Rangers

by Chloe Garner

  “Damn,” Jason said again. Sam drained the last of his beer, then put it at the front edge of the table, shaking his head.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s like the goblins, only sexy,” Jason said. “If I’d have known that, I’d never have let you get her to yourself.”

  “Shut up,” Sam said. It was a reflex, more than a mustered response. He kept getting flashbacks of her waist, skin from hips to chest, standing in the hotel in Oklahoma, as he would get glimpses of flesh through the crowd when her tank top lifted clear of her jeans. He shook himself. Not an option. Bass pumped and she and Kara danced, hips, waist, shoulders rolling as her feet moved, taking up all of the space the crowd left her and pushing them back for more. Kara pulled one guy out of the crowd after another, grinding with him or teasing him in a circle, then pushing him back into the ring of onlookers and turning to dance with Samantha again. With Kara, Samantha was scandalous. The crowd grew rowdy, hooting at them and taunting for more. After thirty minutes or so, Samantha broke out and made her way back to the table, breathless, and put down two shots and the half of Sam’s beer that he had sitting in front of him, then wordlessly returned to the music.

  And she danced.

  “Dude,” Jason said. Then, a few minutes later, “dude, are you sure she isn’t into girls?”

  Sam glared at him and Jason grinned.

  “Who knew?” his brother asked. Sam turned back to watch. Once or twice, men attempted to dance with Samantha, but she brushed them away, in her own world. Her face, the glimpses he caught of it behind her hair and through the crowd, was still, her eyes distant when they weren’t closed. Finally, more than an hour after they had left, Kara and Samantha came panting back to the table. Kara slapped it loudly, calling for more drinks. Samantha sat back in her seat, looking exhausted but grinning, her hair in tangled locks and her skin slicked with sweat. Sam found it hard to swallow, suddenly.

  “I’m so buzzed right now. And so out of shape,” Samantha asked. “I used to be able to do that for six or eight hours at a stretch.”

  Kara raised Jason’s beer at her and shook her head.

  “Uh uh. We’re just here to get our second wind, then they’re going back out with us,” Kara said, sitting up and looking around. “Who do I have to screw around here to get a beer?”

  Three men nearby offered theirs, but she waved them off.

  “I want my own freaking beer,” she said, draining Jason’s. Sam notice Jason’s hand on Kara’s back, the fingertips tucked down the inside of her jeans and had to force himself to look away. It made him think of the feel of skin against skin. Samantha was watching him. She knew.

  “Are you going to dance with me?” she asked playfully. She had apparently read his face, or his own thoughts, correctly, because she shook her head in a moment when both Kara and Jason had glanced away. She gave him a small smile, then shrugged.

  “Wow,” he mouthed, and she grinned.

  “Well?”

  “Sam. Does not. Dance,” Jason said. “You’re going to have to give up on that one right now.”

  “How about you?” Kara asked him.

  “Not like that, but I’ll come dance with you,” he said, leaning in toward her. She grinned at him, wrinkling her nose and lifting her upper lip in something that more resembled a snarl than a smile, then bit her lip. She whirled and grabbed Samantha’s elbow.

  “Back out!” she announced, dragging Samantha behind her. Samantha looked back at Sam and pressed her lips together, then grinned and dove after Kara. Jason followed along behind, looking for all the world like a puppy. Sam sat back in his chair and crossed his ankle across his knee, striking his cool pose. Just holding down the table for the rest of the crew. Sure.

  It was true he didn’t dance. Never had. His feet were too big and Jason teased that it took too long for electrical signals to cover that much distance, but it didn’t mean he had never wanted to. He watched Jason and Kara for a minute, but he’d watched that a hundred times before. Samantha, now dancing completely by herself, was slower, more expressive, stronger. No crowd formed around her without the paired show with Kara, and she kept running into people and apologizing.

  He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Even knowing she was probably aware that he was staring at her, he couldn’t do it. At the lake, she had been clean. Innocent. He’d wanted to kiss her. Touch her face. Watching her move, though, his mind kept wandering to the feel of body against body. He finally broke away, staring down at his beer, then motioning to the waitress to bring more.

  Kara and Jason made it maybe fifteen minutes before Jason caught Sam’s eye and jerked his thumb at the door. They were headed upstairs. Samantha retreated back to the table, sitting quietly with her knees up against the table, looking up at Sam from time to time.

  “You look great out there,” a guy said, touching her shoulder and glancing once, quickly, at Sam.

  “Thank you,” she smiled at her beer. The guy waited for a second, but she didn’t look up, and he moved on. A minute later another guy Sam vaguely knew came and sat down next to her.

  “Would you like to dance?” he asked. She looked at him with a genuine smile and shook her head.

  “I don’t dance with other people,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “Looked like you could handle yourself pretty well,” he said, ducking his head to try to catch her eye again.

  “C’mon, man,” Sam said.

  “She here with you, Sam?” the guy asked, as though it had only just occurred to him.

  “Yeah,” Sam said.

  “Sorry. Didn’t know.”

  He stood and walked away.

  “Sorry,” Sam muttered.

  “Thank you.”

  He paused, looking around the room.

  “You want to come meet my friends?” he asked. She looked up.

  “Yeah. Of course.”

  He indicated she could leave her beer on the table, then waved at a waitress he knew, letting her know they were done. Samantha grabbed her backpack and Sam led the way back out of the room and down the hall a ways further.

  “I didn’t expect there would be so many girls here,” Samantha said. He nodded, carefully not looking at the couple leaning against the wall that had caught her attention.

  “Maybe a quarter of the Rangers are women. Not quite as many of the Seekers.”

  She shuffled against him as a shoving fight broke out among a trio of shirtless men, and he let her step in front of him, taking the impact of the next one who came stumbling out of the circle.

  “They do play hard,” she said.

  “Haven’t got a lot to lose. Jason’s like a fish in water, here,” Sam said.

  “Not everyone with nothing to lose is like this,” she said. “Believe me.”

  He found the doors he was looking for and pushed them open, holding one open up high enough for Samantha to walk under his arm. A head turned from the nearest bank of computers.

  “Sam!” the guy called.

  “Sam!” someone else echoed, then a buzz went up, and a couple of people beyond the first row stood up.

  “Sam and Sam!” someone called. It echoed around the room like a cheer. Samantha backed into his chest and almost fell down.

  “They know you,” she muttered. He grinned and stepped aside to shake hands with the nearest guy.

  “They all know who all of us are,” he said. “And we have no idea who they are. In theory, at least. These are the Seekers.”

  Samantha walked over to the next computer in the line, and the kid at the keyboard looked up at her, leaning back as if she couldn’t see the screen clearly with him there.

  “LAN party?” she asked.

  “We’re wireless, now,” the kid told her.

  “What are you playing?”

  He told her and she nodded.

  “I’m a generation old. Been out of it for a while. Can I give it a try?”

  Sam watched in amazement as the nerd herd, as Jason called them, mobilize
d to get a computer allocated for her and a character created. Within ten minutes, she was logged in and going through a tutorial with three people trying to simultaneously give her directions. She graciously accepted all of their input, but they were too busy basking to notice what Sam saw: she was an old hand at the concept. It was just the mechanics she was going to have to pick up, and those were quickly mastered. She looked over her shoulder.

  “Are you going to play?” she asked.

  “Sam’s really good,” one of the guys offered. The user next to Samantha quickly logged off and stood.

  “You can use this one. There’s another computer over there,” he said. Sam sat and looked at Samantha silently as the three helpers slowly melted back to their machines. Samantha looked at the table by his arm, smiling awkwardly.

  “I had a standing RPG group,” she said. “We met at my house. My mom thought I was never going to get married and have grandbabies.”

  “And I thought you were sexy before,” Sam said, grinning as he logged in with his account. He glanced at her. “This is a real turn on, though.”

  “Oh, is it?” she asked.

  “You have no idea.”

  She grinned at her screen, navigating out of the tutorial and into the broader world. Different guys around the room kept calling advice to her.

  “It’s like they don’t think I read the in-game chat,” she said. “Is Simon here?”

  “No idea. They all use the same screen names on e-mail as they do on the games, but they could be anywhere, playing.”

  He paused, then grinned.

  “They’re all amazed that I’m any good at this,” he said softly, “but they don’t really get tactics.”

  She narrowed her eyes at the screen, then glanced over at him.

  “So shall we show them how it’s done?” she asked. He pursed his lips in a mock-sinister face and nodded.

  “I think we should. I’ll come find you.”

  <><><>

  She was lethal. Simply lethal.

  “Where did you learn to play like that?” one of the older guys asked her as the party finally broke up around dawn.

  “You’d never believe me,” she said. “Good game.”

  Sam shook hands with several of the guys he knew by face, and more came up to Samantha as they headed upstairs. She leaned against the back wall of the elevator, eyes closed, smiling.

  “Oh, that felt like home,” she said. “I haven’t played online since I was a teenager.”

  “Why not?” he asked. “You’re always on your computer.”

  “Carter disapproved. Not that my mom didn’t, but you don’t do what Carter disapproves of. He has creative ways of breaking you of that kind of thing.”

  “I can imagine. So why don’t you, now?”

  She sighed.

  “Old habits. I’ve forgotten how to play, entirely.” She looked at him. “They’re all really big fans of yours. And they all knew who I was.”

  “Jason says they gossip like girls. I think they all just know each other really well. It’s a tight-knit community, and when something happens, they all find out about it.”

  “But you’re one of the only ones who treat them well, aren’t you?” she asked. He shrugged.

  “I should have been one of them. All of the Rangers are fond of the Seekers, the way you are of your kid brother. Sometimes, when we get really drunk, we talk about what would happen if a demon showed up at one of these things, going after the Seekers. These are the only time we’re ever around each other, you know, the Rangers and the Seekers. Any other time would be too dangerous, but when there are as many Rangers around as there are now…”

  “I hope no one ever finds out,” Samantha said. Sam frowned. It was a parlor game with the Rangers, like capture the flag. How do you protect the Seekers and kill the demon with as few losses as possible. Not many Rangers looked at the Seekers as individuals, outside of their own. And since, downstairs in the computer room, they were all nameless, they turned into livestock, almost, for the Rangers. The elevator doors opened and she followed him down the hallway as he counted off doors.

  “I am going to sleep so hard,” she said. “And you get your own bed again tonight. No sleeping in a chair, or anything.”

  He wished he could have kept the disappointment from her, but the look she gave him told him that she knew. He shrugged.

  “I wish I didn’t have to pick,” he said.

  “You don’t get to,” she said. “I’m sorry, but training you and getting you stable was more important. There’s no option left where we are together like that.”

  He nodded.

  “I understand.”

  He unlocked the door to the room and she walked in and set her backpack down by her duffel bag.

  “I’ve made up my mind,” he said. She looked at him and sighed, eyes sinking closed for a moment, then looked hard at him.

  “I know. And I know what the decision is. But I’m exhausted. Can we talk about it after I get some sleep? You must be as dead on your feet as I am,” she said. He nodded.

  “Tomorrow?” He glanced at the clock. “Tonight, whatever?”

  She nodded.

  “Tonight.”

  <><><>

  Jason lay sprawled on his stomach in a sweaty tangle of sheets, only vaguely aware of anything outside of the happy fogginess of his brain.

  “Sam is quite the hell-cat, isn’t she?” Kara asked. He grunted, pulled from the very edge of sleep.

  “That’s what you’re thinking about right now?”

  “I bet she’d be something else in a threesome,” Kara went on.

  “Never happen,” he said, blowing air to try to get the pillowcase out of his mouth.

  “I think I know that, and I think you know that, but I’m not sure I’m not sure she does.”

  Jason’s head rolled deeper into the pillow and his mind drifted off again.

  “You’re insane,” he said, already technically asleep.

  <><><>

  Samantha stood in the bathroom, taking her time drying her hair. With fine hair like hers, if she dried it too fast, it exploded into a poof-ball of frizz, instead of laying in coherent waves along her face that she at least tolerated. She had showered and dressed, and this was the only thing she had left to do that she could think of. She knew what was going to happen, or at least what Sam wanted to happen, and she was stalling. Delaying this conversation this long had been the right thing to do, but now there were no more legitimate reasons, so she was drying her hair.

  This was part of the reason she had done her half of the bond without asking. She could figure out what it meant, how much of a sacrifice it was, long before she ever had to explain to him that it was designed as a two-sided ceremony. Bloody Carter.

  She hadn’t intended for most of the sacrifices so far to be his. The lack of privacy hadn’t really occurred to her. The Templar whose account she had read hadn’t really had much privacy to begin with, nor a personal life at that. But letting someone volunteer their fidelity and freewill to you. It was terrifying. Surely he couldn’t do that. Who was going to referee and say that it was okay? Some of the translation out of the French had been a little touch-and-go, and she was learning where the words in English hadn’t translated well out of French, and then had translated worse into modern American English, but she didn’t regret it. She could tell when the shadows were creeping up on him, and when his dreams got too loud for him to sleep. She could tell when he was in pain. These made her an effective Shaman. She could use her abilities and her knowledge so much more effectively with a direct link to what he was feeling in response. But to let him pledge the same thing back to her?

  What had she done to merit such a level of attention and devotion?

  What if she was letting him commit to something he didn’t even begin to understand?

  Her hair was beginning to frizz, and she finally put down the towel and tried to brush her hair back into submission. She had over-cooked it badly.
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  “You look like a witch,” she said idly to the mirror. He was getting restless, outside. She felt a bit sick. Looked at the toilet for a moment, wondering if just going ahead and throwing up might make any of the rest of this easier. Gave up and pulled her hair up into a pony tail, then sighed. It was time.

  She opened the door and went to sit on the bed across the walking aisle from Sam.

  “If we’re going to do this, I want to do it all the way. I don’t want you carrying the burden alone, whatever it is,” he said. She closed her eyes and sighed.

  “I’m afraid you don’t know what you’re getting into,” she said.

  “Did you?” he asked.

  “Not really, but…”

  “Then let me do this. Fine, we won’t ever be a couple. I can live with that. I want us to be as effective as we can be at whatever else it is we end up doing.”

  She sighed.

  “You’re sure?”

  He nodded.

  “No doubts at all?”

  He nodded again.

  Both were true.

  She hadn’t even had to ask.

  She closed her eyes, summoning strength, then stood and started to get the things he would need out of her bag. She showed him the ring.

  “This is how you draw blood. I’ll soak it in bleach then wash it in RO water so it is completely clean. The first thing you need to decide is what blood source you’re going to pledge from.”

  She handed it to him, and he looked at it. It was a thick band of fine pewter weighing most of an ounce, and it had a quarter-inch spike on it. He tried it on his finger, thumbing the spike. She showed him.

  “I pledged left-handed from the wrist. The wrist, here,” she said, showing him the pulse point she used, “is symbolic of flexibility, dexterity, sociability, and advance guard. At the elbow,” she pushed her thumb into his elbow to find the pulse, then nodded, “more symbolic of strength, but flexibility, criticality, and balance. Shoulder,” deep in the arm below the armpit, she felt too close, backing off to sit back down on the bed, “power, core connection,” she paused, “passion. Then your neck, and I forbid you to pledge from your neck, is life-source. Always pledge with heart-blood, not cold blood.”