The reporter nodded seriously, her face tense.
He’d gotten to her, though. I could see it in her eyes, and on her face. The emotion wasn’t all feigned for the camera, or even in the vein of that false sympathy thing people did when confronted by someone else’s grief. If I didn’t know it was an act, that Razmun cared as little for human life as someone else might about crushing cockroaches, it might have gotten to me, too. He was damned convincing, for a mass murderer.
I knew it only made him that much more dangerous.
Behind them, another blast ricocheted between the buildings, causing everyone to flinch and duck. I saw police in SWAT uniforms scatter backwards from the scene, illuminated by spotlights in the dying sunlight. Firemen and a line of cops stood there, too, huddled behind their parked cars, almost as if they had the building under siege. Another, smaller explosion rocked the street a few seconds later, as if something inside had ignited. The line of civilians I could see on the other side of the police ring flinched and ducked as a mass again.
Then they all looked up, as if seeing something on one of the higher floors.
The reporter turned to face the camera, her expression even more tense as she touched her earpiece, presumably so she could hear better.
“...We are now being told that a gas heater in the basement has ignited from the initial blast,” she said. “Police and emergency personnel are still trying to get everyone out of the building...”
From next to me, I heard Gantry swear.
I caught another glimpse of Nik’s face from where he watched the flickering screen from the lime green trundle bed that we slept on every night. The bed had been flipped back into a couch, but he still sank in it almost to the carpeted floor.
From his expression, Nik was even less happy about seeing his childhood friend than I was.
“They set off a bomb?” I said, when no one was talking. “The morph, I mean?”
Nik looked up at me.
His eyes were the same pale hazel as Razmun’s.
“Yes,” he said simply.
“Why?” I said. “Why would they do that? Do they want the humans to know they’re here?”
Nik didn’t answer me, but Irene did, looking up from where she sat next to Nik. She held her hands clasped between her knees, creating a fold in the faded, print dress she wore over bare legs and feet.
“Nik thinks it’s a threat,” she said.
I frowned. I couldn’t help it, seeing the two of them sitting so close together.
“He does, does he?” I said.
“Yeah,” Irene said, not seeing my frown from where she trained her eyes on the television. “An implied one. At the two of you.” She looked at Nik. “Right?”
Nik’s eyes were focused on me when I turned to look at him again.
“He will describe you to the police as the woman who left the building,” Nik said simply. “He will describe you...and possibly me, and anyone else connected to you that he has uncovered. He very likely will produce visual proof to back up his story, since some of his morph will undoubtedly have transformed into likenesses of us to lend credence to his story.” Nik might have felt something off me at that, because he looked away from the television once more, meeting my gaze, his expression serious. “He will also likely say that you and those near you...and me...were the people who accompanied you into the building. If he has no other human witnesses, or the evidence from surveillance equipment is not adequate for some reason, he will get other morph to testify the same, as if they are humans who were scattered in different parts of the building. I am quite sure he will be convincing. This is not a difficult thing to do...given that the humans here have no awareness of morph.”
I let out a disbelieving snort.
“That’s ridiculous. Why would he do that, Nik?”
When Nik didn’t answer, I sharpened my voice.
“Nik?” I said. “Why would they take such a stupid risk? If you got picked up by the cops, they could ID you as an alien. Your blood is different, right? Well, they would probably take a sample...they definitely would if they locked you up for real.” I glanced at Gantry to confirm this, and he nodded, once. I looked back at Nik then, folding my arms in front of my chest. “Why the hell would Razmun want the human authorities of Earth to know that any of you existed?”
“He doesn’t care about the human authorities here at all,” Nik said, shrugging. “He likely sees them as wholly irrelevant...right now, anyway. His opinion may change later, but right now, they are not a part of his calculations at all, I imagine.”
“What?” I let out another disbelieving snort. “Why not?”
“He thinks I can get him off Earth,” Nik said simply, looking up at me again.
I stared at Nik blankly for a moment, briefly stumped.
“So?” I said finally. “How the hell does bombing the Yesler Building help with any of that?”
“He will keep killing people until I agree to help him, Dakota,” Nik said, his voice patient that time. “Or he will try to get us arrested, then break us out, once he knows exactly where we are. He has likely been unable to locate us through the channels he has attempted thus far, and is growing impatient. He is trying this now.”
Nik said it all matter-of-factly, his voice a near-monotone.
I could feel his anger now.
I watched him look back at the television, his expression unmoving.
I glanced at Irene, who sat utterly still, staring intently at the screen, her face pale in the flickering blue light from the old television. I looked at Gantry last, who was texting something into his phone with quick jabs of his fingers. He alone met my gaze, glancing up from the text once he’d sent it, his expression foreboding.
“You have people down there?” I asked him.
“I will in a few minutes,” Gantry said. “Does he want us to try and pick this guy up?”
I realized he meant Nik.
My eyebrows went up, right before I glanced at Nik himself.
That time, Nik was staring between the two of us. I still couldn’t see much of an expression on his face, but I saw a hardness touch his lips that approached a frown.
“That wouldn’t be advisable,” he told Gantry a few seconds later.
“What would they do?” I said. “They wouldn’t want to make a scene, right?”
Nik shook his head, but not exactly in a no.
“I do not know exactly what they would do, Dakota,” he said. “It depends on how desperate Razmun feels his situation is here. If he thought they had a way to reach us through Gantry’s people, he might order his people to capture as many of them as possible. He would then torture them until he got information out of them about where we could be found.”
Gantry grunted. When I glanced at him, his expression had turned openly dismissive as he texted another message, probably to that same team.
“Good luck with that,” he muttered.
Nik looked directly at Gantry, his expression still unmoving.
“They would succeed,” Nik assured him. “They have more patience than most human interrogators. They would also find loved ones. They would seek out their families. It might take him weeks...months...but Razmun would eventually find a way to break them, using one of his forms. He could also have one of his people form a temporary lock-bond with one of them, and extract information that way.”
Gantry looked at me, arching an eyebrow.
I didn’t need him to voice it to hear the question.
“He knows what he’s talking about,” I said. “I would listen to him, Gantry. Maybe have your people try to follow them, but don’t––”
“I wouldn’t advise that either,” Nik cut in, glancing at me. “If Razmun’s people are able to identify them as having some connection to us, the same problems would apply.”
“Well, what would you have me do?” Gantry said, his voice openly irritated.
“Nothing,” Nik said simply. “I would do nothing for now.”
“Nothing?” I said. I put my hands on my hips, staring at him incredulously. I didn’t want to gang up on him, but I was kind of with Gantry on this. “You want us to sit around and do nothing while Razmun sets off bombs all over the city? And says I did it? Nik, the cops are going to pick me up. They know me...some of them, anyway. If my face shows up on that surveillance footage, they’re going to come looking for me. And you, if they show your picture around and connect it with me.”
Nik didn’t answer at first.
He’d turned back to stare at the television, watching smoke pour out of the Yesler building behind the reporter with the sweaty-looking face. Her hair had started to come down somewhat, but she kept talking, her fingers pressed to the earpiece as she relayed what she was learning about the emergency workers still caught inside the white brick building.
“Nik?” I said, sharper. “We can’t do nothing.”
“You can,” he said, giving me a harder look. “I will handle this.”
“You will...?” Gantry’s voice made it clear, in no uncertain terms, exactly what he thought of that idea. “How, exactly?” His scorn leaked through even clearer the next time he spoke. “Didn’t you say there were a few hundred of these...aliens, or whatever...running around after your pal, Razmun? You plan to take them all on single-handed, shape-shifter?”
Gantry looked up at me, his expression darkening when I gave him a warning look.
Ignoring me, Gantry swiveled his gaze between me and Nik.
“...That is Razmun, right?” Gantry said. “The guy who tried to kill both of you...if I’m remembering your story correctly? Didn’t you say he’s some kind of cult leader with the rest of these...people?”
Realizing Nik must have filled Gantry and Irene in more than I’d realized, I just shrugged, nodding. When Gantry frowned back at Nik, I have to admit, I was feeling more sympathetic to him than to my friend the morph.
Trust me, Dakota... Nihkil said then.
It took me a few seconds to realize he hadn’t spoken out loud, but had communicated to me alone, via the lock-bond we shared.
Trust me...please... he said, the words coming through even quieter.
After another pause, I felt something in my chest relax.
I don’t know if it was me simply remembering who Nik was, or what he was capable of, or how much we’d been through together already, but I realized I did.
Trust him, that is.
Before I could think my way through that, however, Nik rose from the couch. Moving swiftly, in that animal-like way he had, he headed for Irene’s front door without speaking to any of us, or even looking at us, really. Gantry watched Nik, his expression wary now, as Nik walked past where we stood. I saw a near-angry expression flash across Gantry’s face as he turned to follow the morph towards the door. He looked almost like he might grab Nik’s arm to keep him from leaving, but instead, he looked at me, his full lips twisting into a confused expression halfway between a frown and an accusation.
“Where the hell is he going?” Gantry demanded to me.
He looked at me as if I was personally responsible.
And yeah, okay, maybe I was a little responsible.
Looking at Gantry, it also occurred to me that he might have picked up on something while Nik had been talking to me through the lock, consciously or not.
“Let him go, G-man,” I said, as casually as I could. Even so, I heard the worry in my own voice as I watched Nik leave. “He knows what he’s doing.”
The door shut behind him with a rattling bang. I heard Nik’s footsteps as he descended down the rickety wooden stairs leading from Irene’s porch.
“Yeah,” Gantry grunted. “Sure he does.” He gave me a harder glare when those footsteps faded. “Real convincing, Tonto.”
Gantry didn’t try to follow him, though.
So I didn’t bother to argue.
Even so, I found myself fighting not to listen to that nagging part of me that sat somewhere on my left shoulder, agreeing with Gantry vehemently and urging me to follow Nik, to at least try to talk him down before he went wherever he currently intended to go.
Some part of me already knew it was too late for that.
Nik, whatever his intentions that night, was already gone.
7
An Ill-Advised Promise
I didn’t hear Nik come in that night.
I woke up with him gone the next morning, too.
Irene told me he’d been back, though. Apparently she’d seen Nik crashed out next to me on the couch when she first got up that morning. She told me she’d only been up herself to let Gantry in after he called her cell to warn her he was coming. Gantry woke Nik up as soon as he arrived, also according to Irene...then the two of them left, without so much as a shower and a cup of coffee. Presumably Gantry had some idea of what Nik had been up to the night before.
That, or he intended to find out.
Knowing Gantry, he’d gotten there at the crack of dawn to head Nik off before he could get himself or the rest of us into any more trouble.
Either way, yeah, they were gone when I finally dragged my own ass off that saggy mattress, about an hour later.
I’d been up late. Too late, apparently.
So I ate a leisurely breakfast with Irene and decided not to care that no one bothered to fill me in before they took off. Mostly, Irene and I talked about the Culare case...although we talked about the bombing of the Yesler Building, too. It was pretty hard not to talk about it, since the incident in downtown Seattle was still being covered on all of the Seattle news stations pretty much non-stop, and even some of the national, cable news stations, too.
I saw a police sketch on there, too, and it looked an awful lot like me.
Eventually, I got sick of staring at Irene’s ancient television.
I downed the last dregs of my coffee cup, brushed my teeth, messed around with make-up for a few minutes and finally donned my boots. I added a jacket, too, after peering through her curtains to the overcast sky. Saying goodbye to Irene a few seconds later, I left out the front door, taking the porch steps two at a time to get to the main street.
I decided not to go to Culare Modeling School’s main office downtown.
Not right off, anyway.
About a half-hour later, I stood on the stoop of an olive green, one-hundred-year-old Craftsman in the Greenlake District instead, just north of downtown on the main freeway. I’d decided to spend the day doing interviews, if only to break up the monotony of staring at screens.
Of course, a big hunk of that was b.s.
I’d been putting this part off and I knew it. It was well past time for me to get to know my missing girls a little, if only so I could eliminate a few possibilities...like them running off with a boyfriend, for example, or possibly joining the circus. I’d been putting it off because I knew it would suck. I’d never in a million years get used to talking to grieving family members when I strongly suspected those family members were dead.
I’m a shitty liar, so that’s part of it.
I’d taken a cab out to Greenlake, which was a pretty wealthy district, in a suburban-ish kind of way. I was sorely missing the Enfield about now. I resolved to get it back from Gantry that night, if I could possibly wrangle it.
I stood at the top of the wooden stairs for a few seconds too long, looking at the refinished deck chairs that had been painted a muted yellow to match the trim of the house and windows. The porch itself was clean enough that I could have eaten off it, only marred in appearance by a few high-end garden gnomes that hadn’t been placed in the garden yet for some reason, and one of those decorative stick-wreaths on the door. For some reason, those wreaths always made me think of the bloody crucifix in the Mexican church where mom dragged me and Jake when we were young, during her off and on bouts of piety. Those could come and go like the weather, and usually had more to do with some guy or her current 12-Step program than reality.
And yeah, I found the association in no way comforting.<
br />
My eyes paused on the pyramidal-shaped stone and mortar pillars on either end of that same porch. They stood in each corner of the wraparound deck as if to hold up the roof and top story of the entire house.
I knew I was stalling.
Visiting the family members of victims or potential victims of violent crime––particularly violent, sex-related crimes involving minors and international organized crime syndicates––was possibly my least favorite thing in the world to do. Ever, really.
Definitely my least favorite job-related thing.
Probably my least favorite thing-related-thing.
I hadn’t called ahead, so there was a good chance no one was even here.
I knew a part of me hoped no one would be here, although that would pretty much defeat the purpose of the trip.
Walking up to the red-painted door with more resolve than I felt, I rapped sharply on the wood to the left of the beveled window, then stepped back a few feet.
I waited a few seconds, then stepped forward and repeated the ritual.
I waited again.
Feeling my shoulders start to relax, I’d just about decided no one was home when the door creaked open sharply. I jumped about a foot, my eyes jerking back towards the newly-created opening.
A Chinese-looking man stood there, squinting at me, his dark eyes openly wary. He looked to be somewhere in the neighborhood of late forties, but had this kind of kicked dog look that I both recognized and that made me wince once I remembered why I was there.
“Mr. Jiāng?” I said.
He opened the screen door wider, still looking at me more warily than not. “Yes? Can I help you?”
Taking a deep breath, I returned his look with a grim one of my own.
“I hope so,” I muttered, hopefully too low for him to hear. I hesitated another beat, then just said it. “My name is Dakota Reyes, Mr. Jiāng, and I’m a private detective. Culare Modeling School hired me to look into a series of fake modeling shows where the perpetrators used their modeling school’s name...” Taking a breath, I looked him directly in the eye. “The same ones that might be connected to your daughter’s disappearance.”
Crash Morph: Gate Shifter Book Two Page 10