A Sense of Danger

by Jennifer Estep

  I flipped on the lights, entered the alarm code, and stared out at the open, empty space. Two years ago, before my grandmother had gotten sick, cozy furniture and cute knickknacks had filled the kitchen and living room as well as the two bedrooms and attached bathrooms in the back. Now, all of those things were gone, and the only furniture, if you could even call it that, was a mattress on the floor in the back corner of the living room next to the windows, and an old, worn-out yoga mat in front of the living room fireplace.

  Cancer was one of the few diseases that impacted mortals and paramortals equally, and Grandma Jane’s battle had been a long and expensive one. Even Section 47 insurance only went so far, and my grandmother hadn’t had any savings, thanks to my father’s final and most spectacular fuckup. As the medical bills started piling up, Grandma Jane and I had gone through the apartment, selling off her fine china, silverware, and other things we didn’t need nearly as much as we did cold, hard cash. A sofa we never sat on. A gold-framed mirror. Even some of her clothes, which I had taken to a local vintage shop. Piece by piece, we had sold and hocked everything we could, trying to keep ahead of the rising cost of her care.

  We hadn’t been successful.

  I had eventually taken control of my grandmother’s finances, so she had never known how truly bad it was getting—or how desperate I was becoming. I had barely managed to scrape together enough cash to cover her funeral and burial. After that, I finally swallowed my pride and got a private loan to pay off the medical providers and insurance companies, but I was just keeping my head above water when it came to meeting the monthly payments. Really, I had only switched my debt from all those companies over to a single individual—the weight and stress of trying to pay it back was still slowly crushing me.

  I sighed into the emptiness, and the bare walls soaked up the soft, resigned sound. I slung my bag onto the kitchen island counter, then went over and rolled up the yoga mat. Once it was out of the way, I reached down, removed a couple of short, loose floorboards, and slid my laptop into the small, hollow space underneath, which also featured a couple of guns, several magazines of ammo, three passports with varying names and nationalities, and ten thousand dollars in small bills. My own private, personal stash of emergency supplies in case I ever needed to get out of town quickly and never return. Always a possibility in the spy business, even for a lowly analyst like me. Of course, I had been tempted to use the money to pay down my debt, but a lousy ten grand was nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands of dollars I owed, so I had kept it.

  Every Section agent was supposed to store their laptop, documents, and other work products in a secure home safe, but I’d sold my grandmother’s freestanding safe for three hundred bucks. The money had helped pay for her casket. Besides, since no one besides Jensen ever read my reports, no one had any real reason to swipe my laptop. My hiding space was good enough for government work, as the old saying went.

  Once I’d stowed my laptop away and returned the floorboards and yoga mat to their previous positions, I headed into my bedroom, which was as empty as the rest of the apartment, except for my clothes hanging in the closet and a few cardboard boxes of loose photos and other mementoes stacked up in the corner.

  I glanced over at the boxes. Since I had sold all the picture frames, I had taped photos of Grandma Jane and my dad, Jack, to the sides of the cardboard, along with one shot of myself. We Lockes all looked alike, with our auburn hair, blue eyes, and pale skin, and the photos featured my grandmother and father standing in front of the main Section building on their first days of work. My grandmother had started the tradition, and she had snapped a photo of me outside the building too. One of the better, more normal legacies that she and my father had passed down to me.

  Another box featured a picture of my mom, Josephine, with her dark brown hair and eyes and tan skin, holding up a copy of Charlotte’s Web in the library where she had worked. It had been my mother’s favorite book, and she had named me after the title character, the smart little spider who saves her friends. My mother had died in a car accident when I was nine, and I still re-read the book at least once a year, usually around her July birthday, as a way to remember her. I had also read the book aloud to Grandma Jane a few weeks before she died.

  The bittersweet memories washed over me, and I sighed into the emptiness again.

  I opened the closet and pulled out an old-fashioned waitress uniform of a short-sleeve polyester shirt with an oversize white collar and round plastic buttons and a knee-length pleated skirt. The uniform’s powder-blue color reminded me of the cleaner Desmond’s tie. I once again wondered what he wanted.

  Maybe he’d just been looking for a hookup. Most of the cleaners thought they were hot stuff and that we should all swoon and drop our undies just because they killed people. Either way, I had more important things to worry about, so I shoved the cleaner out of my mind and shimmied into the waitress uniform, along with white tights and thick-soled sneakers. A gray fleece jacket completed my ensemble.

  I grabbed my bag, left the apartment, plodded downstairs, and fell in with the flow of people moving along the sidewalks. It was mid-October, and the sun was already setting. The fall chill, which had been so crisp and refreshing earlier in the day, was quickly turning cold and frosty. I shivered, wrapped my arms around myself, and hurried on.

  A few blocks later, I reached an old metal train car that squatted at the back edge of a large parking lot covered with cracked asphalt and littered with potholes. Over the front door, a sign burned a bright neon-blue, spelling out Moondust Diner one cursive letter at a time, along with a white half-moon and surrounding stars. Smaller, atomic-red signs in the windows glowed in the shapes of burgers, fries, and milkshakes. Despite the battered gray metal, grimy glass, and uneven front steps, the Moondust served great food. Even better, since I worked there, I got to eat for free. My wallet thanked me for that, even if my arteries didn’t.

  I pushed through the door and went inside. Dull chrome booths lined the front windows. Next came a wide aisle and then a long dining counter studded with equally dull chrome stools and topped with clusters of silver napkin holders, plastic ketchup bottles, and glass salt and pepper shakers shaped like half-moons and stars. Behind that was another counter bristling with burping coffeemakers, gleaming glass cake stands, and towering stacks of neon-blue ceramic coffee mugs.

  An open-air service window was embedded in the wall behind the counter so that the cooks back in the kitchen could pass the waitresses plates of pancakes, eggs, bacon, and meatloaf. Those same delicious aromas curled through the air, making my stomach rumble. I was definitely getting the meatloaf special for dinner.

  It was just after seven, so the dinner rush was in full swing, and several folks were eating turkey clubs, onion rings, and fries and slurping down chocolate milkshakes at the booths and along the counter.

  A seventy-something woman with iron-gray hair pulled back into a tight, severe bun sat behind the cash register directly across from the front door. She was tallying the day’s receipts, although her head snapped up as I walked inside. Her dark brown eyes narrowed, and her tan, wrinkled face crinkled in severe disapproval as I moved around her, stripped off my jacket, grabbed a clean white apron off one of the hooks embedded in the wall, and tied it on over my uniform.

  Zeeta Kowalski, who had opened the diner with her late husband, Mel, way back in the day, made a point of looking up at the pie-shaped clock on the wall next to the cash register. “You’re three minutes late,” she snapped in her low, gravelly voice. “It’s coming out of your pay.”

  “Sorry,” I muttered, even though I wasn’t sorry at all.

  Except for her yearly Christmas vacation to visit her daughter, Penny, in Florida, Zeeta spent all her time at the diner, and she thought the cooks and waitresses should be as devoted to the eatery as she was. To me, it was just a paycheck, and I planned on quitting as soon as I could afford to. Which was probably never, given my current glacial pace at paying down my
massive debt.

  Zeeta gave me the stink-eye, then went back to her receipts, slowly sorting through each and every slip of blue paper and scribbling down the amounts on a yellow legal pad. I could have gone through the tickets much faster, as well as totaled them up on the cash register, but the one time I’d offered to help with the money, Zeeta had growled that she didn’t need a young whippersnapper like me trying to cheat her. Paranoid old crone.

  I walked over and peered through the open service window. The rest of the diner might look old and rundown, but the kitchen was a shining beacon of stainless-steel appliances. Zeeta might skimp on the décor out front, but the kitchen was all clean, sleek business.

  “Hey, Pablo,” I called out, my voice much more cheerful than before. “What’s the dessert special?”

  Pablo Suarez, a tall, skinny, twenty-year-old guy with thick black hair, dark brown eyes, and bronze skin, pointed to a glass cake stand sitting off to one side of the counter. “Peach pie with a vanilla-sugar crumb topping. I’ve got a dozen of them back here.”

  My stomach rumbled again. Like me, Pablo was only working here for the paycheck while he put himself through culinary school. He was a talented chef, and peach pie was one of his specialties.

  “Save me a piece?” I asked in a hopeful voice.

  He winked at me. “I already set some aside for you to take home.”

  “You’re a saint.” I blew him a kiss.

  “Aw, now, don’t be doing things like that. Enrique might get jealous.” He winked at me again.

  Enrique was Pablo’s boyfriend, a pre-med student who often came into the diner to drink coffee and study.

  I would have chatted with Pablo longer, but Zeeta was giving me that look again, so I got busy, taking orders, refilling coffee cups, and doing my best to stay out of her way.

  The first two hours passed by in a blur, but around nine o’clock, business slowed down for the night, the way it always did. Soon, the only people in the diner were truck drivers and nurses who wanted a quick bite to eat before getting back on the road or returning to the nearby hospital to finish their shifts.

  During my break, I stood at the back counter and gulped down my own dinner of Pablo’s excellent, spicy cayenne meatloaf, buttery mashed potatoes, and roasted Brussels sprouts with smoked bacon and onion jam. The kid truly was an artist, and I was going to miss him and his food when he graduated from culinary school and moved on to a bigger and better restaurant.

  I was scraping the last of the mashed potatoes off my plate when the front door opened, and a man stepped inside. His black hair was cropped close to his skull, and his ebony skin gleamed under the lights. He was a couple inches over six feet, with broad shoulders and a muscled chest poured into a tight, black, long-sleeve T-shirt. Black cargo pants and boots completed his minimalist ensemble. You could take the cleaner out of Section, but you couldn’t put the color back in his wardrobe.

  Gabriel Chase grinned at Zeeta, who tittered and batted her eyelashes, despite the fact that he was a good forty years younger than she was. The old crone hated me, but she loved Gabriel. Then again, most women did. I might have too, if I didn’t know how dangerous he was.

  Gabriel sauntered over and took his usual seat in the corner booth, with his back to the metal wall, and stared out over the rest of the diner. I topped a piece of Pablo’s warm peach pie with a large scoop of his equally excellent homemade vanilla-bean ice cream, then grabbed the freshest pot of coffee and headed over to Gabriel. I set the pie down on the table and filled his cup.

  “Mmm. Peach pie. My favorite,” Gabriel murmured in a low, silky voice.

  He gestured for me to sit in the other side of the booth, which I did. Zeeta shot me a nasty look, but she didn’t growl at me to get back to work. She might think Gabriel was gorgeous, but she also knew he wasn’t the kind of person you said no to. Besides, Gabriel often brought his crew in here to eat, and Zeeta knew it was in the best interests of her cash register to keep him happy, even if that meant letting me, her least favorite employee, take an unscheduled break.

  Gabriel took a couple bites of pie and ice cream and washed them down with some coffee. He sighed with contentment, then raised his light brown eyes to mine, finally ready to get down to business. “Your information panned out.”

  I arched an eyebrow. “Did you ever doubt it would?”

  Gabriel grinned, his white teeth flashing in the middle of his trimmed black goatee. “Nah. I know how good Charlotte Locke is with numbers. Even when we were kids, you were always the smartest person around.”

  Gabriel’s father, Leon, had worked for Section, making him a Legacy just like me. The two of us had gone to the same schools and parties and had basically grown up together. We weren’t exactly friends, but we had been through a lot of mutual shit, thanks to our fathers, and Gabriel was the closest thing I had to a true confidant. He was also the only person who realized exactly how desperate my financial situation was. Miriam thought I was temporarily working at the diner to pay down a few final bills for my grandmother’s medical care, but Gabriel knew I was roughly five hundred thousand dollars in debt and that I probably wouldn’t be quitting my crappy diner job—ever.

  Gabriel used to be a cleaner, just like his father, but a few years ago, he’d gotten embroiled in a scandal involving a general’s daughter and had been kicked out of Section. Most people probably would have slunk away in disgrace, but not Gabriel Chase. Instead, he had started Chase Industries, his own private contracting firm. Kidnapping rescues, witness protection, security details, even the occasional heist to return stolen art to its rightful owner. Gabriel and his crew did all that and more, and they had a reputation for being professional, efficient, and invisible.

  As a result, Gabriel’s fortunes, and especially his bank balance, had astronomically risen since his departure from Section, while mine had fallen off a cliff. Sometimes, I envied Gabriel’s freedom, and especially the riches that had come along with being his own boss.

  “You were right,” he said. “Ramirez was skimming from our petty cash accounts.”

  A couple of weeks ago, Gabriel had asked me to take a look at his books, since money was going into various accounts and then seemingly disappearing into thin air. It had taken me less than a day to figure out that Alfredo Ramirez, his business manager, was diverting funds into his own private account. I had spent another day double-checking my work, as well as tracing the funds, which Ramirez had used to pay down some of his outstanding child support as well as buy his current girlfriend a very nice diamond bracelet.

  “I assume Ramirez is no longer in your employ?” I asked.

  Gabriel grinned again and curled his fingers around his fork, casually holding it like a knife he was about to stab someone with. “You might say that.”

  Danger-danger-danger, my inner voice whispered.

  Gabriel might look like an ordinary, albeit gorgeous, guy, but he was far stronger and faster than a mere mortal. He could break bones as easily as regular people broke bread and snap someone’s neck with little more than a slight twist of his hand.

  He also had the far more unusual and unique paramortal ability to walk through walls. Wooden planks, concrete slabs, steel vaults. Gabriel could slip through all those objects and more with ease. Phasing, some folks called it. When we were kids, I’d once seen him dissolve his hand into a cloud of gray smoke, stick it into a birthday party piñata, and pull out all the candy inside. I’d screamed, but Gabriel had just laughed and started shoving candy into his mouth before offering me some of his spoils.

  Gabriel didn’t take too kindly to folks stealing from him, and he tended to use his fists and magic to make examples out of those who wronged him. Alfredo Ramirez’s bloody, beaten body was probably already floating in the Potomac, just waiting to frighten some poor unsuspecting fisherman.

  “You didn’t stop by just to say I was right. You could have texted me that.”

  He leaned back in his side of the booth. “You should come wo
rk for me, Charlotte. We both know your talents, and especially your magic, are wasted at Section.”

  At Section, I was on record as being a synth who saw mistakes and errors. Nothing more, nothing less. But Gabriel was one of the few people who knew about all the other things I could do with my magic, including the sense of danger that perpetually haunted me.

  I arched an eyebrow at him again. “So I could be further indebted to you? No, thanks.”

  “You’re already indebted to me,” he pointed out. “My dad was the one who fronted your Grandma Jane the cash for your father, remember?”

  As if I could ever forget. About fifteen years ago, when I was in college, my father’s last mission had gone horribly, horribly wrong. His entire team had been ambushed and slaughtered, and he had been captured by the leader of a Mexican drug cartel, who had threatened to send bloody pieces of Jack Locke back to Section unless the cartel’s ransom demands were met. Section 47 didn’t negotiate with terrorists or criminals, not even to rescue their own people, but my grandmother had wanted to save her son, so she’d gotten a loan from Gabriel’s father—three million dollars.

  I loved my father. Truly, I did. But sometimes I hated him for being such a thoughtless, reckless bastard, getting captured, and putting Grandma Jane—and now me—in this situation. His ransom had been the start of our downward financial spiral. Thanks to her savings, generous Section pension, and especially her various moneymaking schemes, my grandmother had managed to repay most of the money in the intervening years, but then she’d gotten sick, which had added even more debt on top of what she had already owed. Now, I was left to pick up the pieces and work my fingers to the bone trying to repay the rest of it. Sometimes, I thought being in dire financial straits was my father’s true legacy to me instead of working for Section.