As soon as I got close enough, he let go with a not particularly stealthy whisper.
“Why didn’t you call me? I told you to call me!”
“I didn’t know.”
“How long has he been here?” Jon demanded.
“Well, if I knew that, I would have known when he got here, right?” I folded my arms. “I didn’t. Know, I mean.”
For an instant this stumped Jon. He squinted at me.
Cass said, “I don’t know, Al.” Her lips pursed. “You sure you don’t want to talk to this one? Before Jon goes all kung fu on his ass...?”
It was my turn to stare at Cass. “What?”
She nodded towards Mr. Monochrome. “Him. Look at him.”
I felt my jaw tighten, even as Jon gave Cass an incredulous look. Then both of us turned, following her gaze to the man with the coal-black hair.
I knew Cass was right, in a way.
Mr. Mono had little in common with my usual breed of stalker. He didn’t stare at me nervously, clutching flowers or bad poetry that rhymed. He didn’t talk to himself. I’d never seen him wear crosses or pentagrams or so much as a Buddha T-shirt. He didn’t look particularly unstable to me, either...or even like he wanted anything from me. Most of the kooks I came across seemed to be looking for something. A savior, maybe.
This guy didn’t seem to need or want anything like that, though. Not from me, not from anyone. In fact, he seemed to have all kinds of purpose already.
He practically breathed purpose.
In fact, if I didn’t know better, I would think he was on the clock right then. Although, in looking at him, he appeared to be sitting alone in a dingy diner, staring at his own hands splayed on the scratched formica. Still, he must want something from me. No way he could be all right, if he got his kicks following people around.
Unless someone hired him to follow me around.
The idea made me pause.
Still, it felt closer to the truth. The longer I thought about it, the more true it felt. He was a PI maybe. Maybe even a cop. Had I done anything that would warrant a cop following me, though? Even with recent freakout in the bar and the GPS, I figured I was pretty much a nonentity in their eyes. First time offender, no previous history of drugs or violence. I was pretty sure my public defense lawyer convinced them of the “temporary insanity” thing, even if it didn’t get me off the hook with community service or my suspended sentence.
I still found Mr. Mono’s ethnicity impossible to pinpoint, too. His mouth broke an angular face in a narrow line below a thick nose and those lamp-like eyes. He touched the formica tabletop with long-fingered hands, staring down at his own digits with the same almond-shaped eyes, the same eerily pale irises. I could gauge no emotion there, or even a precise color for the irises themselves.
His face remained endlessly flat, his body inconspicuous in its stillness.
While we watched, he picked up his glass of milk.
Inserting a finger into the contents, he withdrew it carefully, sniffing the end of his own digit. Frowning, he wiped it clean with a paper napkin.
Jon stifled a laugh.
I fought not to do the same, raising an eyebrow at Cass and cocking my head with mock inquisitiveness.
“Yeah, okay.” Cass shrugged. “But I like his hands.”
“You said that about Jack, Cass,” I reminded her.
“Yeah, well I was right, wasn’t I?”
I didn’t touch that one. I squinted at the black-haired man. “He’s like a walking corpse,” I said a second later. “...Minus the goth. He probably lives in his parent’s basement. I get Asperger’s syndrome, listens to bad cowboy music.”
Cass gestured with her slim fingers, tugging at a silver chain around her neck. “He looks like there’s more to him than that, Al.”
“Again. You said that about Jack, Cass.”
“And I was right, wasn’t I?”
I grimaced, glancing back across the room.
The black-haired stranger rose to his feet.
I watched him reach into a back pocket and extract a money clip. Like he had the day before, and the day before that, I knew he’d leave actual paper money, and well in excess of what he owed. He wore a single piece of jewelry, I noticed, a silver ring on his smallest finger.
“He’s leaving,” Cass said.
Jon yanked on my arm. “Stop staring, Al.” He sharpened his voice when I didn’t look down. “Al...seriously. What are you doing?”
I watched Mr. Mono move softly out of the diner’s front door. It was already dark outside, but the neon sign lit up his face as he passed by the plate windows. He didn’t hurry, and just when I thought he wouldn’t, he turned.
The lamp-like stare met mine.
When it did, the world became soft.
I grew aware of the sharp lines of the diner blurring. Night filled in the gaps...a sky teeming with violet and black clouds, a backdrop streaming further back than my mind could reach.
Stars exploded behind my eyes, a single shocking plume of brilliance.
And it is beautiful. So incredibly...
The clouds enveloped my mind, leaving nothing but silence.
Cass watched the black-haired man turn from the window.
He was tall, she realized again, maybe more than six and a half feet, and despite the haphazard and almost dated way he dressed—like something from an old fifties movie mixed unevenly with the newer lines of the Aardvarks shirt and a modern watch—Cass could see an athletic body beneath the hanging clothes and inconspicuous gait.
He was really hot, actually.
She wondered why Allie was pretending he wasn’t.
Not stereotypically handsome, not by a long shot, but the guy had a quiet intensity that exuded sensuality. It also struck Cass as a relatively thin mask for whatever lay beneath. Cass watched him glide past the outside window, reminded of Jon’s martial arts buddies and of Jon himself, in the way he moved. This man might be a fighter, too.
So yeah, he was even Allie’s type.
She’d always gone for the dark ones, anyway.
Cass watched until the black-haired man disappeared behind the adjoining wall of the next store front. She caught his brief stare at Allie, and it struck Cass that his eyes seemed to have almost no real color to them at all.
“Weird,” she said, once he was gone.
“You say that like you’re surprised,” Jon said, annoyed.
Cass glanced at Allie, curious as to her silence, wondering how she had reacted to the man’s departure.
Allie had always collected weirdos. While Cass personally thought her friend was gorgeous, she knew that wasn’t the reason, either.
Allie was fairly average by most accounts. While she had stunning...at times riveting eyes, really her face and figure were relatively normal, especially for California. Allie didn’t fall into the “pretty girl” rubric in dress, confidence or manner, either, tending to downplay her assets instead of going out of her way to emphasize them.
Even with all that, Allie had a less-obvious quality that always seemed to have guys chasing after her anyway. More than Cass did. More than a lot of people who were technically better-looking than her did.
Whatever that quality was, it unfortunately was well-appreciated by the full moon crowd even more than normal people. In Jon’s words, Allie was a freak magnet and always had been. Mia Taylor, Allie’s mother, once confided to Cass that Allie had been nearly abducted something like four times as a child. Once, she actually got taken, if only for a short period of time. She managed to get away...luckily...and mostly thanks to the intervention of a stranger who saw her with the freak and figured out something was wrong.
After the second time someone tried to grab her, Allie’s parents gave her a whistle to wear around her neck. Her father had her carrying pepper spray by the third grade...and once, when he didn’t have anything else to give her, he put a knife in her school lunchbox. He taught all three of them—Jon, Cass and Allie—how to fire a gun b
efore any of them got to high school.
Even then, Cass suspected Allie’s “issues” were at least part of the reason.
Allie’s mother, Mia, tried to get her to keep the GPS implant when she turned eighteen for the same reason, but Al wouldn’t hear of it. She got the tattoo along with all of her friends, and got the implant removed.
Anyway, stalkers came with the territory in being Allie’s friend. Cass barely batted an eye anymore when a new one showed up.
This guy felt different somehow, though.
Cass still hadn’t decided if that was a good or a bad thing.
When she saw her friend, she forgot all this.
“Allie?” she said. “Hey. Are you okay?”
“Fine,” Allie said, with no pause.
Her green eyes looked lighter than usual. They appeared almost transparent, like glass, as they stared out the window, as if following the man somewhere in her mind still.
“Okay, robot girl,” Jon joked. “Jesus. Do you need a new boyfriend that badly, Al, that you’re looking at your stalkers like that?” He sounded exasperated, but not really angry. “No wonder the guy’s following you around. He probably thinks you have a thing for him.”
“Maybe she does,” Cass murmured, still watching her friend.
Allie didn’t answer. Her eyes seemed to exude a kind of static.
Cass touched her friend’s arm. “Hey. Seriously. Are you okay?”
“Fine,” Allie said. “I’m fine.” She smiled, but it seemed faraway still. “I’m good. Just really tired.”
“Well. Go make yourself a cappuccino or something.”
“Okay.”
She wandered off, and Jon and Cass exchanged looks.
“What’s up with zombie girl?” Jon said.
“She’s tired,” Cass said. “Leave her alone, okay? You don’t have to give her shit all the time, you know. Be the big brother about everything.”
Jon shrugged, but Cass saw his eyes follow Allie as she wandered back over to the espresso machine. Cass found herself doing the same, hoping the worry didn’t show on her face.
Whether the deal with this guy, Allie had been acting decidedly weird lately.
That whole thing in the bar with Jaden and that girl was beyond bizarre. Allie had always been the rational, pacifist, talk-it-over type. In fact, sometimes Cass had wished Allie would be a bit more aggressive, especially when it came to Jaden, who'd been dicking her around for months now while Al defended him. For Allie to go all gangland violence like that, though, out of nowhere, was just...weird.
In fact, if Cass had to take bets before all that, she definitely would have plunked money down on Cass herself doing something like that. Not Allie.
The whole thing was weird.
Of course, Allie hadn't done anything like that since. Still, she hadn't exactly been normal either. If Cass didn’t know better, she would think her friend had developed a drug problem. But Allie never touched anything in that area, not even to experiment.
Cass knew Jon had noticed the weirdness, too.
Whatever was up with Allie, it was definitely getting worse.
3
EXIT
“Excuse me? Ma’am?”
Someone near me cleared his throat.
My eyes clicked back into focus.
I found myself looking at a man in a dark blue suit. A red, silk tie contrasted the darker color, setting off the auburn highlights in his long hair. His light brown eyes met mine, crinkling at the edges in a smile.
When he cleared his throat again, politely, my gaze drifted down to his hand, where he held out several twenty dollar bills.
“Can I use paper currency here?” the man said.
He spoke like someone who’d already asked the same question several times. I blinked, then looked down at his hand. Christ. He was a customer. I’d probably waited on him; that’s why he looked familiar.
Where had my head been?
I glanced down the bar counter at Jon and Cass, a little bewildered that I wasn’t standing next to them anymore. I stood by the cash register instead. Jon and Cass didn’t seem to have noticed that I had apparently teleported to the opposite end of the bar.
Cass laughed while I watched, leaning closer to Jon’s ear to answer something he’d said.
Feeling the man in front of me waiting, I jerked my eyes back to his.
“Yeah,” I told him. “Yeah, sure. Of course. Sorry.”
His smile widened. “No apology necessary, my dear. I am sorry...to break you out of your reverie.”
I smiled back, hitting through keys on the old fashioned register.
“Is that what it was?” I said.
“You looked very deep in thought right then, Alyson.”
I hesitated, glancing at him. Then, shrugging it off, I gestured towards his arm. When he bared it to the elbow, I summoned the bill by scanning his barcode.
“Were you?” he said, politely. “...Deep in thought?”
I smiled. “Yeah. Well. Even waitresses think about things, I guess.”
The man returned my smile, his gaze flickering over the rest of me.
Ignoring his appraisal, I met his gaze. “Do you want the change in hard currency, too?” I said. “Or just on your account?”
“Hard is fine.” His smile widened, even as his eyes grew more serious. “What are you doing after work? Can I buy you a drink?”
Counting out the coins, I handed him his change. I kept my smile polite. “I can’t date customers, sorry.”
“No? Are you sure? You won’t make an exception?”
I smiled again. “Sorry.”
The man met my gaze directly and I paused, in spite of myself.
For the first time, I really looked at him.
His eyes were riveting, difficult to look away from. They shone a brown so light they were nearly yellow, like burnt amber. I found myself lost there briefly, in his gaze, and wondered why I’d been so quick to turn him away. I could have one drink with the guy, sure. Why not? I was single. He was age appropriate, more or less, and while I didn’t usually date suits, he was cute. Nick the bartender, the guy I'd been seeing casually for the past few weeks, probably wouldn’t like it, but we weren’t exactly a couple.
It would be good for me. I needed to meet new people.
My attention got pulled off him abruptly when the door to the diner opened with a bang. I looked up, blinking in confusion, almost like I’d been smacked.
Once I did, I found myself staring behind the person standing at the counter.
The black-haired man stood there.
For the first time, he looked directly at me.
His colorless eyes grew utterly motionless, like a held breath.
Immediately, my head started to clear. I was still standing there, my hands poised over the cash register, when the man with the amber eyes turned, staring at the black-haired man along with me. Neither of them spoke, but I felt some kind of exchange take place.
Then the man with the amber eyes smiled. Looking away from the taller man, he glanced around at the diner briefly before bringing his gaze back to rest on me. He made a soft clicking noise with his tongue, giving me a regretful smile.
“But I see that you’re already taken,” he said, softer. “Perhaps another time, my dear.”
“Sure,” I said, only half-hearing him. “Whatever.”
I was still looking at the man with the black hair.
The guy in the blue suit turned from the counter, heading for the door. I watched him walk past the taller man and noticed that he wore his hair in some kind of clip at the nape of his neck. The clip glinted with jeweled stones, like sapphires.
The black-haired man didn’t take his eyes off him as he passed. His eyes followed the man through the front door and outside, onto the street. I saw the amber-eyed man watching him as well...saw him wink at the black-haired man through the window before he disappeared down the sidewalk, past the edge of the building.
Before I cou
ld wrap my head around what had just happened, the black-haired man walked directly up to where I stood. His colorless eyes met mine, and I flinched at the anger I saw in them, although it didn’t seem aimed at me.
“We’re leaving,” he said. “Now, Allie.”
When I didn’t move, only stared, the black-haired man grabbed my arm.
“Allie.” His voice was a growl. “Now.”
Before I could bring my eyes back into focus, Jon appeared at my side. He had his hand on the other man’s forearm, standing almost between us. Jon’s voice came out quiet but firm, not an ounce of compromise in his words.
“Let go of her, man. Now. Step away.”
I saw the black-haired man look at Jon.
“Jon,” he said. “I won’t hurt her. You know I won’t.”
I saw Jon’s eyes widen in surprise, right before they blurred, growing less clear. The black-haired man focused back on me.
We don’t have much time.
I stared up at him, feeling a cold wash of fear when I realized I’d heard his words, but his mouth hadn’t moved.
Allie! I know you can hear me! You have to come with me. Do you want to spend the rest of your life in a cage? Wearing a collar? That man who just left here. He knows what you are.
More fear coursed up my spine as his words sank in.
Allie! They can’t hear me! Only you can...what does that tell you?
Cass ran up at the same moment. “Allie! What is going on?”
The black-haired man looked at her. As he did, his concentration seemed to break.
Jon’s eyes cleared in the same instant. He stepped forward once they had, as if remembering where he was. His mouth hardened into a line as he grabbed ahold of my wrist.
“Al...get away from this guy!”
Confusion twisted my stomach in knots. I tried to think through the fear I saw in Jon’s eyes, the worry I saw on Cass’s face...but the black-haired man’s words resonated somewhere in my mind, and I knew suddenly, that I believed him.
I couldn’t stay here.
Memories swam forward, worsening that ache in my gut. Things that I’d suppressed for years, maybe since I’d been a kid. I remembered needles, endless tests, my dad pale-faced and silent while my mom yelled at doctors in white jackets. I remembered feeling like there was something wrong with me, like they all knew. I’d been so afraid of being found out, of them knowing I wasn’t like them, even though my blood said I was.
Allie's War, An Urban Fantasy: Episode 1 Page 3