by TylerRose.
“Shen Ren Fa,” he replied.
“Who is that?”
“The equivalent of the Shaolin. Their compound is inside a mountain to the north of the capital city.”
“Can you give me a map?”
He projected an image onto the spot of wall opposite her in the window seat.
“This is the mountain.” It flashed an outline of the compound within. “And here is the city.”
Twenty miles away.
“This is happening suddenly and very fast,” he commented. “When did you decide this must be done?”
“I’ve been mulling it over. I’m going out,” she said, heading to her dresser. “I’ll be back very late.”
Late getting home and hungry when she woke for the day, she went down to get some peanut butter toast and coffee. Reaching for the bread atop the fridge, she instead put her hand on the nearly empty package of cookies. Something wasn’t right. She felt deception and anger. Taking it down, looking inside, she saw only three sandwich cookies were left. Someone had a habit of taking the last ones. The person who bought them was angry.
She put the package back and got down the white bread and went about making her toast and a cup of coffee. As she was spreading the margarine on her hot toast, she felt Starbird coming down the stairs and up the hall. She went directly to the cookies, the package crinkling. Crunch of a bite into cookie and…
“Oh my god!” she nearly shouted, running to the trash can to spit it out and then to the sink for a glass of water to rinse and spit.
Tyler opened the bread and held out a slice. “Chew this. It’ll work better. Water spreads the capsaicin, bread or milk stops it. You don’t have to swallow it.”
“Who the fuck did that?!” Star demanded.
“Whoever owns that bag of cookies,” Tyler replied quietly, taking the plate and her coffee to the table rather than up to her room.
“Gable,” Star said. “Little fucker. I’ll get him for that.”
“I don’t think you were the intended target.”
“Then who?” Star asked, getting out a yogurt cup and sitting on the end of the table while Tyler scooted around the corner to the wall bench.
Jerome came in, went directly for the same cookies, took the last two and put the empty package back. Star and Tyler kept quiet while he tossed an entire cookie into his mouth and chewed.
“Ooh! Hey, that’s pretty good.” He popped the second in and grabbed the jug of orange juice to finish the last bit and drop the empty in the sink.
“Seriously?” Star said. “I about burned my tongue off.”
“Yeah, but I’m Mexican. That little bit is nothing.”
He thumped down the stairs to his office.
“Fucker,” Star muttered.
“I heard that!” he called back up the stairwell.
“Good!” she shouted back.
Halfway through her toast, Tyler got up to get another cup of coffee. Gable came in, went to check the cookies.
“Son of a bitch! Who ate the last of my cookies?!”
“Jerome did,” Ty and Star said together.
“Shit. Did he even notice the hot sauce? Coulda at least threw the damn package away.”
“He thought the hot sauce was good,” Star said, looking at Gable’s ass while he bent over to reach the bottom drawer of the fridge.
“Figures,” he groused, coming to the table with a vanilla pudding cup.
Top ripped off, he dug his tongue in.
“You could use a—“
Tyler stopped Star with a poke in the leg under the table. Sitting back, with Gable utterly oblivious to his audience, they watched him use his tongue to dig deep and eat out the pudding cup. Nearing the bottom, he noticed them.
“What?”
Tyler looked up to Star. “You are a lucky, lucky woman.”
“Don’t I know it,” Star replied in equal tone.
Gable looked from one to the other, looked into the nearly empty cup, realized what he’d been doing.
“God damn it!” he blurted in humiliation, turning beet red.
Star got up and patted his shoulder. “I expect a personal demonstration of that later,” she said before heading down to the Torino for the next round of modifications.
“Are you doing anything right now?” Tyler asked when she was out of the room.
“Being completely embarrassed.”
“After that.”
“No, why?” he asked.
“Wanna go to Jamaica and taste coffee and get some lunch?”
“Jamaica Blue Mountain thirty five dollar a pound coffee?” he dead-panned, the pudding cup forgotten. “At the grower’s price? What should I wear?”
“It’s hot there. Friday summer business casual will be fine.”
“Give me ten minutes.”
She teleported them to a dirt road far up into the mountains, only a couple dozen meters from a rickety, ancient gate. A tiny storefront sat another dozen meters inside the gate, an equally ancient little man sitting in wood chair. His eyes spoke volumes on seeing most unexpected American visitors.
“Good morning,” Tyler smiled. “We’re here to buy for a restaurant in America. May we have a small roasting and tasting?”
She handed over one of Jerome’s cards for Giuseppe’s.
“I need to buy several hundred pounds at least.”
“Come to the roasting room,” he said, getting out of his chair. “We will see what we can do.”
“Are we really buying it for Giuseppe’s?” Gable whispered.
“Yup. I’m getting him started on the coffee craze before it ever gets to the Midwest. We get a bag or two as a finder’s fee. Jamaican, Kona, and Kenyan, to start. Fancy another day-trip to Hawaii?”
His answer was cut off by their emergence into a warehouse full of sacks of unroasted beans.
“I’ve died and gone to heaven,” he breathed.
A sack opened, a small roaster was used to prepare a pound of beans. All the while, he explained how far they should be roasted, what to smell for. Ground up while still warm, brewed at once, Tyler and Gable enjoyed a cup of nirvana in the shade of a small shed out back. They looked out over the mountains in the distance, down to the valley.
“Wow,” Gable said, and absently reached for the small container of sweet but unflavored creamer she’d conjured up.
She stretched an arm over the back of the bench seat they shared and he heard her exhale a burst, all but felt her tension levels drop.
“You put yourself under a lot of pressure, sis. How you holdin’ up?” he asked quietly.
“I need moments like this, removed from everything,” she admitted. “A little while to forget the rest of it exists.”
“You hold your cards mighty close, that’s for sure. If there’s something J or I should know, please tell us.”
“I do.”
They enjoyed a silence. Then a flutter of black and green swooped past Gable to land on her outstretched hand between them. Tiny black bird about three inches tall with a brilliant iridescent chest and a long red beak. Twin tail feathers some four inches long trailed from him. He looked up at Gable, looked at her, hopped up her arm and flew around to her other hand holding the cup of sweet coffee. Sitting on the rim, it bend over to get a good long drink.
“Well, hello there,” she said to it. “I think caffeine is the last thing you need.”
It sat up, looked around, tweeted a few notes, and within seconds, half a dozen birds were arriving to land on her hand and drink from the cup.
Gable froze in place, shocked at the sight of hummingbirds swirling around them to get their turn at the drink dispenser.
“What’s happening to you, Tyler? Really?” he had to ask.
“I’m becoming a galaxy and world creating goddess. In leaps and bounds.”
“That guy on the station that wanted to stop you from being here in February? He knows it?”
“He does. That’s why he wants to end me. You know that rich guy i
n California I talk to sometimes?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“He knows too. He’s supposed to be helping me also, but in my previous existence, he tried to force me into isolation so he could control me and force me to evolve. He wants to be there at the end when I become what they want me to be. I can only trust him so far.”
“Maybe he won’t try that in this timeline?” Gable offered.
“Maybe. I have to wait and see. I have a question for you,” she said, half her coffee gone and the tiny birds taking off into the trees.
“What?”
“What is it with you guys and the practical jokes? My fiber; the cookies; he put cream cheese in your deodorant. I don’t get it.”
“Was worse when Tony was there,” he grinned. “He once put powdered cheddar in the pitcher with a cup of water to make it look like orange juice.”
“Gross.”
“Yeah. It was funny as fuck when Jerome drank it all directly down out of the container. He chugged that shit down. Made him puke into the sink.
“But…Why? What’s the purpose?” she asked. “Seems to me that people who like each other shouldn’t do that kind of thing to each other. It’s mean.”
“You an only child too?” he asked. “I used to think it was mean. Then Jerome showed me how to coat a bar of soap with clear fingernail polish. Took Tony two days to figure it out. That was funny as hell.”
“But…why?” she persisted.
“Keeps us on our toes. Blows off steam and tension. You did one on me earlier, you know, with the pudding cup. You stopped Star from telling me to get a spoon just the same as I stopped you from telling Jerome it was fiber and not sugar in the container. Both were jokes of opportunity, not planned. I do wish Star hadn’t stopped him with that second dose. Man, that would have been epic,” he concluded with a shake of his head.”
“It really could have hurt him, Gable.”
“Him? Nah. He’s practically indestructible.”
“If only,” she said under her breath, getting her first sip of the coffee.
The grower came around the warehouse. “You are liking the coffee?”
“Very much,” she said.
“Absolutely,” Gable said.
“I’ll take your entire on hand stock as is.” She pulled out a wad of American hundred dollar bills. “Let’s talk money. Can I buy the big roasting machine too?”
She ended up teleporting three hundred and six sacks plus the big roaster to a room in Giuseppe’s basement. Bringing a black marker to her hand, she wrote “Jamaican Blue Mountain” on the outside of the door. She and Gable arrived in the kitchen with six sacks and the small roaster the old man had given her. Coffee sacks in the pantry, he came out to the table.
“Serious question,” he said, sitting with her and waiting for her to look at him. “What was that really about?”
She needed a few seconds to be sure he was really ready to know.
“I hear people, Gabe. All night long, I hear people praying to their god for this and that. Last night, I heard ‘Oh Lord, please send someone to buy my coffee. I am old and not long for this world. I have no children to take over my land. My neighbors want to burn me out.’ So we bought the entire stock that he was too weak to haul to the wagon. The stock neighbors prevented him from taking to the town at the bottom of the hill and prevented buyers from going up the hill. We gave him enough money to move to the town today and live on for the rest of his life.”
Gable sat there blinking at her much as when the birds had been drinking her coffee and she had so casually let them.
“That’s what you do?” he asked. “Fulfill people’s prayers?”
“Not all of them. Not all the time. I do what I can, when I can. He didn’t want to win the lottery. He wanted out of a very bad situation that might have gotten him killed. He was afraid for his life.”
He thought on that a moment.
“It’s not always a bloody, murderous mess when I go on a mission, Gabe. Sometimes I take mercy with me.”
No words, he could only nod.
“Ready to go do the same thing to another farm in Kona, Hawaii?” she asked.
“Fuck yeah!” he brightened.
Another farm, another four hundred and twenty nine sacks of coffee that couldn’t be taken to market because of neighbors who wanted to force someone out and take their land for themselves. Tyler kept nine sacks for the apartment.
“You said something about Kenya?” Gable reminded her when they’d moved their private stash.
“I did indeed. Ready?”
“I like giving mercy,” he nodded. “It’s fun.”
This time it was an entire little village being threatened by a larger, stronger neighboring farm. Buying the entire stock gave them enough money to hire people to fight back and hold the land. Three hundred and fifty five bags of coffee, five kept for themselves.
“Only roast what we need. A couple pounds at a time. Leave the rest raw until we get to them. I’m tired,” she said when they were done. “I need to rest for a while.”
They’d really not had much coffee to drink, all things considered, but she’d teleported three great distances with large quantities of goods three times. He stopped her long enough to give her a hard hug.
Going back into the store room, he did a little more organization, marked bags so they wouldn’t get the varieties mixed up.
“Where’d you two go?” Jerome asked from the door.
“We went coffee shopping,” Gable gestured to the sacks piled on the bottom shelves of the three perimeter racks.
“Damn, I guess so.”
“She told me something about Thomas Holmes. You already said you don’t trust him.”
“She probably told you the same thing she told me, Gabe. I am aware of the situation.”
“Okay. All I needed to know,” Gable said, filling a plastic container with raw Jamaica Blue beans.
Jerome sat on the opposite side of the prep island while Gable plugged in the batch roaster and got to work cooking up coffee beans. Two batches of one pound each, roasted and ground for the next day or two, Gable told him about the hummingbirds.
“It was like magic, dude,” Gable said.
“I know the feeling. The first time she came here, it was a butterfly. That’s when I fell in love with her.”
“I love her too. She’s the sister I never had,” Gable told him, and looked down to his beeping phone.
Pudding cup, Earthman.
Gable grinned. “I gotta go do something to my woman. See you at supper.”
Jerome spent a moment looking at the many sacks of coffee and decided he needed to go do something to his woman too. He went in without knocking, expecting her to be asleep, and found her in tears on the edge of the bed, vigorously rubbing her right arm.
“You exerted too much, didn’t you?” he said, stepping in front of her.
Her pained expression and wet eyes said it all. Shoes off, he climbed up to kneel behind her and hold her close while rubbing the arm for her. After a moment of feeling all kinds of energies bouncing off his Staff Power sphere, he backed up and dragged her to the center of the bed to lie down together on their left sides. He made his sphere larger around her, keeping those invading energies farther away while continuing to massage her arm.
His plans to maul her with mouth and hands forgotten, his new goal was to get her calmed down and comfortable enough to sleep for a while.
“I gotcha, little girl,” he whispered with a kiss to her over-warm temple.
Keeper. This was what it meant. Not just protecting her from enemies, but taking care of her in her worst moments. Taking care of her in those moments no one else ever knew about. She wouldn’t have told anyone if he’d not walked in. She’d have suffered this completely alone and in silence. He vowed to himself that he would never allow that to happen. Not if he had anything to say about it.
He found he had plenty to say. Soon as she was asleep enough, he went and found
Landra Ahr.
“Why the fuck didn’t you tell me she was hurting that bad?” Jerome demanded.
“Look at your phone.”
Halted, Jerome looked to see his phone was turned off. Turned on in ten seconds, he saw a text message telling him Tyler needed him.
“You turned your phone off literally five seconds before you received the text. I did tell you.”
“Oh. Well okay then. Never mind. As you were.”
Chapter Thirty Five
Four days after her meeting with Mankell, Tyler had that same feeling again. Her answers were just out of her reach. She read the journal about her last stay on Sanctuary. She remember Zamren. He had been a thorough and attentive lover, which she’d needed at the time. He had reawakened her to her own passions and made sex good again.
[May I see you?] Sta’s telepathic voice broke her thoughts.
She smiled to herself, shaking her head. He just could not stay away now he knew her. [Yes.]
He appeared with a small box in hand, and sat with her in the window seat.
“You, Femina, have worked your magic on yet another man.”
“Oh?”
He handed her the box. “Mankell sends his regards and inquires when you might be tempted to visit his House.”
She grinned with the formality of that statement, knowing the intention behind it, and opened the small box. It was only a few inches by a few inches, a rectangular cylinder. A carving of a pair of Tihi birds done in blue jade. She smiled fresh, its duplicate from the other timeline in her jewelry box. She’d made it into a hair barrette. Now she would have a mated pair, if she did the same to this one.
“He asked me questions about you, in private, for nearly an hour after you left.”
“K’Tran are known for their obsessions when it comes to women. He chased me hard.”
“Did you give in to him?”