by Audrey Faye
Rosie held on to casual just long enough to stand up and take two steps toward the fridge. I held my breath as she moved past me, reaching for glasses and napkins and a pitcher of something cool and pretty from the fridge.
From the back, it all looked like normal, competent Rosie.
But I’d seen the gathering tears.
When she turned back around, however, a tray in her hands and a smile on her face, there were no traces of what I’d seen.
I offered up silent words of respect for the impressiveness of her bootstraps. She has the kind of resilience that only comes from knowing exactly who you are and liking what you see a whole lot.
She was going to need it.
4
I’d seen spaceships launched with less fanfare. We’d assembled the iced tea, three kinds of kale chips—Lelo was experimenting with making her own, which is a clear sign of impending apocalypse—and moved the small dining table into the center of the living room. Command Central.
All with Carly and Rosie doing more of their strange new dance.
Lelo and I had been smart enough not to step into any of the awkward pauses and eventually things had leveled out to the kind of pond we might be able to paddle in and manage to keep afloat. Which was good, because the kid was going to jump out of her skin if we didn’t look at whatever she had queued up in the shiny red folder sitting in the middle of the table.
“Ready.” Rosie slid herself into the last empty chair, glass of cool tea in one hand and a tiny bottle of something in her other.
I eyed the bottle. “Do I want to know what that is?”
She grinned at me. “Smelling salts. Just in case.”
I didn’t even know those were a thing anymore. “You get to wave that under my nose when I’m dead and not a second sooner.” I wasn’t all that worried—I’d passed out exactly once in my life, and that had involved an unexpected meeting with Dakota Preston’s very hard head.
Dakota hadn’t woken up all that quickly either.
Rosie set down her bottle in front of the red folder and took out the little stopper. It smelled, even that distance away from my nose, kind of like a forest glen—if forests were sexy and sultry and a little bit bad.
Lelo rolled her eyes and stuck the stopper back in the bottle. “Stop it with the voodoo already.”
“I’m just the side entertainment until you get this show on the road.” The gypsy florist raised an eyebrow. “Do it soon or I’ll talk you through all seventeen steps of how pansies mate.”
That sounded like a scene from seventh-grade biology, and I had no desire to relive anything from those years.
Carly reached for the folder and then jumped as Lelo smacked her hands. “What’s in there, pictures of you naked?”
“No.” The kid snickered. “There’s only one of those in existence, and I was three and covered in chicken pox.”
That wasn’t a memory from my childhood I wanted to revisit either. I could still smell the nasty pink lotion my mom had diligently applied to Every. Single. Spot. “Get on with it, short stuff, or I’ll tell Mrs. Beauchamp that you’re done with black and you need some help adding color to your wardrobe.”
Carly gave me a look that was one part surprised, one part impressed. “That’s a good one.”
I wasn’t an entirely useless assassin.
“Fine—you asked for it.” Lelo reached into the folder and pulled out the top two pages. Photographs, or at least that’s what I thought they were at first. Big glossy prints in vibrant color, with two toothy women smiling out from a gaudy rainbow.
Clearly, they weren’t related to the kid in black. I glanced at the picture, mystified—and then I heard the slow, hissing intake of breath beside me.
“What is this?” My partner was using her careful voice, for reasons I didn’t understand yet.
“An online ad.” Lelo seemed unconcerned by the hissing.
“I got that. You made these?”
“Please.” The kid looked totally offended. “I’d have way better taste.”
I took a closer look. The picture looked like one of those photo-booth images where everyone tries to make a face and gets caught looking fairly normal at least once—but never together. Their faces, however, weren’t what had my attention.
The image had two women, arm in arm. Wearing our t-shirts. With “Let Us Take Care of the Scumbag in Your Life” emblazoned over their heads in screaming neon green.
I looked over at Carly, who just raised her shoulders and palms in a slow-motion shrug. Assassin, mystified. I looked back down at the travesty on the printed page, Lelo’s earlier words finally sinking in. “Wait—this is an ad? From the Internet?”
Rosie chuckled. “Now you’re getting there.”
I wasn’t arriving anywhere good. I knew next to nothing about online advertising, but I was pretty sure it meant these two lovely ladies weren’t doing this shit under a very private rock. “Someone put this up on the Internet on purpose?”
“Yup.” Lelo looked at my partner, knowing where the online brains of our outfit lived. “They’re buying display ads on a bunch of forums. The wrong ones, mostly, but still.”
She had Carly’s full attention.
“That’s not the worst one, it just enlarged the best.” Lelo pulled over her laptop and made the gyrating pentagon on her screen disappear. “Here, look.”
I stared at the online real estate, hermit lost in a land she didn’t travel very often.
My partner leaned forward, stabbing a finger at a bright rectangle on the left side. “There. Make that bigger.”
Lelo tapped a couple of keys and the rectangle sized up into something even I couldn’t miss. I squinted my eyes against the assault of lime-green letters on a hot-pink background—it was somehow worse on a computer screen.
“Bloody hell.” Carly sounded totally disgusted. “They could at least learn how to hold a knife decently.”
That wasn’t my first concern. “They look like one of those bad psychic hotline commercials.” The ones that sucker people into paying three dollars a minute for a sob story from their long-lost auntie. Nobody from Vermont ever calls those places—we don’t grow that kind of stupid in the woods.
“They’re charging five hundred dollars for an initial consultation,” said Lelo grimly.
Carly grabbed the laptop. “Where does it say that?”
“It doesn’t. The ad clicks through to a landing page. You fill out their online form and one of their smarmy selves contacts you and hits you up for five hundred dollars. Probably the one who doesn’t know how to hold a knife.”
Carly’s head was up, growl ready. “You contacted them?”
“Give me a break.” Lelo jabbed her finger at the ad. “Do they look dangerous?”
Danger comes in a whole lot of forms, and our resident sixteen-year-old hadn’t met most of them. But my head agreed with hers. This duo of lovelies didn’t look scary—they were just going to be really, really annoying.
Maybe. My gut wasn’t entirely sure it agreed with my head.
5
Lelo sliced a neat circle around the last of the avocados and did her cool trick to make the big seed in the middle squirt out without coating half her body in green slime.
It was a trick I had yet to master.
She surveyed the counter, queen of her domain. “Perfect. You want to squeeze limes next or chop onions?”
Neither were likely to slime me as badly as the rogue avocados. I had no idea how I’d been turned into her guacamole assistant in the first place—all I’d done was show up with a bag of ingredients. It shouldn’t be legal to recruit the person who’d delivered them.
And given the knife skills required for this job, Carly would have been the far better choice.
Lelo popped a perfect cube of avocado into her mouth. “I can’t believe you got Tommy’s mom to give up her secret recipe.”
I hadn’t, I’d gotten it out of her six-foot innocent of a son. Behind every foodie with a
secret recipe is someone with loose lips. “Tommy wasn’t positive how much cayenne to add.” And I hoped he was way off on the leafy green stuff—three big handfuls sounded like way too much.
“No problem.” Lelo was taking care of the limes herself, stabbing them with a fork and raining drops of light green juice on avocado mountain. “We’ll just taste test and figure out what we like.”
Once upon a time I’d been a decent hand in a kitchen, but I’d never had that kind of knack. I followed recipes, ones from well-worn cookbooks with precise directions and little pictures of what every stage should look like. I admired the freewheeling souls who could pull six things out of the fridge and turn them into magnificence, but I’d never been one of them.
With food, anyhow. Songs had sometimes done that dance of creation with me back in the day.
“It’s no wonder Carly never lets you play with the knives,” said Lelo dryly.
I looked down at the contents of my cutting board. I’d managed to chop the onions into pieces. Kinda. With their skins still on, which had made an unholy mess and not a very edible-looking one. Oops. Never think with a knife in your hand. “You might need to hire some more competent help.”
“It’s guacamole. A four-year-old with a masher is competent help.”
Apparently I wasn’t getting off the hook. I sighed and started picking onion skins out of my chopping disaster.
Lelo picked up the cilantro and herded green leafy bits into a tightly wadded mass. “So, what are we going to do?”
I burrowed after a recalcitrant piece of onion skin. “About what?”
“World peace, stupid chicks trying to steal your assassin gig, Rosie and Carly.” The kid was chopping like a fiend. “Take your pick.”
“Fields of marijuana. Lots of them.”
She stared at me blankly.
I paused a beat, enjoying myself a little too much. “That’s my plan for world peace. You said to take my pick.”
A mostly drained lime pinged off the side of my head. “Brat.”
Probably. But no way was I touching the other two possible topics of discussion.
She made speedy chopping sounds and then looked up again when she finished. “Do you think the stupid chicks are a problem?”
We didn’t know yet, and I’d learned to scope things out a little before I decided what scale of trouble they were. “Carly will go digging—we’ll see what she finds.”
Lelo tossed handfuls of cilantro bits on top of the rest of the guac-in-progress. “You could call them. They gave me a number.”
No way. No renegade assassins, baby ones or otherwise. “Nope. We work slowly and methodically and we do it as a team.”
“Thanks.”
I was lost. “For what?”
She swept up runaway cilantro leaves and shrugged a little. “For not making me fight to be on the team this time.”
We’d put up a lousy fight on that right from the beginning. “You could stop bringing us quite so many charming problems from the Internet.”
“Mom used to say I adopted trouble and brought it home for dinner.”
That was the first time I’d ever heard Lelo talk about either of her parents and sound happy. “She has a point.” The kid had a biker gypsy and two assassins in her tribe already, and she wasn’t even old enough to vote.
Lelo stuck her finger into avocado mountain for a taste test. “Thanks for coming back.”
Too many important people hadn’t—there was a reason the kid adopted people. “You feed us. We’re pretty much suckers for a hot shower and a home-cooked meal.”
Another shrug, more diffident this time. “I wasn’t sure whether to call you about those women. Rosie thought maybe I should just send Carly the links.”
That was interesting—and heading into lands I didn’t really want to visit this afternoon. Rosie and Carly were adults, and they could work out the twists in their own underwear. There was something else that needed to be said, though, and that one I could take care of. “When you do something dumb, we let you know, right?”
She raised a confused, slightly defensive eyebrow. “Yeah.”
“And when you do something really dumb, we say so in really loud voices, right?”
“Yeah.”
A little less confused this time—she could see where I was going. Not that I was making any efforts to be subtle. “So, if you’re bugging us, we’ll let you know.” I waited until she’d let that sink in a little. “We play straight with you.” At least, as straight as we played with anyone sixteen and still shiny.
She pondered that a moment longer and then grinned. “You lie to me about kale chips.”
Busted. “Possibly.”
“Totally.”
I tried not to look amused. “You could send some to the pretender assassins. Death by kale.”
She snorted. “You and Carly can take those two down without even breaking a sweat.”
Assassin catfight—there was a mental picture I didn’t need. And I knew better than to underestimate anyone with a chip on their shoulder, even if it glowed in the dark. “I don’t know—lime green and hot pink are pretty lethal weapons.”
She cocked her head, hearing something underneath my words. “You think they’re a real problem?”
Anything could be a real problem. “We don’t know enough about them yet.”
“But you have instincts.”
“Sure. So do lemmings.” Gut feel wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
“Whatever.” Lelo pointed her really big knife at me. “Spill. I want to know what you really think.”
Shiny, bossy sixteen-year-old. “I hope they’re just two women who got a little too drunk one night and decided to start a business.” One with a really bad marketing plan.
“But you don’t think so.”
I didn’t have enough data to start thinking yet. “So far, we know they have horrible taste in graphic design, really good taste in t-shirts, and atrocious knife skills. And they’re trying to charge people money for something.” The first three were ignorable. The last one, not so much, especially when the services might be rendered by ladies wearing our t-shirts.
Lelo’s face clouded over. “You think they’re scamming people.”
So did she. “I think we need to find out.” Carly and I knew a lot about women desperate enough to go looking for our kind of solution, and how many of them might throw five hundred dollars they didn’t have at anyone offering hope.
“And if they’re not?”
“Then we’ll eat a lot of really good guacamole and go find ourselves something else to do.”
She frowned. “After you get your t-shirts back, right?”
Ah. Our small knight in shining armor. “We can’t control who wears a couple of words on their chest.” Even if they did it all over the Internet.
“Can so.” The kid’s eyes were mutinous. “They’re using your product in their advertising—that’s brand infringement and a whole bunch of other stuff. You can file complaints with the people who give them ad space, and even sue them if you want to.”
Lesbian assassins taking the pretender lesbian assassins to court. The mind boggled. “Suing people isn’t all that good for staying under the radar.” Neither was having a brand.
Lelo’s shoulders sagged. “I guess.”
I knew a little something about knights and quests. “That other stuff about shutting down their ads might be interesting, though. If they are trying to scam people, taking away their audience would be pretty smart.” And a safe project for a computer-savvy teenager who needed something to do. “Let’s bounce it off Carly.”
“And Rosie.” Lelo was mashing the proto-guacamole with a vengeance. “She knows a lot about scammer types.”
That was interesting. And totally off limits, if I wanted to stay sane for the remainder of the afternoon. “Ready for the cayenne pepper?”
She nodded, one teenager exchanging her knight’s helmet for a chef’s hat. “Just a little bit
to start. I got mine from a lady who runs an enchilada shack in Houston, and it’s way spicy.”
I only needed to be warned once.
-o0o-
I pulled into one of those scenic lookout spots that never have anyone in them once it gets dark. Trees on both sides, and we hadn’t seen a lot of meandering tourists on the road—just commuters headed home for dinner and totally uninterested in a dusty van and its passengers.
The traveling-assassin recipe for a little privacy.
Carly was already reaching into the back for her bag of knives. “You want to play or watch?”
Sometimes I help oil her knives. It has a meditative riskiness—lots of Zen and the constant possibility of losing a finger. Not what I was in the mood for tonight, though. I’d left my urge to play with knives somewhere back in avocado mountain. “I’ll watch.”
She shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
I usually did. “When did you sharpen them?”
“Up on the roof this afternoon.”
That probably wasn’t an activity Lelo’s rooftop deck saw too often. Carly had more than one reason to be alone with her thoughts on a rooftop, but I didn’t want to talk about them, particularly the one that involved an aggravating sexy gypsy and the scary temptations she offered. Or maybe Rosie hadn’t offered yet. Either way, I was staying the hell out of it. I reached for a bag of slightly stale cheese doodles and steered for safer ground. “How worried do you think we need to be about those two pretender assassins?”
“They’re annoying.” She flicked me a glance. “And they’re annoying while wearing our t-shirts.”
That part pissed me off too—something of us lived in those t-shirts, and it sucked to see them misused by idiots. I’d seen worse as a songwriter, though. When you put things out in the world, they tend to take on a life of their own. “Are we going to do something about them?”
She shrugged. “What can we do?”
I squinted at her in the semi-dark. “Who are you, and what did you do with my partner?”