his pocket and Lou straightens up—is he going for a knife?—but all he draws out is a folded scrap of paper. It’s a printout from a news website.
The man has folded it so that mostly all you see is the photo that accompanies the article. Lou recognizes the picture—she has a copy of it herself, tucked into the front cover of a book in her bedroom. It’s a blurry shot from her brother’s arrest. You can’t really see his face, and because he was under eighteen, and because of “the nature of his crime” (their words), his identity was mercifully kept from the press. The shot isn’t really of him, anyway, so much as the three people standing in front of him as he’s hauled away. Captain Lumen, Granite Girl, Windforce.
That paper scares her more than anything else that’s happened so far.
“What’s this?” she asks, playing it cool. She motions at it like it’s nothing, like it means nothing. Though she probably hasn’t looked at it long enough, she realizes, too late.
<
br /> “This,” he says, stabbing the paper against the bar with his finger, “is why you’re going to help me. I have need of someone with your particular skill set.”
Lou gives a nervous laugh. It doesn’t convince either of them. “Bartending?”
“Sure,” he says with a smirk. “Bartending.”
He raises his glass to his lips. The amber of his beer catches the light, and the drink leaves behind a faint mustache that he wipes off with his hand. He sets the glass down pointedly between them.
Lou stares at it. It feels as if the world has begun to spin, like the bar actually has taken off from its tracks, bouncing and bumping over uneven terrain. She clutches the bar to steady herself.
She did not pour him that beer.
It’s the same glass that she gave him, though, exactly the same one—Lou recognizes the faded logo on the front, a drawing of an eagle, the dark scratch like a lightning bolt across its face.
She looks up. Meets his eyes.
He knows.
She knows.
The man takes another drink. Puts it back down. “Here’s the deal: you help me out, and I guarantee that I can get your brother out of prison. For good.”
Lou goes cold. She doesn’t like being manipulated, not one bit. She doesn’t like any of it: not her secrets, somehow in the hands of this wacko, not his smile that she’d thought looked so cute at first, not the way that he’s just been able to come sauntering in here and turn Lou’s life upside down on a whim. If he was anyone else, Lou would not hesitate to tell him exactly where to stuff it.
But.
On the other hand.
Her brother.
The man grabs a napkin, and a pen left behind on the bar. “Tell you what,” he says, as he jots something down quick. “You give it some thought. Let me know when you decide.”
He slides the napkin across to her. Lou reads it in an instant: Cal Goodman, it says, with a phone number scrawled beneath that.
He stands up, taking the glass with him. “After all . . . ,” he says, and then he pauses to drain the last of his beer. The glass clunks against the bar like a heavy door slamming shut. He looks straight at her, flashing another one of his grins. “It’s not like I’m going anywhere.”
Author’s Note
Thanks for reading! If you’ve enjoyed this book, please take a moment to leave a review at your favorite retailer. Reviews are super important for getting visibility on a book, and the more people see my books, the more I can afford to write for you all! Reviews don’t have to be long, even a single line saying what you did or didn’t like is a big help. Thanks!
About the Author
If JENN GOTT could have any power in the world, it would be superjumps. Lacking that, she fills her days writing stories about people with extraordinary abilities and tragic pasts. Her weaknesses are parallel worlds, time travel, and girl heroes. She lives in New England with her equally nerdy husband and their spoiled snuggle-cat.
Connect with Jenn:
Website: jenngott.com
Twitter: @gottwords
Email: [email protected]
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Also by Jenn Gott
The Beacon Campaigns
The Lady of Souls
Fixing Fate
Heart’s Blood
Hopefuls
The Private Life of Jane Maxwell