I stared at him in disbelief.
“Are you threatening me, G-Man?”
“No,” he said vehemently. He shook his head, just as vehemently, a second later. Glaring back at me, he clenched his jaw. “No, chica, I’m not threatening you. I’m telling you. Hell, I’m promising you...I will always have your back. Right now, that means I have Nik’s back, too. But if it ever seems to me that those two things might be in conflict, make no mistake. I won’t hesitate for a second to blow that fucker away, Dakota. Not one second. Comprénde?”
I stared at him, weirdly shocked by his words.
I mean, I knew what Gantry was.
I knew what he’d done.
Maybe not all the details, but I knew he’d been in Marine Recon, which was some form of elite Special Forces unit, and that he’d been in some other black ops groups, too, being recruited out of Marine Recon into something that was off the books entirely, and maybe even reported through a whole different command structure than what came directly out of the Pentagon, or even Langley, maybe. Gantry couldn’t tell me much of anything about any of that, of course, but I got the gist.
He’d killed people. Probably a lot of people. He’d also done it in ways that would probably never be known or reported on by anyone, from any government.
I knew Gantry had a code of his own, that didn’t exactly mirror society’s code.
But Gantry was also my friend.
It never occurred to me before that moment that Gantry might kill someone I cared about, just because he perceived them as a threat to me...or to the country...or to whatever.
As I stood there, staring at him, Gantry sighed.
That time, his big shoulders seemed to deflate.
Some of the heat also leached out of his blue eyes.
“Dakota...look,” he said. “I’m worried about you, all right?”
I gave a bitter laugh. “Worried.”
“Yeah, worried,” Gantry said, his voice a growl once more. “But that’s not all of it, and you damned well know it.”
I shook my head, though, folding my arms where I stood.
“No, G. I really don’t,” I confessed. “What the hell are you talking about? Do you mean you still see Nik as some kind of national security risk? Is that it? Because I got the message on that one. Loud and clear.”
“Of course I see Nik as a goddamned national security risk!” Gantry snapped. “Are you going to tell me you don’t?” Before I could answer that, he cut me off again. “...But I’m not talking about that, either.”
I sighed. “Then what are you talking about, Gantry? Want to enlighten me? Or is it just way more fun to make me guess?”
Gantry stared at me, his blue eyes showing disbelief.
When I only stared back at him, making it clear that his staring wasn’t making his vague-talk-innuendo crap any clearer to me, he frowned in another near-scowl.
Without speaking that time, he walked right up to me, purpose in his steps.
When he reached the side of my desk where I stood, I stepped back, caught off guard, but he closed the gap between us with another step and caught hold of my arms.
Before I could speak, even to ask him what the hell he was doing, he kissed me, hard, on the mouth. I raised my hands in a half-assed protest, but I let him kiss me, truthfully, and even kissed him back a little, maybe.
Old habits die hard, I guess.
When we parted, a few seconds later, he stared down at me, his blue eyes full.
I saw anger there, frustration, but I saw other things, too.
Things that made it hard to hold his gaze.
“I missed you, Tonto,” he said, his voice gruff, lower than normal. “I missed you a hell of a lot during those eight damned months where I thought you were dead. Enough that I made certain promises to myself about what I’d do if I ever saw you again...what I’d say to you.” His jaw clenched, even as that anger ignited back in his eyes. “...Promises that alien, shape-shifting fucker blew out of the water, showing up here with you.”
I stared up at Gantry, stunned.
I opened my mouth, about to ask him again what the hell he was talking about, but before I could, he averted his gaze.
He released my arms in the same instant. Stepping back, Gantry shook his head again, as if frustrated, or maybe regretting what he’d just said, or maybe just angry. Whatever he was thinking, I still saw that deeper emotion in his expression, too.
Truthfully, I think I’d turned over his words enough times by then to be in shock.
I couldn’t quite believe he was serious.
I didn’t get a chance to ask him.
Watching me for a few seconds longer from where he stood, a few feet back from the giant, old-fashioned desk, Gantry finally shook his head, letting out a humorless laugh. He turned his back on me as he finished, still frowning around at the dingy walls.
Then, without looking at me again, he walked purposefully away from me, and towards the door leading out of my cramped and cluttered new office with the smoke-stained walls.
He slammed that same door behind him as he left.
He did it hard enough to rattle the glass pane...and to make me jump.
I didn’t try to follow him, though.
20
New Digs
I fell asleep on the couch not long after Gantry left.
I’d spent most of that morning cleaning the new place, which pretty much wiped me out, although in looking around, it seemed like I’d barely made a dent. I focused on the small kitchen, first...and then tackled the bathroom. Everything still looked pretty dingy, but I didn’t mind. The bed was new, a gift from Jake with his new modeling cash, and probably a bribe to get me to let him stay with us when he was in town...and the refrigerator was new, too, having just been installed by the landlord. Or new-used, anyway.
We also got a fluffy, lime-green carpet from Irene, and even P.J. and Ravi pitched in for the traditional housewarming houseplant when we first moved into the new place.
The shower had great water pressure, too, which made Nik happy.
These old buildings didn’t seem to have as much in the way of water conservation shower heads, for one thing, but I suspected the last tenant had messed with the water limits, too.
I hadn’t opened doors for real on the new P.I. front yet.
For one thing, Jo reminded me pointedly that my license needed renewing.
For another, yeah, who’d had time?
Although Jo had warmed to me somewhat, after finding the girls alive and that whole fiasco with Evers, she still had a number of questions swimming around behind her eyes whenever I spoke to her. Most of her big ones seemed answered. Since the young politician, Lars Falk, had withdrawn his candidacy following the scandal with his “campaign manager,” Jo seemed less inclined to buy into his testimony fingering me, especially once a solid link was found between those guys who owned Misty’s Boom-Boom room and Evers, too.
No one had found a similar link with Lars Falk, a.k.a. Razmun, but the relationship with Evers tainted him in Jo’s eyes, definitely.
So yeah, there was no question of hauling me in on murder for Evers.
The two girls, Nik and Gantry all testified to self-defense, and given the mess at the farmhouse, they were convinced we’d all been caught in the middle of some drug deal / trafficking / mob war gone wrong kind of thing, and therefore pretty much treated us as witnesses and victims and didn’t book us with anything.
Jo seemed to be good with that, too.
As for the guys at Misty’s, most of them packed up and left town.
I didn’t have anything solid on them anyway, nothing that would have stuck, but it was still annoying, and kind of horrible since no one ever found Marla, Hilary’s sister, either. Jo promised she’d keep looking for her, but her and the rest of the Seattle P.D. seemed pretty sure that Marla had been taken out of the country before that whole mess went down.
Jo told me privately that, once sold, the chances of finding mis
sing girls who disappeared into trafficking dropped down to almost nil.
She’d informed Interpol and the F.B.I., so I had to hope.
The club itself was put up for sale, and while I had zero illusions that the actual organization had shut its doors in the Northwest, they would have to be dug out of the next sewage drain into which they’d crawled before anyone could do anything about it.
I told Jo she could handle the next round with those jokers anyway, now that I’d softened them up for her a bit.
Of course, everyone was worried those guys would come after me next, including me, but somehow I doubted it. Nik made a few cryptic comments that made me think he’d already dealt with the guys who had known who I was...including the six who met with Evers and Razmun in that mirror-paneled room that afternoon.
I didn’t ask a lot of questions, truthfully.
Nik did tell me some of what he’d overheard back there, of course.
Most of it was what I’d thought...meaning that Evers and Razmun had been setting me up with those mob guys, presumably to have me eliminated. They’d gotten me on the case to pull suspicion off Evers if I disappeared.
So Razmun had been using Evers to find me, and thus Nik...and Evers had been using Razmun to get me killed without going to jail for murder one.
One big happy clusterfuck of mutually screwed-up benefits.
Nik did hint that Razmun seemed to have another motive going on there, too. He implied it had something to do with the trafficking of live humans, but Nik didn’t get much into the details. Or maybe he just didn’t know the details yet. In any case, I got the impression that Razmun might have been looking a bit further ahead than Evers and his psychotic revenge gig.
I got more of the story on where Nik himself had been, too, meaning for those few hours where I couldn’t reach him via the lock. Apparently Nik totally freaked when he found out I’d been grabbed. He ran for the door, still a cat, and began yowling to high heaven to be let out. He said he knew it was a risky thing to do, but he “had few good options,” in his words. He’d already cased the room and there was no other way out.
None he could access in cat form, anyway.
Razmun put two and two together and had some of the mob guys grab him.
Nik said he contemplated shifting right then and there, even with the Russians watching, but Razmun had him tightly by the neck, and might have broken it during Nik’s shift...which was sort of the point, I guess. Before Nik could decide what to do, Razmun actually choked him to unconsciousness...then threw him in the trunk of his car.
So, as it turns out, I wasn’t the only one who had that not-so-pleasant experience.
When Nik woke up, he’d been in human form, naked, and lying in the dark trunk of a car parked out at that meth ranch where I’d been held captive along with Hilary and Jazzy. Of course, he hadn’t known that last part until later, but he looked for me, felt me relatively close and in danger, and came to find me as fast as he could.
He hadn’t told me how he got out of the trunk, but I could guess. I think I dreamed about that, actually, after Gantry left.
In my dream, I had dragon-like claws. I screeched, crammed into a too-small space, trying to tear my way out of a metal box, seeing light through the long slashes made by my glass-like nails. It hurt like hell. I was also angry, frightened, half out of my mind...desperate, maybe.
When I woke up, I was sweating.
I lay stretched out on the beat-up leather couch that matched my office chair, and that I’d dragged off the lawn of the same yard sale with Gantry, Irene and Jake a few days before, loading it up on a beat-up pick-up truck with the chair and the old desk.
I was no longer alone.
I flinched a bit, startled, when I saw someone sitting next to me, perfectly still.
He laid a hand on my arm, as soon as I had.
“Sorry,” he said, stroking my skin. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
I smiled at him, stretching on the long couch.
“You know, this thing is about a hundred times more comfortable than Irene’s crappy hide-a-bed,” I informed him.
Nik smiled, but the more serious look didn’t leave his eyes.
Still fighting to wake up, I pulled myself up to a sitting position on the couch.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
Nik only looked at me for a minute, his eyes a light green, one of the colors I still didn’t have a real interpretation for. I almost saw confusion on his face, but there were other things there, things that made me nervous for some reason.
“Nik?” I said. “Did something happen at the meet today?”
Nik looked over at that. He shook his head, once. “No,” he said.
“Then what’s wrong?”
He met my gaze directly, and I watched his eyes shift a few shades darker. “Do you want me to leave? To go with Razmun when he goes?”
Nik’s voice was blunt, but I heard the hurt there.
I sighed, relaxing back into the soft leather. “Haven’t we been over this?”
“Gantry implied you’d changed your mind,” Nik told me.
I pressed my lips together, feeling my face tense a little as I remember the conversation with Gantry earlier that day. And his kiss out of the blue.
“He kissed you?” Nik said.
I heard anger in his words that time.
Sighing again, I sat up more, laying my hand on Nik’s leg. “Look,” I said, ignoring his second question. “Gantry doesn’t know what he’s talking about. That, or he’s lying.”
“Did he kiss you?”
I shook my head, but not in a no. “It doesn’t matter.” Feeling another rush of anger from Nik through the lock, I found myself biting my lip, even as more thoughts ran through my head. Thoughts about how much I’d been pushing Nik away, about whether it was fair to let him stay here on Earth, separated from his own kind for the rest of his life. Could I really let him stay, surrounded by humans, the same race that enslaved him all of those years?
“You do want me to go,” Nik said, his voice cold.
I shook my head again. “No,” I said. “But some part of me thinks I should let you go, Nik.”
I felt another flush of anger from him, but Nik didn’t speak.
I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but I forced my mind off that, away from what might be going on in Nik’s head, and back on what was going on in mine.
Did I want Nik to go? Seriously?
The thought hurt me somehow, even as I fought with my own conflicting feelings.
“Why would you want to stay, Nik?” I said finally.
He gave me a hard look. I winced a little, maybe trying to prepare myself for what he might say, but he didn’t say anything. He looked away from me instead, staring at the floor of our small one bedroom apartment. The apartment I’d picked out with both of us in mind. With the thought that Nik would be here with me, working with me, but having his own life, too.
“You don’t want that anymore?” he said, his voice low.
“Of course I do!” I said, exasperated. “Nik, quit with pretending you don’t know how I feel. I get that the Gantry-kiss thing bugged you, but let it go, okay? This is too important. I don’t want you to end up hating me for encouraging you to stay. How can you really be okay with losing all connection to others of your kind?”
“They aren’t gone yet,” Nik muttered. He looked at me. “Some might stay. You don’t know.”
“What if they don’t?”
Nik frowned.
I could tell my questions were frustrating him as much as his were me, though.
Neither of us wanted questions. We wanted answers.
Solid, unambiguous answers.
“I love you,” he said. He looked at me, his eyes holding a near challenge. “I wanted to tell you after we made love...or during...or when you’d said you would stay with me.”
I smiled, shaking my head a little. “So many conditions,” I teased.
“Not cond
itions,” he said, a touch of anger reaching his voice. “I didn’t want you to feel guilty, if you ended up asking me to leave. I was trying to give you space to decide. I did not want to be controlling...not with my words, and especially not through the lock. I am trying to be a good mate with you. To not do to you what was done to me.”
I blinked at that. Probably because it hadn’t even occurred to me, but now that he’d said it, it made total sense. Especially given what I knew about Nik, and how he tended to think about things. Especially given what he’d told me about lock-mates he’d had in the past. I forgot sometimes that being bonded to Nik made both of us vulnerable to one another. I also remembered what he’d told me about a “good” lock-bonding, about how that meant respecting the other’s mind and free will.
Remembering Gantry earlier that day, threatening Nik...threatening me, indirectly, and threatening Nik...I felt my jaw tighten again.
It would be the most selfish thing in the world if I told Nik to stay here.
He wasn’t safe here, and I knew it. He probably never would be.
Nik let out a bitter-sounding chuckle. “But no doubt, I’ll be safe with Razmun,” he muttered.
I smiled, trying to lighten his expression when I nudged his arm. “Was that sarcasm?” I said. “Because you’re getting pretty good at it, if so.”
I felt another wash of frustration through the lock I shared with Nik, and I shook my head, cutting him off before he could voice it.
“Stay,” I told him, my voice decisive. “Well...do what you want. Do what makes you happy, Nik. But I want you to stay.”
Nik looked at me, his mouth hard. “You are humoring me.”
“No.” I shook my head, more sure as I said it. “No, I’m not.” Biting my tongue as I weighed the other thing back and forth for a few more seconds, I realized I’d made up my mind on that score, too. “...And no other people, Nik,” I told him. “I promise.”
He stared at me for real that time, his eyes shifting to a paler green.
He didn’t speak, though.
I watched his face, trying to decide if he’d understood me the way I meant it.
Crash Morph: Gate Shifter Book Two Page 29