by Beth Dranoff
“Like you?” Yeah, that wound wasn’t close to the surface at all. Nope.
Owain leaned back, watching me. Evaluating. Then:
“You haven’t made a decision about the offer yet,” he said. I shook my head. “Because of me?”
“Not everything has to do with you.”
“Then what?” Owain paused, looking up and to the left of me, calculating the variables. “Not me. But someone, or something.” I stared at him, my lips pressed together without words. “You’re not going to tell me.”
“Been busy with the shit that’s my life.” I bent down to pull clean glasses out of the steaming dishwasher, the sanitize cycle done and cooling. Something to do. Easier than admitting the thought of working with the Agency had woken me up in a cold sweat three times last night. Even now, my stomach was churning at the reminder. Of who I’d been. Of who I didn’t want to be again. Besides, it’s not like I was about to tell Owain what was keeping me so busy these days. Or who. Last I checked, my potential re-employers weren’t big on treating everyone with the kind of inter-dimensional equality for all approach we practiced at the Swan Song. “What’ll you have to drink?” Changing the subject. “I know how much you hate Bailey’s.”
This time Owain’s smile was genuine.
“A pint,” he said. “Something dark and sweet. Local. Surprise me.”
I thought about what we had on tap. Yeah. Poured him a full pint draft of Mississauga Gravelings. A local stout made from chocolate, black tea, cherries, clover, apple peels, and a solid base of native burial grounds surface dirt stored in oak barrels. The distributor had thrown in a few cases of those green glow-in-the-dark plastic skeleton fingers to hook over the pint glass rim. Because that’s what people want to think about while drinking—severed fingers. Then again, given our clientele, maybe it wasn’t such a misguided marketing ploy.
Owain stared at the finger, then at me. Unhooked the digit and licked it clean, tongue around and along the side, pulling it out again with a tight suctioning pop. I couldn’t look away. Until he rolled it around between his thumb and forefinger, raising the pointed nail to the side of his nose, and scratched.
I snorted and returned to filling the drink orders piling up, while he settled back into his seat, grin twitching. Yeah. Got me there.
Janey’s most recent drink order had drained us of the last bottle of domestic vodka. Mixed with Smarnog lashes, cinnamon, fenugreek leaves, orange neon ear jelly squirts and a couple of shots of blue Curaçao, I couldn’t afford to go dry on it.
Even better, here was my excuse to get away from Owain. Years of nothing then, what, I see him twice in as many days? There had to be something else going on.
I glanced over at his silhouette from the shadows of the Employees Only area. Still familiar, time distancing itself from circling the clogged drain of my memories. That way lay darkness and a remembered pain in my chest as his absence squeezed out my ability to breathe.
That was then. In the now I was doing better. Playing well with others, more or less, and I was even having relationships. OK, plural and OK, concurrent. Your point being?
What was Owain really doing here?
And why was the Agency so interested in me that they’d sent one of their more senior operatives as the lure?
Chapter Fifteen
“Dana.” Sandor’s basso echoed along the hallway, the exit sign’s red light the only illumination other than the incandescent blue-white glow from his office. I hovered in the doorway, unwilling to explore Sandor’s new language-of-guilt side further. Still, boss. I bit my lip and pushed myself past the threshold.
“What’s up?”
Sandor studied me, standing there, and the outer edge of his left eyelid twitched. That was new. Then again I was feeling kind of twitchy myself. He was fiddling with his lower lip, pulling it out and down between thumb and forefinger, careful not to knock himself with those thick orange claws. His inner lip was paler, although still more orange than I’d ever seen it, and dotted with flecks of purplish Forget-Me-Not blue.
Sandor’s transformation from Gustav’s blue to this kind of toad-like green—I didn’t know such a thing was possible. This was coming from someone who could sprout whiskers and claws though; surrealism could be relative.
“Thanks for hiding my brother,” he said, abrupt, releasing his lip right before shaping the words and pushing them through. “It’s not too bad, right? I know he can be a dick.”
“He hasn’t tried to kill me yet,” I said, “so it could be worse.”
Sandor started fiddling with his lip yet again, worrying at a non-existent flake of loose skin, before he noticed me noticing. He stopped, then made a show of rummaging in the top drawer of his desk. “I know I’ve got toothpicks in here somewhere,” he muttered.
“Sandor,” I said. “It’s alright.” He looked up at me. “OK, maybe it’s not great. But I’m doing it. For you.” I left out the part about who owed what to whom. Sandor nodded. “Did you find out anything more about who’s after him?”
“There’s this clan, west coast fuckers,” he said. “Islanders. I spent some time out there years back—they grow some of the best psilocybin crops. ‘Shrooms,” he clarified, to my blank stare. “They also run these Ayahuasca camps out in the bush.” Sandor paused. “Is it the bush if it’s not around here and we’re talking mountain-adjacent?” I shrugged. “Whatever. Anyway, I’ve been hearing rumblings that maybe they’ve got their twigs in this. Not sure why though.”
“Are the octopod things that keep hassling us from that clan?”
Sandor shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “These guys are more leafy/branchy. Big teeth. Think dryads, like those ones you read about in your sanitized-for-human-consumption fairy tales. Only smaller. More shrubby than towering hundreds-of-years-old-protected-by-granola-munchers oak.”
“What did Gus do to piss them off?”
Sandor shrugged.
“So,” I said. “Shrooms, huh?”
Sandor shrugged, his smile sheepish. “What can I say? It was the ‘70’s.”
I narrowed my eyes, realizing in that moment I had no clue how old my boss was. I’d always assumed a few years older than my thirty-something, but I had no idea. Did his type age like humans? How long would they live—like us, or longer? Shorter? Was it rude to ask? Ugh. Probably.
“I’m guessing you already tried getting Brother Blue Dearest to share and got nowhere, right?”
“Useful exercise, that.” Why would Gus help us help him with actual information? That would make things too easy. “So who are you avoiding?”
My turn to shrug.
“Girl, it’s prime evening bar tab tip time out there, the happiest time of the night—your words, not mine.”
“An ex.” Voice clipped to strip out the emotions I didn’t want to face in the mirror. “That ex.”
Sandor grunted, sympathy crinkling his nose and the skin around his bottom two eyes. “He here to get you back?”
“Nah,” I said, crossing the room to settle into one of the hot pink pleather armchairs. The silver duct tape covering that rip under my right elbow. Damage from a knife fight, or did the chair come that way as part of its second life? Dumpster Diving Special was my guess. “He offered me a job.”
“Come again?” Sandor leaned forward. “What kind of job?”
“Agency.”
All three of Sandor’s eyes narrowed. “Agency,” he repeated. “That Agency?”
I nodded. “They made the starting number lucrative enough to get my attention,” I said. “Sending it with Owain, given our history, was their way of underlining it with a thick red marker.”
“Blood like, as it were,” commented Sandor. “You telling me I should start looking for a replacement smart ass to serve my drinks here?”
“Nah,” I
said. “I don’t know. Owain says the terms are good, and I could use the cash, but I can’t get the details until I agree. I’m not angling for a raise, by the way,” as Sandor opened his mouth to protest, “although I wouldn’t complain if you found your way to throw a monetary increase in my direction. I’m just not sure I want to be owned by the Agency again.”
“Not sure?” Sandor snorted. “You like your freedom.”
“No kidding.” A grin to soften my words. Then: “I’m not sure I trust myself to go back. Also, why me? I’m hardly the only operative to quit. Easy enough to find someone hungry to get back on that payroll to do whatever dirty work they need doing.”
“And the guy? Opportunity to work with him doesn’t sweeten the deal?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Honesty because I had no choice. “It feels like someone wants me looking in one direction, at Owain, so I don’t look somewhere else—maybe at the reasons for this sudden gig, or why I shouldn’t get sucked back into that life.”
“Plus,” Sandor said. “Three guys might be too much even for you. Especially if one of them is the one who got away.”
“Yeah, well, I can’t see Jon caring.”
“And the other guy? Your big cat?” Sandor raised an eyebrow. Just one. Impressive. “He doesn’t strike me as someone who likes to share.”
“You’re not wrong,” I admitted. “But he’s OK with Jon.” Sandor raised a second eyebrow. “Ish. Besides, Owain only just showed up. It’s not like anything’s going on.”
“Yet.”
I stuck my tongue out at Sandor. Realizing after it was out that maybe giving my demon boss the raspberry wasn’t the most respectful of acts. Whoops.
Fortunately, Sandor seemed to have rediscovered his sense of humor.
We both heard footsteps in the hallway, followed by a head of dreadlocks hovering in the doorway. Janey.
“Girl, you planning to come back and tend bar sometime soon? They be getting restless out there. And that fine drink of Irish ain’t making to leave as long as you’re back here.” She gave me a smile she probably meant as encouraging, but the sour downturn of her mouth hiding her teeth suggested something else. Something meaner.
Sandor narrowed his eyes at her. He saw it too.
“Sorry,” I said, hoping to redirect any rebuke from the boss—who, granted, could be a bit of a pushover with his female staff members. Fortunately, it worked. Sandor shut his mouth again and waited.
“So you’re coming?” Janey wasn’t letting me off the hook.
“Yeah.” I glanced over at Sandor as I pushed myself up from the chair. “Later.”
* * *
“Who’s the guy anyway?”
I was surprised Janey cared. Maybe she was bored. “My ex.”
“Which one?” Janey raised her hands in surrender at my glare. “Fine, fine. But seriously girl, ain’t you already got two? What’chu need with a third?”
Fuck it. Janey already had a picture of me in her head, with all the preconceptions and assumptions that went with it.
I stopped her with the hand not holding the jug of vodka, palm to forearm, until she was looking straight at me. “Variety,” I said with a grin that said naughty could beat nice any day.
That got a real smile from Janey. Finally. I was still echoing it right up to the point where I slid back behind the bar.
“Missed you,” Owain said. His smile, that look—it was hard to breathe. Like a smoker who’d gone without for the magical three-day grace period and now wanted that glowing cancer stick in hand, its orange ember burning as harsh smoke was inhaled into lungs that craved it and more. Physically, emotionally, I couldn’t go there again. And yet...
“Sure you did.” I knew his words were bullshit and yet I allowed myself to be fooled by the veracity I wanted to find there.
“When do you get off?”
“Is that an offer?” The words smirking out before I had a chance to slam down my protective filter again. Damn. Hello old habits. Bad habits. Remember why he’s here and who sent him.
“Wicked lass,” Owain said, flashing me a grin. “Work.”
“Work. Right.” I couldn’t help myself. “Soon. A couple of hours. Why?”
“There’s a late gallery opening for a friend,” he said. “Be my plus one?”
“You do art now?” That was new.
“I do all kinds of things now,” Owain replied with a wink. “Don’t worry, I won’t bite. Unless you ask nicely.”
I shook my head, trying not to laugh. Even though we were sliding back into old rhythms, and I couldn’t stop it. Dangerous times indeed. Still...
“Fine,” I said before I had time to think about it. Because fire was super pretty. And maybe I wouldn’t get burned by it this time.
Chapter Sixteen
The gallery was in the middle of the city. Just west of Chinatown, Kensington Market was a historic hub for waves of immigrants who settled here before moving out to the relative affluence of the suburbs. It was where my mother’s mother’s family had grown up. Even now, if you stripped back the layers of signage replaced by Spanish and Portuguese and Arabic and Vietnamese, you’d be able to see the Yiddish underneath.
But it was more than a haven for first generation entrepreneurs. It was also home to a community of artists, buskers, junkies, skateboarders, students, stoners, poets, writers, musicians and more, sharing the interlocking laneways and street-art-covered alleys.
More recently, the urban cool elite—hipsters, digital strategists, those who’d sold a chunk of their souls for a piece of the money pie—had started buying space in the area’s low-rise condos as they sprouted up. Concrete and glass boxes rising from the ashes of brick and wood and dead weeds and turn-of-the-century squalor.
The gallery was in an older section of the market, around the corner from the one-hundred-plus-year-old synagogue that now doubled as a Korean community center during the week. I almost tripped on the steep slabs of stone, no handrail, leading to the cavernous basement hosting the showing. Owain steadied me with his hands on my shoulders. Too easy. I slid out from under their weight as soon as I hit the level ground of the entranceway.
The space reminded me of the subterranean bars of Madrid. Windowless and carved into stone, with reds and purples and blues and greens lit by a targeted white and yellow incandescence. There were a couple of bridge tables shoved together to create an impromptu bar, with pitchers of Sangria and bottles of wine ranging in shades from pale to lustrous. Smoke, too, and vapor. I stumbled again, this time on nothing; was the floor really uneven or was it all in my head?
“Let me get you a drink,” Owain said, close enough to my ear that I could hear it over the murmuring of the voices around us. So many people in such a small space. I nodded my thanks to the place where he’d been and found myself in a room full of strangers, chattering and laughing, all elbows and asses that pressed in without ulterior intent around me.
I scanned the room taking shallow breaths. There. A gap in the bodies, off to the side and towards the back. So hot. Fans propped in corners beating fruitless air against the solid heat-emitting human barriers. Those closest got a breeze, felt some movement in the sweat bubbles slicking their skin. My skin.
Jon’s gallery was the opposite of this. It was above ground, for starters. High ceilings, big windows, air-conditioning; even his busiest openings were more comfortable than this. Although arguably less gritty. A showing at Jon’s was more glitter, moneyed with attitude, from this season’s John Fluevog footwear to the latest haute-brand Queen West jacket or showpiece shirt. A chain carelessly draped from neck to belly. His clientele were the artistic elite and the patrons who financed them.
This place was more tattoos and piercings and collars. Leather and bare skin; muscles toned from work and not some gym, yet equally unconcerned with showi
ng what they had. Vintage versus new with tags still on. I relaxed a bit. Here I could blend.
“Hope you like Sangria.” Owain passed me a plastic cup of something red with stained fruit chunks.
“Thanks,” I said, but he couldn’t hear me so he shrugged and smiled. I raised the cup and tapped his, mouthing the word anyway. “Cheers.”
“Sláinte,” Owain replied, smile broad. We could be on a first date, or even a blind one. Awkwardness and distance and possibility coupled with what ifs.
We wandered from piece to piece, mounted on walls or as part of a floor installation. There were even a couple of dye-dipped popsicle stick floaters hanging from the nearly invisible fishing twine strung over our heads.
“What do you think?” Owain had downed half of his drink already; I’d been sipping at mine, more cautious. Even so, I was light-headed from the combination of heat and alcohol.
I stopped to look at a 3D mandala. Patterns on lines and shapes that bent and expanded into an abyss of infinity. “There’s something about this one,” I said. “I can’t look away.”
Maybe I could be arty, adorn my walls with the creativity of someone who was not me. I glanced at the price beside it: $1,600. Then again, maybe bare brick could be my personal artistic statement. A brand that says I’m going to pretend blank is good because I can’t afford anything else.
“Owain! Ye arsehole.” A burly man sporting a shiny purple dress shirt with sleeves rolled up to his elbows slapped my sort-of date on the back by way of greeting. Sweat dripped down, beading on individual eyebrow hairs and pooling in the dark smudges under his eyes. His accent said Dublin but his light brown skin suggested somewhere the sun shone hotter. “I thought ye weren’t going to show.”
“I told ye I’d be by when I could,” Owain countered, smiling his deflection. “And here I am. Had to wait for the lass to get off work first.”
The man spun to take me in, an overhead halogen bouncing shiny glare off his bare skull.