Out of the Box 7 - Sea Change

by Robert J. Crane

  “You’re not watching me like that,” Kat snapped, slowing her walk, lingering about ten feet from me, apparently so she could get whatever was off her chest—it was a pretty minimal chest—uh, well, off it.

  “How am I watching you?” I asked, my tone wending toward dark amusement. “Like Yancy over there? Because I think he might fancy you, Kat. Yancy fancies.” I chortled. “Come on. That’s good.”

  “I can hear you,” Guy Friday said.

  “And so?” I called back.

  “None of this is funny,” Kat snapped back.

  I looked over the ruin of the park. While it hadn’t exactly been the classiest of places when we’d arrived that morning, I couldn’t find fault with her assessment. “You’re right,” I said, accepting my chastening, “it’s not.”

  “I’m not talking about this, either,” she said, waving a hand around to encompass all around us.

  “Because … this is funny?” I asked her uncertainly, now without a clue as to what she was driving at.

  “I’m talking about how you look at me, Sienna,” Kat said, and now she was almost spitting fury at me. I wanted to laugh again, from exhaustion and from the image of this little stick getting pissed at me after I came to LA and died trying to fight the guy who wanted to kill her—not really sure which of those was the worst part of this whole ordeal.

  “How do I look at you, Kat?” I asked, my cynicism settling in for a good laugh. “Like you’re an idiot? Because that one’s really more on you than me—”

  “Janus told me,” she said, puffing up with a sense of satisfaction like she was confronting me with my own personal kryptonite.

  “Told you what?” I asked, more tired than curious. “That you were special? Because he sold me that line of bullshit, too, but fortunately he didn’t try and use it to sleep with me afterward—”

  “He told me that you know,” Kat said, arching her eyebrows as though plainly I was aware of the big dramatic important thing of which she was speaking.

  I racked my weary brain and camp up with goose eggs. “Kat … I have not the first clue what you’re on about.”

  “Bullshit,” she said hotly.

  Kat didn’t really swear very much so that one woke me up a little. Also, calling me a liar on a normal day was not wise. On a day like today? I envisioned myself making a speedy exit from this town, but not before clearing the ten seconds on my calendar that it would take to drop her down the big hole in front of me as I made my way home. I pictured her screaming as she disappeared into the darkness, skinny limbs flailing, and it calmed me enough to respond without violence. “Okay. Tell me what I know that you know that Janus told—” I paused, trying to disentangle what I’d just said. “Just tell me, Kat, so we can get on the same page with this argument you clearly want to have.”

  “You’re painting me as the villain,” Kat said, snotty, turning her face away from me and looking to the heavens for either intervention or rain, neither of which was forthcoming. “Typical.”

  “This is why I look at you like you’re an idiot, by the way,” I said, probably not salving the situation much.

  “You look at me like I’m a damned steak and you’re hungry, Sienna,” Kat snapped.

  I sighed. “Kat … I wouldn’t eat you if you were the last cut of meat on earth, all right? I’m not a cannibal, you don’t look very filling, and if you’re suggesting that I’m in any way harboring same-sex tendencies for you, you’re out of your damned mind. Also your ego is huge-normous. Like, it couldn’t fit in the Metlife Blimp, or the Metrodome, or Canada—”

  “You know what happens if you absorb me,” Kat said, almost like it was a threat—to me, not her.

  “Absorb you?” I stopped short of laughing. “I can barely stand to be around you for a day. If you think I want to live with you in my head, you’re even dumber than I’ve always suspected. I’d rather deal with Wolfe—”

  Grrrr …

  “—or Bjorn—”

  I am a tasty Nord. All meat—

  “—or Eve—”

  Ach du—!

  “—or your irritating brother—”

  HEY!

  “—point is,” I said, “I don’t even like you, Kat.” I watched her face fall. “You’re a treacherous whore who’s thrown me under the bus with meta strength for her own good while pretending to be a friend. Want to absorb you?” I scoffed. “If Scott wasn’t here right now, if there wasn’t an obvious and imminent threat to innocent people, I’d let you die a cold and ugly death at the hands of Redbeard.”

  “You can’t lie to me, Sienna,” Kat said, cold indignation breaking through her brittle facade that I’d just chipped away at. “If you absorb me …”

  “I get an annoying voice in my head forever?” I snorted. “What a prize. Do I get your chlamydia, too, because, if so, bonanza—”

  “You keep acting like you don’t know,” she said haughtily, “but he told you. I know he did. Acting like you don’t think about it—well, let’s just say you’re in the wrong town for bad acting, okay?”

  “Or the very right one, considering how much of it you’re doing right now.” I paused, thinking about Janus’s conversation with me about Kat, about absorbing her. Oh. Wait, he had said—

  Ohhhhhhh.

  Right.

  Something must have showed on my face, because Kat puffed up a little bigger. “Yeah. No need to fake your way through the scene anymore.”

  I rolled my eyes. It was utterly genuine. I’d filed away the rest of what Janus had told me regarding what would happen if I absorbed Kat because—frankly—I didn’t give a shit. Absorbing a Persephone meant I could control my skin-based soul absorption powers rather than just have them work whenever I touched someone. And while that would have been kind of useful, I supposed, it wasn’t something I gave a lot of thought to anymore, because—well, I had better things to do, and I didn’t really want to absorb anyone, ever, let alone Kat Forrest, Queen of People-Who-Piss-Me-Off Town. “What you attribute to fakery might be better chalked up to not caring.”

  “I know you look at me, thinking about it all the while,” Kat said, running a hand up herself in a very ewwww sort of way. I’m sure it would have looked great on film if her hair, makeup and dress weren’t almost as bad a wreck as the train below, but Vanity Fair and their wardrobe, hair and makeup people had long since fled this scene. “About how you could just live a normal life if you did that one thing—”

  “Yeah, I’m sure that’s the only thing separating me from a normal life,” I muttered under my breath. “Just absorb you and it’s like a magic tonic that will make everything better—I won’t be a workaholic hated by the world anymore, sitting on the edge of being fired from my job and declared a public enemy, and all my relationship woes and baggage will miraculously be fixed because I’ll be able to have unprotected sex.” I nodded smartly. “It’ll probably bring my parents back from the dead, as well—”

  “You’re such a bitch,” Kat said, utter loathing in her eyes as she turned to walk away.

  “I’m sure it’ll fix that, too,” I called after her. “Come back! Let me absorb you, Kat! We will have a magical, extra-special awesome life together!” She stalked off past Scott, who watched her go with a frown, and Guy Friday, who met my gaze with arched eyebrows. “Ugh,” I said, and folded my own arms in front of me. “Why do I get stuck working with difficult people?”

  “Law of attraction,” Steven Clayton said, stalking silently up behind me.

  “I am not attracted to Kat, no matter what Yancy over there might be fantasizing—”

  “That’s not what the law of attraction is about,” Steven said with a chuckle. “It’s a philosophy thing that went big a few years ago—‘You attract what you are.’ Therefore, positive, excited people attract themselves to positive, excited people and negative, angry folks—”

  “Find many opportunities to punch the shit out of positive, excited people,” I finished for him, drawing a smile from him. “Sorry,”
I said. “I’m in a bit of a mood.”

  “You got PTSD?” he asked, jerking a thumb over his shoulder to indicate the hole to the tunnel. “Because that strikes me as the sort of thing that would do it.”

  “I’m fine,” I said, broken record that I am. “Don’t you have … I dunno, work or something?”

  “Let me tell you about my profession,” he said, cracking a smile, “when I work, it’s like … epically long days. But then I may have a month or two off in a row before I have to go and do a round of press tours and stuff. Right now, I got nothing until my next movie starts table reads next week.”

  “Yeah, you look bored and idle,” I said, surveying him. “Thanks for the … uh … breath of life, I guess?” The life-giving kiss, I didn’t say. All remarks regarding slipping me the tongue were similarly not mentioned, though I was tempted to throw on a Guy Friday-esque expression and let one loose.

  “You’re welcome,” he said. “You’re going to need to reload your gun, by the way.”

  I frowned and felt instinctively for the Shadow in my holster. “Did you steal my sidearm?”

  “That thing shoots like a dream,” he said by way of explanation. “Smoothest thing I’ve ever shot.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Wow. I didn’t expect you to …”

  “Haven’t you seen my movies?” He grinned. “I shoot all kinds of guns in those. All loaded with blanks, but still.”

  “Yeah, well,” I shrugged, “you’re an actor. You’re supposed to be able to pretend with the best of them.” I eyed him warily. “Also … you keep coming to my rescue.”

  He gave a shrug of his own. “I was a lifeguard as a teenager. You keep falling in the water. This is just instinct for me.”

  “Feels like more than that,” I said. “I mean … I’m not exactly the most popular person in the world at the moment. The tabloids alone—”

  “Yeah,” he said, cutting me off. “About that … if truth were peanut dust, the tabloid stories I’ve read about myself wouldn’t even trigger the most allergic person on earth. So … I’m assuming that the same applies to their coverage of you.”

  “Really? Because most people seem to operate from the assumption that where there’s smoke, there’s Sienna Nealon setting fire to something.” This was true.

  “Don’t let ’em get you down,” Steven said with a smile that was warm and engaging, and made—uh, maybe just a little—one of my own spread slowly across my lips. “And about that drink …”

  I fumbled for my cell phone and thumbed it on to exchange numbers. It did not light up, and I doubted it was from failing to charge it. “Dammit,” I said. “Lost another one.”

  He pulled a little notebook and pen out of his jean pocket and opened it, ready to write. “Now, normally, my mother would kill me for giving a girl my number instead of asking for hers. But, since your phone is clearly inoperable, probably due to being fried by electricity, I’m just going to give you mine and passively wait by the phone until you call.” He finished writing with a flourish and then tore out a little rectangle of cream-colored paper and handed it to me. A phone number was written on it in nice handwriting. I took it tentatively, like a clown car was going to drive up at any second, run over my foot, and a whole circus full of the bastards was going to pile out and laugh at me for thinking the Sexiest Man in Hollywood was actually giving me his number.

  “Uh, thanks,” I said, taking it and folding it carefully before realizing that if I slipped it in any one of my myriad pockets it would get soaked because they were all still damp from when I fell, shuddering with electrical current, into the water. I pinched it between my thumb and forefinger and nodded at him once. “I will call you when I get a chance to, uhm … not be bodyguarding and also not dodging Redbeard’s wrath.”

  “Redbeard’s Wrath sounds like a really epic pirate movie.”

  “It kinda does, doesn’t it?” I nodded. “Or a really gross porno.”

  He pressed his lips together in a narrow line. “Uhhhhh …”

  I closed my eyes instead of slapping my forehead. “It was nice to meet you again, Steven. Thank you for saving my life. And possibly, Kat’s.” I paused. “I mean, obviously you saved Kat’s, I’m just not sure whether I should thank you for it.”

  “You’re an odd one, Sienna Nealon,” he said slyly as he started to walk away. “I think I like you.”

  “That’s good,” I said, “because otherwise you just gave your personal, private phone number to me for no reason.”

  “Wouldn’t want to do that,” he said with a grin, walking away backward, depriving me of a hell of a view. The grin was nice, though.

  45.

  We left the park at four in the afternoon, almost on the dot. Turns out the bomb squad had to give the SUV we drove in a once-over before we could leave in it. The driver, for his part, swore up and down that no one had been near the vehicle, that he’d been parked a couple streets away the entire time, waiting for the call to pick us up. I believed him, because he looked too bewildered to be lying and Redbeard didn’t strike me as the type to have a well-ordered conspiracy behind him. He was a lone gunman sort, but without the gun. Lone bombman? Lone phase-through-peoples’-chests man? Doesn’t have much of a ring to it, does it?

  We got stuck in traffic, which I had more or less worked out was a feature of LA, not a bug. It was a feature I hated, like the distressed look in clothing or customer service help lines that automatically route you to a robot for a “Dial 1 to Induce Bone-Chilling Rage At My Lack of Understanding Your Very Basic, Slow-Diction Speech!” Something like twenty-seven hours after first stepping into the car, we made it back to the hotel. I think the sun had risen and set multiple times, but no one had spoken, Guy Friday and myself squeezing Kat into the middle of the backseat, Scott in the front. She squirmed like a petulant child, acting like a black hole trying to collapse in on itself to avoid touching either me or Guy Friday, which was probably wise in both cases, but for very different reasons. When I let her out of the back of the car at the hotel, she stalked off in a huff, not even daring to look at me. I didn’t complain, but it did make for an awkward elevator ride.

  When we got to the room, she disappeared upstairs, stomping the whole way. Taggert emerged from his suite next to us as Scott, Guy Friday and I stood uneasily in the living room. Well, Scott and I stood uneasily. Guy Friday …

  “I should go watch the blond girl,” Guy Friday said.

  “You mean stand guard by the door of her room, right?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “What if someone sneaks in?” Friday asked, making his way up the stairs. “We can’t take that chance.”

  He disappeared up the balcony, and I started to interject, but Scott spoke first. “I need to talk to you in a bit,” he said, eyes a little downcast. “Privately.”

  “Uh, okay,” I said, my eyes making their way up to where Guy Friday had just disappeared. “You mind going up and taking a look to make sure Guy … err, Yancy … doesn’t get out of line with Kat? I’d go myself, but—”

  “Yeah, I heard the dustup in the park,” Scott said with a nod. He seemed uncomfortable, and he wouldn’t look at me. “Just come find me in a few, okay?” He made his way up the stairs slowly on wobbly legs, without waiting for an answer.

  Whatever I might have wanted to say was drowned out first by Kat’s slamming of her door upstairs and then Taggert’s next words, which were both booming and filled with excessive amounts of TMI. (Too Much Information. It’s a slang thing.)

  “Look,” Taggert was saying into his cell phone, shrugging his shoulders at us, clearly his understanding audience, “this is your problem, not mine. She was fully legal at the time—you know what? I can see we’re not going to have a productive resolution to this. Get in touch with my lawyers if you have something else to say. Don’t call me again, I have no time for a loser like you.” He hung up the phone and took a deep breath. “What a day, huh?” he asked us. Like he’d been there.

  “What was that
all about?” I asked. I closed my eyes at my mistake upon realizing it a second later, because unfortunately, Taggert was the sort of guy who would probably assume interest.

  “Well, there was this girl,” Taggert said with that same loathsome grin. “She’s eighteen, and she and I had a little thing going on here a while back, nothing major. A fling, you know. Anyway, it’s just a daddy, mad that his little girl grew up and started making her own decisions.”

  “Terrible ones, clearly,” I said, “and surely based entirely on mutual attraction and having nothing to do with any perceived favor she could receive from you in return.”

  His grin grew wider and my skin crawled. “You ever heard that old Churchill quote?”

  “Well, I wasn’t alive when old Winston was around and running things in Merry Old England,” I said, “but since you clearly were, why don’t you tell us what your oldest friend in the world said?”

  “He’s at this party,” Taggert said, my dig at his age not slowing him down a whit, “and he’s talking with this lady. ‘Would you sleep with a man for a million dollars?’ he asks—”

  “They use pounds in England, so I’m already doubting the veracity of your anecdote,” I said. “Are you sure this isn’t you talking to every woman ever?”

  “And she says, ‘Of course,’” Taggert went on, grin broadening to the point where he was reaching Glasgow smile territory, and I was wondering exactly how much plastic surgery he’d had on his mug, “So Churchill, keen observer of human nature that he was, says, ‘What about for five dollars?’ and she has a shit fit. ‘What kind of woman do you think I am?’ she asks, fit to be tied—”

  “Stop dragging your fantasy life into this.”

  “—and he says,” Taggert paused before delivering the punchline, “‘We’ve already established what you are, madam’—’cuz he was a classy guy—”

  “Yes, I always think of men who call women whores as classy, that’s the first adjective that comes to mind.”

  “‘Now we’re just establishing the price!’” Taggert belted out the last bit with a sort of gusto that made me want to punch him in the face and give him a real Glasgow smile. It was entirely possible that in anyone else’s hands, told for anyone else’s purpose, this joke could have gotten at least a chuckle out of me. However, coming out of the mouth of a man who was a blatant, unrepentant sleaze, I couldn’t help but feel he’d just opened the window to his soul, and I wanted nothing more than to shut said window and brick it up like I was Montresor. For the love of God.