A Sense of Danger

by Jennifer Estep

  Gabriel must have realized he’d hit a nerve because his face softened, just a bit. “You know I didn’t mean anything by that, but my offer still stands. Come work for me, Charlotte. All you have to do is say yes, and I’ll forgive your debt.”

  It was tempting—so very tempting. But my grandmother had taught me you didn’t take favors you couldn’t pay back in kind, unless you absolutely had no other options. I might not like it, but working at the diner was another option. Besides, the only thing I had to offer Gabriel was my magic, and since I’d already found his embezzler, he didn’t have any real use for my skills. I didn’t want his pity, and I was no one’s charity case.

  I shook my head. “No. We’ll continue with our current payment schedule. Minus the money you recovered from Ramirez’s secret account. That would be thirty-three thousand nine hundred and nine dollars and fifteen cents.”

  Gabriel waved his hand. “We can round it up to an even thirty-five grand.”

  “No,” I snapped. “Thirty-three thousand nine hundred and nine dollars and fifteen cents. Not a penny more, and not a penny less.”

  His eyes narrowed at the bite in my voice, but I stared right back at him, despite the danger-danger-danger whispers still clanging in my mind.

  Gabriel and I might not be best friends, but I knew he would never hurt me, not like he had probably hurt Alfredo Ramirez. Still, he didn’t have to get physical to wound me. He could always get pissed off enough to sell my debt to someone else—someone who wouldn’t take no for an answer when it came to my magic, my body, or my position at Section. I might only be a lowly analyst, but someone could easily find a way to use that—me—to their advantage.

  Gabriel shrugged. “Fine. If that’s the way you want it. Text me the amount, and I’ll deduct it from your debt.”

  The tension between us eased, and I nodded. “Thank you.”

  He shrugged again. “Don’t thank me. I didn’t do anything. You’re the one who’s being a stupid, stubborn fool.”

  He was right about that, although I would never admit it.

  Over at the cash register, Zeeta let out a loud, angry, pointed cough. My break was over.

  I slid out of the booth, got to my feet, and grabbed the pot off the table. “I’ll bring you some more coffee. And another piece of pie.”

  Before he could say anything else, I spun around and stalked away from Gabriel, wishing I could leave the rest of my problems behind so easily.

  Chapter Three

  Charlotte

  A few minutes later, Gabriel paid up and left. I went back to work, taking orders, refilling coffee cups, clearing tables, and wiping down booths under Zeeta’s suspicious, disapproving glower.

  The diner slowly emptied out for the night, with only a few people trickling in, which made it easy for me to spot the cleaner when she pushed through the door.

  The assassin was around my age, mid-thirties, and was wearing a black suit jacket over a black shirt and pants. Naturally. Her dark brown hair was pulled back into a pretty but functional French braid, and her lips were painted a bright scarlet, as were her short fingernails, bringing out her lovely features and bronze skin.

  The cleaner didn’t look at me as she took a seat in the corner booth, the same one Gabriel had occupied earlier. She gave her order to Felicity, the other waitress, and calmly, quietly checked her phone and ate her BLT and sweet potato fries, which she washed down with an ice water with lemon. She might not have noticed me, but I kept an eye on her.

  This wasn’t the first time someone from Section, especially a cleaner, had eaten here while I’d been working. The Moondust Diner had great food, reasonable prices, and was open until midnight, all of which made it attractive to the Section 47 crowd, who often worked long, odd hours.

  Despite the fact that my coworkers were spies, no one ever seemed to notice me bustling around the diner, fetching their food and drinks. Mortals weren’t the only ones who got lost in their devices and ignored their surroundings. The cheesy waitress outfit seemed to transform my familiar features into a stranger’s face, one that my fellow agents couldn’t be bothered to glance at, much less recognize. That was the only perk of wearing the atrocious, old-fashioned uniform.

  The one exception was Miriam, who had come in several weeks ago with her Greek boy toy. She claimed she had been craving a bacon cheeseburger and a chocolate shake, but that had just been an excuse to leave me a hundred-dollar tip. I hated that she knew how badly I needed the money, but I had slipped the bill into my pocket anyway. I might not want people’s pity or charity, but I wasn’t above taking it in certain cases when I knew it couldn’t be used against me. Besides, I wasn’t letting Zeeta sink her claws into my tips, not one single cent.

  The cleaner finished her BLT and fries, then ordered some peach pie and coffee for dessert. Felicity deposited everything on the table, along with the order ticket. The cleaner still didn’t look up from her phone and food, but I studied her from my position behind the counter, flipping through the mental dossiers I kept on everyone I came into contact with at Section. Sadly, this dossier was thinner than most. All I could recall was that the cleaner’s name was Rosalita, and the only reason I remembered that much was because of her lipstick. Red lipstick for Rosalita. A simple word association.

  Despite my unease, Rosalita ate her dessert, paid up, and left. I let out a quiet sigh of relief when she was gone. Looked like her visit had just been a coincidence, unlike Desmond, the Aussie cleaner. Once again, I wondered what he had wanted with me—

  “I don’t pay you to stand around daydreaming.” Zeeta’s snide voice cut into my reverie, and she made a sharp shooing motion with her hand. “Go clear that booth.”

  I bit back the retort dangling on the tip of my tongue and scurried over to do her barked bidding.

  At exactly ten minutes before midnight, Zeeta turned off the neon signs, locked the front door, and flipped the placard over to Closed. Felicity helped me wipe down the dining counter and turn off the coffeemakers, while Zeeta stuffed the cash from the register into a long, skinny money pouch that she tucked into her purse.

  When Zeeta was ready, the three of us headed into the kitchen to help Pablo clean up and put away the leftover food. We’d done this same routine a hundred times before, and we worked in quick, efficient silence.

  After we finished, Pablo slapped off the kitchen lights, then handed me a white plastic bag that contained my promised piece of his amazing peach pie. Even though I was full from my meatloaf dinner, my mouth still watered in anticipation.

  “Hope you enjoy it,” Pablo said as we trooped out the diner’s back door. “And don’t tell the boss lady, but I slipped you two pieces.”

  I grinned at his conspiratorial wink. “And that’s why I love you.”

  “There you go again,” Pablo teased. “I’ll have to tell Enrique that you’re trying to steal me away.”

  “If only I could. A girl can dream, right?”

  He grinned back at me, and we went our separate ways.

  It was after midnight now, and the moon and stars were shining big and bright in the October sky. The air was quite chilly, and I tucked my hands into my jacket pockets. The wind whistled down the street, cutting straight through my thin white tights and swirling up under my skirt. I shivered and hurried on.

  A few people were ambling along the sidewalks or curled up in building doorways, trying to get out of the worst of the wind. If not for my grandmother’s apartment, I probably would have been one of them. If I’d had the money, I would have given those folks a few bucks, but I didn’t have so much as a nickel to spare.

  Still, despite the cold, the walk was pleasant enough. During the day, D.C. was a pressure cooker of a city, with mortals and paramortals alike always hustling for more power, money, deals, and information. All those folks spewing all those innuendoes, half-truths, and lies sometimes sent my synesthesia into overdrive, and I often saw gray, pink, and red clouds streaming out of people’s mouths the same way that
my own breath was currently frosting in the chilly air. The resulting haze cloaked the streets in a swirling miasma of colors, giving me a headache and making me feel as though I were walking through an abstract painting.

  I much preferred the city at night, when the streets and sidewalks were largely empty of cars, people, lies, and colors, and everyone’s frantic greed, ambitions, and agendas had been put to bed, at least for a few hours.

  It had been another long, tiring day, so I quickly headed home. I had just stepped onto my block when I spotted a woman leaning up against the side of my apartment building. For a moment, I thought it was Miriam, sneaking a late-night smoke, although as far as I knew, Miriam didn’t know where I lived and would have no reason to visit me at this late hour.

  The woman must have heard the soft, steady swish-swish-swish of my skirt because she glanced over at me. Dark brown hair pulled back into a thick braid, sleek black pantsuit, bright red lipstick. Rosalita grinned, her white teeth flashing like square opals in the moonlight. The smile of a predator who had finally spotted her prey. Rosalita pushed away from the building and sauntered toward me.

  The second I recognized her, my inner voice started screaming. Danger-danger-danger! But I didn’t need my magic to tell me how much trouble I was in. A cleaner lurking outside my apartment building in the middle of the night only meant one thing.

  Rosalita was here to kill me.

  * * *

  I whirled around to run away, but three men were coming up on the sidewalk behind me. I hadn’t heard their footsteps, and I didn’t recognize their faces, but their black suits and sharp, thin smiles marked them as cleaners too.

  My mind seized on the numbers, the way it always did. Four cleaners were coming to kill me. Not one, not two, not three, but four. What had I done that would prompt someone to send four cleaners to murder me? Didn’t they realize that one probably would have been enough? This was most definitely overkill, in every sense of the word.

  My head whipped back and forth as I searched for an escape route. There wasn’t one, so I lurched to my right and darted into the narrow alley that ran between my building and the next one over. Of course, that was a mistake, since the alley was a dead end, but at least the cleaners couldn’t surround and attack me from all sides at once in here. Not that it was going to make a difference, since I didn’t have any weapons.

  I thought longingly of the guns hidden underneath the floorboards in my apartment. A weapon would have at least given me a fighting chance, although the outcome—my death—probably would have been the same. Besides, one of the many reasons I became an analyst was so I wouldn’t have to carry a gun and worry about people trying to kill me the way they had when my father was alive. But here it was, happening again, all the same.

  I sprinted to the far end of the alley, then whirled around so my back was to the red brick wall. Rosalita stepped into the corridor and sauntered toward me at a slow, steady pace, with the other three cleaners trailing along behind her. They had me cornered and were taking their sweet time coming to kill me. No doubt terrorizing me was a fun, added bonus. Fucking cleaners.

  I dropped my blue shoulder bag and the white plastic one with its precious pieces of peach pie onto the ground, then scanned the alley, searching for a makeshift weapon. A broken beer bottle was lying next to one of the overflowing trash cans, and I darted forward, grabbed the neck, and brandished the jagged, broken end. I might be outnumbered and outmatched, but I wasn’t going down without at least trying to save my own miserable life.

  Rosalita stopped a few feet away. She arched an eyebrow, then laughed. “Oh, come on, Charlotte. You know who I am, so you know I can take that bottle away and cut your throat with it before you can blink, much less scream.”

  “Who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky and you’ll trip or do something else stupid, and then I can cut your throat.”

  Her dark brown eyes narrowed, and she studied me a little more carefully. “You almost sound like you know what you’re talking about—and that you have the balls to actually do it. What would an analyst know about killing people?”

  Plenty, thanks to my father, and my grandmother too, but Rosalita didn’t need to know that. Besides, it didn’t matter. I might get lucky and kill her, given how badly she was underestimating me, but the other three cleaners were still lurking behind her. I couldn’t get them all with my pitiful weapon.

  “Who sent you?” I asked. “Someone inside Section?”

  Even though I worked for the government agency, it wasn’t unheard of for the Section higher-ups to discreetly eliminate agents who broke the rules, caused problems, and attracted unwanted attention to the paramortal population. Like analysts who used their insider knowledge to make big, illegal trades in the stock market. Charmers who double-dipped and sold the personal intelligence they gathered to third parties. Or cleaners who went rogue and started killing people indiscriminately.

  I wasn’t stupid enough to do any of those things, so this was most likely about my father. It was almost always about my father. Jack Locke might have been one of the best cleaners that Section 47 ever had, but he’d also racked up a lot of enemies, both inside the spy organization and out of it. My father had been dead for fifteen years, but paramortals had long, long memories. Killing me now would be a petty form of revenge, but I supposed it would be revenge nonetheless.

  I looked past Rosalita at the other three cleaners. They weren’t from the D.C. station, and I wondered if they might be part of Gabriel’s crew. But I had just ratted out a thief to Gabriel. He wouldn’t kill me right after I’d helped him recover thousands of dollars…would he?

  Sometimes I hated being a spy and all the paranoia that came along with it.

  Rosalita gave me another amused look. “Do you really think I’m dumb enough to tell you anything?”

  “If you’re going to kill me anyway, then what does it matter? I’ll be too dead to tell anyone you ratted them out.”

  She tilted her head to the side, thinking about it. Then another grin split her red lips. “Nah. I’m not getting paid to talk.”

  Rosalita flicked her wrist, and a slender silver butterfly knife slid into her hand. The blade popped open, and she whipped it up, around, and into position almost too quickly for me to follow. She was clearly skilled with the knife, and she obviously had some supernatural speed to augment her deadly Section training. Terrific.

  “In case you were wondering, your death is going to look like a mugging gone wrong. Sadly, the perpetrator will never be caught.” Rosalita clucked her tongue in false sympathy.

  The three male cleaners remained silent and hung back, apparently content to let her do the dirty, bloody work of actually murdering me. I wondered why she had brought them along, since she was so confident she could kill me all by herself. Whoever had dispatched Rosalita must have desperately wanted me dead to send this many cleaners, and that person wasn’t taking any chances on my getting lucky and surviving a single assassin. Smart of them, deadly for me.

  I racked my brain again, trying to think who I had pissed off or what I had done to warrant such a certain execution, but I couldn’t come up with an answer. Then again, the answer didn’t really matter, since my death was all but assured. Still, despite my dire situation, I tightened my grip on the broken bottle. My father might not have been around much, but he had taught me a few things, as had my grandmother.

  Rosalita spun her knife around in her hand again and marched forward. She probably expected me to lurch away or try to sidestep her, but I raised my bottle, firmed up my stance, and held my ground.

  Don’t mess around, and don’t dance away. Always go in for the kill the first chance you get, my father’s deep voice whispered in my ear.

  Memories of our sparring sessions flooded my mind, but I couldn’t focus on them. All I could see was the red haze pulsing around Rosalita’s knife. Not only was my synesthesia not an offensive power, but it sometimes went haywire and highlighted the wrong thing. In this case, I could
see the danger the knife represented far more clearly than I could see the actual blade itself. I grimaced and ignored the swirling color.

  Rosalita grinned again, then surged forward and swiped out with her knife. This time, I did sidestep her, but I whirled right back around and closed the distance between us. She must have been expecting me to retreat instead of attack, because she hesitated, which let me lunge forward and lash out with my broken bottle.

  I was aiming for her throat, but she used her speed to jerk to the side at the last second, and I only got her left cheek instead. Rosalita yelped with pain and surprise and slapped her hand up against the deep gash on her face.

  She looked stunned that I had actually managed to injure her, but then her eyes narrowed, and her nostrils flared with fury. “You Legacy bitch!” she hissed. “You’re going to pay for that!”

  Rosalita surged forward again. One second, she was five feet away. The next, she was right in front of me. I snapped up my broken bottle, going for her throat a second time, but I was too slow, and she ducked the blow and lashed out with her knife.

  I spun away, so that she wouldn’t lay my stomach wide open with the weapon, but the blade still stabbed deep into my left side. White-hot agony exploded in my body, and I screamed and staggered back into the alley wall. My legs buckled, and my ass hit the ground. I glanced down.

  My left side was wet with blood, which had already stained my blue waitress uniform a dark, sick brown. Pain pounded through my veins like a sledgehammer hitting me over and over again, and tears streamed down my cheeks. I gasped for air, but I managed to hold back the second scream rising in my throat. No use wasting my breath.

  I might just be a lowly analyst, but Section work had often followed my father home, and I had been stalked, kidnapped, and injured by his enemies more times than I cared to remember during my tumultuous childhood. So I knew my wound wasn’t immediately fatal, although I would bleed out if I didn’t get medical attention. But it was a moot point, since the cleaners would finish me off soon enough.