The Fourth Sense

by Kat Parrish

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, organizations, or persons, whether living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The Fourth Sense: Vetiver Quinn #1

  Copyright © 2019 by Kat Parrish

  Published by Dark Valentine Press

  Cover design by: Indie Author Services

  http://indieauthorservices.com/

  Formatting by Amit Dey | amitdey2528@gmail.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems — except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews — without permission in writing from its publisher, Dark Valentine Press.

  Please contact the author at kat@katparrish.com if you experience any formatting or readability issues with this book.

  To get news about Kat’s new releases, special offers, and giveaways, sign up for her newsletter, Eye of the Kat at: http://kattomic-energy.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html

  There are five senses—taste, touch, sight, smell, and hearing. Not everyone is born with all five senses and some are born with a sixth. And then there’s Vetiver Quinn. She only has five senses but her extraordinary ability to use her “fourth sense” makes her special. Able to read the “olfactory aura’ of anyone she meets, Vetiver uses the insights she gains to craft everything from love potion-laced perfume to powerful protective compounds. And then one day Peter Eliades enters her shop, flashing a badge and asking a favor.

  It’s not every day someone wants your help saving the world.

  Vetiver Quinn has only five senses but one of them is a little “extra.”

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER 1: The scent of adventure

  CHAPTER 2: Making new friends

  CHAPTER 3: Failure is not an option

  CHAPTER 4: A taste of wild honey and lemon

  About the Author

  Also by Kat Parrish

  CHAPTER 1: The scent of adventure

  No one had much liked Maelstrom, the aquatic unisex cologne I’d crafted the previous month after watching half a dozen shipwreck videos one night when I couldn’t sleep. I’d grown up in walking distance of the Pacific Ocean, but Maelstrom was an Atlantic Ocean scent, full of salt seaweed accords and cold darkness beneath the surface waiting to be kicked up by hurricane winds. There were metallic notes lurking in its depths, fragrant flakes of rusty iron floating in the cologne like the glimmering flecks in Goldwasser liqueur.

  I’d used algae extract and coriander oil and essence of kaffir lime in Maelstrom and infused everything with a kiss of fish oil so subtle you’d have had to be a shark to detect it.

  I thought it smelled terrific, that it was the perfect scent for a hot summer’s day, but mine seemed to be a minority opinion.

  Kyle had dropped by the house while I was working on it and the first words out of his mouth were, “Whoa, it stinks in here.” This from a man who shares an apartment with his pothead sister who thinks burning Nag Champa incense and patchouli candles masks the scent of cannabis. It so doesn’t. If I spent too much time in their apartment, I either got a contact high or a stuffy nose from all the smoke and smells in the air.

  Kyle.

  I sighed at the thought of my more-or-less boyfriend. Who I was pretty sure was boinking an actress he’d met when they’d both had small parts on The Santa Clarita Diet. Her name was Arielle and she was a cute strawberry blonde who had a great future ahead of her as a personal trainer if the acting thing didn’t work out. Plus, she had a really sexy French accent I’m pretty sure was real because she was no Meryl Streep. And she knew how to work that accent. When she said her name, it sounded like a pseudonym a goddess might adopt as her street name. “Ariel spelled with extra letters,” Kyle had told me when he introduced us at the watch party his sister threw for the episode they were in. Arielle-with-the-extra-letters had given me a three-cornered cat smile and then butchered the pronunciation of my own name even though “Vetiver” is derived from a French word. I remembered wondering at the time what the French word for “bitch” was.

  Kyle had told me he was going to drop by the shop later today, and since he never gave me advance notice about anything—he liked to think of himself as a guy who lived in the moment—I knew whatever he wanted to discuss was serious.

  I hoped he’d finally nerved himself up to have “the talk.”

  We’d been dating nearly a year, trying to build a relationship out of an enjoyable wedding party hookup straight out of one of the romantic comedies Kyle was always auditioning for but never quite landing. “They went with Chris/Ryan/James again,” he would complain. “What have they got that I don’t?”

  I bit my tongue whenever he vented this way because it would not have been supportive to answer, “I don’t know Kyle—talent? Drive? An agent who isn’t working out of a pot dispensary?”

  Something about Kyle’s passivity and general lack of direction had started bringing out the worst in me. I was turning into a bitch around him. Kyle could be a lot of fun, but for a long time now, fun hadn’t been enough, and it didn’t speak well for me that I was still hanging in there, pretending everything was fine. Especially now that Arielle-with-the-extra-letters in her name was in the picture.

  The thing was, Kyle was a talented actor, but he wasn’t interested in paying his dues or playing by the rules. He knew he could get a walk-on part as “Construction Worker” or “Sexy Cop” any time he wanted just because he was handsome in that pouty Byron-meets-boy band kind of way. I was pretty sure he considered himself way out of my league, looks-wise, which was annoying, but hung around because he had a fetish for redheads. Hence Arielle with the strawberry blonde hair.

  I’d always known there wasn’t a future for us but dating in Los Angeles can be brutal, so I told myself there was no harm in being friends with benefits as long as we were both enjoying ourselves. Lately though, both of us had been doing some re-evaluating. Kyle was really needy and in a rare moment of self-reflection, he told me he aspired to meatier parts and didn’t want to wait until he “grew into them.” His theory was that the “pretty boys” like Leonardo DiCaprio and Johnny Depp hadn’t really gotten the “Oscar bait” roles until their forties, and it was all I could do not to mention What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. Because Kyle really didn’t want to hear it.

  “I don’t want to be that guy who has a thousand listings on IMDB and still has to sell real estate part time,” complained, a not-so-subtle dig at my friend Liam who was making a killing flipping houses in between auditions. “Liam should just give up,” he’d said to me on more than one occasion. “He doesn’t have the looks to be a leading man and nobody is going to sell a project around a character actor.” Again, I bit my tongue because…Paul Giamatti!!! But I was already being so short with him that he was calling me out on it. And it’s true, I had pointed out that it wouldn’t hurt to have an additional stream of income to “tide you over.”

  He had not reacted well. “I am an artist, Vetiver, I can’t waste that creative energy selling real estate.”

  As if he could actually pass the California realtor’s exam. So rather than honing a marketable skill, Kyle relied on magical thinking and a well-worn hard copy of The Secret to bring him luck. He got just enough lucky breaks that he assumed that strategy was working, so he was reluctant to change anything about his “process.”

  And yet, even when he did get lucky, he still managed to screw things up.

  Like the time he’d been cast as Tullus Aufidius in a production of Coriolanus starring Tom Hardy in the title role and Helen Mirren as
Coriolanus’ mother.

  A week before the limited run’s opening at the Mark Taper Forum, he’d been fired for reasons he never shared with me. “Extreme stupidity,” was my father’s guess. My father would leave my mother—whom he adores—if Helen Mirren so much as crooked one of her elegant fingers in his direction and he was ready to buy a ticket for every performance of the play “to support Kyle.” As it was, he saw the Kyle-less production twice.

  “Kyle probably showed up for rehearsal stoned,” my mother opined at the time. Although she has been known to partake of the herb herself, my mother disapproves of people who use it too often. And besides, though she loves my father as much as he loves her, she would leave him for Helen Mirren too, so the idea that Kyle had managed to blow the opportunity to share billing with Dame Helen made no sense to her.

  WWHMD, I wondered, what would Helen Mirren do about Kyle?

  I knew the answer to that. She’d kick him to the curb with one swift boot of her elegantly shod right foot. It was more than past time I did the same.

  * * *

  I sighed again and removed the dark green bottles of Maelstrom from the display case. Normally I transition the slow-sellers to a discount table before I put them in the freebie basket by the store’s entrance, but I was pretty sure that step would only be delaying the inevitable. Poor Maelstrom.

  My notebooks were full of scents that had seemed like good ideas at the time but had ended up being stinkers. Maelstrom would join my ill-fated Halloween scent Stone Angel, my summer scent Honey Rose, and the green musk and black amber-infused Pantano.

  Oh well, everyone has an off day. Even Jacques Polge must have had his off days. But then, when you’re the “nose” behind fragrances as classic as Coco, Allure Homme, and Bleu de Chanel, who even notices the scents that don’t make the cut?

  Sadly, I’m no Jacques Polge.

  I filled the empty spots at the counter with bottles of Sunsplash, a light and refreshing summer cologne bursting with tropical florals, solar accords, and a slight mineral base note meant to suggest the volcanic black sand beach on the Big Island of Hawaii. It’s a perennial best-seller and in Los Angeles, where it stays warm most of the year, I don’t have to take it off the shelves in the winter months.

  Sunsplash was bottled in cute little glass vials I sourced on Etsy from a woman in Indiana who tumbled them until they looked like they were made of beach glass. I bought the little bottles by the gross every couple of months or so. The artisan gave me a discount in return for samples of my product. I love barter.

  I was still fiddling with the display when I heard the two men enter the shop.

  Cops, I thought at first, and then a moment later, military. Both men were fit, in their early 30s, dressed in well-worn jeans and faded T-shirts like off-duty musicians but without the d-bag attitude.

  The taller one approached the counter while his companion cruised around the shop looking at things in a way that was meant to seem aimless but instead conveyed a sense of casual purpose.

  I carry a lot of gender-neutral and metrosexual products in the store but I wasn’t getting that vibe from them. They weren’t here to shop; they were scoping the place out.

  And when they had satisfied themselves that they were the only customers in the shop, the shorter one locked the front door and stationed himself in front of it like a sentry.

  “Excuse me?” I said, annoyed at myself because the default courtesy slipped out almost unconsciously. I picked up my cell phone. “Unlock that door right now.”

  I didn’t get a sense of menace from them—if their intent was to rob a place, they would have gone next door to hit the coffee shop, or across the street to the least-secure Bank of America in the state of California.

  They were here to see me but for what purpose I couldn’t divine. But that didn’t mean I had to like it that the man made no move to open the door after I asked him to. Without taking my eyes off him, I curled my finger over the phone’s face as if to hit speed-dial. It was just a bluff. My phone is locked and there’s a complex pattern I have to key in before I can use it.

  “Please don’t,” the taller man said and reached over to pluck the phone from my hand.

  “Give me my phone back,” I said. “Right now.”

  I hated the way I sounded and wondered what I would do if he countered with, “Make me.”

  But he didn’t. Instead, he carefully put the phone down on the counter in front of me and stepped back a bit so that he wasn’t crowding me.

  “We just need a few moments of your time,” he said. I looked up and met his gaze, staring straight into his eyes, which were a light honey-brown with darker flecks in them like Baltic amber. Wolf eyes.

  He smelled of gun oil and blood, of anger and sorrow and pain. His scent was scorching winds and twisted roots and the dry rasp of desiccated bones.

  He was a soldier.

  No. That was the wrong word to describe him.

  He was a warrior.

  I couldn’t imagine what had brought him to my door.

  “How can I help you?” I asked.

  He smiled then, a lazy smile that did not spread to his eyes but still looked good on his face. “We’re here for one of your ... custom ... orders,” he said.

  I kept my expression bland, but his use of that coded phrase rattled me. Not that many people know about the “custom” work I do.

  “Do you have a referral?” I asked.

  “We were given your name by Severine Junot.”

  Severine was my college roommate. She’s now a doctor who volunteers with Médecins Sans Frontière s, spending months in places most people can’t even spell. When she’d left for her latest gig, I’d sent her off with a satchel full of protective essential oil blends, including my own version of “Thieves Oil,” the fabled concoction of aromatics that was used in the Middle Ages to protect against plague. There’s actual science to back up the oils’ anti-bacterial claims, and so far, Severine had remained healthy against all odds.

  I tried not to think about Ebola or Zika when I thought about Severine, or about terrorists, those viruses in human form. I’d done some custom work for Severine when she needed help with a diagnosis and her patient wasn’t able to communicate. I trusted her and she apparently trusted this guy so that was good enough for me.

  The guy at the counter was waiting for me to say something.

  Impatient, but covering it well.

  I wondered how Severine knew him. He wasn’t her type, but maybe he had a lookalike sister. Blondes were her kryptonite.

  “All right,” I said, “but I need to see some ID.”

  He actually smirked at that and reached into the back pocket of his jeans for a small plastic folder. He flipped it open and presented it to me. In it was an ID with his photo on it and a name, Peter Eliades. There was also an impressive seal next to his face. I traced the words around the seal. “Security Science Sector/Homeland.” I looked up from the folder. “You’re agents of Sssh?”

  Eliades looked pained but the other guy laughed. “We call it ‘Tri-Ess,’ he said. The ‘H’ is silent.”

  I returned the folder to Eliades. “I’ve never heard of your agency,” I said. “Are you like DARPA?”

  “Sort of,” he said, “but we’re more proactive.” This time there was amusement in his voice as well, but I was getting a bad feeling.

  Banter, I thought. So that’s how he’s going to play it.

  “So, what can I do for you Agent Eliades?” I threw a nod at his companion to let him know I wasn’t just ignoring him.

  “We need you to close the store,” he said, “and come with us.”

  “It’s the middle of the day.”

  “We’ll pay for your lost sales.”

  “We?” I said. “Are you part of a hive mind, like the Borg?” Now I was doing it too. Banter is infectious. Like Ebola.

  I could sense the other guy’s amusement bubbling up but Eliades sighed, not happy that I was not playing along. He pulled a
wad of cash from his back pocket and put it on the counter in front of me. It was a lot of cash. I was amazed he could even fit it into his pocket.

  His jeans were that tight.

  Not that I was complaining.

  Agent Eliades was easy on the eyes.

  If that was even his real name.

  I eyeballed the cash. Way more than I would make in a week, much less a day. But they probably knew that.

  I picked up the roll of money, peeled off a couple of hundreds and slid the rest of it back across the counter. Eliades looked surprised.

  “Way too much,” I said.

  He held my gaze for a moment and then nodded and put the money back in his pocket.

  “So, what can I do for my country today?” I asked which sounded more flippant than I meant it to be. He gave me a level look. “Our agency thinks you have a skillset that would be...useful to us in solving a situation we have.”

  I waited but that seemed to be all he wanted to say. Could you possibly be more cryptic? I thought.

  “Okay,” I said.

  He stared at me with those amber eyes. They were the eyes of a patient predator, not a wolf at all but a lion on the Serengeti who was more than willing to wait all day for a gazelle to wander by. I held his stare, caught up in what felt like a weird test of wills. It was getting kind of intense when my phone rang and gave me a reason to break eye contact. I glanced at the number.

  Kyle.

  For some reason I felt a twinge of regret.

  “My boyfriend’s on his way over,” I said.

  The agent whose name probably wasn’t Eliades smiled. “No, he isn’t.” Pissed, I turned my back on Eliades as I answered the call.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey babe,” Kyle said, which he knows annoys me.

  Then he launched into a long-winded story about a last-minute audition for an as-yet-unannounced movie by some auteur I’d never heard of. Apparently, Arielle-with-the-extra-letters and the sexy French accent had already been cast and she’d suggested him to the casting director as her leading man.

  I’ll bet she did.