A Shot in the Dark jjd-2

by K. A. Stewart

  “It’s a goodly walk, but if I can make it up there, I’m sure you can.” I tilted my head to look at his leg, though under his khaki slacks it was impossible to see what was causing the limp. “It didn’t seem to hold you up any when you were at my place.” Bridget slipped away while we talked, presumably tidying things up before her lunch, and inconveniently leaving me without a good way to escape. Dammit!

  Cam nodded. “It’s a lot better than it was when it first happened. I was on crutches for months.” That at least I could sympathize with. When I didn’t say anything else, he seemed compelled to fill the silence. “Car accident. Last spring.” With one hand, he lifted his gelled spikes away from his forehead to reveal a small pink scar disappearing into his hair. “Head, meet windshield. I was lucky.”

  “I can tell.” Obviously, he expected me to elaborate on my own injury. I didn’t feel like it. “Well. Guess I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Sure thing!” He grinned at me with perfectly white teeth, and some small, petty part of me wanted to punch him in the mouth.

  The good doctor chose that moment to join us again and I used it as my excuse to duck out.

  Okay, he seemed like a good guy. A really good guy, and Dr. Bridget obviously had the hots for him big time. So why did I have the urge to snatch him up by the collar of his designer polo shirt and shake him like a rag doll?

  The strangeness of my reaction bothered me the rest of the day, enough that I looked at my punk-haired boss halfway through my short shift at my real job and asked, “Am I an asshole?”

  The music was blaring some kind of death-metal-techno crossbreed crap, and of course I had to repeat myself three or four times before she could hear me.

  Kristyn grinned at me from under her locks of pumpkin-orange hair. “Is this an essay question?”

  “Come on, I’m serious.” I stuffed my armload of novelty T-shirts on the appropriate shelf and reached over to turn the music down. “I’m pretty easygoing, right? I don’t fly off the handle for no reason, do I?”

  There was a long pause there, one of those that answered more than her words could. “You’ve… had your moments, lately. Why?”

  “Yeah, but… general grumpiness aside, do I normally dislike people immediately? I mean, I like to think I give people a chance, y’know?”

  She paused to think that one over, clicking her tongue piercing across her teeth. “Nope. Normally, you are one of the mellowest people I know, old dude.” She tilted her head curiously. “Why?”

  “Just… thinking.” I went back to rearranging the novelty wall, and she let it drop. I, on the other hand, couldn’t.

  I pondered on it all the way through a really domestic dinner with my wife and the kids (It was just easier to think of Esteban as ours. It saved time in the long run). I mean, I’m normally an easygoing guy. You don’t bother me, I don’t kick your ass. That kinda thing. But the events of last spring had changed me, and not for the better.

  A guy tried to kill me. That was a given. Two people, actually, though only one of them remained at large. So I suppose I was entitled to a bit of natural wariness. But somewhere along the way, this cynical, borderline paranoid grouch took my place, and he was starting to annoy even me. I was trying to manage it through my usual meditations and katas, but… it wasn’t working. So, was my reaction to Cam just a byproduct of post-traumatic stress disorder, or was there really something wrong with the guy? God, I hated not trusting my own instincts.

  Later that night, Mira and I lay in bed together, her head nestled in the crook of my neck where I could smell the strawberry-ness of her hair. Still bogged down in my brooding of the day, I mentioned my less than charitable feelings toward Cam-short-for-Cameron.

  Mira chuckled softly, her breath warm on my chest. “It’s like a new dog in your territory. Go sniff each other’s butts, you’ll be fine.”

  “That’s… distinctly unappetizing.” I tilted my head to look down at her and she gave me a grin. “But seriously, you don’t get a weird vibe off of him or anything?”

  She rolled her green eyes. “I don’t scan every person that I run into, Jesse. Next thing I know, you’ll be having Cole run a background check on the guy.” I know my eyes lit up, and when I opened my mouth, she put her hand across it. “No. Do not do that.”

  There was a very disappointed little boy deep inside me. “But it would be cool!”

  That earned me another roll of her eyes. “Leave it alone. This is the first guy Bridge has dated in forever, and I kinda like seeing her happy, okay? Try to get to know him before you call out the dogs.”

  My head flopped back to the pillow and I sighed. “I’m just being a jerk again, aren’t I?”

  “I wasn’t going to say that…”

  “You were thinking it.” I rubbed my gritty eyes, trying not to think about all the sleep I would not be getting that night. “Maybe I should skip this trip. Stay home, get some sleep, do some stuff around the house.”

  Mira sat up and looked down at me, her wealth of sable, curly hair falling around my face like a curtain. “Jesse, I’m going to say something, and I want you to understand that it comes from a place of love, okay?”

  Slightly worried, I said, “Okay?”

  “If you don’t get out of this house for a few days, I’m going to do you grievous bodily harm.” She leaned down and kissed me once, then rolled over and turned off the bedside lamp.

  In the darkness, we curled up together, both of us knowing it was only a matter of time before I woke us both with my nightmares and spent the rest of the night on the couch. Mira’s fingers traced up and down my forearm where it rested across her waist, like she could memorize it just by touch.

  She was right. I was being a jerk. I’d been a jerk all summer, touchy and quick to anger. Part of it I could chalk up to frustration at being injured, but… not all of it. I mean, I’d been hurt before, and worse. I’d been blown up, stitched together, taped down, and stapled shut. I couldn’t blame it all on that.

  Deep down, I knew it was the fear of the unknown. It was the lingering mystery of who tried to run me off the road a few months ago, of where my last client had disappeared to after the tornado took us on our brief tour of Oz. It was the uncertainty, the inability to do anything. I was great with an enemy to fight. Just point me and I do the slice and dice thing. But with just doubts and what-ifs? Not so much.

  That’s where the dreams came from. Always the same one, with silver claws and red eyes materializing out of nothing, killing me again and again because I simply couldn’t see it in time to save myself. He was the Yeti, and the ugly scars down the left side of my rib cage were only a small part of what he’d left me.

  I’d tried to find something in my bushido texts, some snippet of wisdom or piece of advice to set me back on track. The Hagakure said that a samurai should never joke about being afraid, lest their true heart be revealed. Since humor was one of my chief defense mechanisms, I was pretty much screwed.

  Of course, it also said that in order to ease nervousness, you should rub spit on your ears and kick everything in your path. Hadn’t tried that yet. Maybe next week.

  “What did he really want?” Out of the darkness, Mira’s voice startled me, and I jumped a little. She sounded smaller somehow, and I held her tighter without really knowing why.

  “Who, Cam?”

  “No. Him. The… thing, yesterday.”

  “Ah.” She wouldn’t say a demon’s name, not even the mocking one I’d assigned to him. But I knew who she meant. Last night, we’d carefully avoided mentioning Axel and his party crashing, but I guess my reprieve was over. “I don’t know. Like I said, he was being weird, even for him.”

  “What did he say?”

  I frowned a little, though she couldn’t see it. “Not much. He seemed really excited that I was going on vacation. Enthusiastic, even.” Too enthusiastic. Yet another thing that had bothered me ever since.

  “How do you feel about that?” Her hand was still stroking
up and down my arm, and it finally occurred to me that she was looking for goose bumps. I was and always would be the magic-less wonder, but my earlywarning system was finely tuned.

  “I don’t know. My first instinct is to do exactly the opposite of whatever makes him happy. But then I think, maybe that’s what he wants me to do, and I should go after all, and then I get all confused after that.” I nuzzled her ear a little, hoping to distract her. “Ignore him. He’s a douche.”

  She turned in my arms, facing me though neither of us could see in the darkened room. “You’d tell me, right? If you thought something was wrong, you’d tell me?” Her fingers stroked through my hair, combing the strands out straight over and over.

  I had to think long and seriously about that. Lying by omission had become all too easy for me of late, and I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t do it anymore-not to her. So, was something wrong?

  I really thought about it, bringing Axel’s face to the front of my mind, rolling the idea of the vacation trip through my head. There was no twisting of my innards, no painfully cold goose bumps along my arms. Just my natural antidemon revulsion where Axel was concerned.

  “I got nothing, baby. No shivers, no nothing. I think we’re okay. Besides, you’ve got like fifty layers of protective spells on me. What could happen?” That seemed to appease her and we both settled down to sleep.

  Well, Mira settled down to sleep. I lay awake, watching the streetlight outside cast weird shadows through the blinds and replaying the strange conversation with Axel over and over. My brain kept coming back to one sentence again and again.

  “We always come back, Jesse.”

  Then the goose bumps came, peppered over my skin like tiny needles of ice. I didn’t know why that one statement triggered my danger-sense, but I was pretty sure I’d get a chance to find out.

  4

  Morning comes damn early on two hours’ sleep, especially when “morning” starts at three a.m. But we had a long drive ahead of us, and the early bird gets the… oh screw it. It was freakin’ early.

  I kissed Mira’s forehead and slipped out of bed without waking her. Bonus points for me. I’d packed the night before, and left my clothes in the living room so I could dress without waking anyone else.

  Walking down the hallway, I poked my head into Annabelle’s room. It took me a moment to locate her head of red curls, pillowed between a giant pink frog and a worn wolf plushie. Even in the darkness, I could see the faintest pink tint to her cheeks, her face flushed with the heat of sleep like kids’ do. Aside from her coloring, strawberry blond hair and blue eyes, she was the image of her mother, right down to the shape of her mouth and her pert little nose. She was the most beautiful thing in the world.

  “Sleep well, button. Be good for Mommy,” I whispered, then moved on.

  The only other thing I really needed to do would involve waking someone, but considering that someone was living in my house rent free, I figured ten minutes of lost sleep wouldn’t hurt him.

  Our spare bedroom had been converted from Mira’s personal sanctuary into Esteban’s room when he came to live with us. Not that the kid had much, but he’d put up a few posters, and some letters from home were taped to the wall above his bed.

  Unfortunately, Mira’s computer was still set up in there, mostly for the kid to work on his homework. (Mira was a stickler about grades. Who knew?) But it was also how I kept contact with the other champions, like myself. And since Esteban was nominally one too, he was allowed to peep at my conversations. A little.

  Mira’s brand-new, custom-built computer had enough lights and whizzers on it to light up the entire room, so I didn’t bother with flipping the overhead on. I parked myself in front of the green glowing monitor and proceeded to jump through seven kinds of hoops to finally access the Web site I was after in the first place. Our Webmaster was downright paranoid when it came to security.

  Just because I could, I left the volume up when the sentry-bot screamed “BOOBIES!” at supersonic decibels.

  Esteban said something like “Grnf?” and rolled over, yanking his comforter over his head.

  The Webcam window popped up on the screen, and I smirked at Viljo. “Boobies, hmm?”

  “I thought you were Esteban.” The hacker-turned-Web-security-expert rattled around on his keyboards without even looking up at his screen. “I do not want him surfing for porn on my baby, and he is surprisingly easy to embarrass.”

  Due to unexpected motherboard meltdown a few months ago, we’d been forced to replace Mira’s old computer. Viljo had taken great pride and care in building this new monstrosity before us.

  “But enough of that, down to business. Password?” He finally peered at his screen, eyes narrowing suspiciously. The wispy mustache he’d been trying to grow for the better part of a year looked like it might actually have enough hair now to warrant shaving. Or at least a good plucking.

  “Viljo, you’re looking right at me. It’s me.” The new computer came with a shiny new Webcam. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, yet. The improved technology did confirm that Viljo really was as pasty as I’d always thought, though, and that his dyed black hair was even stringier.

  “Do not care, new protocols. Password?”

  “Viljo, I’m going to come through this computer and kick your ass.” Which was, oddly, my password. “And shouldn’t it be pass phrase ?”

  “Password accepted. Hold on to your socks.” Viljo hit a few keys, and suddenly my computer screen blossomed into sights and sounds and colors not known to mortal man. Okay, not really, but that’s how he wanted me to feel about it.

  I hunt-and-pecked my sign-in ID into the right fields and finally got logged into Grapevine, flipping to the ITINERARY tab. “I’m gonna be out of town for a few days, Vil, and nowhere near a computer.”

  “Does Ivan know you’re going?”

  “I mentioned it, a long time ago, but I doubt he remembers. That’s why I’m filling out the nice little form, right?” I was almost thirty-three years old. I was fully capable of leaving the house without “daddy’s” permission.

  Don’t get me wrong. I have the utmost respect for Ivan Zelenko and the network of champions he has created out of nothing. Without Ivan’s knowledge and training, most of us would have been dead years ago. But I draw the line at letting him govern my “off hours.”

  “Business or pleasure?”

  “Pleasure, in theory. Camping trip with my buddies.”

  The computer geek paused in his furious typing and blinked at me, owl-eyed. “Like… outside?”

  “Yes, with the big glowing ball of death in the sky. Y’know, the sun?”

  He snorted. “Now you are just making words up.”

  I had to chuckle. I highly doubted that Viljo was as blatantly stereotypical as he pretended to be, but he still made me laugh with some of his nerd outrage. “I’m gonna be in your neck of the woods, actually. Just west of Fort Collins.” Viljo was hunkered down somewhere south of my impending vacation, near Pikes Peak last I knew.

  “I will be sure to wave in your general direction, from safely within my tightly closed curtains.”

  I finished updating my expected whereabouts-after last spring, I was damn lucky they didn’t want me to let them know when I went to piss-and hit SEND. “I should be back on Saturday. If I’m not, send in the cavalry.”

  “Will do.” Viljo grumbled to himself. “Not like I am doing anything else at the moment.”

  Work technically done, I settled in the comfy chair for a chat. “Still slow?”

  “Not a single contract since April, across the board. Nothing for me to do but sit here and polish my connectors.”

  That sounded… never mind how that sounded. “There have been dead spells before though, right?”

  Viljo shook his head, his matte black hair falling down into his eyes until he pushed it back irritably. “Not like this. And even the two contracts in April were negotiated long before the incident. So really, there have been no new on
es since…”

  “The incident.” That’s what we were calling it now. He really meant since Miguel and Guy died. Two champions down in the space of a month, and it would have been three if it hadn’t been for major luck, and (I was fully willing to admit) Esteban’s timely arrival. Six months since I banished the thing that stalked them, killed them. Tried to kill me. And not a peep out of a demon in all that time. Axel didn’t count.

  “What’s Ivan got to say about it?” I hadn’t heard from our revered leader-ish person in a couple of months, and even when I did talk to him, he kept things pretty close to the vest. It was just his way.

  The geek shook his head, frowning pensively. “He does not say much, anymore. I think he is worried, but I do not know about what.”

  Yeah, I got the same feeling from the old man, but trying to get him to talk was like hugging a rabid wolverine. You could do it, but you wouldn’t like what came next. “Maybe I’ll try and poke him a little, when I get back.”

  “Would you? I would appreciate that.” There was very real relief in Viljo’s voice, and it occurred to me suddenly just how very devoted the little geek was to our Ivan. “Is Esteban going with you on your vacation?”

  “No, he’s staying here to hold down the fort.” I glanced back at the sleeping lump in the bed, trying to decide if he was really asleep, or just faking. I finally settled on faking. No one really snored that evenly. “Listen, if he tries to log in a contract while I’m gone, send someone to find me, okay? He’s not ready yet.” Yeah, kid, hear that? I’m always watching you. I felt rather pleased with myself at being two steps ahead of the kid.

  “I do not know who I would send, but I will do something.” Windows on my computer screen started shutting down on their own. Viljo was obviously done with our conversation.

  A thought occurred to me, belatedly. “Hey, Vil?” He looked up. “Have the Knights Stuck-up-idus had any contracts?”