Convergence (Winter Solstice Book 1)

by J. R. Rain

  “Solstice, you’re emotional. Where are you getting this from?”

  “Damn right I’m emotional. The man I’ve been with for two goddamn years is staring at me like my pussy’s suddenly grown teeth. All your little jokes and jabs over the years… comments about waiters or taxi drivers… about wanting to eat again in half an hour.”

  He sighs at the ceiling. “That’s not offensive. Chinese food is good. I’m not being racist saying I get hungry again in a half hour. It makes you want to eat more.”

  “So, I’m overreacting.” I fold my arms, not buying it.

  Diego holds his fingers up in a pinching gesture. “A little.”

  I march over and peer up at him. “Touch me.”

  He stares.

  “If I’m overreacting, touch my ears like you used to. Kiss me. Tell me I’m still someone you love.” His weight shifts ever so slightly away. I sigh, staring at the rug, telling myself I will not cry in front of him. “I’m sorry for wasting two years of your life.”

  “Sol, I need time to wrap my brain around everything.”

  “Is it what I look like or can you not get past thinking that I’m inhuman.”

  Diego wanders off to the side, scratching at his hair. “I can’t think about this now.”

  “Too much going on at the office. Yeah. I know. That’s what’s important, right?” Mr. Moody leaps to mind, his offer to ‘defend my honor,’ and I let out a sad chuckle. I should bring him here and let Diego experience a talking cat.

  “I’m sorry. I just…” He sighs. “At least stay and eat. I thought this is your favorite.”

  As little appetite as I have left, I force a weak smile and sit at the table. Maybe I’m being a little unreasonable asking him to be okay with finding out he’s been sleeping with an elf and not knowing it for two years. Or that elves are a thing that exists. And okay, it’s a shame to waste the food. Eyes closed, I meditate on my family for a little while to ease myself into a calmer state of mind. It doesn’t matter what Diego thinks of me. I have my family. And Jade. And everyone at The Spiritualist.

  My hope crumbles over an awkward meal. He rarely looks away from his plate and makes no effort to say anything. Probably better that way so things don’t get worse. Maybe I should try and start a conversation, but I can’t. It takes enough effort to eat, and every time I sneak a glance at him, that battle gets harder. At least the man can cook. I used to tease him that between his looks and his kitchen wizardry, he’d be perfect as a television chef. TV viewers seem to like it when chefs scream at people, and he’s good at that too. Maybe he can hire Scott on as his ingredient fetcher or something.

  Fortunately, he didn’t overload my plate and I manage to leave only a bit of the rice.

  We sit in silence for a while after our forks stop moving. He’s giving off the sort of body language one does when an annoying tangential relative they barely ever see stops by and lingers well past their welcome. I guess I’m in his way, invading his sanctum. So much for my panties decorating his floor. That’s not happening tonight. Probably not ever again the way he’s subtly cringing away from me. Maybe I’m too thin for him now or more likely, he can’t get past the elf thing. I dunno what it is. The guys at the office couldn’t stop staring at me, and they didn’t make me feel like a circus freak. No, the way they ogled me was pretty well into ‘go complain to HR’ territory. Good thing The Spiritualist doesn’t have an HR department. Too small.

  I stand. Clearly, my presence is interfering with the rest of the life he wants to get on with, no freaks wanted. “Thanks for dinner. I should go.”

  He nods, not taking his eyes off his empty plate. How ‘bout that. He didn’t even lose his appetite. Guess that’s why he didn’t look at me. My eyes narrow. I’m a ‘creature’ to him. Hah. If anything, I’m the one who should feel sick. I might live for thousands of years so that puts me a rung or ten above him on the evolutionary ladder. Hell, we’re not even on the same ladder.

  “And thanks for clearing that up about where I stand. I’ve been wondering for a while if I was anything more to you than sex on speed dial. Guess I know now.”

  At the word ‘sex,’ his lip curls, like he can’t stand being reminded of it.

  To show off, I grab my coat from the outer hall with a Fetch spell. The look in his eyes when it sails across the apartment to my hand is priceless. “You shouldn’t feel so sick. It’s true one of us is a higher order being. I’m the one who traded down. Go figure.”

  His head snaps up, but before he can say anything, I storm off to the door.

  I wind up at Starbucks a little after nine. My hopes for a comfortable night at Diego’s careen out of the sky in flames, along with our relationship. I sure am going to miss that waterfall shower. Maybe he’ll come around or maybe he won’t. On second thought, screw him. Anyone who makes someone they’re supposed to care about feel as terrible as he just made me feel can go to hell, which might also exist now, for all I know.

  Would that whole lifemate thing cripple me if it picks a human? Could I handle loving someone into their elderly years when I don’t change? I can’t even fathom what it’s like to contemplate a life spanning centuries or millennia. There could be Val’nathiri alive now who existed when Jesus walked the Earth, whatever he happened to be. God, demigod, djinn, mage… who knows.

  At least those thoughts keep me from breaking down. I expected to cry like I did when Kurt dumped me for Fiona Richards halfway through senior year. That makes me laugh now. He caught so much static from his friends for dating a sophomore. Even though I was a senior too, I looked like an eighth-grader. Sigh. I kinda wonder where those two wound up.

  Andre walks over to my table. At this hour, he’s not working alone. A couple of African-American teens are running the espresso machines and making lattes while a lily-white girl with neon blue hair and a bunch of facial piercings buzzes about making cold drinks and microwaving the prefab food. No wonder people on the street haven’t reacted too much to my appearance. They probably think I’m some rebellious teenager.

  Seven customers stand in line waiting. Except for one old woman and a tween hovering at her father’s side, everyone radiates impatience to get out of here and on with their day.

  Andre, of course, is probably why I wandered here in the first place.

  “Hey,” I mutter.

  “Hey yourself.” He spins a chair around and sits, folding his arms over the seatback. “The man cannot appreciate what he has lost. He is not worth the imbalance in your energy.”

  I smile, still staring into the table. “Am I that obvious?’

  “Every person glides along the river of life. Some create ripples.” He holds his hands up, index fingers a few inches apart. “Follow someone at the wrong distance, close, but not close enough, those ripples can drown you.”

  “Yeah.” I lift my head and look at him. He’s got such empathy and kindness in his eyes. Interest as well, but I can’t tell if it’s romantic. More the way a kindhearted soul looks at the tattered kitten they find in an alley. “I think I’m finally swimming away from that particular ripple.”

  Andre bats out a quick drumbeat on the chair back. “Mocha?”

  “Are you offering me coffee or something a little more involved?” A grin spreads across my face, and I find myself giving him a flirty stare.

  He smiles. “Coffee and another soul with which to share a moment in this vastness of the river.”

  I nod. Good enough.

  Andre twists around, tells one of the boys behind the counter to whip up a mocha latte.

  “I’ve been listening to those hang drums a lot,” I say, and, on autopilot, fish out the iPhone and open the Starbucks app to pay for the drink.

  “No need.” He puts a hand over mine. “My treat. You look like you need it.”

  His touch sparkles and tingles; it’s not my body craving rebound sex. No, there’s… something. His deep brown eyes, a little darker than his skin, hold my gaze. For an instant, my brain plays tricks o
n me and wisp of energy, brilliant and gold, swirls behind his pupils. He soothes me merely with his presence. At the same time, it’s frustrating. I don’t get the impression he’s hoping we wind up tangled in my sheets later, but there’s definitely an odd sense of protectiveness.

  He hasn’t reacted at all to my change in appearance. The last time I saw him, I still looked human. Andre touched my ear.

  “You knew…” I whisper.

  “I know many things.” He winks and heads to the counter to retrieve my drink. The blue-haired girl rings it up, and he hands her a fiver. Guess there’s an employee discount.

  When Andre sits again, I tease a finger at my ear. “You knew… before.”

  “Ahh, that ‘you knew.’” He slides the coffee across the table to me. “Yes. I did.”

  That means he somehow saw through the glamour, which hadn’t been a weak one. My mind goes in circles, an elderly lion stumbling around in a chaotic herd of questions, unable to take one down and ask it.

  “I am here to protect you.”

  The elderly lion runs headfirst into a tree. “Huh? Me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why me?”

  Andre chuckles. “Because it felt like this is where I needed to be.”

  “Protect me from what?”

  “Oh”―he shrugs―“from whatever.”

  Warmth seeps into me from the cup cradled to my chest while the essence of chocolate and coffee embraces my senses. “Maybe you can show me how to play that drum one of these days. If it’s not too hard.”

  He tucks a few strands of hair behind my ear. “The music lives inside all of us, but learning how to let it out, that is the tricky part.”

  “Yeah, yeah. You should get a job writing for fortune cookies.”

  He chuckles.

  “Are you busy tomorrow night? Seems like you’re always here… do you work on Saturday?”

  “How about Sunday?”

  That works. “All right. You’ll bring your drum?”

  “But of course.”

  Andre grins, gets up, and heads back around behind the counter. Someone overhearing us would probably think we made plans for a hook up. I’m not sure what I’m expecting to happen, but I doubt it’s going to wind up with us in bed. Either way, I’m sure he won’t ignore me half the night to scream at Scott over the phone.

  have Saturday all to myself. Well, me and Mr. Moody. It’s a nice day out, but I have no interest in leaving my apartment. So much crazy has happened in one week, I need the quiet comfort of home. After feeding the cat and hitting the bathroom, I crawl back in bed, floating between sleep and awareness for a while until I’m more awake than not.

  Eventually, I wind up on the sofa with my breakfast―a bowl of dry Special K mixed with fresh blueberries―and the books I borrowed from my parents, the TV on in the background to kill the silence. I read and munch, interpreting theories of the arcane while sometimes debating changing my cat’s name. Since he started talking, he hasn’t had his usual random moods: one minute cuddly, the next hissing, the next zooming back and forth across the apartment. Nowadays, he’s been rather sedate.

  Oh, he’s also upset with Diego. Who’d have thought my cat would turn out to be an empathic listener? Though he’s still plenty enough cat. A blueberry slips out of my hand, bounces off my thigh, and rolls down my leg onto the carpet. Mr. Moody’s on it in seconds. I can’t tell if he’s trying to eat it, kill it, or play with it, but bleh, whatever.

  “… a number of various sightings all last week …”

  The CNN guy gets my attention. Bad photos slideshow on the screen, probably hastily-taken cell phone camera shots. Someone caught a picture of an alley at night, I can’t say if it’s NYC or not, but it’s a big city. A jet-skinned old man, so thin he’s a skeleton wrapped in leather is standing in the middle of the frame with glowing yellow eyes, naked, and a mouthful of shiny needle teeth. I’m astounded whoever got the photo bothered to try… instead of doing something sane like shitting themselves and running. The next picture looks like a brown blob in the sky. Only because I saw it up close do I recognize the griffon. CNN’s image could be taken for a bad shot of an eagle though. Other pictures scroll by, the anchor mentioning cities and the names of people who took the photos. Small things hiding under cabinets in homes precede lots of smeared images that are so vague they could be described as anything. After an obligatory Bigfoot picture, they cut to an interview with three city workers from Denver who swear they ran into a ‘troll’ in the sewer. No pictures though, so who knows what they saw.

  I’m about to turn back to my books when a familiar, clear photo of a griffon perching on a rooftop comes up.

  “And this is by far the best and most believable image to arrive yet. It comes from Solstice Winters, a photojournalist with a small, local paper in New York City. According to the information we received with the photograph, this creature was discovered in Brooklyn, nesting on the roof of a high-rise apartment.”

  All three books in my lap fall to the floor.

  They cut to my video.

  “We sent these images to a lab for analysis, and they confirmed there’s no evidence of digital manipulation. What you’re seeing here, people, is real.”

  Holy sh―

  My cell phone rings.

  I nab it from the coffee table. The caller ID shows CNN. Numb, I swipe to answer.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi,” says a cheerful female voice. “I’m Natalie Guererra, calling from CNN news for Solstice Winters?”

  “That’s me…”

  “Great! Hey, we got your story about the creature sighting in Brooklyn and think it’s amazing. We’d like to have you come in for an interview to talk about it, or if that’s inconvenient we could do it over Skype or something.”

  Mr. Moody twists his head sideways, staring at me.

  My throat dries out. “Umm. Sure. I can do that. Thanks for calling. When should I… umm show up?”

  “We can get you in either five-ish tonight or tomorrow morning around eight.”

  News is one of those things that can go stale on the trip home from the store. “Tonight is fine.”

  “Great! I’ll send you an email to confirm then. Would you like us to send a car?”

  “Yes, please, that’ll help.”

  “All right. They’ll be there to pick you up around four.”

  I give her my address and email. When she hangs up, I don’t even lower the phone from the side of my head I’m so stunned. Good thing too, as it rings three seconds later. Meanwhile, the TV has switched to a panel of two well-dressed men and one woman muttering about something.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, superstar,” says Fenton. “I wanted to give you a heads up but got tangled in another issue. We sold your griffon story to Reuters. It’s going to go worldwide. Big check incoming. Congrats. The selfish part of me is hoping you’ll stay with us, even part time, but I’ll be happy for you no matter where this takes you.”

  “Umm. Thanks.” No sense getting ahead of things. A couple of pictures and some video on CNN doesn’t turn me into Anderson Cooper overnight. In all likelihood, I’ll get my fifteen minutes and it’ll be back to normal. More likely, someone will dig up that ‘the reporter from New York’ works for a tabloid, and try to harpoon any credibility out of my story. People suck sometimes. “I’ll be careful. Maybe I’m not in a rush to go anywhere.”

  He chuckles. “They’re still deciding on the faun pictures. Didn’t really get a good, clear look at his legs so there’s some doubt if it’s possibly a high-end cosplayer.”

  “Damn. Oh well. I wonder if the MIBs found him… or if they’re going to come back for me after putting that griffon on the news.”

  Fenton hums. “I wouldn’t worry too much. There’s stuff cropping up all over the world. If they tried to make it all disappear, they’d only draw more attention to it.”

  I chat with him for a few minutes more about the CNN interview, and my expectation of wind
ing up being no one special by the end of next week.

  “Sol, I want you to know that we’re here for you if you need us,” says Fenton. “There’s some stuff going on I’d like to bring you in on if things work out. Can’t say much about it yet though.”

  “Fenton Malcolm, man of mystery.” I flick Special-K crumbs off my leg. “All right, let me know once I’ve gotten clearance.”

  He laughs. “See you Monday.”

  I don’t even put the iPhone down before it rings again. Good grief.

  Jade this time.

  “Oh, hey.” I grin. Hmm. Maybe I shouldn’t tell her about Diego. On second thought, I’m pretty sure our flirting is playful and she’s not seriously hoping to get with me. “What’s up?”

  “You’re sitting around naked, aren’t you?” asks Jade.

  “I’m at home.”

  “So… yes. Put something on.”

  “Why?”

  “So I don’t have to think about your body while I talk shop.”

  I grab a pillow off the couch and plant it in my lap. “Okay. Done. You know, I found out that elves apparently treat sex like a hug, doesn’t matter man or woman till they find that special someone, then they commit for life.”

  “Well, if Paula leaves me, I might need a hug.”

  I laugh.

  “So…” Her voice goes serious. “We have a problem. Not us we, the FBI we.”

  “Sorry.”

  “This isn’t your fault. Dr. Pushpa Kumar’s lying in our morgue.”

  Oh, shit. My mood bottoms out, only a little scrap of ‘hey I’m going to be on TV’ happiness remains. “Wow… that poor woman. Umm. By any chance, were her organs missing?”

  Jade’s quiet for too long.

  “Oops. I guess so. Before you ask how I knew that, no, I had nothing to do with her death. That thing we saw in the video might be a shaz-alor. It’s a kind-of Sumerian demon. Sometimes they eat people, but only some internal organs.” I relate the bit about how they can ‘absorb’ people, carry them elsewhere, and drop them off. “Tracking that thing down is going to be almost impossible.”