by Sandra Hill
Trond in lecturing mode was enough to make Harek puke, and he might just do that anyway if he continued to drink. As for the life mate remark, forget about that. Any warm thoughts Camille might have had about him evaporated with the first mention of slave trader.
And since when were love and war the same thing? Well, he would give Trond points on that one. There were similarities.
“You’re supposed to be cheering me up, not making me feel worse. Shouldn’t you be hiring dancing girls, or something? Taking me to a brothel? Buying me a longship?”
“Nicole put a ban on dancing girls when we got married. Brothels are against the law. And I’ve got fifty dollars, max, in my wallet.” Trond grinned at him. The lackwit!
“I feel like shit,” Harek complained. “What do women do when they get depressed?”
“Play sad music and cry. Watch chick flicks.”
Harek looked at Trond as if he’d lost his mind and said, “I’d rather watch zombies.” The commercial was over and Michonne was wielding a bigass sword at a herd of “walkers.”
“Look at it this way,” Trond said, taking a sip of beer. “Things could be worse. God could have made us zombies instead of vangels.”
“Fuck!” Harek said succinctly.
“Precisely. You are fucked, my brother.” He looked at Harek and wagged his fool tongue some more, “Ain’t love grand?”
“Where’s my sword?”
Chapter 16
School days, school days, good old golden . . . whatever . . .
Linda Larson was settled in at the Global School as a fifteen-year-old ninth grader, bemoaning algebra homework and talking about boys. Did times ever change? Camille wondered.
The school was operating at half capacity due to the constant threat of terrorism in Nigeria. Those who could afford to send their children to school outside the country did so. Those who couldn’t homeschooled, if they were able. But many international families in Nigeria wanted or needed boarding schools for their children. Thus, there were a hundred and ten fifth-to ninth-grade girls, ages ten to fifteen, still there. A companion high school was located a few miles down the road, closer to Abuja.
The square-shaped building opened from four interior sides onto a lovely garden area in the center, complete with lush tropical plants, fountains, benches, and grassy areas. Classrooms and a library were located on the first floor in front, and in the other wings were kitchens, a dining hall, a lounge for guests, an auditorium, and a gymnasium. Upstairs were the dormitories for the students, two girls per spacious room, as well as quarters for the faculty who lived in. There were also comfortable lounges for watching television or studying. Everywhere was blessed air-conditioning, a must at this time of the year.
Scattered about the complex outside were a swimming pool, stables for student-owned horses, riding paths, athletic fields, and so on, although outdoor activities were somewhat limited during these tense times.
Overall, it was a luxury school commensurate with the fifty-thousand-per-year price tag for paying students. The owners of the school could have shut it down for the duration of the threat, but everyone knew the threat wasn’t going away anytime soon, whether it was Boko Haram or some other nutcase tango du jour group. And if they gave in here, they might as well do it everywhere in the world because, let’s face it, terrorism was growing, not declining, and it was no longer limited to third world countries. Can anyone say 9/11?
It was a risk, nonetheless, to stay open. But the same was true for any school, even in the cities. Any public, or private, place really. Hotels, offices, stores, airports, restaurants, stadiums, theaters.
The atmosphere here at the school was as close to normal as possible considering the circumstances, not to mention the bulletproof glass in all the windows and barred, triple-depth, metal-reinforced doors. The regular school security staff was in place, as well as Sly, Donita, Omar, and Camille, and the special forces units were gradually settling in the periphery.
Camille didn’t want to think about Harek out there in the jungle somewhere, facing danger. Well, yes, she did want to think about him. Being bitten, maybe. Not by a snake, and there were lots of those in Sambisa Forest, but by bees, which were also plentiful. Yes, she hoped he got bitten by a big bee, one the size of a golf ball, right on his slave trading butt. Or his lying tongue. Or the knuckles of his wicked fingers. Or . . .
No, best not to waste her time thinking about the man. He was history.
Besides, the more superstitious of Boko Haram believed that the snakes and bees in the forest were their reincarnated victims come back to plague them. Bad as he was, Harek didn’t deserve to be lumped in with the likes of these vile terrorists. At least she didn’t think he was that bad. Maybe he was.
In any case, it was a waiting game now for Camille and others of the Deadly Wind operation, a well-orchestrated game.
Because it was mid-Friday afternoon, some of the students had gone home for the weekend after an early dismissal, about twenty-five of them, who would return Sunday evening. That left about eighty-five girls still in residence.
Age was relative, Camille soon realized on her arrival at the school on Monday, especially for girls in this age range. There were eleven-year-old girls who resembled mini-hookers and fifteen-year-olds who looked and acted like little girls.
Camille was in her room with her roommate, Cora Elton from Savannah, Georgia. Her parents were divorced and her father had a whole new family. Sound familiar? Her mother was the Nigerian representative, a high-powered exec, with an international beverage company.
Cora was a slightly pudgy thirteen-year-old who had a bad case of acne, which she was always complaining about, and a passion for Snickers bars, which she kept stashed in a mini-bar inside her closet, intended for fresh fruit and cold bottled waters.
The one good thing in this whole mess with Harek was that he’d cured her of her addiction. The smell of chocolate now made her nauseous. Or maybe it was the image of Cora constantly popping her zits, then using the same fingers to pop a mini chocolate bar into her mouth.
There was a light knock on the door and Else Kervandjian, a seventh-grade Armenian from Iran, stuck her head inside. “Linda, you’re wanted in Miss Tinibu’s classroom.”
Miss Tinibu would be Donita Leone, language arts teacher.
“Uh-oh, Linda!” Cora said. “You must be in trouble.”
“Nah,” Camille/Linda said. “Miss Tinibu just wants to give me some assignments so I can catch up with the rest of my English lit class. A book report and a term paper, I think.”
“Ugh! Like I said, trouble.” Cora hated school, and the prospect of extra homework, to her, would be comparable to a ban on Snickers.
“See you at dinner,” Camille said.
Else was already gone to her own room.
It took a while for Camille to make her way down the stairs and then the length of the long corridor leading toward the front of the building. Along the way she nodded or spoke to teachers and students she’d already come to know. A boarding school was like a family where everyone knew one another in short order.
When she got to the designated classroom, not only was Fatima Tinibu there, but the assistant principal, Desmond Buhari, aka Sylvester “Sly” Simms, her husband, was there as well. They made a gorgeous couple. Donita, with her close cap of dark curls, wore a short-sleeved, mid-calf dress of native fabric, vivid colors of aqua and yellow and green in a bold, original Nigerian print. Sly, whose head was shaved almost bald, was equally attractive in his own way, wearing a short-sleeved white dress shirt and bright tie with black pleated slacks.
“I just stopped in to check on Miss Tinibu’s class schedule for next week. How are you getting along, Linda?”
“Okay,” she said. “It’ll take me a couple days to catch up. My last school didn’t have advanced lit.”
They had to be careful what they said to each other, even in a private room like this. They never knew who might be listening, or what eavesdropping
devices might have been planted.
“These are the assignments I mentioned,” Donita/Fatima said, passing a folder to Camille. She assumed there would also be some info about the mission’s status.
Camille left at the same time that Sly did. When they were out in the hall, he walked a ways beside her. “I hear there’s trouble in paradise.”
Camille rolled her eyes. There were no secrets with SEALs and WEALS. “Yeah. Do you know what he did?”
“You mean, a thousand or so years ago?”
“You know about that?” That shocked her. She knew how secretive the vangels were about their existence.
“Hard not to know. JAM and I were both saved by the vangels at one time.”
“From death?”
He shook his head. “Worse than that. From becoming those horrid demon vampire things. Lucipires.”
“What? How could that be?”
“JAM and I had been bitten, and, man, we were well on our way along the evil highway. I even ditched Donita during that time, hurt her big-time. I was a solid gold bastard.”
“So I should just forgive and forget with Harek. Because he’s now one of the good guys.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“What are you saying?”
“Not sure. Maybe just that we are all sinners to one extent or another. Holy shit! I sound like some kind of preacher.” He grinned at her.
Camille understood, but what she thought, but didn’t say to Sly, was that some sins were way greater than others. Some sins were like indelible ink, no way to wash them away.
When she got back to her room, Cora was gone and Camille sat down at the desk to read through the folder. Using a predetermined code, she was able to decipher Donita’s notes to her. BK was closing in. Be prepared. Any day now. Any minute now.
Camille was suddenly worried, more than usual. About herself, the girls at the school, her teammates. And Harek, blast his black soul!
She did the only thing she could. She went to the mini-fridge and took out a sinfully sweet chocolate bar. Not the itty-bitty bite-size one, either. This was a supersize one. She was going to Snickers her worries away.
And she didn’t even throw up.
In fact, she thought she heard an annoying voice in her head repeating over and over, I think I love you.
There’s hot, and then there’s HOT! . . .
Harek was miserable. What else was new?
Seriously, what was it with these extremes in living conditions? First he froze his ass off in Siberia. Now he was burning up in some snake-infested, mosquito-swarming, monkey-chirping jungle, sharing a tent with that douche bag F.U. If F.U. told Harek one more dirty joke, Harek was going to punch his lights out.
Not that Harek didn’t appreciate a good dirty joke, but the man never knew when to stop. In fact, when Harek introduced F.U. to Cnut yesterday, the halfbrain said, “You do know that Cnut is just another way of spelling cunt, right?” Cnut had picked him up and hefted him onto a pile of monkey dung.
In F.U.’s defense, not that the idiot needed any defenders, Cnut did trigger teasing lately with that Travis Fimmel hairdo of his, based on the History Channel’s Vikings series depiction of Ragnar Lothbrok. It involved shaving the sides of his fool head and weaving the rest of his long hair into an intricate braid down the center from his forehead to his nape, the rest hanging into a kind of ponytail. No way he’d done it himself! Must have paid a mint in some fancy hair salon. And Camille thinks my hair gel is excessive!
Cnut claimed that women loved it.
“Lot of good that does you,” Harek had pointed out. “You’re supposed to be celibate.”
Cnut had just shrugged.
Harek didn’t know if that shrug meant So what? or What celibacy? He hadn’t bothered to ask. He would probably get another lecture on women, just like the one Trond had given him.
They’d already killed five terrorists and taken five captives, sent off to a military jail in Abuja. Likewise numbers for the other Deadly Wind teams in place. A mere drop in the tango bucket, according to Geek, who seemed to have the best tally on their current headcount.
In the meantime, they had time to kill, and, unfortunately, Harek seemed to be the unwilling subject of attention. Everyone knew that he’d been dumped by Camille, thanks to Trond’s big mouth. And probably by Harek’s pathetic, sad-sack demeanor as well, truth to tell.
As a result, they all had advice for him.
“Fuck her, there are lots of women available,” F.U. said. “And women do love SEALs. Not that you’re a SEAL, but you could pretend to be.”
“Damn, F.U. I can’t believe you’re advising someone to pretend to be a SEAL. There are too many SEAL wannabes out there doing it already.” This from JAM. “Have you tried prayer?” He waggled his eyebrows at Harek because he knew that Harek was an angel, having had some kind of saving encounter with Trond in the past. A vampire angel, Harek was about to point out to JAM, but then Harek supposed he was an angel nonetheless. Another thing he thought, but didn’t say, was that if he prayed, he would just call Mike’s notice to his recent sexual activities. Not a good idea!
“Give her time. She’ll come around,” Henry, his FBI friend, advised. Apparently both of his ex-wives wanted him back, and he couldn’t decide which he preferred. Maybe neither.
“You Fibbies and your time crap!” said Brad Omstead, a CIA agent. “If you weren’t always diddling around waiting for the right time, we would have wiped out Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, and every other terrorist group a long time ago. Just bomb the crap out of them. Kaboom!”
Henry just scowled at Brad. The two of them had been at FBI/CIA odds from the get-go. No matter what one said, the other disagreed. Soon they would come to blows.
Cage offered, “Listen, cher. Down South, we have a motto. A belle isn’t a belle until you’ve rung her bell. Have you rung Camo’s bell?”
Holy clouds! Do these guys have no boundaries? They’re worse than vangels.
“Personally”—Geek glanced up from the Motorola communication device he was fiddling with—“I think you should buy one of my penile gloves. No worries about unrequited love then. You can requite your own love in a honey sleeve.”
Harek threw a clump of dried mud at Geek and barely missed his head.
Geek grinned. “I’m just sayin’, my friend.”
That evening Zeb showed up to give them an update. Before he left, he cornered Harek and said. “I hear you managed to lose your soul mate.”
“I didn’t lose my soul mate. You lost my soul mate.” Not that Harek was convinced that he and Camille had been or were soul mates, but he didn’t need to discuss that with his favorite Lucie. Or not-so-favorite Lucie at the moment.
“Moi?” Zeb said, putting a hand over his heart.
“Yes, you. When you blabbed that I used to be a slave trader, the night you came to Camille’s cottage.”
“She overheard?” At Harek’s scowl, he added, “Oops.”
“Pfff! I’d like to give you oops.”
“Didn’t you intend to tell her?”
“Eventually.” Probably not.
“I never got a chance to tell my wife about my bad sin,” Zeb confided.
Harek knew about Zeb’s wife and family, and how he had inadvertently been responsible for their deaths. Mainly due to greed. Harek could certainly understand that.
“Would you have told her?” Harek asked.
“Eventually,” Zeb repeated Harek’s word back at him, then grinned. “And she probably would have kicked my arse out, too. See how much we have in common?”
“So, what do you think I should do?” I can’t believe I’m asking a demon for love advice. Can anyone say, “dumb as a Saxon door hinge”?
“Beg.”
Forget all the crappy advice Harek was getting. He knew what he had to do. That night, well after midnight, he teletransported himself into Camille’s room at the Global School. If Michael found out he was misusing this vangel skill for such purposes, he wo
uld be teletransported all right, back to Siberia. Ah, well, Nothing ventured, nothing gained, he told himself. He had to try. To which Michael would probably say, No pain, no gain, as in painful icicle toes.
By the light of a full moon, he could see Camille’s roommate snoring away, gobs of Clearasil dotting her face and Snickers wrappers on the floor next to her bed. Camille, on the other hand, came instantly awake and was reaching under her pillow for a pistol, which she aimed right at his heart.
She wouldn’t really shoot him. Would she?
“You!” she said in a whisper when she recognized him. Her tone of voice was not welcoming.
He put a fingertip to his mouth. “Shh!” He motioned toward the en suite bathroom. “Come,” he said.
She tucked her weapon back under the pillow and followed him inside the bathroom, where he’d already flicked on the light. She was wearing her Snoopy nightshirt. He had fond memories of that Snoopy nightshirt.
“Are you crazy?” she hissed. “You can’t come here, like this. Anyone could have seen you enter the building.”
He shook his head and tried to pull her into his arms.
She shoved him away.
“No one saw me. I teletransported.”
“Tele-tele . . .” she sputtered. “Never mind. I don’t want to know. What the hell are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“I think I love you.”
She rolled her eyes. “So I’ve heard.”
“I think I love you,” he repeated.
“Big fat hairy deal. You’re a slave trader.”
“I was. For my sins, I was. It was a long time ago. I think I love you.”