He didn’t get the motion. She could only hope that someone in the back would clue him in to the pointy animal ears peeking out of his mop of fire-engine hair. She smiled as she texted Shane. Get here quick. You gotta see the new guy.
Her new waiter returned to the table as she fired off another text message, along with her move to the ongoing word-tile game between them. “So where’s Ken today?” She set the phone down on the table and tried not to stare at his hair as he set a water glass down in front of her.
Kitty-ears chuckled. “Took the wife and kids to the Magic Kingdom.”
“Magic Kingdom, huh? I just got back from somewhere like that myself.” Only not the one you took your kids to. She did wonder at Ken’s decision to take a vacation so close to the end of the year. Right now, only handful of Sunday brunchers scattered at tables, but the place did a pretty brisk business with its New Year’s buffet.
“He left the place in my capable hands. So I’ll be serving you today. Call me...Kit.”
“Not very subtle.” She flicked her fingers in the space over her head. “You’re still wearing your ears.”
His eyes were light, almost brandy-hued. He rolled them up. “Maybe my ears really did grow like this.”
She snorted. “Yeah, right. Cat-man. And I’m a secret high-school ninja princess.” At almost forty.
He sniffed. “They’re fox-ears, I’ll have you know. Your Highness.” He executed a little bow that had her lips twitching even as she rolled her eyes. “Shall I fetch Her Majesty some green tea?”
Her smile froze. Majesty? Hadn't Jack told her the little potato-headed gremlins all thought he was their king? Hadn't she witnessed the spirit in the hooded robe address him as ‘Majesty’? All of a sudden, she noticed what was missing about the fox ears.
There was no band to keep them from falling off his head. Maybe because they’re attached. “That's—sure. Green tea,” she finished lamely.
He winked at her. “Relax, ninja princess.” He leaned in and his voice dropped to a whisper. “We keep each other’s secrets.”
~*~
Heat flushed her face as Kit disappeared into the back. His thick mop of hair didn’t betray a thing. Who knows, maybe he’s one of those weirdos who had them surgically attached. Maybe they’re actually his hair, molded into ear-shapes.
Or maybe Kit was a not-so-subtle hint that fox-spirits were now finding part-time jobs in tea houses. As the door to the kitchen swung shut behind him, her gaze darted around the room. She looked for telltale signs—movements up towards the ceiling, flashes in otherwise-shadowy corners.
Kit returned with her tea, his ears absent, but she couldn’t help noticing how his hair stuck up in two mounds where the ears had been. They should be flat. “Would you like anything else?”
Her stomach growled, but she shook her head. “I’m still waiting for my friend to get here.” She checked her phone again.
“I wouldn’t stand up a gorgeous woman who wanted to meet me for brunch.”
At what age, she wondered, did flirty waiters bucking for tips become serious boosts to the self-esteem? She frowned. “Neither would he.”
Twenty minutes, three unanswered texts, and two phone calls later, she abandoned her tea and left her fortune cookie uneaten. Shane hadn’t shown for their brunch, and her first call had gone straight to voice mail. Her second call had gone to Shane’s other standing Sunday morning engagement. When Carol reported that Shane had missed the weekly meeting, a telltale curl in her stomach went from vague concern to prickly hyper-awareness.
As she shouldered her handbag, Kit stopped by her seat. “Aren’t you gonna open that? You can’t know your fortune without cracking your cookie.”
She lifted her eyebrows. Sometimes she wished she could come right out and say, Look, save the show for the tourists, but she never did—it just seemed a little more rude than she wanted to be. “Oh, I don’t really believe in that stuff.” Given she still couldn’t help staring at the two lumps underneath his hair, her protest sounded a little weak.
“You mean you don’t believe in crispy vanilla goodness with a hint of citrus? Or you don’t believe in supporting local cultural artisans fighting against a homogenized, mass-produced anti-culture of preservative conformity?” He held up the plate. “They’re home-made. Just like mom used to make.”
Okay, that part of the show impressed her. “My mom wasn’t the cook in our family.” Mostly to do with her own dislike for octopus and seaweed because they weren’t hamburgers and French fries. Nevertheless, she took one of the handmade fortune cookies and cracked it open. “Fine, you talked me into it. But only because I’m supporting local artisans and Otaku guys wearing fox ears.”
She ate the cookie, but deliberately left the fortune unread. Kit tsked and picked up the slip of paper. “That which is missing from your life cannot be found in the places you usually look.” His whiskey-colored eyes locked with hers. “Seek it out in the places you have yet to discover. Maybe your friend went to the Magic Kingdom without you.”
Her teeth clamped together as a rush of awareness raced up her spine. Friday night showed her there was more than one kind of Magic Kingdom. Stop it, she told herself. Just because Mother was right about one thing doesn’t mean she’s right about everything.
Kit dropped the slip of paper down onto the table. “And your lucky numbers are three, seventeen, and eighty-two.” He winked again. “See you around, Princess.”
“Right.” She stuffed her wallet back into her purse. “Thanks.” It’s just a stupid fortune. They can mean anything. They’re supposed to mean anything, so you apply them to your life. She willed herself to walk out the door. Powered by something other than her own mind, her hand darted out and snatched the paper at the last minute.
But she’d be damned if she’d read it before she got outside.
~*~
She left the Tea House and caught the city bus that wound through the mall zone and right past her street. She didn’t bother going into her apartment, just unlocked her car and spent the next hour cruising the streets of the places she knew Shane frequented.
She started with his apartment, moved to his work—hoping that he’d been caught in a deadline at work. She went on to his usual hangouts, all the while feeling a burn flushing the skin on her neck, sneaking out from her solar plexus to creep up and start a tinny ringing in her ears. And jumping at every flash out of the corner of her eye.
She checked her home phone as soon as she walked into her apartment, on the off chance that Shane had tried to leave her a message on the land line. The uncomfortable heat that prickled over her skin moved into her solar plexus, radiating out to her extremities. “Dammit, Shane,” she muttered. “Stress does not help these hot flashes.”
Starla texted her not long after. She called her best friend back, because texting would take too long. “I can’t find Shane.”
“And it was your turn to watch him, too. Did you forget to put batteries in the shock collar?”
She chuckled in spite of the growing concern. “I think he’d probably be the one to remember the batteries. And beg for the remote. He didn’t make our brunch, and Carol said he wasn’t at the meeting, either.”
Starla’s tone sobered. “He doesn’t miss meetings.”
“I even checked my house phone’s answering machine. No message, no emails, either.”
“Last I heard from Shane was yesterday morning.” Starla paused. “After you called me for, uh, extraction.”
Lin felt heat creep up the back of her neck and lifted the fun-fur collar of her jacket away from her skin. “Jack said Shane tracked him down on his run yesterday.” She tactfully didn’t mention that Starla was the one that likely prompted that little adventure.
“Shane was probably worried about you. And a little jealous, I think. He’s usually the one who finds the hot guy at a party and doesn’t get home until noon the next day.”
She flushed harder. “It wasn’t noon.”
“
Yeah, yeah. Details. So did you two get busy after I left? Swing from the chandeliers?”
“Starla! Jesus, don’t you have your own life?” The full-on sweats prickled over her skin.
“Let me live vicariously through you. Bailey and I can’t swing from chandeliers anymore. Puts too much stress on the ceiling trusses.”
“Use your imagination.” It’s less unreal than what really happened. “We’re going ice skating tomorrow before we come up to your place.”
“He’s trying to weasel out, isn’t he?”
“He promised he wouldn’t.” A thought occurred to her. Starla’s backyard wasn’t Jack’s ‘home turf.’ Wasn’t that what got them in trouble to start with? Forget about it. We said we weren’t going to talk about The Thing. Because that always works in a relationship.
Now that she started to think about it, she couldn’t put out of her mind that she was the one who actually got him into trouble. If he’d stayed in the house and not followed her out into the clearing…
“Shane said he’d be there, too. Said he might be bringing a date. It’s got me all sorts of curious.”
She switched back to concern about Shane. “I never checked his social media page. I wonder if this new date has anything to do with the disappearing act.” She tested her gut to see if she felt relief.
Starla read her mind from fourteen miles away. “Go with your gut. If it tells you to be worried, be worried. I’ll see if Bailey’s heard from him.” She hung up soon after.
Lin shook herself out of the cropped jacket and flung it onto her bed. “Dammit, Shane,” she said again. “The one time I need you to tell me if I’m being stupid—” A scrap of paper fluttered out onto the coverlet next to her jacket. She frowned and picked it up. The fortune from the Tea House.
She snorted. “Seek out what you’re missing in the places you didn’t look yet. Real good advice.” She turned the fortune over to the printed side. Then she frowned again. “Your true talents will be discovered?”
She mulled over the misquoted fortune while she sank her overheated body into a cool bath. Maybe she was reading too much into a fortune. Because it wouldn’t be in my freaking genes to do that, would it?
Or maybe, as Jack had predicted, she had started seeing Oddlings all over the place. She sat up straight in the bath, water sluicing off her, and covered herself with a glance upward. “Stupid.” No gremlins lurked between the rings of her shower curtain. The ceiling was low enough for her to touch and painted white, leaving no open duct work or places for a peeping Oddling to hide.
She splashed cool water on her face, letting it drip down off her chin. Jack was right. Now I’m seeing them everywhere. As she dried herself off, she wondered if it was a condition of knowing—did you see them everywhere because you knew about them, or were the Oddlings only “there” so long as you knew about them? She knew what her mother would say. The Youkai were everywhere and all eyes were on you. But her dad had actually studied the stories. Legends and myths always had rules. Spirits and supernatural creatures, as powerful and frightening as they may have seemed to the cultures that spawned them, all still operated under laws and restrictions.
In her mother’s world, the waiter could really be a kitsune, tipping her off to help her find her friend. Or more likely, trying to lead the hapless human into trouble. But according to the way Dad saw things, the spirits had roles to play and usually lessons to teach the hapless farmers of the average fairytale. So what lesson am I supposed to learn, she wondered. Not to misplace my friends? Or should my friends learn to stay where I last put them?
She wondered if maybe Kit’s words held meaning after all. She was looking for Shane, and she hadn’t found him in any of his usual places—
Places you haven’t discovered, Kit said. And he read her the wrong fortune.
She resorted to calling Shane’s younger sister, who worked reception for campus security at the university. “Look, Lori. I’m not asking you to break the law. Just—maybe get a few of your friends on patrol to look out for his car? You don’t think he’s gone to your parents’ house, do you?” While she talked, she soaked a washcloth in cold water and held it against her forehead.
Lin swore her hair ruffled from the force of Lori’s over-the-phone sigh. “Dad hasn’t spoken to him in almost a decade, why would he start now? Especially if Shane’s gone and fucked himself up again.”
“Stop that. I don’t know that he has.” For all the fighting Lin did with her mother, she couldn’t imagine completely cutting her off. And she doubted her mother would allow it. Asian parents were supposed to be hard on their children, but the Abernathys had been far more unyielding than Yukiko at her most Japanese.
“All I know is that we were supposed to meet, he didn’t show, and I’m worried. Accidents happen, too, you know.”
Lori sighed again. “I’ll have the golf cart patrol check around.”
“Thank you.” It was like pulling teeth. While walking a tightrope. An absence of maybe twenty-four hours or so wasn’t cause for alarm. Only it was telling in the places Shane had been absent from. Lin had only been peripheral to the events that happened eight years ago, but since she and Shane had grown closer, she was more sensitive to the Shane from now—the one who’d pulled through the physical aspects of addiction, but still needed work on the emotional ones.
It wasn’t until she was dressing for her date that the thought occurred to her that she might not be the hapless human of this particular tale. Jack made no secret about his worry that the Oddlings in his life would bleed over to people close to him. What if that had already happened?
She couldn’t quite picture the little potato-gremlins armoring up and kidnapping Shane to get back at Jack, though. As far as she could tell, the little critters worshiped Jack and just wanted to be close to him. But what about others? The Scarecrow might not have been actively hostile, but hadn’t he warned Jack of others not so friendly? And what about that other hooded figure? Jack’s chatelaine or seneschal or whatever.
Jack wanted to keep his life separate from the superstitious, and she couldn’t blame him. She had her own long-held habits that kept her mother’s superstitions firmly outside of influencing her life. But to her, they were just superstitions. What if Jack wasn’t able to treat them as silly old folk beliefs?
~*~
The chunky eggplant sweater was not her favorite, but it worked well in lieu of a coat. It was still hovering around the high fifties with humidity that made everything seem a little warmer. And it made day-to-evening transition much easier. All she had to do to transition from daytime ice skating to evening dinner party was take off the sweater to reveal the silky silver shirt she wore underneath. And change her shoes. Already, her feet were sweating in the gray suede boots as she parked on the street a block and a half down from Jack’s building.
She wanted her heels back. Being three inches shorter than she usually felt made everything seem bigger, and she needed the extra confidence for what she was about to do. She scuffed her toes in the elevator as it made its way up to the penthouse. If she could call it that. It was clear that whoever owned the building had grand ideas about making it a classy urban address, but they still had a long way to go. Long on dreams, short on reality. It reminded her, in a weird way, of the early, thrilling days at EvoWorld. Was it too late to let the dreams point her way?
Jack was waiting in the open doorway of the Loft when the elevator pinged open. He wore a sport coat over an open-collared shirt, and a pair of broken-in corduroys in a faded charcoal hue. His gaze swept over her and when he met her eyes, naked appreciation gleamed in his.
Thank heaven for skinny jeans, she thought, because denim was the only thing keeping her from melting into a puddle. As it was, heat crept up her cheeks and tinted the smile she couldn’t keep down. Forget the ice skating, she wanted to say. The sexy professor look made her want to dress like a Japanese school girl. A very naughty schoolgirl.
“Hi.” His voice scraped over her sk
in, making the dream so much dreamier…and the doubt so much sharper.
She licked her lips. “Hi, yourself. Happy Christmas Eve.”
He bent his head and touched his lips to hers, at first seeking permission, and when she consented, seeking entrance. He tasted like frozen lemonade with a hint of mint. The small sounds she made in response seemed inadequate.
When they broke apart, he breathed just as heavily as she did, fogging the air between them. “Come on in,” he murmured. “Or maybe not. If you come in, I might not let you back out.”
“You might never get rid of me.” Her eyes fluttered closed as she breathed in his aftershave. “We need…”
He pulled her inside. “I know what I need.” The door clicked closed. “Is it what you need, too?”
She shuddered. “God, yes.” I need focus, dammit! “Wait—” She stopped his hands as they lifted her sweater.
He stilled. “You’re right.” He pulled the door back open. “I’m doing this right. Taking you out. Showing you a good time.” He spoke the words with fading conviction while his gaze remained fixed on her mouth. “Out there…good time…”
Her lower lip tingled. It wanted to be nibbled on. “Out—out there,” she echoed. The heat flushing her body told her to forget it, that it could wait. But she knew it was a false security. She licked her lips, feeling her stomach curl when his eyes followed the motion of her tongue.
He blinked and visibly shook himself, like a dog shaking off the cold. “After you.” He motioned to the elevator, and she was glad one of them had enough fortitude to move in the right direction.
Aside from her worry about Shane, and her concern over the 800-pound gorilla between them, she’d spent the morning thinking on and off about the nature of what she and Jack had between them. Part of her wanted to jump in with both feet and head-first, while the rest of her knew that way lie madness. They’d spent one night—one crazy night—together, and part of a day. Even with decades of friendship between them, that made for, at the most, a friends-with-benefits situation. At worst, a relationship peppered with land-mines.
WinterJacked: Book One: Rude Awakening Page 19