Quinn Security

by Dee Bridgnorth

  “Maybe Roxanne and Harold wanted you to have a normal life,” Sasha guessed. “But they did you no favors by protecting you from understanding what you are.”

  “An Astral God?” she asked.

  “Goddess,” the old woman corrected her.

  “Why is this happening to me all of a sudden?”

  Kaleb felt his chest puff up and a grin began tugging at the corner of his mouth. He was about to suggest that it was because of him and the sensual power of his kisses, but Sasha beat him to the punch with a very different answer:

  “The fog has lifted.”

  “The fog?” asked Lucy, confused. But Kaleb wasn’t.

  He told her, “Those anti-anxiety meds you’ve been pumping through your system.”

  “My Xanax?”

  “You said you were on them since you were twelve?” he pointed out.

  “Since my parents died,” she admitted. Then she realized herself, “I haven’t been taking them. I’ve felt calm enough around you.”

  Good, he still had a reason to feel proud.

  “You’ve been bogged in a haze until now,” Sasha elaborated. “I’d cut the meds.”

  “Christ, this is the last thing we need,” Troy barked as he abruptly paced away, taking an anxious lap around the living room. “If she was a Younger, we could guide her. We have no experience with this!”

  Lucy looked to Kaleb with a million questions in her eyes, the most obvious of which was probably, what’s a Younger? but he wasn’t about to muddy the waters by going there.

  “Calm down,” Nikita ordered her eldest son.

  Kaleb asked Sasha, “Can you train her?”

  “I’m no Astral Goddess,” she laughed.

  “Well, damn,” he shot back. “Who is?”

  “Can you see anything?” Troy asked Sasha. “Can you see a way out of this?”

  But Kaleb was starting to think his brother was concerned with the wrong thing. “Lucy’s life is in danger. I think whoever killed her parents has come after her. They want her dead as well. So, who is the enemy of these Astral people? Maybe we can take them, or him. Maybe it’s just one individual.”

  Sasha’s shoulders began trembling, which would’ve been cause for concern, except that laughter began billowing out of her.

  Was this funny?

  “She doesn’t need your help,” Sasha laughed, wiping a tear from her eye. “She’s stronger than any of us and she’ll live a thousand times as long.”

  “There’s no way that’s true,” said Lucy, finally grasping enough of this to contribute to the building frustration in the room. “My parents were vulnerable, obviously. And weeks ago, that wolf-man was able to penetrate my mind like my brain was butter. I’m not stronger than anyone.”

  “That’s what you think,” said Sasha, though she’d sobered up from laughter at the mention of her illegitimate son.

  Kaleb neared Troy and used a confidential tone to tell him, “We aren’t going to get anywhere with Sasha. I say we figure out who killed Lucy’s parents, and start putting the pieces together. Use the crystals like we have been as a tool to tell if Dante or one of his damned is behind this. Maybe Lucy can get a handle on her powers in the meantime.”

  It gave Troy an idea and he asked loudly, “What are Lucy’s powers?”

  Sasha cut her eyes to him and said, “She’s Astral and can zip through that dimension faster than the speed of light.”

  “Then why couldn’t my parents escape their deaths?” Lucy challenged.

  Sasha grew quiet and grave, and her answer sucked all the air out of the room. “I don’t know.”

  “If I don’t want to be like this,” Lucy concluded with an edge of fear in her tone. “Then all I have to do is keep taking my medication.”

  Chapter Ten

  LUCY

  Lucy had no idea how to go on with her life as usual. It felt surreal, waiting tables at Angel’s Food. Her head was filled with questions, too many to process. And she kept screwing up orders because of it.

  She had reminded herself over and over again that the real trigger that caused her to light up brighter than the Wyoming sun in summertime was kissing Kaleb Quinn. Period. If she could avoid doing that, then she’d retain some semblance of a normal life.

  If she really wanted to kiss Kaleb, well… she could always pop a Xanax or two, couldn’t she? That was the real antidote, wasn’t it? Stay in the fog. Keep the haze of it so thick that no light would ever cut it. It was a solution. Not a great one, but a solution none-the-less.

  Even more puzzling than having learned that she’s technically not human, as Sasha Quinn had put it, was the apparent fact that neither was Kaleb or his entire family.

  If they weren’t human and they weren’t Astral Gods and Goddesses like herself, then what the hell were they?

  As she slapped an order slip on the kitchen counter in exchange for grabbing two hot plates of meatloaf with extra gravy and potatoes, she suddenly remembered the framed photos she’d seen on Kaleb’s mantel. All those costumes. All those different periods like the 70s and 1800s that she’d observed. Maybe they weren’t costumes…

  “I ordered a burger, medium-rare,” said her middle-aged customer at Table Two when she set the hot plate of meatloaf down.

  Her customer’s date, or husband, also complained, “I asked for a steak.”

  “Shoot, I’m so sorry,” she said, lifting the plates from their table and wracking her brain for which table had asked for meatloaf.

  As she started off, the annoyed female customer called out, “We’ve been waiting quite a while!”

  “Be with ya in a sec!”

  Having gotten her bearings, she brought the meatloaf dinners to an elderly couple at Table Twelve, then quickly returned to the burger couple, and confirmed, “Burger and a steak. Let me check on that for you.”

  As she padded back to the kitchen, feeling sweat bead up on her forehead, she was tempted to take a Xanax for no other reason than to calm her very human nerves. She needed to relax and focus, and worrying that she was some other unheard of species who would outlive most by at least one thousand years wasn’t helping matters.

  Luckily, she found the burger and steak waiting on the kitchen counter and once she served those to her annoyed customers, apologizing profusely, she checked the clock on the wall. It was only now the very start of the dinner rush, and if history repeated herself, it wouldn’t let up for another hour at least.

  Kaleb was tucked in his usual booth at the back near the large, picture windows that faced Main Street, but unlike her previous shifts, this time he’d been watching her like a hawk.

  She couldn’t fathom why, though. It wasn’t like if she suddenly lit up like a halogen bulb he’d be able to stop it before the entire restaurant full of customers would take notice.

  She shot him a weary smile before turning for the kitchen again, but as she rounded past the hostess stand, her good luck turned suddenly bad.

  Courtney Harrington had just entered the diner.

  “Be with you in a sec!” she told the territorial girl, but Courtney had already locked her gaze on Kaleb.

  “I’m meeting someone and he’s here,” she said without further acknowledging Lucy.

  Meeting someone?

  Lucy doubted that so she stepped in front of Courtney, forcing her to stop.

  Far behind them, Kaleb straightened his spine in the booth, concerned.

  “Look, Courtney, I hate to break it to you, but Kaleb isn’t interested.”

  It was perhaps the boldest statement she’d ever made in her life. Lucy was far from a confrontational personality, and it wasn’t like her to not think twice before opening her mouth, but she hadn’t been able to hold herself back. Enough was enough.

  “Excuse me?”

  “He isn’t,” she maintained. “And you’re embarrassing yourself.”

  Courtney stepped in close and sneered in Lucy’s face, “You’re a drug addict. A weirdo. And you should’ve died with your par
ents twelve years ago. I hate to break it to you,” she hissed, throwing in Lucy’s face the exact phrasing that Lucy had just used on her, “but that’s what everyone ‘round these parts thinks of you.”

  With that, Courtney bypassed Lucy, being sure to clip her shoulder aggressively to get her to step aside.

  Lucy watched her, mouth gaping, as Courtney swung her sassy hips all the way down the aisle until she reached Kaleb in his booth.

  Fury burned in Lucy’s chest. Her skin flared hot. She felt her molars clench and her hands ball into fists. But it wasn’t until she felt eyes on her and heard the muffled gasps of shocked customers that she realized her grave error.

  Her emotions had skyrocketed, and without a shred of Xanax flowing through her seething veins, Lucy had started to glow.

  But just as she realized this, she flickered out in the blink of an eye. At first, she thought she’d suddenly mastered the art of dimming her light in an instant. But that wasn’t the case. She’d flickered out of this dimension and into another, and the next thing she knew she was standing in front of Courtney with her angry finger in the aggressive girl’s face.

  “Get the hell out of my diner,” she warned, and Courtney’s eyes nearly fell out of her head they were so wide with astonishment and horror.

  “How did you—?”

  “Get out now,” she ordered firmly, as Kaleb jumped to his feet to hold Lucy back from doing whatever her emotions might compel her to do next.

  Puzzled wonderment broke out across the diner customers in quiet murmurs, but Lucy wasn’t about to back down.

  “Get out or I’ll take you out,” she told Courtney as a final warning.

  But Kaleb had other ideas. He was dragging her up the aisle as customers looked on, and they burst out into the cool night air.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he asked, gripping her by her shoulders and staring at her.

  Everyone was watching through the diner windows, so he pulled her up the sidewalk until they were in front of the next-door shop that had already closed for the day.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I just got angry.”

  “I mean, how did you disappear and reappear like that?”

  “Oh God, everyone saw me, didn’t they?”

  “Fuck everyone,” he barked. “How did you do that?”

  “I don’t know!”

  He took a deep breath, perhaps realizing that if he didn’t calm himself, he wouldn’t be able to calm her. He rubbed his large hands up and down her arms, then said, “That was incredible.”

  “For a circus act, maybe. Oh God, Kaleb! What’s happening to me?”

  “I wish I knew,” he told her. “But you can’t lose control like that in public.”

  “You think I don’t know that!” she snapped, and her vision went blurry with tears in an instant. “You don’t know what this is like. I feel like the whole world is crumbling at my feet. I don’t know how to get a grip or control myself.”

  “I know a little something about it,” he assured her, but unless he provided further explanation, she had no reason to believe him. “Your abilities must be all tangled up in your emotions,” he realized. “When you get turned on, you light up. When you get angry, you, I don’t know, slip into another dimension and pop up ten feet from where you started. Just try to get a handle on your feelings.”

  “That easy, huh?” she shot back sarcastically.

  But he assured her, “Nothing about this is easy.”

  “Why does Courtney keep showing up left and right?” she blurted, confronting him about what was really bothering her. The last thing she needed was to get arrested for tearing Courtney’s hair out, and as far as she was concerned, none of this would be happening if Kaleb would just man up and tell the girl he wasn’t interested in her. What the hell was wrong with men, was the real question?

  “She’s dense,” he offered. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, did you tell her you aren’t interested in her?” she asked point-blank.

  He released her shoulders and asked, “You think I should break up with a girl I’m not actually seeing?”

  “Ugh, men!” she complained.

  “Who does that? Who breaks up with someone they’re not with?”

  “Who goes around the Fist, sleeping with everyone?” she countered, furious.

  “She’ll get the hint,” he told her, which only pitched Lucy into a higher fit of emotion.

  She thought she might throw a punch and sock him as hard as she could in his stupid jaw, but instead, she flickered out and found herself in the back of the kitchen, standing in front of her locker.

  She let out a few rocky breaths, willing her sky-high heart rate to subside.

  She should’ve never kissed Kaleb. If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have had to be confronted with the fact that, evidently, she was capable of glowing brighter than the goddamn sun. If she hadn’t kissed Kaleb, she wouldn’t give a damn about Courtney, she’d just roll her eyes at the situation and laugh like she’d been doing for years when it came to Kaleb Quinn and his shameless conquests.

  If there was a problem she needed to solve in her life right now, it wasn’t that a friend of hers had been murdered in her apartment and it wasn’t that someone had broken into her apartment to draw a disturbing oval on the mirror in lipstick with guilty—a harsh accusation—written above it. It was Kaleb. The second he’d come into her life, things had started to fall apart.

  And she reasoned that the solution had to be to get rid of him.

  He might not have the balls to break up with Courtney, thanks to his spineless man-logic, but Lucy certainly had the balls to break up with him, relationship or no relationship.

  So that’s what she resolved to do.

  Get Kaleb Quinn the hell out of her life.

  ***

  There had been more than a few road blocks, figuratively speaking, before Sheriff Rick Abernathy and his most tenacious police officer, Rachel Clancy, finally made it out to Damned Repair, the automotive repair shop on the western outskirts of town.

  Administrative mumbo-jumbo had held them up at the precinct, but now that night had fallen, Rick had cleared his plate well enough to be able to sneak out of the police station with Rachel in tow.

  “Curt Wilson gives me the creeps,” she commented as they climbed into his SUV that was parked in front of the precinct.

  Assuming that she was referring to some feminine instinct that to Rick qualified most women for irrational hysteria, he didn’t ask her to elaborate, but clearly Rachel didn’t require his encouragement.

  “He’s always lurking around the salvage yard with that dog of his,” she went on, narrowing her eyes as though the image of Curt in her mind disturbed her. “How does he even stay in business, anyway, that’s what I want to know? Anyone ‘round these parts who gives an actual damn about their car will bring it on over to Jackson Hole to get it serviced.”

  Rick would’ve liked to trust that her question had been rhetorical, but Rachel was staring at him expectantly now.

  “Who knows,” Rick agreed, as they drove at a clip along Main Street.

  When they passed Angel’s Food diner, he noticed Kaleb Quinn loitering around outside, then a furious harlot stormed out of the diner, wagged her finger in the guy’s face, and started stomping up the sidewalk, her mini-skirt lifting in the night breeze. If it had been his Whitney telling Kaleb off, Rick would’ve steered his SUV onto the sidewalk and arrested him, but questioning Peter Swanson at Damned Repair was far more important.

  “You think Swanson killed Leeanne?” she asked him when the conversation had lulled terribly.

  “Maybe,” he told her. “Maybe not. Until I look a man in the eye, I don’t give my gut too much credence.”

  “Smart,” she said, and he had to wonder if the compliment was genuine.

  Rachel had been acting odd, more than usual, more than most women. He figured it was related to the promotion
he was hellbent on refusing to give her. Rachel didn’t know that, of course. All she thought was that she’d lock in that badge this time around. She’d been going above and beyond, sometimes outwardly, like on excursions such as this one. But at other times, she’d been plugging away at her own private and unauthorized investigations. He knew what it was about. The wolf-man. But quite frankly, he had bigger fish to fry. He needed to separate the wheat from the chaff, right ‘bout now. And those two factors had everything to do with Holly van Dyke and Leeanne Whitaker. Did they share the same killer—the wolf-man? Or had a regular old wolf taken Holly’s life? Whereas Leeanne might have been murdered by Peter Swanson?

  Wheat from chaff.

  But the deeper into this investigation he foraged, the more questions he found himself tangled up in.

  Damned Repair sat like a mountainous heap of junk metal on the brink of the majestic Yellowstone National Park. The mighty Tetons loomed in the far distance, to the west, under a twinkling dome sky, and here was the repair shop, a dusty blemish on an otherwise breathtaking landscape.

  They pulled up into the dirt driveway and Rick noted that a few lights were on inside the office.

  As they climbed out of his SUV, an old lab darted right up to the chain link fence and started barking its head off at them.

  Fearlessly, Rachel started right on over to the fence, talking sweetly to the mangy dog, while Rick looked on with a frown.

  “Hey, yo!” Curt Wilson called out as he stepped out of the office building. “’Fraid we’re closed up for the day. Ya just missed us, Sheriff.”

  Curt was a middle-aged man who looked every bit the mechanic he’d been for the last twenty or thirty years. His fingernails were black with grease and he hadn’t worn a pressed shirt for as long as he’d lived. The baseball cap on his head looked almost as old as he was, and though he was nearing Rick with a friendly smile on his face, the glint behind his dark eyes was all apprehension.

  “Not here to service my SUV,” Rick informed him. “I hear you’ve got an ex-con in your employ. Man by the name of Peter Swanson?”

  The smile on Curt’s face faltered and he seemed hesitant to confirm that the sheriff was correct. “Sure, Peter’s been working here a bit.”