Anything but Ordinary

by Nicola Rhodes

‘I mean, I never knew he could be such a … maybe I’ve made a mistake. I should never have said “yes” not if it’s going to be like this.’ she stopped. ‘No, I didn’t mean that,’ she said seriously.

  Then she grinned impishly at Cindy, as her sense of humour reasserted itself. ‘You can’t have him,’ she said.

  They both laughed. Cindy’s laughter sounded a little forced. She sometimes wondered how much Tamar knew about her feelings for Denny. Not that she was not over it now of course. But there had been a time … not now, she thought giving herself a mental shake. She had to help Tamar fix this. If she did not, it would be like admitting that she wanted Denny; and she did not, not any more. Definitely not!

  Tamar watched the expressions flit over Cindy’s face, shrewdly. She knew very well what was going on in Cindy’s head. ‘I expect you think I should be grateful to have him,’ she observed.

  ‘You are I think,’ said Cindy, ‘really. It’s just that … Well, it’s not that easy sometimes. If he’s acting like a prat, why don’t you just tell him?’

  Tamar shrugged. ‘More arguments,’ she said.

  ‘Or possibly less,’ suggested Cindy.

  Tamar looked thoughtful.

  ~ Chapter Two ~

  There was a gentle scratching on the bedroom door; both women’s heads turned instinctively. Cindy raised her eyebrows; it was not like Denny to knock on his own door, but who else could it be? The same thought had obviously occurred to Tamar; she looked at the door in a puzzled fashion. Cindy shrugged, and Tamar went and opened the door. It was Stiles, looking extremely embarrassed.

  He coughed self-consciously. ‘Er, sorry,’ he began. ‘I just thought … never mind eh, I’ll come back later.’

  ‘Did Denny send you?’ demanded Tamar sharply, but Stiles detected a hint of hope in her voice.

  ‘Not exactly,’ he admitted. ‘He’s pretty upset,’ he added. ‘I thought maybe … probably not though.’ he shrugged helplessly. ‘Women are better at this sort of thing,’ he ended, looking at Cindy.

  Tamar made a decision. ‘I think I’ll go and talk to him,’ she said to the relief of both Stiles and Cindy.

  * * *

  Agent Dawber shaved carefully in the tiny mirror and stared unwillingly at his own reflection. What he saw, so he believed, was a sucker, a pawn, a pigeon, a fool, a sap and a dupe. But no more, he decided. Today he was going to tackle Rook about what was really going on. He squared his chin and immediately regretted it; it not being a good idea to do this when holding a blade against your face. However, the cut was not deep, and Dawber dealt calmly enough with it then he dressed and stood before the tiny mirror again to straighten his tie and square his shoulders determinedly.

  He frowned at his reflection. ‘No more mister nice guy,’ he asserted and marched from the room stiffly, like a cat when facing a particularly large dog.

  Rook was also facing himself in the mirror. He had, if Dawber had only known it, made a decision of his own during the night. He had had enough. Enough of the Agency’s underhanded tactics and habitual mistrust of its own recruits. Enough of lying to Agents less senior to himself, and enough of the puzzled look on Agent Dawber’s face after every briefing with The Director.

  Agent Dawber was not a fool and Agent Rook was sick and tired of treating him like one.

  Agent Dawber came into the room at that moment looking determined. Rook had seen that look before. Usually he would have handled this situation differently. He had had years of practice at making a rookie agent calm down and eventually admit that maybe he was getting a little paranoid. That not everybody was cut out for the Agency, the long hours took a toll on the mind and perhaps he should take a little holiday, etc. etc.

  This time he merely said. ‘You want to know what’s going on?’

  Agent Dawber, who had not even had time to open his mouth, gaped for a second. Then he recovered sufficiently to stammer. ‘Y-you’re damned right I w-want to know what’s going on.’

  ‘Sit down,’ commanded Rook, ‘and get ready for the weirdest story you ever heard – I guarantee it.’

  * * *

  The argument could be heard all over the house. Cindy held the boys on her bed, an arm around each of them, they were crying. Finvarra had gone out as soon as it began and Stiles and Hecaté were debating whether or not to interfere before they killed each other.

  Tamar had not meant to start a fight. She had descended the stairs calmly, and had been rationally marshalling her thoughts, when she noticed a newspaper on the mat as she passed. Automatically, she picked it up and read the headline. In a normal frame of mind, she would have been amused by it – even now, anger and humour were combating for possession of her features – it was, after all, only a rag sheet, a supermarket gossipy thing. She ought to have wondered who had delivered it, and why. But it never crossed her mind.

  Denny was still in the kitchen. Tamar stormed in and slapped the paper down in front of him knocking over his beer. ‘Have you seen this?’ she demanded.

  Denny looked down bemusedly at the paper. His eyes widened as he saw…

  THE ENQUIRER

  Is Denny Sanger the sexiest man in the world?

  ‘How did they get a picture of you?’ snapped Tamar. ‘You were supposed to be being careful.’

  ‘I’m not sure they did,’ said Denny diffidently, examining the tiny blurry and pixelated image. ‘This could be of anyone.’

  ‘It’s you all right,’ snapped Tamar. Then she conceded. ‘Or perhaps David Beckham,’

  ‘Or anyone else with blond hair,’ supplied Denny. ‘Such is fame.’ He grinned. ‘I don’t look anything like David Beckham,’ he added.

  ‘I suppose it could have been worse,’ said Tamar not bothering to mention that that had been her point. ‘It could have been me.’

  ‘You don’t look anything like me either,’ said Denny with another grin.

  ‘I never imagined that we would end up practically famous,’ said Tamar, ignoring this. Sometimes Denny’s sense of humour annoyed her, at least at times like this when she considered it inappropriate.

  ‘Just as long as you don’t bring out a fitness video,’ said Denny. ‘That really would be false advertising. Nobody in the world could ever look like you, no matter how many crunches they did.’

  This time Tamar did smile. And it might have all ended peacefully there if Tamar had not walked over to the sink and started rattling dishes.

  Denny snapped. He clicked his fingers and the dishes vanished.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ Tamar turned on him.

  ‘Because I can!’ said Denny angrily. ‘And so can you. If you must know, I’m bloody sick of all this pretending to be ordinary. You are anything but ordinary, and I like you that way.’

  ‘And if I had no powers?’

  ‘That’d be different.’

  ‘How exactly?’ she asked sardonically.

  ‘You wouldn’t be pretending. It’s all a game to you, a bloody silly, boring game. I’m getting really fed up with it.’

  ‘Fed up with me, you mean?’

  That had been half an hour ago and now the fur was really flying. The house was shaking as they threw lightning bolts at the furniture and Tamar screamed. ‘How do you like me now? Nothing ordinary about that was there?’

  ‘Your aim’s bad,’ countered Denny sneeringly. ‘You haven’t hit me once.’

  She hit him hard in the chest and flung him across the room. But even in the midst of the raging fury that had taken possession of Denny, he still could not bring himself to retaliate with a like action. He missed her by inches sending her diving for the floor, but she was unhurt.

  ‘STOP IT RIGHT NOW! ARE YOU TRYING TO KILL EACH OTHER?’ In the doorway, taking his life into his hands, was Stiles.

  There was a silence before Stiles continued in the same bellowing tones. ‘YOU’RE FRIGHTNING CINDY’S KIDS AND I HAVE AN ALMIGHTY HEADACHE. OTHER PEOPLE LIVE HERE TOO, YOU KNOW. YOU MIGHT HAVE A BIT OF CONSIDERATION INSTEAD OF ACTING LIKE T
WO-YEAR OLDS. SORT IT OUT AND THAT’S AN ORDER.’ He stomped out of the room.

  ‘I guess that told us,’ said Denny rubbing his head ruefully.

  ‘I’ve never seen him so angry,’ said Tamar, awed. ‘I’ve never seen you so angry either actually,’ she added.

  Denny maintained a tactful silence here. He had seen Tamar this angry before, many times, just never with him.

  ‘He’s got a pretty loud voice when he wants,’ she continued. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard him shouting before.’

  ‘He had good reason, don’t you think?’ said Denny. ‘We were pretty awful. I mean just look at this mess.’ He indicated the destroyed kitchen.

  ‘I’ll get a dustpan and brush,’ said Tamar. But Denny assumed she was joking and held his peace.

  He did, however, wave a hand and clear away most of the rubble, just in case she was not.

  Tamar sat down on the floor suddenly looking defeated. ‘How did it get like this?’ she said.

  Denny knelt down beside her and took her hands gently. ‘Why don’t we talk about it and find out.’ he suggested.

  ‘I wouldn’t have killed you,’ she said suddenly.

  Denny’s eyebrows shot up. ‘I know,’ he said. But it should not have needed saying, he thought, feeling slightly disturbed. This was worse than he had realised. For the first time since they had met, Tamar felt like a stranger. Would they, he wondered uneasily, ever be able to bridge the gap that had sprung up between them so suddenly?

  * * *

  A frigid silence had descended over the house. Denny and Tamar had, by tacit agreement, decided to keep away from each other at least for a few days. In a smaller house, he would have been sleeping on the sofa. As it was, he moved his few possessions into a spare room on the same floor. There was a dull ache in his chest that he recognised as a breaking heart. He did not know how to go back, he wished he did. He would have done anything.

  Tamar was feeling bad too, but somewhere inside her was the unquestioned assumption that she could somehow fix this. What she was mostly feeling was frustration that she had not yet figured out how. But she did not doubt that she would. It was her unshakable belief that she could fix anything.

  It was Stiles’s contention that nothing would be fixed unless they talked, as he tried to tell them both.

  ‘But every time we try, we end up fighting,’ argued Tamar. ‘I just can’t reason with him.’

  ‘What are you, my dad?’ was all that Denny had to say about it.

  Cindy, despite her still unresolved feelings about Denny, was distressed by the turn matters had now taken. She tried, unsuccessfully, to ignore the situation as much as possible, feeling that she was neither qualified nor impartial enough to interfere. Hecaté had no such reservations, and was resolving that a month on a desert island was what they both needed when matters suddenly came to a head in an unforeseen and abrupt way.

  The atmosphere in the house was nearly normal again, at least on the surface, when they had some unexpected visitors.

  The two agents stood rather awkwardly on the front doorstep while Tamar, Denny, Stiles and Cindy appraised them intently.

  Tamar was the first to speak. ‘Well,’ she said, drawing on her experience of Denny’s favoured viewing habits. ‘If it isn’t Mulder and Scully.’ she glanced at Denny for confirmation that she had the names correct, but he remained impassive, his eyes flinty and cold.

  ‘He’s Scully,’ said the older agent pointing at his companion who shrugged bemusedly, he had clearly never heard of the X Files.

  A spark of amusement flickered in Denny’s eyes for a moment, but only Tamar, who was watching him closely, observed it.

  ‘Agent Dawber,’ the younger agent, who had been designated “Scully”, introduced himself. He looked as if he was in the middle of a particularly incoherent yet convincing nightmare.

  Denny sympathised, but did not show it.

  ‘Rook,’ said the older agent curtly. ‘Can we come in?’

  ‘What do you want?’ said Denny. He sensed a threat here, if not to his person then at least to his peace of mind.

  ‘To come in,’ said Rook cagily. He seemed nervous; at least, he kept looking behind him as if he expected to see something unpleasant following him.

  ‘No!’ said Denny more forcefully than he had intended. Tamar looked curiously at him. ‘What can it hurt?’ she asked. ‘I want to know why they’ve been following us about.’

  ‘I just don’t want them here,’ said Denny stubbornly. ‘We’ve got enough trouble as it is, they could be more.’ Even as he said it, he knew he was wasting his breath. Tamar never took advice, even from him.

  But this time Tamar hesitated. Things were bad enough between Denny and herself at the moment. ‘Well,’ she began ‘if you really think …’

  Agent Dawber bobbed forward. It’s important,’ he hissed. ‘And we need to talk privately.’

  ‘Before all the soddin’ press turn up,’ said the one called Rook meaningfully. ‘We’ve noticed they always seem to find you too.’

  ‘They’re probably following you,’ said Denny. After all, we aren’t anybody. Maybe they want to make you a film star,’ he added caustically noting the younger agent’s immaculate appearance. Behind him, he heard Cindy giggle.

  Then Tamar lost patience. ‘Oh come in then,’ she said and stood back from the door. Denny did not move.

  The agents moved forward hesitantly and Denny eventually moved casually aside without taking his eyes off them. The two men shuffled in hastily under his gimlet like gaze; neither of them met his eye. Up close, this apparently scruffy and unimpressive “boy” as they had thought him, was incredibly intimidating.

  Agent Dawber, in particular, hoped that he would take his disapproval to the extreme of leaving them alone with Tamar. But Denny had no intention of doing any such thing. He propelled them firmly into a study and ordered them to sit down. ‘All right, he said. ‘What do you want?’

  Tamar stood behind him smiling but saying nothing. She was remembering in exact detail a conversation that had taken place between her and Denny not long after they had first met.

  ‘Always consider the possibility that you might be dead wrong,’ she muttered under her breath.

  If Denny heard her, he gave no sign of it.

  ‘Well?’ he said, as the intimidated agents quailed in their seats.

  ‘We work for a government agency,’ said Rook eventually. ‘You might say the government agency actually, but we can’t tell you any more than that at the moment, not unless …’

  ‘Unless what? Denny’s voice grated harshly across the agent’s.

  ‘We’ve been sent here to recruit you,’ said Dawber. ‘All of you really, or as many of you as are willing.’ He looked at Tamar.

  ‘What you mean,’ cut in Stiles. ‘Is that you want Tamar, but you’ll take the rest of us if you have to.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Rook smoothly. ‘We know who you are, who you all are; and we are aware that you all possess remarkable talents that our agency can use.’

  ‘Keep dreaming,’ said Denny ‘there’s no way …’

  But Tamar nudged him. And he heard her thoughts clearly in his head, as he had not done for some time. ‘Say yes, or at least maybe. We can find out who they are then, what this agency is …’

  ‘Who cares?’ Denny’s thought flashed back.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘You’re going to have to tell us more than you have if we’re even going to consider it.’ Denny temporised, knowing that if he did not say it Tamar would, and a whole lot more besides.

  ‘What do you know about us?’ asked Cindy with just a tinge of concern in her voice. Denny gave her an approving look, which set Tamar’s teeth on edge.

  ‘Everything,’ said Rook meaningfully. Which was not entirely true, but they, or rather, The Director, knew enough.

  ‘Are you really five thousand years old?’ asked Dawber naïvely.

  Tamar gave a start.

  ‘It’
s not polite to ask a lady her age,’ said Cindy, unexpectedly rescuing her from having to answer.

  ‘Sorry,’ muttered Dawber looking at his lap. This was all a bit much for him really.

  ‘We know she is,’ said Rook firmly. ‘Really “Scully”, don’t ask stupid questions.’

  ‘Just like we know that you defeated the Queen of the Sidhe and rescued all those children,’ he added.

  This was, in a way, common knowledge. At least it had been in all the papers in one form or another. But all the same, it was disquieting to hear in such matter of fact tones.

  ‘We aren’t going to get out of here alive are we?’ said Agent Dawber looking at the angry, astonished faces surrounding him.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Denny. ‘We don’t kill people.’

  ‘Well, he doesn’t,’ said Tamar wickedly. ‘I might.’

  ‘I might be persuaded, myself,’ put in Stiles, ‘given enough provocation.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t,’ said Cindy positively. ‘But I have no objections to turning them into toads or something.’

  ‘Chickens,’ muttered Tamar. ‘Or puffins maybe,’

  Denny allowed himself a smile.

  ‘Your situation is not a good one,’ he told the agents. ‘I’d start talking if I were you.’

  The agents looked at each other for the first time. Each was thinking the same thing. They had not been told nearly enough about what they would be getting into here. Someone was going to pay for this. But in the meantime …

  ‘We’ll talk,’ said Rook. ‘It’s why we came.’

  ~ Chapter Three ~

  Cindy and Stiles were talking in the conservatory. There was a definite air of conspiracy in this, as it was the only part of the house that could be relied upon never to contain either Tamar or Denny. Both were allergic to having glass all around them. Tamar, because it reminded her of living in a bottle, and Denny, because of its reflective qualities. Denny avoided any surface that might contain a reflection as assiduously as any vampire could.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ said Stiles. ‘All that stuff about secret government agencies – secret world government agencies – and probing into the supernatural. That’s our job.’