by Gini Koch
I got out to the hallway when a man’s hand grabbed my arm. Chuckie spun me and pulled me into his arms. “Stop running.”
“This is a really bad time for this, okay? Yes, we just broke up. Not exactly the perfect timing, sorry.”
“Better than having to fight him for you. I probably couldn’t win.” He had his arms around me, but he wasn’t holding me so hard that it was frightening. But I was scared anyway.
“Chuckie, why are you doing this? This isn’t like you. You’re not acting like I’m used to.” Wow, I’d had a similar conversation with Martini only hours before. Today officially sucked beyond all other rotten days.
Before he could answer, my phone rang. I pulled out of his arms and got it out. “Hello?” Silence. “Hello.” Nothing. The caller hung up. I looked—not a number I recognized, but certainly local.
“Who was that?” Chuckie asked me.
“Wrong number, I guess. Look, can we just agree that you’re not going to be amorous right now? I can’t take it.”
“That bad?”
“No, honestly, pretty good. But your timing is the worst ever. I can’t handle this.”
He sighed and rubbed his forehead. “Look. I’m rich. I’m successful. I’m reasonably good-looking, and before you walked on the alien side of life, we were pretty compatible in bed. I’m working in a similar field, so you’d never have to lie to me. I didn’t come here to terrorize or upset you. I came to ask you to marry me.”
My jaw dropped. He reached out and closed it gently. Then he reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a small jewelry box, and handed it to me.
“Open it. Please.”
I did. I was too stunned not to. Inside was a beautiful diamond solitaire, not too big. I didn’t like large stones because I thought they looked like paste on my hands. This was exactly the size I would have picked for myself. I didn’t know that much about precious stones, but I could tell the diamond was of exceptional quality.
“I know you’re not recovered. But I also know that once you say it’s over, it’s over. So, I don’t need an answer today, this week, not even this month. I just want you to at least consider the fact that I love you and want to marry you.
“Where was all this popularity when I was in school?” Whoops, again, not something I’d intended to say out loud. I managed not to ask why he’d waited until now to propose—it wasn’t as if we hadn’t seen each other over the past few years. Of course, I’d been essentially avoiding him for the past five or six months, so it’s not as though he’d had any opportunity.
Chuckie laughed. “It was there, you just didn’t notice all the time.” He stroked my face. “You never noticed, did you? That I was in love with you?”
I was still staring at the ring. I tried to ignore the fact that I’d thought Martini was close to proposing, officially, really proposing, a few times recently. I’d wanted that, so much. For him to do something romantic instead of just saying “marry me” while we were at breakfast or killing a fugly. He’d said “marry me” thirty minutes after we’d known each other. Of course, he’d said “I love you” a lot, too. And Chuckie never had until tonight.
“No. You never said anything, and it never occurred to me.” Not even in Vegas.
“I couldn’t risk losing you.” I looked up at him. He gave me a half-smile and shrugged. “I wasn’t kidding—I couldn’t have survived high school without your friendship, and college wouldn’t have been all that great without you, either.”
A small thought waved at me. “Is that why you went to A.S.U. instead of Cal Tech or MIT?”
He grinned. “Well, that and the fact that I’d already figured out that I was going to be happier in business than I was locked in a science lab.” He stroked my face again. “But, truthfully, if you’d wanted to go to an all girl’s school, I’d have found a loophole somehow that would have let me go there with you.”
I’d never considered Chuckie in the stalker-boyfriend category, but clearly, even the laid-back guys who liked me were at least slightly obsessive. I’d have complained, but I’d been overjoyed he’d gone to college with me.
I felt beyond dense and emotionally battered. I closed the box and handed it back to him. “I’m not saying no. I’m not saying yes. I’m saying I can’t keep this unless or until I say yes.”
“Fair enough.” He put the box back into his pocket. “So, ready for dinner?”
“Not really.”
“Well, fake it. Pretend you’re having fun. I won’t be overly amorous unless someone we hated is nearby and then we’ll be totally into each other. You need to eat, and you might as well dance. I know you’ve always thought I was kidding about this, too, but I’ve taken ballroom dance for years. You’ll love my tango.”
I started to laugh. “Okay, I think I can handle it, even the tango.”
CHAPTER 66
DINNER WAS RELATIVELY OKAY. We ended up with people neither one of us had known well at our table and so got away with not having to talk to them too much.
I managed to choke a little food down, mostly because Chuckie coaxed me into it. It all tasted like wood chips to me, but my stomach hurt a little less.
He kept me filled up with Cokes. The waiter was extremely attentive, I presumed because Chuckie tipped well. There was something vaguely familiar about him, but it was dark, and I had other things on my mind than checking out some little guy in an ill-fitting tux. I had a big guy in a perfectly fitted Armani tux to deal with.
True to his own hype, Chuckie was a great dancer now. Why he hadn’t shown this to me over the past several years I didn’t know, but he could have made at least the finals of So You Think You Can Dance. Martini had taken me dancing a few times, and I’d relearned how to follow a man’s lead. It was actually fun to be dancing, and I only pretended Chuckie was Martini half the time.
He was muscular under the suit, but more like Christopher, lean and wiry. He’d bulked up since Vegas, though, that was for sure, which was, as I thought about it, the last time I’d seen him naked. Not that he’d been scrawny then, just less obviously muscular.
I was having to reassess everything I’d ever thought about him, and my brain wasn’t cooperating all that much. The awkward kid I’d befriended in ninth grade had already turned into someone successful before we’d gone to Vegas together to celebrate his buy-out. But he’d still been a little shy and unsure then.
Though, as cheerful memory reminded me, not so shy that he hadn’t put the moves on me before the plane was up in the air at the start of that trip. Come to think of it, there was still one place I could have sex that wouldn’t remind me of Martini. Of course, now that my memory had been jogged, it sure would remind me of Chuckie.
Chuckie was the opposite of awkward, shy, or unsure now. He was smooth, suave, debonair, and, frankly, appealing in a way I’d been unprepared for. I wondered if he’d been this way for the last few years and, like everything else, I just hadn’t noticed. I had a horrible feeling he had been. The realization that I’d put Chuckie into a box in my mind and had never let him out of it, even after having wild sex with him for a week, would have been enough to reduce me to tears if I hadn’t already had enough to cry about.
And yet, here he was, not berating me for being a moron but instead patiently asking me to finally take the lid off that box and look at him the way he’d always looked at me. In that sense, he was the same Chuckie he’d always been. We still had all the things in common we’d used to, but now we had much more.
The musical choices were odd. We’d graduated in the late nineties, but the deejay seemed intent on an eighties revival with current hits thrown in. I was reasonably okay with this—I liked music from all eras and genres, after all—until he spun John Mayer’s “Dreaming With a Broken Heart.” It was a slow song, and we were dancing close together. But the lyrics cut through me like a knife, and the tears came. Not too many, but enough to make me glad I hadn’t worn makeup.
Chuckie noticed, but all he did was wipe them a
way with his fingertips. Then he leaned my head against his chest, and we kept on dancing.
We did tango, more than once. It was fun, but it was also sexual and romantic. I was glad I had to concentrate on not tripping, because if I’d been comfortable with all the dance moves, I would have felt worse than I already did. And I felt pretty bad, because a part of me was wondering if it was right to enjoy being like this with Chuckie while I still wanted to be with Martini. The short time in the elevator with Christopher I could put down to lustful insanity and fugly interference. Having the dance equivalent of hot and heavy sex with Chuckie seemed much more . . . intentional. I started working on my acceptance speech for Class Super Slut and went back to concentrating on not stepping on Chuckie’s feet.
The evening’s entertainment ended, and we wandered outside to one of the pools. There was no moon out, but there were enough lights from the hotel to be able to see decently. I heard a beeping and realized I must have missed some calls. Only one, as it turned out. I dialed. “Hello, I think you called me?”
“Kitty, it’s Brian. Glad you called me back.” He sounded tense.
“What’s up?”
“You’re at the reunion?”
“Yes. You’re not.”
“We were coming. Got delayed.”
“We?”
“Me and Serene. Don’t say it, yes, I was an idiot, yes, she’s a great girl now that she’s not being drugged, yes, I was acting xenophobic.”
“Good, good. So, why are you calling?”
“Serene needs to talk to you.” I could tell the phone was passing from him to her. “Kitty?”
“Hi, how’re you feeling?”
“Better. Why aren’t you with Jeff?” Well, apparently she was always blunt, drugged or not.
“We . . . we broke up.”
“Why?” She sounded strained.
“I really don’t know. Um, Serene, this is a horrible time for me to be talking about it.”
“No, we have to talk right now. I can see you—you look really nice, by the way—but I can’t see who you’re with.”
“Okay, not a shock. I’m with someone I went to school with. Tell Brian it’s Chuck.”
She relayed the news, I could hear Brian making a snide comment in the background. “Look, something’s wrong with Jeff.” Serene sounded worried.
“Yes, so everyone seems to think. I do, too.”
“When did it start and what did he do?” Serene still sounded freaked, but I could hear the Dazzler scientific mind back there, too.
“It started when we got back from Florida. He got more and more distant. Everything I said was a reason to break up. Every man I spoke to I was cheating on him with. He got belligerent, angry, cold. I could go on. It got worse every day, ending with this afternoon when he just didn’t care that I was leaving and seemed to want me to go.”
Chuckie was listening to this, and his eyes were narrowed. I figured asking for privacy now was stupid.
“Kitty, did anyone give Jeff something?”
“What do you mean?”
“A shot, something odd to eat, anything like that?”
“Why do you ask?” My brain started whirring.
“He sounds like me, only much, much faster. The drug they gave me works on the id; it focuses on your negative emotions, like jealousy and rage, and it enhances them. We studied it these last couple of weeks, and it’s self-replicating. The more you get, the more it creates inside you.”
“That seems impossible.”
“It’s A-C technology, okay? We’ve been working on ways to put humans and A-Cs into suspended animation.”
“How much would you think he’d have to have taken to be this bad in two weeks?”
“A lot. Not just one shot. It took months for me to get as . . . deranged as Jeff seems to be right now.”
I thought about it and my mind went right back to the jet. “Hang on.” I looked at Chuckie. “I need help with a conspiracy theory.”
“I’m your man.”
I brought him up to speed very quickly on what had happened in Florida. “My question is, what’s the overall goal? I already know who’s behind it.”
“Leventhal Reid.” I nodded. “Okay, so ultimate goal?” He pursed his lips. “Destroy Alpha Team. Take away Centaurion Division’s leaders, leave their Pontifex exposed and unprotected. Chaos enhances the ability to make bad decisions.”
“How do you figure?” I decided I’d ask how he knew all this later.
He shrugged. “Every attack was centered around Alpha Team, and around its leader in particular. Martini’s apparently out of his mind. You’re here, without him, without any of them, so without any form of backup. What are the others doing? Fighting with Martini or trying to figure out what the hell’s going on with him.”
Serene spoke. “Brian just showed me a picture of your date.”
“We’re not on a date.” Chuckie raised his eyebrow. “Well, not a planned date.”
“I can see him now. He’s cute.”
“Thanks.” This was getting surreal. “How’d Brian have a picture?”
“He brought his yearbook.” Amazing. I didn’t know where mine was, Brian schlepped his from Florida to Arizona. “Chuck looks a lot better now.”
“I agree.” I found myself wondering if all the drugs were really washed out of Serene’s system. “So how did the drugs get into Jeff’s system?”
“I don’t know. Did he eat anything at the Space Center?”
“Nothing other than what Alfred brought in—we were too busy dodging attacks. Besides, that was days prior to when Jeff started acting weird. Did Taft hit him with something, right before I killed him?”
“No, nothing. When did he start, before you left Florida or when you got back?”
“Once we were back. He was tired and worn out. We didn’t have time for him to go into isolation . . . ” My voice trailed off. There were standard things the A-Cs did for empaths who needed regeneration. Isolation, adrenaline, regenerative injections. Or, in the case of our flight home, an IV drip. That was sitting in an unprotected jet for two days. And it wouldn’t need a power chess piece to contaminate the drugs—a pawn would be better, more likely to be ignored or seem innocuous. “Serene, get to James, right away. Tell him whatever’s in Jeff’s system is in the medical bay of the jet we used in Florida. He took in five hours’ worth of the stuff.”
“Oh, my God. That would explain it. And it’s replicating inside him.” She sounded out of breath.
“What are you doing?”
“Running at hyperspeed.”
“Good plan. I’m going to get back to the Base.”
“Okay, meet you there, somewhere.”
We hung up, and I put my phone away as I turned back to Chuckie. So I didn’t see the gun he was holding at waist height until I looked up. “Interesting wrinkle.” I didn’t know what else to say.
He wasn’t smiling and he looked deadly. “Kitty, it’s time.”
CHAPTER 67
“TIME OR WHAT? I was too close to have a hope of getting out of the way if Chuckie pulled the trigger.
He moved faster than I’d remembered him having the ability to do, grabbed me with his free hand, and flung me behind him as he fired. “Time to get out of here.” He spun and started running, dragging me along.
I looked behind us. “Is that our waiter?”
“Yes. He’s not looking for a better tip.” This was true. He was carrying a gun and firing back. Chuckie flung me around the side of a building, used it as a shield and fired again. “Do you have a car here?”
“Yes. But my keys and valet stub are in my room.”
He cursed. “Okay, Plan B.”
“You don’t have a car?”
“I assume my car’s rigged by now.”
“You know, they could be after me.”
“They are after you! But I’m not stupid enough to assume they’re not after me, too.”
“Oh.” I ducked down and risked a look at o
ur would-be killer. He was running toward us, and as he went under a lamppost, I gasped and flung myself back. “That’s Shannon the Toothless Weasel!”
“Who?” Chuckie stopped firing, dropped the clip, put in another, fired once more, then grabbed me and started running again.
“He’s a nobody in Club 51. One of the guys who was trying to blow us up when we were leaving from Saguaro International. But he was arrested by the Feds. I don’t know how he got out.”
“I do. Reid.” We ran around another building and he cursed. “That wrong number you got earlier? I’ll bet it was one of them, confirming where you were and that you were with your phone.”
“Come again?”
“Satellite technology, you can track via cell phones.” He looked at me. “A-C technology at the core.” We were headed to the valet area. There was a convertible Porsche in front of us. “Get in.” He shoved me toward the passenger’s seat. “No, dammit, don’t. It’s a stick.”
“You get in,” I said, as I slid over the hood. “Unlike you, I’m a real driver.” Keys were in the ignition, great. I started it as he leaped in, and we peeled out, valets and Shannon running after us. “Okay, I’m now in for grand theft auto. What’s going on?”
“You tell me. They’re after you.”
“Why are you here?”
Chuckie made a sound similar to the one Martini always did when I frustrated him. “I told you. I came to propose. I thought it would be romantic.”
“It was. Seven months ago would have been better timing.” Bullets whizzed by, and I looked in the rearview mirror. “Oh, great. They have a humongous Escalade, and it seems to have something extra under the hood.” More bullets flew past, one of which hit the left side-view mirror. “We took a convertible why?”
“It was there and it’s a damn sports car. I should think you could outrun an SUV in this.”
“I can. It’s the several police cars I’m having a hard time with. Turn on the radio.”
Chuckie cursed impressively. “You don’t have any identification on you, do you? I mean that lists you as a federal officer?”