Round Trip Fare Page 7

  Pretending to check her phone, Carey took a quick picture of the boy and texted it along with the address of the coffee shop. It had only been a few days since he’d left home and stopped showing up at his classes or part-time job. Too little time for the police to be concerned, but long enough for his frantic parents to agree to her search fee. Setting the phone aside, she adjusted her video window to give him a critical once-over. But he didn’t seem any more pale or unhealthy than would be explained by devotion to the laptop he was even now pulling out and opening.

  “Get me a coffee?” He didn’t look up from his laptop as he spoke. The girl pouted again but bounced off. Returning with a cup for each of them, she leaned forward to lay a gentle hand on his arm. “Is your poem cycle done yet?” The boy shook his head impatiently, fingers tapping at his laptop’s keyboard. She smiled. “Don’t worry. Now that I’m here, it will go so much better.” He blinked and shivered. She breathed in and smiled again. His typing increased, his face intent on the screen.

  Carey flipped the cover down on her iPad, rewound its power cable as well as the one for her phone, and stored them in their specially padded—okay, armored—case. The Apple people had been incredibly nice about that last bullet incident, but she could just hear Marley explaining, again, how their little company couldn’t afford to keep buying her new iPads. Setting the case into the backpack hanging behind her corner chair, Carey leaned both elbows on the table, peering over the brim of her raised coffee cup. Excellent coffee, she decided. Wonder if they roast it themselves?

  Finally the two men, the only other customers in the secluded rear room, stood up and left. She took a final look around at the coffee shop’s rear seating area—one door, no windows or other access—and left to talk to the barista in the front room of the coffee shop. Twenty dollars later, Carey taped a handwritten sign—“Rear room reserved for private meeting”—to the outside of the door. Stepping back inside the room, empty now except for the younger couple, she closed the door behind her and stopped in front of the boy.

  “Your mother is worried about you, Will.” His automatic sneer came a fraction too late to cover his stunned expression. Before he could speak, she turned to the girl. “It’s time to go, Leigh Ann.”

  “The name is Leannán.”

  Carey laughed. “Well, Leannán Sí…” She pronounced each Gaelic syllable with exaggerated care, L’ann-AN Shee. “Since you refuse to honor the Accords Agreement, the Council feels it’s time for you to go to Null City. Let’s go. I have a class this afternoon, and I don’t want to be late again.”

  The boy started to stand, trying to look tough, but only managing to achieve the ferocity of a puppy protecting his favorite chew toy. “We don’t have to go anywhere with you. Get your stuff, Leigh Ann. We’re outta here.”

  “Actually.” Carey’s voice was quiet. “You’re half right.” Her hand shot out and pressed his stomach. “You don’t need to go with me.” His breath whooshed out, and all three looked down at the tiny needle as she pulled her hand back. A moment later, his legs buckled, and Carey guided his falling body back down to his chair. He slumped there, head hanging awkwardly.

  Leigh Ann stared from Will to Carey, eyes round. “Is he…?”

  “He’s fine.” Carey turned to the girl and pointed to her corner table. “Sit. And don’t even think about talking.”

  Carey checked the boy’s pulse and nodded to herself in relief. As a young witch, her friend Claire’s sleep spells wore off pretty quickly because she had to boil down the spelled water to make it take effect so fast. He’d probably just wake up with a hell of a headache. She arranged his head on his arms as if he was taking a quick nap in front of his laptop. In an afterthought, she picked up his fedora from the floor and pulled it onto his head, hiding his face.

  Returning to the scowling girl at her table, she took a small book of forms from her backpack and started filling out the top page.

  “You can’t just—” Leigh Ann sputtered.

  Without looking up Carey showed her the hand. “What did I tell you not to do?” The girl fidgeted for another minute as Carey frowned at the form in front of her. Finally she looked up. “How old are you again?”

  “Nineteen. And I don’t…”

  Carey shook a warning finger without looking up. “I hate these Accords forms. You have to make sure you fill in every last blank or those badgers in accounting will hold up your check.” She made a final note, put the notebook away, and pulled out her phone to check the time. “They should be here by now. Must be that damn bridge traffic.”

  “Who?”

  Carey jerked her head toward the next table. “Sleeping Beauty’s parents. I’ve found it best to collect my fee on the spot. People’s memories tend to…fade…otherwise.”

  “Wait.” Leigh Ann sounded indignant. “You were hired to find Will?”

  “Nah, he was just a bonus. One of his friends told the Agency that he’d disappeared with a Leannán Sí. I used him to find you because I have an authorized ARC warrant for you.”

  “ARC?”

  “Accords Recovery and Capture.” When the girl still looked confused, Carey sighed. “Amateurs. I’m an Accords Warden licensed for paranormal recoveries, and I’m serving an ARC warrant in your name. That reminds me.” She rooted through the pocket of her backpack for the laminated card and set her phone camera to video. Centering the camera view screen on Leigh Ann’s face, she pushed record, and began to read the card. “By the authority of Accords Agency warrant number 110309A57, I charge you, Leigh Ann…” Pausing, she looked over to the form she’d filled out before returning to the card. “Leigh Ann Shay, a practicing Leannán Sí, to accompany me to the Council Headquarters. If you request a hearing, you are entitled to representation. Otherwise, you are sentenced to five years of Null City residency without an amnesty day. This recovery and your rights are specified in Amendment 3, sections 7-18 of the Accords Agreement of 1998. The current time is 15:57 on March 7, 2011. Carey Parker, Accords Adjunct Warden License 07823 class 3, submitting authorized Accords Recovery and Capture statement.” She turned off the camera and played back the recording. Satisfied, she uploaded it to Agency servers, put her phone and the card back into her backpack, and faced the girl.

  Leigh Ann looked uncertain. “Null City?”

  Carey looked at her curiously. “You don’t know about the City?”

  “Yeah, and I know about the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny too. Come on. You really believe there’s a city you get to on a magic train, and after a day there you become a normal human?”

  “Since my family founded it, yeah. I kinda do believe it.” She leaned back in her chair to consider the teenager in front of her. “You could have killed that boy, Leigh Ann. What could be worth his death?”

  The girl widened soft blue eyes at her. “I’m a Leannán Sí. He’s a writer, and I would have given him an intense, brilliantly inspired life of creating masterpieces. So what if it would have been a short one? It’s got to be better to go as a blazing star than stay as a…” Her voice trailed off as a snore filtered from beneath the fedora.

  “Did you give him a choice? Did you say to him, ‘Will, I’ll be your muse and give you lots of coffee shop kissing although the actual sex won’t be that great, and there’s the whole die young thing… But you won’t mind because it will all be for your Art?’”

  Leigh Ann frowned. “The sex wouldn’t have been that bad.”

  Carey snorted. “And actually, that masterpiece he was producing?” She reached over to snag Will’s computer and pulled it around to face Leigh Ann. “First thing I did was put a keystroke tracker onto his laptop. And believe me, reading that drivel was almost as bad as my humanities essay. He copied most of it from last month’s Poetry!Slam online. Here’s what he was actually writing.” She selected Recent Documents on the laptop and opened the top file listed.

  The younger girl’s eyes widened. “Fanfiction?” She peered at the screen and looked like she might be sick. “O
ne Direction fanfiction?”

  “Nothing wrong with fanfiction.” Carey raised an eyebrow. “We’ve all done it. But Will’s was…” She shuddered. “Really, really bad.” She looked curiously at the younger girl and waved at the snoring boy. “Why did you do it?”

  Leigh Ann looked down at her clasped hands. “My parents were killed just before the war ended. When Haven and Gifts signed the Accords in 1995, I was sent to live with my father’s cousins. They had a little apple orchard up on the Olympic Peninsula, and there wasn’t much money. Everyone had to work pretty hard all the time, just to get food to eat and a few clothes. But I knew there was something different inside me. Something that would inspire beauty and genius and glorious creativity.”

  Carey stared at her. “Well, that’s an entire pickup truck full of prime quality manure.”

  “Was it the farm?” Leigh Ann frowned. “The orphan bit?

  “All of it, actually.” Carey pulled off her dark glasses, met the younger girl’s eyes, and smiled when she flinched. “I figure you grew up over in some Bellevue McMansion where your only clothing worries were which designer jeans go with your Uggs.”

  The girl’s expertly shaped brows drew together. “Why are you doing this? You don’t look like you’re much older than me. How could you be an Accords Warden?”

  “Let’s just say I’m precocious.” Carey had few illusions about her looks. A late growth spurt had brought her to just under five and a half feet, but with her curling dark hair cropped mercilessly short, baggy clothes covering both a surprising number of weapons and toned muscles that would never come from aerobics dance classes, plus dark glasses hiding the even darker eyes that made people so nervous, she knew she could pass for a teenager. “Also, I need the money. Those tuition bills will kill you.”

  Leigh Ann thought for a moment. “I can give you money. Lots. Then you could just say you couldn’t find me.”

  “How much money?”

  The girl looked startled. “How much would it take?”

  Carey got her phone out and punched in a few numbers. “How much do you have?”

  “I’m not telling you that, but it’s a lot.”

  “Well, you’re in luck because a lot is just how much I would want.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Yeah, but you started it.” Carey’s dark eyes rested on Leigh Ann’s face. “What makes you think I would give up the one job I’m good at so a spoiled little rich kid can go on to kill some other stupid, beautiful boy? I’ve been poor and I’ve been rich, and they can both be taken away. The difference between you and me is that I know I can always take care of myself, as long as I haven’t blown it by, you know, murdering someone.”

  She was spared the girl’s reply as a couple stepped hesitantly into the room. The stocky man in khakis steered the plump, pretty woman fidgeting with her artistic jewelry, avoiding contact with the dark tables and walls covered with ironic, equally dark photographs. The woman gasped at the sight of Will, still slumped against his table. “Is he…?”

  Standing up, Carey leaned over and hissed into Leigh Ann’s ear. “Do not even think about moving. If I have to chase you, I may just bitch slap your little goth cheerleader butt back all the way to Null City.”

  “He’s fine.” She turned to Will’s parents. “He’ll have a bit of a headache when he wakes up. But you should just get him home to bed. And you might have a talk with him about safe—” She paused. “Well, just talk to him.” As the man headed for his son, she put a hand on his arm. “There’s the matter of my fee.”

  Silvery precision-cut highlights gleamed as Will’s mother turned to frown up at Carey. “We didn’t agree that you could hurt him. I can’t imagine why we would pay you so much money.”

  “That’s why I didn’t hurt him. It’s bad for business. So’s having clients who don’t pay their bills. Their friends, the friends who recommended my services to them, get concerned when they hear about it.”

  The man hesitated, and without meeting his wife’s eyes, pulled out a checkbook.

  While the couple supported the still-sagging Will out the door, Carey returned to her table for her backpack. She had seen Leigh Ann slip out while she was collecting her payment, but she couldn’t risk alerting Will’s parents to her true role. She did wish, for at least the millionth time, that she’d gone into an easier field, like underwater welding or cat herding. By the time she got to the door, the girl was nowhere in sight.

  Wonderful.

  Chapter Seven

  March 2011: Seattle

  “Wait here.”

  She had, Carey reminded herself, served ARC warrants on some of the most dangerous and violent runners the Agency had ever seen. She’d been shot at, stabbed, and hit upside the head with a surprisingly lethal Prada handbag. Just today, she’d brought in her prisoner, and she had all the proper approvals signed off for the check she’d requested for her little company, Bainbridge Solutions.

  Marley said it was weird to name their private investigation company after her dog, but—as Carey reminded her business partner—the Accords Agency was supposed to be low-profile, so naming it “Outside Contractors Who Hunt Down Criminals the Accords Agency Doesn’t Have Time To Chase” was probably not going to fly. Still, she had a solid track record—better than any other Warden, internal or adjunct—of resolving open warrants. So was she really supposed to cower out in the hallway just because some Accords Agency accountant was glaring at her?

  When the accountant in question was a were-badger whose eyes were squinting, nose quivering, and top lip even now raising over her teeth?

  Carey dove for the gray plastic chair by the doorway. “You got it.”

  The clock on the wall outside Accounting must have been left from the days when the Agency’s offices belonged to the previous tenant, a now-bankrupt software company, because it showed the time in binary code. Near as Carey could figure, she’d been looking at featureless gray walls and floors accented only by the red lights on the binary clock for thirty-eight minutes. Or three days. She never quite got the hang of those flashing dots. Either way, her shot at making it to her class was history. Even as she mentally winced at that pun, Carey heard her name.

  “Warden Parker. You haven’t brought me any work lately. Where’s the love?”

  “Hey, Frankie. Believe me, I was tempted today.” She grinned at the petite figure in the lab coat. The Agency’s resident pathologist had autopsied more than one of Carey’s search targets. “So, resurrected anyone lately?”

  “As I explained at the time—” The scientist’s tone was severe, but the tired eyes behind the rimless glasses crinkled with amusement. “—he was only mostly dead.”

  “If you want to hang onto your geek creds, Frankie, you need to quote something more badass—or at least more recent—than Princess Bride.”

  Carey’s former Academy roommate, Claire Danielsen, had once explained patiently that the three of them—Claire, Frankie, and Frankie’s partner Warden Laurel Franklin—were Carey’s friends—not just the kind of friends who would provide bail money, no questions asked, but the kind who wouldn’t bail you out because they’d be in the cell right next to you. Carey wasn’t sure about that whole friends concept, but when Laurel translated it as good people to get drunk with, she decided she could live with the definition.

  Carey moved her chin slightly toward the accountant glaring at them.

  Frankie’s freckles stood out against cheeks gone suddenly pale. Short, frizzy brown hair fluttered as she held up both hands, palms out. “Uh, right. Well, I’m…going somewhere. Tell Marley that Laurel and I are off to Portland for the weekend, but we’re on for Beer Tuesday.” As she backed carefully toward the door, Frankie didn’t take her eyes from the quivering accountant.

  Carey didn’t blame her in the least. After all—badgers. “Hang on. I’ll come with.”

  Seated in Frankie’s tiny office with the door locked behind them, Carey accepted the beer Frankie had pulled out of one of
the morgue bays on their way in and sat back.

  Frankie took a long pull from her own bottle, leaned back and burped delicately. She pushed her hands through her hair, raising the frizz to new heights. “I’ve been up all night doing the autopsies on those two ex-Haven soldiers Laurel dragged in. Is it just me, or are we seeing a hell of a lot more of what Director Jeffers keeps labeling ‘incidents’?”

  “Poor baby. Never a moment’s peace.” Carey grinned, and pointed with her bottle to the newly framed photo on the desk. “Who took that?”

  Leaning back in her chair, eyes closed, Frankie smiled. “Director Jeffers did. Don’t you remember him bitching about how you and Laurel should take off those goddamn shades and smile?”

  “Yeah, and then when we did it, he said it was actually better before?” Carey looked at the photo of the five of them from last month’s Agency picnic at Gas Works—Frankie with her partner Laurel, surrounded by Claire, Carey, and Marley. Laurel and Frankie had their arms around each other, while it looked like Claire was physically restraining Carey from walking off.

  She sipped and thought about how they’d met. Right out of the Academy on a three-month probation as Associate Warden, she’d been partnered with Tony Montari, an experienced Warden. It didn’t last the week before he transferred to another division. Neither ever mentioned a reason, and at their few meetings since, each had been scrupulously polite.

  Her second assignment, Matt Coulson, was a relatively new Warden himself. They didn’t even last the day. He’d resigned, blaming job stress. The rest of the Agency, though, thought it might have something to do with his dislocated shoulder, broken jaw, and left arm fractured in two places. All Carey would say was that he had “slipped.”

  Partnering with veteran Warden Laurel Franklin was, their former Director told Carey at the time, her last chance. She had to successfully complete her three-month probation to earn her Warden appointment.

  Remembering Laurel’s face that day when she saw her new partner, Carey took a long drink from her bottle and belched.