by ID Johnson
He smiled at her and Cadence thought, perhaps, she had eased his fears a bit. “Alright then,” he said. “I guess you’re right. It’s just a silly dream.”
She was just about to excuse herself and start telling everyone good-bye when he added, “I just have one more question though. Why weren’t you at the hospital with us?”
She froze. She had no idea what the correct answer to that question was. She tried stalling. “What do you mean?” she asked, instinctively taking a step back towards the tree house.
He followed her. “You know, that night, when the rest of us went to the hospital with Drew. You weren’t there. In fact, you never even talked to the police, did you?”
She hadn’t talked to the police. Elliott had taken care of that as well. But she didn’t know what to say in answer to his question. “Oh, don’t you remember why I wasn’t there?” she began, again trying to dig for information or at least buy some time, praying for a miracle. Just then, her cell phone rang. She pulled it out of her sweater pocket and, though, she did not recognize the number, she knew she had to take it. “Just a second,” she said to Jack. “I have to take this.”
“No, wait, Cadence. It can wait, just answer me,” he was saying, but she already had the phone up to her ear and had turned away from him. Jack seemed to be growing increasingly angry as each second passed, which seemed extremely unusual to Cadence.
“Hello?” she said, praying that it wasn’t a telemarketer.
“Just look him firmly in the eye and say, very calmly, ‘Elliott explained that to you. Don’t you remember? Remember what Elliott said?’” It was Aaron and while she was a little shocked that he knew exactly what she had been talking about, she was relieved to have some help.
Despite the fact that she had taken the phone call, Jack was still standing right in front of her, demanding an answer with eyes growing narrower by the moment. She pulled the phone away from her ear for a moment and, looking Jack directly in the eyes, she said as calmly as she could, “Elliott explained that to you. Don’t you remember? Remember what Elliott said?” Cadence watched in astonishment as Jack’s expression went from anger to calm serenity.
“Oh, yeah, that’s right. Elliott explained that to me. I remember now. Thanks, Cadence,” he said patting her on the shoulder.
If Cadence had thought Angry Jack was odd, Serene Jack was even more peculiar, and she really didn’t want to wait around to see which Jack appeared next. “Okay, Jack,” she said smiling, “I’ll talk to you soon, but I need to take this phone call, okay?”
“Okay,” he said politely. “Talk to you later, Cadence,” and then he turned and walked toward the house, as if the trance had solved all of his problems.
“How the hell did you know what I was talking about?” she asked, pulling the phone back to her ear and walking over towards a corner of the yard away from the house.
“Look up,” he replied.
At first she was confused, knowing he couldn’t mean directly up. Instead, she looked out towards the rooftops. She saw nothing on Drew’s parents’ house, nor did she see anything or anyone on the neighbors’ houses. However, when she peered off into the distance, she could see black clad figures on top of houses two and three blocks away. “Your people can hear me from all the way over there?” she asked. “Yes,” he replied, “when we want to. I don’t make it a habit of eavesdropping on you everywhere you go, but some of my contacts are reporting some unusual behavior centered around Jack and we wanted to see if he would say anything to you.”
“Well then, you already know that he did,” she said.
“Yes, yes I do,” he said matter-of-factly.
“I really wish I knew when you were spying on me,” she said slightly irritated that who knows how many Guardians had just been listening in on a discussion with her ex-boyfriend but even more so that he was talking to her in the curt little manner he used for business purposes. She found it particularly annoying since she had been looking forward to talking to him this afternoon since he had promised to call her after the funeral. If he were going to talk to her like this, she would rather not talk to him at all.
“You will know in a few days when we implant the IAC,” he responded.
This answer was a little friendlier and she began to think perhaps he realized he was being short with her. “Well, why don’t you just bring it over later and put it in yourself?” she asked.
“Ha!” he smirked. “You want me to place an IAC? Are you crazy? You’d end up needing eyeball-removal-surgery.”
She couldn’t help but smile at that remark. “Well, could you at least, please, attempt to find some way of letting me know when your enforcers are scoping me out? I mean, what if I want to tell my girlfriends how mean my new boss is and you’re spying on me, you know?”
“Then, I guess you will only be able to tell them how awesome your new boss is, just in case I’m listening,” he replied.
“Not saying that right now,” she said with a hint of sarcasm in her voice.
“Okay, okay! I’m sorry I was blunt earlier. I wasn’t trying to be rude, I was just trying to give concise directions to alleviate a problem. Cadence, you’re going to have to get used to me giving you directives in that tone. It doesn’t mean that I’m angry with your or belittling you, I’m just trying to direct the movement of thousands of individuals all at the same time. Do you understand that?”
She did understand what he was saying, but she didn’t like it. But she also didn’t feel like pressing the subject so she said, “Yes, I understand.”
“Good,” he said in a much calmer, sweeter tone. “Now, how did it go today? Are you alright?”
She took a deep sigh. “I’m alright,” she said. And she was. Not good, not perfect but alright.
“I’m glad. It will take time but you can move on from this. We’ve all lost loved ones and there’s never an easy way through it, I know, but you’ll make it, one step at a time.”
“I know,” she said quietly. She really wished he were actually there with her and not just on the phone.
“Cadence, I have to go,” he said, “There’s a problem that needs my immediate attention and I can’t keep flipping between talking to you and IAC.”
“Okay,” she said quietly.
“I’ll talk to you later though, alright?”
“Alright, bye.”
“Bye.”
“Good luck with your . . . thing” she said aloud, even though he’d already hung up the phone. She was beginning to feel a headache coming on and pressed her palm against her forehead. This relationship was getting more difficult by the hour, and she had no idea what she was going to do about it, if there even was anything she could do about it.
She decided to go tell her friends good-bye and head back to her house. Just as she was making her way up the tree house ladder, she heard her text alert. “You really don’t want me to do that implant, but I can stop by this evening, if you want.”
Taylor and Sidney noticed the grin on her face immediately. “Whose that from?” Taylor asked.
Cadence could feel herself blushing, but she didn’t want to say too much. “No one,” she replied sheepishly. “It’s just this guy from my new job.”
“Oh!” Sidney said, looking at Taylor and then back to Cadence. “What’s his name?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Cadence answered. “I don’t think he’s really that in to me anyway.”
“Yes,” she typed. She hesitated for a minute wondering if she should say more but that would do. She sent the message and then returned to the arduous task of saying good-bye to her heavyhearted friends.
***
“What are you doing?” Elliott asked, a pleading look on his face. “You know this never ends well!”
Elliott had been standing near-by the entire time Aaron had been talking to Cadence on the phone, and he had also seen the text. “I know, I know,” Aaron admitted. “And, I’m not intending to start anything this time,” he said adamantly.
Elliott snorted, “The hell you’re not. I have seen the girl, you know. I am a male. Sorry, gonna have to call bullshit on that one, Bossman.”
Aaron sighed. The Nevada sun was beating down on them, despite the fact that it was December. They were attempting to coordinate the destruction of a Rogue Vampire by a veteran Hunter. They believed the Rouge to be holed up somewhere along this particular hillside. “I’m really not,” he insisted. “She just needs someone to talk to right now, that’s all. And,” he added, “As much as I want to run the other direction and hide, I just can’t seem to do that.”
“Which is an indicator to me,” Elliott concluded, “that you are smitten with this girl, and you’re going to end up in the exact same situation you do every single time this happens. You realize you can’t have a relationship with a subordinate because every time you give a directive, she gets her panties in a wad and then you end up breaking up and she leaves the team.”
“You make it sound like I’ve dated thousands of team members, Elliott. That particular scenario has only happened twice and both of those situations were much different than this one. Most recently, let us not forget, she did not leave the team and she is, in fact, presently a member."
“Yes, and how is that working out for you?” he asked sarcastically.
“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter! Because nothing is going on between Cadence and I, okay?”
“Okay,” Elliott said not believing him one iota. “If that’s the case, I’m going to see how she feels about men shaped like teddy bears!”
“Go for it,” Aaron said, raising his hand up as if to say he wouldn’t try to stop it. “Now, let’s catch this Vampire so I can get back to Iowa,”
***
Cadence had taken a nap after she returned from Drew’s house. She had visited with her family and watched some television with her sister. Now, she was sitting on her bed, dressed in comfy pants and a long sleeved t-shirt, perusing Facebook on her phone and waiting for Aaron to arrive. He had sent her a text earlier that he was still planning on coming over but that his trip to Nevada had been a bit longer than he expected, so it might be a little later than he had hoped.
She knew that it was very unprofessional and risky to have a crush on her boss. In fact, she really wished that she could find a way to completely erase any friendly conversation that ever taken place between them. She remembered that, just last week, she was completely convinced that he was an ass and she didn’t want to have anything to do with him. But then, everything else in her life had changed drastically since that time, so why not her feelings toward Aaron as well?
At about ten past ten, she got a text from him. “Are you dressed?”
“Yes”
“Do you mind if I enter your room now?”
“No, go ahead.”
“Via the window.”
“That’s fine.”
“The same one I used last time?”
“YES!”
“Okay—just so we are clear. I’m coming in to your room now, through the window, the one I used last time. In your room.
“OKAY!”
As he climbed through the window, she couldn’t help but say, “Alright, smart ass, I get it. I made a big deal out of the fact that you broke into my home while I was naked in the shower. So sorry!”
“Well, someone is in a touchy mood this evening,” he commented as he entered the room. He noticed she was sitting on her bed, and while it crossed his mind that he could probably walk right over and sit down beside her without eliciting a protest, he decided that was dangerous territory and so he waited for her to come to him.
It had occurred to Cadence that, by sitting on the bed when he came in, it would appear that she also wanted him on the bed. And, while she had made a decision that she was not going to pursue this relationship romantically, once he entered the room, she found the act of standing and crossing over to the chairs a little more difficult. Luckily for her, he seemed steadfast in his resolve to stay on the far side of the room, and so she mustered all of her strength and pulled herself up off of the bed, careful to walk directly to the chair and not within his vicinity lest she find herself inclined to throw herself upon him.
She sat down in the same chair she had been sitting in the night before and he sat in the other. There were a few moments of silence again, but this time it did not seem as awkward. She was just happy to see him, and he was glad to have a long day over and finally have the chance to talk to her in person.
“How was your day?” she asked. “Did you get everything resolved in Nevada?”
He shook his head. “Not exactly. I don’t think we’ll ever get everything resolved in Nevada, but we were able to locate the Rogue we were looking for.”
“Oh, that’s good,” she responded.
“Yeah, but those ghost towns out there are full of them. It’s just a never ending battle.”
“What do they do in the ghost towns to make them Rogue?” she asked. There aren’t any humans out that far are there?”
“No,” he explained, “but they’ll go into one of the larger towns on a Friday or Saturday night, wreak some havoc and then disappear back out into the ghost towns or the caves. Even when we have a tracker embedded in them, it’s still hard to chase them down out there when there’s so many places to hide.”
“You use trackers on Vampires?” she asked.
“Yes, in fact, every Vampire is required to come to us to get a tracker within the first six months of conversion and any Vampire who creates another Vampire must report it to us immediately and help us ensure that the new Vampire reports to us to get their tracker implanted.”
“Well, if that’s the case, why is hunting them down so difficult? Shouldn’t we just be able to GPS all of them?”
“If they all reported it wouldn’t be so hard, but a lot of times the ones that end up going Rogue are the ones who never cared about following the rules in the first place. Or, they’ll rip out their trackers.”
“Yuck,” Cadence exclaimed, visions of Rogue Vampires splicing their arms open and digging out little silicon chips filled her head.
“It’s not that painful for them. They have a pretty high tolerance for pain, as you will see. It’s just that it leaves a pretty nasty scar on their foreheads and it’s kind of a dead giveaway to any of us that something is going on.”
“On their heads? Gross.” Cadence stated, the visions becoming even more grotesque. “Who has to put those in?”
“You do,” he teased.
“Say what?” she said, though she could tell from his tone that he was kidding. “I ain’t puttin’ no tracker in no Vampire’s forehead, no way. Not happening.”
He was smiling at her; her sense of humor was quite unlike anyone else’s he had ever met. “We have a sub-team who is responsible for that,” he replied.
“Well, don’t put me on that team,” she said sternly. “Because I will be quitting!”
“Okay. Dually noted.” He was leaning on the armrest nearest her chair, and despite the fact that she was curled up and leaning against the opposite arm rest, he was tempted to reach out and touch her. He made a conscious effort to keep his hands to himself. “How did it go this morning?” he asked somberly.
“Other than Jack’s inquisition, it was okay. I mean, there’s never anything easy about that, but like you said earlier, we’ve all been there. We just have to keep moving forward, you know?”
He nodded in agreement. “I do know. I know very well,” he said. He looked away from her for a moment, and briefly, it was as if he were no longer there, like he was lost in a memory. Cadence had the urge to dig deeper into whatever loss had brought that sort of reaction, but she realized now was not the time or place.
“It was nice to see my friends, but everyone seemed so different now, so . . .” she was searching for the correct word and the one that initially cam to mind seemed so wrong, but it truly was the best word to describe the situation. “So naïve. Does that
make any sense at all?”
“It does to me,” he concurred. “They are naïve from your perspective. You have a lot more valuable information than they do and they will never know the things that you know. It will always be more difficult for you to speak to them, to interact with them, to relate to them, now that they’re on the other side of the Ternion from you.”
“I understand,” she said. It actually made perfect sense. She had almost wanted to treat her friends like children at points during the day because they seemed to understand so little. Though she had attributed some of it to whatever spell it was Elliott had put them under, perhaps it was also her new perspective.
The thought of Elliott prompted her next question. “By the way,” she asked, “could Elliott come up with no better story than a rock slit her throat? ‘Cause, if not, perhaps you need a new hypnotist.”
Aaron laughed and the sound of his laughter became infectious. Cadence couldn’t help but join in. Even though it truly wasn’t that funny, she was happy for the opportunity to laugh again, everything lately had been so somber and serious.
Upon catching his breath, Aaron stated, “It really wasn’t his fault. On the way to the hospital, your friends had been discussing what they were willing to let the police know and what they didn’t want to disclose. Basically, everything about the festival needed a cover up. Jack told the rest of your friends that you killed Drew’s murderer, so they wanted to hide that as well. They determined the only way to do that is to say that a person didn’t kill Drew, but that she fell. Well, with a gaping neck wound, that made Elliott’s job a little more difficult than usual. It worked though; everyone directly related to the incident believes it. There are plenty of other people asking the obvious questions, such as ‘where does one go rock climbing in Shenandoah,’ that sort of thing. But none of those people have anything to do with the investigation so it doesn’t really matter.”