Strange Brew

by P. N. Elrod

  Sedgewick has a reputation for being brusque, unsympathetic, impatient, and mean. But that’s for patients who haven’t almost knocked him out. I not only had to endure having my bandage changed more perfunctorily than normal, but was treated to a tongue lashing as well. No extra charge.

  He finally finished torturing me and left, only to be replaced by an unsmiling Hargrove. I wasn’t alive, I decided. I’d died and gone to Hell.

  Hargrove settled himself primly on a hard metal seat. “His bedside manner compares unfavorably with Torquemada’s, doesn’t it?” he asked.

  I blinked at him. Obviously, I was hallucinating. Because it sounded like Hargrove had made a funny.

  When I just stared at him, he sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I have a meeting in fifteen minutes, so I’ll make this quick. You’re to receive a commendation for your actions yesterday. It will go in your file whenever I get caught up enough to write it.”

  “Yesterday?” The edges of my vision were doing this weird butterfly thing. I blinked, but it didn’t help much.

  “You’ve been out of it for more than twenty-four hours.”

  I absorbed that for a moment. “Why aren’t I dead?”

  “Because you were shot literally yards from our main medical facilities and you’re half Were,” he said tersely.

  “So I take it Simons is—?”

  “Dead, yes. And before you can ask, Jason is fine. Simons instructed him to lead us to the Roberts woman and then to elude capture and double back to his apartment. We found him there last night.”

  “He’s okay.” I couldn’t quite believe it. Hargrove had wanted to send in a team to deal with his traitorous subordinate, but I’d insisted on going myself. I was the only war mage with a reputation bad enough that Simons might believe I could be bought off, giving me a chance to talk to him before he panicked. I’d been almost certain that he wouldn’t have risked keeping Jason alive, but I’d had to know. I guess he’d been telling the truth about his busy schedule lately.

  “All four recruits have made full recoveries, at least physically,” Hargrove informed me. “I believe they are somewhat concerned about what effect attempting to murder their instructor will have on their grades. I trust you will exploit that fear to the fullest.”

  “I’m still an instructor?”

  He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Why wouldn’t you be?”

  “I—Adam—”

  “Was murdered, yes, but not by you.”

  “It doesn’t feel that way,” I said softly.

  “Nonetheless, that was the case. Rather than becoming maudlin, you should perhaps try to focus on the fact that you saved four lives, as well as helped us to identify the mole who has been leaking our battle plans. We knew it had to be someone in a key position, but we were looking at combat personnel, not laboratory technicians. But as one of our forensic specialists, Simons was often privy to sensitive information.”

  “Yeah. I was hoping it wasn’t you. Killing two bosses in less than a year might have looked bad.”

  Hargrove didn’t dignify that with a response. One of his assistants ran into the room, looking frantic, and he sighed. “Get some sleep,” he ordered, and left.

  I’d planned on staying awake and maybe prying a few more specifics out of the orderlies, but my body had a different idea. I woke up what felt like only a few minutes later, but it must have been longer because a florist shop had exploded in my room. There had to be thirty bouquets, most of them roses. The place was so stuffed that it took me a moment to notice Cyrus, asleep on the chair.

  He was curled up in a dark bundle under a blanket, a tuft of hair sticking out the top, and I couldn’t stop the smile that spread over my face. I hated finding things like that charming, but when it was Cyrus I couldn’t seem to help it. I tugged slightly at the blanket and it slipped enough for me to see his face. My grin faded.

  He looked like shit. There was several days’ worth of scraggly brown beard on his cheeks, dark circles under the fan of his eyelashes and he was pale underneath his tan. He was snoring, a low, almost soothing rumble, like distant thunder.

  I spied a half-eaten box of chocolates beside him with my name on the card, and my stomach rumbled. Halfway through the caramels, he woke up and sat there for a minute, blinking at me. “I could have them bring breakfast, if you’re up for it,” he finally said.

  I shrugged. “This is good.”

  “It’s not very nutritious.”

  “It has nuts.” I gave him the hairy eyeball. “You finally bring me candy and you eat all the creams.”

  “You hate creams.”

  “Only those nasty coconut—” I had to break off because his mouth was on mine and he was kissing me, hard and thorough, like he never ever wanted to stop.

  “How could you do that?” he demanded sometime later, voice low and urgent. His hands encircled my upper arms, but he used only the lightest pressure, like he was afraid I would break. This time it didn’t make me angry, because for once I thought he might be right.

  “The doc said I’ll be fine. It’s not as bad as it looks.”

  Cyrus wasn’t buying it this time. “You have a concussion, a knife wound in your shoulder, and a bullet in your ribs! If you hadn’t twisted at the last minute, he’d have shot you through the heart!”

  I sighed. I should have known Sedgewick would talk. Bastard. “But he didn’t. I’m fine—or I will be.”

  “Until the next time you tie me up and go after a group of crazed mercenaries on your own!”

  “It was one woman, and she wasn’t—”

  “You didn’t know that!” Cyrus said with his best you infuriate me glare. “When I woke up in those damn restraints and realized you might be off getting killed and I couldn’t do shit about it—”

  “It’s my job.” But while that was true, it wasn’t the point, and we both knew it. “And you’re . . . I couldn’t risk you,” I added awkwardly.

  “Run that by me again?”

  “You have to understand. . . .” I trailed off, watching emotions chase themselves across his face: worry, fear, and then something a lot more desperate. It was obvious that he didn’t understand. “You’re not dispensable,” I finally said. “You’re one of only two indispensable people in my life. You have to know that.”

  “Then make sure I’m in your life,” he said, sounding strangled. “No more lies, no more leaving me behind.”

  “If you agree to stop treating me with kid gloves.”

  “When do I do that?”

  “All the time! You act like you think I’m breakable!”

  “Give me one example!”

  “Every time we . . .” I glanced at the thin partition posing as a door and decided not to risk it. “You know.”

  He looked blank for a minute, and then incredulous. “This is not about our sex life!”

  “Not so loud!” I hissed. “And yes, it is. Because if you’re almost too afraid to touch me, what reason do I have to believe you wouldn’t take a bullet for me?”

  “Because I’m not stupid?”

  “I’m being serious.”

  “So am I!”

  “You mean you wouldn’t jump in front of a bullet for me?”

  “With your shields? I’d be more likely to jump behind you!”

  “Then why aren’t you . . . more intense . . . when we’re together?”

  He groaned. “Because I was trying to give you what you wanted!”

  “Why would you think—?”

  “What part of your life isn’t intense, Lia?” he demanded. “You’re kicked around, beaten up, stabbed, shot, and almost spelled to death on a regular basis! I thought you might want something a little different from me.” His hands left my arms to explore my shoulders, my neck, my cheek. “I thought you might have had enough of the bad kind of intense—” A hand dropped to my breast and I sucked in a breath. “—that you might want this kind for a change. The good kind.”

  I pressed my face against his sleep-w
arm neck. “Okay, then,” I whispered. Suddenly, this was feeling pretty damn intense, too.

  Cyrus pulled my mouth to his, and his hands came up to clutch my face and for a moment, everything lurched—my stomach, the room, the world. And then I was kissing him back greedily. His fingers tightened on the back of my neck, drawing me close, and his mouth tasted like chocolate and dark promise and every holiday I’d never enjoyed until now.

  “All right. That’s enough!” I looked up to see three grinning orderlies and a glowering Sedgewick. “I said five minutes, not five hours,” he snapped.

  “She was asleep most of the time,” Cyrus protested.

  “As she should be. She needs to recover.”

  “He’s not bothering me,” I said. “I could tell. Out!”

  Cyrus grinned down at me. “Read the card,” he mouthed, and left.

  I waited until the room was clear, then pulled the heart-shaped box over and slipped the card out from under the bright red bow. It had one line: Next time, you get tied up.

  I grinned and ate my chocolate. I was looking forward to it.

  Karen Chance grew up in Orlando, Florida, the home of make-believe, which probably explains a lot. She has since resided in France, Great Britain, Hong Kong, and New Orleans, mostly goofing off but occasionally teaching history. She is currently back in Florida courtesy of Katrina, where she continues writing while dodging hurricanes (and occasionally drinking a few). Her Cassandra Palmer novels (Touch the Dark, Claimed by Shadow, Embrace the Night, and Curse the Dawn) are USA Today and New York Times best sellers, and a new series begins with the novel Midnight’s Daughter (October 2008). Check out KarenChance.com for excerpts, trailers, contests, and more.

  HECATE’S GOLDEN EYE

  P. N. ELROD

  CHICAGO, JUNE 1937

  HANGING AROUND THIS alley gave me the creeps because it looked exactly like the one where I’d seen a man gunned down in front of me. That had been shortly before my own murder.

  The man in front of me tonight was my partner, Charles Escott, who was unaware of my thoughts while we waited for his client to show. I didn’t like the meeting place, but the client had insisted, and Escott had to earn a living. At least he’d invited me along to watch his back. Too often he ignored risks and bulled ahead on his own, which was damned annoying when it wasn’t scaring the hell out of me.

  The air was muggy to the point of settling down in your lungs and forgetting to pay rent. I had no need to breathe regularly anymore, but still found the heaviness uncomfortable in this hot, windless place. A car cruised by, briefly visible in the alley opening. The faint wash of light from its headlamps allowed Escott to see my face.

  “Stop worrying, old man,” he said, speaking quietly, knowing I could hear. “Miss Weaver just wants to be careful.”

  That would be Miss Mabel Weaver, his prospective client, who was late. She’d made the appointment hours ago when the sun was up and I lay dreamless and, for all other purposes, dead in the basement under Escott’s kitchen.

  Yeah, dead. I’m undead now, the way Bram Stoker defined it, but don’t ask me to turn into a bat. He got that wrong, among other things.

  I moved closer so Escott could hear. “Careful? Wanting to meet you in a dark alley is nuts.”

  “Less so than wanting to meet you.”

  He had a point, but Miss Weaver didn’t know I was a vampire, so it didn’t count. “Charles, this has to be a setup. Someone with a grudge paid some pippin to get you here. They figured you wouldn’t be suspicious if a dame called asking for help.”

  “I considered that, but there were notes of hope, anger, frustration, and desperation in her voice that are difficult to convincingly feign. . . . I think I know when someone is lying or not.”

  He was uncannily good at reading people, even when there was a telephone in between. I could trust his judgment; it was this damned alley that put my back hairs up. Just like the other place, it had stinking trash barrels, a scrawny cat nosing through the garbage, and sludgy water tricking down the middle.

  This one didn’t have a body in it yet, but my mind’s eye could provide.

  “I have my waistcoat on,” Escott added, meaning his bulletproof vest. His business occasionally required dealing with all sorts of unsavory characters—I was considered by a select few to be one of them—so I was grateful he’d bothered. How he could stand the extra weight of those metal plates in this heat was a mystery, though.

  “You think you need it?”

  He gave a small shrug, fingers twitching once toward the pocket where he kept his cigarettes. That told me he had some nerves after all. A smoke would have calmed him, but it was also a distraction. For a meeting with an unknown client in a dark alley he’d keep himself focused.

  We glanced up at the sound of thunder rumbling a long, slow warning. I couldn’t smell the rain yet, but change was in the sky. It would get worse before it got better. Storms coming down off the lake from Canada were like that.

  “Crap,” I said.

  He grunted agreement. “If she doesn’t appear before—”

  We jumped when the door in the building on my left abruptly opened, filling the alley with the noise and brightness of a busy kitchen. A large man in a sweat-stained undershirt banged out with two buckets of leavings. The scrawny cat went alert and darted toward him with an impatient meow, tail up. This was a regular event. Escott must have come to a similar conclusion, but he relaxed only slightly.

  The stink of cooked food fought against the rotting stuff in the garbage cans a few yards away. Fresh or foul, unless it was blood, all food smelled sickening to me. Coffee was the one exception; I’d yet to figure out why.

  The big man dumped the buckets’ contents more or less accurately into a trash barrel and tossed a large scrap of something to the eager cat, who seized it and ran off. The man fit one bucket inside the other, giving Escott and me a hard once-over.

  We had no legitimate reason to be here, and I looked suspicious. Escott was respectably dressed, but I was in my sneaking-around clothes, everything black and cheap, because sneaking around can be rough work. The man would be within his rights to tell us to clear out or dump us into the barrel with the leavings—he had the size for it.

  “You waitin’ for someone?” he finally asked.

  It was Escott’s turn to take the difficult questions. I made sure the guy didn’t have a gun or friends with guns.

  “I’m from the Escott Agency, waiting for a Miss Weaver. Is she an acquaintance of yours?”

  He gave no answer, going back into the kitchen. A second later, a tall, sturdily built woman hastily emerged.

  She was too big-boned to be fashionable, but there was grace in her simple blue dress. A matching hat teetered on her head, barely held in place by several hatpins stuck in at various angles. The hat was an oddball thing with a brim that was supposed to sweep down to cover one eye, but now askew, as though she’d pushed it out of the way and then forgotten. She had a small purse, but no gloves. My girlfriend never left her flat without them.

  “Miss Weaver?” Escott stepped forward into the spill of light.

  “Yes, but not here,” she whispered. She shut the door, moved toward him, and promptly skidded on something in the sudden dark. I caught her before she could fall. She gave a gasp of surprise. I can move fast when necessary, and this alley murk was like daylight to me. I decided to be kind and not tell her what she’d slipped in. Maybe that cat would come back later and eat it.

  “Sorry,” I said, letting go when she got her balance.

  “Mr. Escott?” She squinted at me, uncertain because my partner and I have nearly identical builds, tall and lean. Our faces are very different, and I look about a decade younger even though I’m not.

  “The skinny bird with the English accent and banker’s suit is who you want. I’m just here for the grouse hunt.”

  Escott shot me a pipe down look. “I am Charles Escott. This ill-mannered fellow is my associate, Jack Fleming.”

>   I tipped my hat.

  “Mabel Weaver,” she said, and ladylike, extended a hand to let us take turns shaking her fingers. She had dusty red-brown hair, a long, narrow, humped nose in a long face, and a lot of freckles no amount of makeup could conquer.

  “May I inquire—?” began Escott.

  “We have to be quick and not attract attention,” she said, glancing toward the kitchen door. Her strong husky voice sounded unused to whispering. “The owner’s an old friend and let me sneak out the back.”

  “Toward what purpose?”

  “I’m ostensibly having dinner with my boyfriend and his parents. They’re my alibi—no one else should know about any of this. I’ll tell you why if you take the job.”

  “Which is?. . .”

  “I heard about you through Mrs. Holguin. She said you pick locks, recover things, and can keep quiet. She said I could trust you.”

  Escott does everything a private detective does, except divorce work, calling himself a private agent instead. It’s a fine point, allowing him to bend the law when it’s in the interests of his client. He’d found it profitable.

  “Mrs. Holguin’s assessment is accurate. How may I assist you?”

  “I need you to recover something my cousin Agnes stole from me. She’s my first cousin on my late mother’s side. We’ve never liked each other, but this time she’s gone too far.”

  “What was taken?”

  “This . . .”

  Miss Weaver wore a long necklace with a heavy pendant dangling from it. She held it up. Escott struck a match to see. Set in the pendant’s ornate center was an oval-cut yellow stone the size of a big lima bean.

  She pointed at the stone just as the match went out. “This is supposed to be a nearly flawless intense yellow diamond. That color is rare, and one this size is really rare. Sometime in the last week my cousin Agnes got into my locked room and switched them. She had a copy made of this pendant, a good one—that’s real white gold, but around a piece of colored glass. She thinks I’m too stupid to notice the difference.”