“Doesn’t matter, I’m good with a chair if you want something comfy,” Mel answered. The fridge door shut, the containers safely stored front and center so that Vickie would see them the next time she opened the door.
“Roger, you get the chair. I’m a sprawler. Tea okay?” Vickie was trying not to show it, by being the hostess, but having a new person in her space always made her nervous. So far, in the last year, she had had more new people in her space than in the previous eight. Bell, Ramona, Bull, the Djinni, Scope, Acrobat, JM, Sera, Mel. Of course the last time Mel had been here, it had been with the others, planning the Vault raid. This was the first time she was here alone. That made it harder, somehow.
“Tea’s fine. You want to eat first and then talk shop, or would you rather multitask?”
Vickie snorted a little. “Mel…it’s me. Multitask is my middle name.”
“So’s skipping lunch, according to Bella, but I figured it was your place and your rules.” Mel rested her hand on her chopsticks, but didn’t pick them up. “The way she talks, you’d think she was your Nana or something.”
Vickie wondered how guilty she looked, and tried to cover it by picking up her box and chopsticks and fiddling with them. “She’s a healer. She thinks I don’t eat right, and she’s probably right. But hell, even if I can force myself out to the store, when would I get the time? Overwatch is two full time jobs, and then some.”
Mel picked up her own box and chopsticks. “She’s a healer, sure, but she’s more than that. That caring about what you eat beyond lunchtime is being a friend, y’know?” She pushed some spicy chunks of tofu around before picking up a square. “She’s trying to cut out the time part of that equation by having it here. You’re important to her, Vickie.”
Vickie flushed. “That’s…new for me,” she replied. “Bell’s the first friend I had here. She’s the one that got me out of the apartment. Hell, I think I probably put Overwatch together for her, not Tesla.”
“You probably did. Helps her out a lot. Helps everyone, come to think of it,” Mel commented around a mouthful. “If Bella’s the glue of the organization, then you’ve got to be the nuts and bolts. More bolts, ’cause the rest of us are nuts.”
Vickie sighed, but it was not a sigh of discontent or weariness. “It’s the best thing I’ve ever done. It may very well be right up there in the top twenty of all major magical works put together by one person. I’m damn proud of it, Mel. And Mark One can run without me, which is even better; it’ll outlive me. Most magicians can’t say that.” She chuckled. “Even Red Saviour approves of it, and getting her to approve of anything having to do with magic is harder than getting her to approve of anything created by a capitalist.”
“She have a bad experience with it, or do you think she’s just naturally suspicious? People who are violently opposed to something usually have a bones-deep reason for it.
“The one-word answer is ‘Rasputin,’ or so I have deduced. The longer response is that Rasputin evidently was up to a lot more government-meddling than the history books give him credit for, and yes, he was a magician.” Vickie ate quickly, and neatly, handling the chopsticks like a native. “How much bad he did, I don’t know, and honestly, it is largely because I haven’t bothered to research it. He’s dead and gone, and I have more crap on my plate in the here and now than I can handle as it is. Saviour evidently has enough dirt on him to want to kill magicians on sight, and that’s more than enough information for me.” She paused for some tea. “If I live through all of this and actually have some leisure time, I intend to look into it, because I’m curious, but now is not the time. I can research, or I can build in more bells and whistles to Overwatch Mark Two while I do monitor duty. I know where my time is going to go.”
“And there’s always the parkour course,” Mel said, with one side of her mouth quirking up.
Vickie groaned theatrically, although…now that there was less pain and less falling involved, she was getting to appreciate runs on the parkour course. Not like, but appreciate. “There’s always the parkour course.”
Mel laughed at the sentiment. “Five, six days a week. I thought about going out there in the evening when it got cooler since it’s not my night for the late shift at the bar. Nobody’s out there once first shift’s done on Echo campus, so there’s less people to fight for a good corner.” She stirred what was left of her noodles. “I’d like to be out there more often. Seems like you get in a fair amount of practice.”
“I spent most of my time in a chair,” Vickie pointed out. “I need all the exercise I can get. Though the Djinni seems to think I need more field work…” She shook her head. “Let’s just say, when I’ve tried, things tend to go fifty-seven different kinds of bad.”
“Really?”
She shrugged. “I may be a bad-luck magnet outside my four walls.” She didn’t see any need to elaborate. Mel had more than enough access to look at the AA reports if she wanted to. But she figured she would prompt. “It’s all in the after-action reports. Unlike some people, I’m always on top of my paperwork.”
That earned her a broad smile. “I know. About being on top of the paperwork, I mean. If everybody managed to be as thorough as you…” Mel set aside the remains of her lunch and leaned back. “Like I said before, Bella loves you, and not just for the paperwork. That’s a bonus.”
Vickie flushed a little. “Well, she loves me for Overwatch. We’d never have put Verdigris down without it. Hell, we couldn’t have taken the New Mexico Thulian hideout without it.”
“That was you first and Overwatch second. Bet that everyone else on that mission would have said the same thing.” Mel leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. “Is it really so bad to think that Bella’s valuing you for you, not just for the whiz-bang stuff that you’re able to do?”
Vickie shrugged again. “Not used to having friends again,” she said, and left it at that.
“Fair enough.” Mel didn’t appear the least bit offended by the admission, nor did she try to press the conversation. She picked up the empty boxes and stacked them. “If you want another one, or at least someone’s ass to kick up and down the parkour course, I’m here. And if not, I’ll be your own Cajun delivery service.”
Vickie conjured up a half-smile. “I’ll take you up on the parkour and the delivery, as long as it’s not eating into your own time too much. Bella hates Nawlins food, so maybe you know. Any decent Cajun places that do carry-out around the campus?”
* * *
“How can something so dirt-cheap and simple be so good?” Vickie asked, halfway into her red-beans-and-rice.
“Soul-food is what people with no money learned to make taste good, cher,” Mel replied, between spoonfuls of gumbo.
Vickie was about to say something when Overwatch gave her the ping that was associated with the Djinni opening his freq to her. She held up a hand to Mel to let her know she needed to concentrate. “Overwatch, go for Djinni,” she said, before he could hail her.
“You psychic these days, Vix?”
“Nope, just made another improvement. Special people get a sign-on tone. And you’re special,” she quipped.
“That’s what my teachers used to say,” he replied. “Got a situation here. Blacksnake poking around where they had no business to be managed to find a pop-up site before it popped-up. My inclination is to let them whittle each other down before we call in the troops to mop up the survivors.”
“Are you in a compromised position?” she asked, quickly, grabbing a wireless keyboard off the coffee-table and bringing up her enhanced HUD. “Overwatch: command: Maestro.” That cued the motion sensors in the four corners of the room to follow her hand motions on her virtual monitors that were now seemingly floating in mid-air.
“Ah, yeah, about that. I’m kinda pinned down…”
“How badly, have you got any room to move, and do you need a hole?” She felt her heart racing with anxiety, the way it always did when he was in trouble. His lifesign monitors showed a lo
t of stress and from the sounds his mics were picking up, the fighting was pretty close to him.
“Any closer and they’d fall over me, enough, and yes.”
She reached for the piece of his claw she’d strung on a thong around her neck, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath, bringing up the fractals that allowed her to manipulate and sense the earth and what was on it. Then she let go of the claw, connection established. “Hole coming in three…two…one.” She clenched her hands around the “edges” of something that didn’t exist, and pulled them “apart.” She heard him grunt as the earth fell away beneath him and he dropped into the hole she had just made. “Six feet deep enough?”
“Ah…make it ten?”
She was sweating with the effort, but this was the Djinni. “Roger,” she replied, and gave him another four feet. “You want me to call the cavalry, or do you want to?”
“I’ll do it. I’ll just wait until the ruckus dies down, poke my head up like a gopher and see what’s left.”
“You didn’t bring one of the eyes, did you?” she asked, not hiding her annoyance.
“Makes an ugly bulge in my svelte outline.”
“Moron. At least if they shoot you in the head, it won’t hit anything vital.”
“Hardy har.”
She brought up his eye-cam; as she expected, it showed the rough sides of the hole she had made for him. Lucky, this time. He’d been in a destruction corridor and she hadn’t had to try and get through concrete. Just plain old red Georgia clay. Which was going to hold together well enough she didn’t need to reinforce the walls to keep them from caving in on him. She typed rapidly on her keyboard, instructing the Colt Brother on duty to get ready to deploy a pop-up team on Djinni’s signal, or hers.
With a gesture, she shoved a couple of the virtual monitors aside to get a look at Mel. She looked…tense. “Don’t die,” she said, shortly.
“Awww, maaaaaa.” The smart-ass retort relieved her, a little. She had a good sense now of how he’d respond if he actually was in trouble. He had been when he’d called, for instance. She licked her lips, and only then realized they, and her mouth, had gone dry. She reached blindly for her coffee and swigged it down.
The combatants were moving too quickly and were clumped too closely together—and probably were on too much asphalt and cement—for her to get a good handle on how many there were. But the sounds of gunfire and energy-weapons began to thin out. A sudden ramping up of the beam-generators and a lost burst, and then there was silence.
“Poking my nose up, Overwatch.” There was absolutely no point in telling him not to, so she just rode that eye-cam like a cowboy on a bronco, and scanned what part of the area he could see before he had even begun to take it all in.
Nothing.
“Poking an arm up.” He was going to use his skin-sense, amped up. She held her breath. As long as there was only powered-armor there, and as long as they were still cooling down from the battle, he’d be able to tell how many of them there were…
“Four suits, which is more than I can handle. Send in the mop-up crew, Vix.”
“Roger that,” she replied, and then monitored the situation until the ECHO squad, equipped with those RPGs, of course, arrived. And then had another bad moment or three when the Djinni popped out of his hiding place to join them.
Finally it was over, the damn crazy fool had lived to tell another tall tale and was on his way back with the ECHO squad. She shut all the extraneous Overwatch stuff down and collapsed backwards on the couch, her eyes leaking tears of grateful relief. He’s okay. He’s okay. He wasn’t even nicked this time. She’d forgotten she wasn’t alone until Mel poked her with the plate of reheated food.
“Uh…thanks Mel,” she stammered, taking it with one hand and wiping her eyes with the other. “Men. Can’t live with ’em, can’t sell ’em for parts.” She managed a laugh that sounded mostly genuine, and dug back into her food, pretty certain she hadn’t let anything slip. Don’t let her guess. Don’t let her guess. She’s never seen me at work before, she can’t know I don’t react to everyone the way I just did to Red being in trouble.…
“If I could, reckon I know which part I’d sell first,” Mel agreed.
Good. Dodged that bullet. She managed to get the food past the lump in her throat, helped by the fact that after all that magic and mayhem, she was ravenous. “You gonna eat all that?” she asked pointing with her spoon at the big box of fried calamari.
* * *
They were coming, and she was strapped to the table. Every time, the door would open and the men would file in, two by two, their faces hidden behind masks. They would move to surround her, and then they would begin.
And she would scream.
“Mel!”
It would never sate them. They kept digging. And she kept screaming.
“MEL!”
And screaming.
“WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, GIRL? STOP IT!”
His hands were on her, strong hands, grasping her by the arms. She expected him to shake her, perhaps hit her, until he got what he wanted. But she couldn’t give him that. She was a soldier, and she had been trained to resist interrogation. Still, nothing had prepared her for this. It wasn’t information they wanted, not something she could just tell them. No, they were after something else, and she had no idea what it was.
So they kept at her.
As far as torture went, they went to some exotic extremes. Sometimes she felt as if she were paralyzed, and slowly suffocating, and the suffering was less pain than helpless anguish. She couldn’t move a muscle, she couldn’t make a sound, her silent shrieks deafening only to herself. Other times it was nothing but pain, in every fiber of her being. They would turn it on, effortlessly it seemed, and this time she was free to writhe and wail for all the good it did her. They were relentless. At first she thought them merely cruel. Now, it was clear they were far beyond that. They didn’t see her as a person, only a subject. An artifact to calmly dissect, to take apart and examine. None of them held any enjoyment in debasing her. Except for one.
His hands were strong. They touched her knowingly. On rare occasions they were alone, and when they were, it was somehow worse.
She felt his hands on her again, and she cringed, and shuddered as her scream died away in her throat. Something was different.
His hands were firm, but gentle.
“Mel,” he said again, but softly now. “Wherever you are, come back. Come back.”
Her eyes opened to a dark room, the fog lifting from her mind. She was in bed. Her bed. She was sitting up, her shoulders and head hunched forward, her hair matted softly to her face. He knelt before her, his hands still on her arms, and as she looked up at him her expression became one of bewilderment. It made him laugh.
“New face,” the Djinni said. “The most challenging one to date.”
“God, I almost prefer the nightmare,” she muttered, shuddering again. “When would you ever be called upon to impersonate Alfred E. Neuman?”
He repositioned himself beside her, and laid a tentative hand on her shoulder. “Nightmare,” he nodded. “Yeah, I figured.”
She glanced at him quickly, grimaced, and let her gaze fall back to her hands. They were shaking. “Was I screaming?”
“For about a minute,” he said. “You bolted up from a dead sleep like a banshee, wringing your hands, hollerin’. Thought we were under attack at first, but nothing. You just kept going, didn’t even seem to know I was here until I touched you.”
She took that in, and finally nodded. “I say anything?”
“Nothing I could make out. But yeah, it was bad. You get these nightmares a lot?”
“Not for long time,” she exhaled. “Guess something woke it up in me.”
“Need to talk about it?”
“Do you?” she snapped. “I don’t see you volunteering intel on your nightmares!”
“What makes you think I have any?”
“Save it, Red,” she growled. “You have n
ightmares all the time. Moaning, crying, fingers twitching. Difference is…”
“I don’t wake up screaming from mine,” he said.
She clenched up and withdrew from him. Finally, she reached for her robe and climbed out of bed.
“Yeah, I guess you don’t,” she muttered. She moved to the vanity, fumbled in the dark and managed to pour herself a stiff drink. “Want one?”
“Sure,” he said, and in moments she was back in bed, handing him a tumbler of scotch. He raised it obligingly, they clinked glasses, and shot back their drinks in unison.
“Need to talk about it?” he asked again.
“No,” she said, cringing inwardly at how quickly she responded, the sudden shrillness of her voice that betrayed an anxiety she had long thought forgotten. For the first time, she felt somewhat vulnerable around this man. That wasn’t what she wanted. Of all the things the Djinni could be for her, confidant didn’t top that list.
“Maybe it’d be more accurate to say that I might need to, in that psycho-babbly sense, but I don’t really want to.” She studied the bottom of her tumbler. “No ’fense.”
“Takes more than a little honesty to offend me, darlin’,” he said. “As for what you need, you can’t expect me to know if you don’t give a little.”
He turned to her, his eyes boring into hers.
“So give a little.”
She frowned and looked away. “Yeah, right.” What business was it of his? For the past few weeks there had been more banter and a few stolen moments away from their daily routines. And each night, they fell into bed and forgot about rest of the world, for at least a little while. But he was not her boyfriend. That wasn’t part of the deal.
Collision: Book Four in the Secret World Chronicle - eARC Page 30