Round Trip Fare Page 8

  Frankie shook her head sadly. “Neither of us will ever do that as loudly as Laurel.”

  Carey nodded. “Did I ever tell you about my first ARC search with Laurel?”

  Without looking up, Frankie waved a hand. “I’ve heard Laurel’s version, but every other line was something about how that damned rookie was going to get her killed.”

  Carey started in a low voice, almost talking to herself. “It was that heatwave summer right after Claire and I graduated from the Academy…”

  Carey and Laurel had been sweltering in a hot car most of the day, watching a small ranch-style house, and working their way through Laurel’s cooler full of Cokes, which she referred to as, “The real real thing, not any of that no-cal, no-caff, why-bother crap.” Unlike the surrounding East Side developments of McMansions owned by professionals from Microsoft and Boeing, these houses were small, with tired paint in shades of beige and gray, moss-splotched roofs, and parched brown yards.

  Laurel had handed her a clipboard and a handful of brochures from a roofing company, and told her to go door-to-door pretending to sell roofing services. Not one house opened a door to her knock.

  An hour later, she collapsed back into the passenger seat next to Laurel, but held up a hand as she swallowed the better part of a can of soda. “I’m having a WTF moment.” She pointed back to their target house. “I think the devil lives there. No, seriously. You see all those butt-cutouts all over the yard that look like the bottom half of a fat person bending over?” She took another pull on her soda. “Well, it gets worse. Along the path on one side, there’s a bunch of gnome statues. About half of them are peeing or sitting on little toilets. The rest of them are…busy with other little gnomes or various cement creatures.” She shuddered. “Very busy.”

  “I grew up in Florida.” Laurel shrugged, and popped the tab on another Coke. Carey watched in admiration as she chugged the entire can, squeeze-flattened the empty, and tossed it into an already bulging trash bag. “We had flamingos. Pink plastic ones. Your block status was measured in flamingos per square foot.” Fingers laced, she stretched both lean arms above her head and gave a long, luxurious belch. “We were very high status.”

  The house they were watching, which belonged to their ARC target’s sister, seemed deserted as the day crept into late afternoon. Around four, a tiny yellow car with a huge bumblebee across the front and “Busy Bee House Cleaners” splashed across the side, pulled into the driveway. A thin middle-aged woman wearing a yellow-and-black striped uniform smock emerged from the car and entered the house. Seconds later, a large-screen television cast a blue glow from behind the blinds.

  They’d been sitting in silence for almost another three hours when Laurel spoke without taking her eyes from the house. “See, this is the part where on some ARCs you say, I’ll come back to this tomorrow. But…”

  “But.” Carey’s voice was flat agreement. Their target, a former Haven soldier named Lawrence Ruh, had attacked his landlady the night before. She was in a coma when neighbors found her, battered and slashed in a pool of her own blood. Ruh had disappeared—along with his victim’s baby son.

  Carey pushed her sunglasses up to hold back her short dark curls and turned to face the other Warden. “I’m staying.”

  “You partnered with Tony first, right?” Laurel took off her own mirrored sunglasses, turned her head, and smiled slightly.

  With her smooth oval face, olive skin, and dark hair pulled back into a bun, the senior Warden looked like a renaissance princess until she smiled. Laurel’s cold, savage stretch of lips over teeth looked familiar. It reminded Carey of someone… Oh, yeah. Herself.

  That smile widened slightly. “I’m guessing old Tony wanted you to help some buddy of his, maybe forget about an outstanding ARC?”

  Carey’s return smile was equally cold.

  Laurel nodded as if Carey had spoken. “And I’m also guessing octopus-hands Matt thought he was putting smooth moves on the cute little recruit?”

  Carey’s grin was even more feral. She finished her Coke and let out a sustained burp of her own.

  Laurel sucked air in through her teeth and then put her dark glasses back on. “I think we’ll get along just fine.”

  The long Northwest summer day had finally yielded to darkness when a man carrying a gym bag approached the house. Despite the Huskies baseball cap he wore with brim pulled down and face averted, the flickering light of a streetlamp briefly illuminated his figure and the line of his chin. Laurel’s voice was barely audible. “Gotcha.”

  Instead of approaching the house, Ruh circled around to the backyard. Laurel motioned to Carey to take the long way around the far side of the house, while she followed the man. When Carey was in position, Laurel stepped out from behind a tree. “By the authority of the Accords Agency, I charge you, Lawrence Ruh, to accompany me to the Council Headquarters. Place your hands on your head and legs crossed.” It didn’t look like the police shows on TV, but experience had shown that position slowed down most forms of shifters or magic users.

  Carey’s connections blazed. Gun! Her hands blurred as she hurled a shuriken into each of his arms.

  When a furious Laurel came pounding up ready to rip her a new one for taking down a target without provocation, Carey showed her the gun, still gripped in his hand. Laurel looked around at the shadowed yard and the man on the ground in its darkest corner. “Good eye,” was her only comment.

  They were both starting toward the groaning man when they heard a woman’s voice behind them. “Get away from my brother, bitches. Drop the guns, and hands in the air.” Carey felt the barrel against her head and saw Laurel freeze. They threw their guns to the ground, and Carey felt the gun pressing against her head shift slightly as the woman behind her kicked both guns away. “Turn around.” Both Carey and Laurel turned slowly to see the gaunt woman aiming her rifle with the confidence of a former soldier.

  “You know what I wish?” Laurel asked conversationally to Carey as they stepped away from each other to widen the shooter’s target area, “I wish that bad guys’ guns really made that stupid cocking sound like they do in the movies, so you knew they were sneaking up behind you.”

  Carey took another step to her left. “Well, I just wish I didn’t feel like such an idiot.”

  The man on the ground moaned, and his sister looked down briefly. Laurel jumped her, and they fought for the gun while Carey snatched up the nearest bare-assed dwarf.

  The woman struggling with Laurel caught sight of Carey lifting the dwarf by his substantial peeing member, and screamed, “No! You’ll break…” Carey shattered the dwarf across her head. Abandoning all interest in the fight, the woman sank to her knees, sobbing hysterically over the broken plaster shards.

  When both siblings had been cuffed with plastic restraints, Carey looked from the hole the man had been digging to his gym bag resting on the ground. As she unzipped the bag, a tiny hand flopped out. Laurel’s string of profanity was quiet, vicious, and creative. Carey looked up to see her partner’s gun trained on the writhing man still on the ground. After a long moment, she swore again but reached down to haul him to his feet.

  Backup emergency crews arrived and loaded the prisoners into ambulances. But when they prepared to remove the little body, Carey’s connections flared again, showing her the child, curled into a ball and sobbing. Alive.

  Confused, she insisted that the baby needed to go to an emergency room. Laurel looked thoughtful, and then pulled out her phone. “Hey, babe. I have one you might want to see.” Laurel explained that her girlfriend, Dr. Janice Allerton, had just been hired by the Accords Agency.

  Over the next hours, Carey watched as Dr. Allerton ran through an increasingly bizarre set of tests. The child’s body was subjected to mild electric shocks, ice packs, various needle probes, and tests she couldn’t even identify. Finally, the doctor went to the staff lounge and returned with a small carton of milk, which she warmed in the lab’s microwave. She painted the child’s face with the milk
, dribbled some onto his lips, and stood back. Within moments, he shuddered, opened his mouth, and wailed.

  “Thought so.” The young doctor sounded satisfied. “Protective adaptation. I read a journal article about this. Sometimes Nephilim young go into profound stasis if there is danger, until their mothers return to nurse them.”

  An awed Carey had christened her Dr. Frankenstein, and she’d been Dr. Frankie to the entire Accords Agency ever since. Much later, over what soon solidified into weekly Beer Tuesdays including Claire and Marley, she’d heard how Janice Allerton had served as a field medic for the Gifts during the war. One of her patients was a prisoner, captured enemy lieutenant Laurel Franklin. Two days after the Accords Treaty was signed, Laurel and Janice signed a lease on their first apartment. Laurel joined the Agency as one of the first senior Wardens while Janice went to medical school.

  “And that was how Laurel met me and I met you.” Carey looked over at the woman behind the desk. A light snore was her only answer. Okay. Carey pulled off the shawl currently wrapping the skeleton in the corner, spread it over her friend, and stepped back. Looking back, she shook her head. Nope, that’s not quite right. She pulled her chair around the desk, and arranged the skeleton so that its head leaned against the sleeping woman’s, one arm stretched across her chest, the other circling her shoulders. Much better.

  She smiled as she took the picture with her phone and emailed it to Laurel with a copy to Frankie before heading back to Accounting.

  I think I might be getting the hang of this friends thing.

  Chapter Eight

  March 2011: Seattle

  Carey parked her jeep in its reserved spot behind her office building, a midcentury blond-brick three-story that had never quite recovered from a halfhearted eighties remodel. She sloshed through the lobby with its plastic orange tree and matching fake leather sofas. Vaguely beige walls huddled over floors covered with defeated industrial carpeting, matted and darkened along foot traffic paths.

  As usual, Carey glanced at the last remaining piece from the original fifties decor. With only two of its four bulbs working, the rocket-shaped hanging light barely illuminated the glass-covered board listing three ground-floor offices belonging to a dentist, a chiropractor, and an holistic health clinic.

  That light needs a good home.

  The signage for the second floor claimed a women’s gym and dance studio. There was no Bainbridge Solutions listed on the third—or any other—floor. As she climbed the three flights of industrial-gray concrete steps, Carey promised herself that she’d rescue that old atomic light one of these days. She didn’t think anyone would notice if she replaced it with one of those modern monstrosities that looked like stacks of glass dinner plates. Marley loved them.

  At the third floor, she ignored the computer-printed paper sign taped to the wall: “Bainbridge Solutions: Closed for Renovations.” Unlocking the deadbolt and knob, Carey shoved the heavy, windowless steel door open with her shoulder. Her frown at the smear of orange and green paint left by her jacket changed to a smile at the furry face impatiently pushing around the edge of the opening door.

  “Hey, Bain.” She laughed at the red-and-white Australian shepherd leaping to greet her with an all-body wag as if they’d been parted for years instead of an afternoon. His silky ears had a tendency to flop underside up when he was excited, so she automatically flipped them back. “Did that mean old Marley ignore you again, Wigglebutts?”

  As she dutifully rubbed his white belly, she called over her shoulder, “Hey, honey, I’m home! And I brought you some lovely fresh bacon.” Crossing to the bare desk on the far side of the room, she placed two checks just outside the box labeled “In-box. Put it in here. Carey, this means YOU.”

  Shadowed by Bain, she moved across the room to the wood desk buried beneath piles of paper and books. Shoving aside the piles, she cleared space for her backpack. Her ancient desk sat in an island of clutter, separated from the rest of the large room by stacks of files, books, and dog toys. She draped her soggy coat around the shoulders of a six-foot mannequin dressed in a C-3PO robot costume from Star Wars and holding a butler’s tray piled with dog treats.

  The rest of the large room bore the mark of Marley’s take-no-prisoners organizational skills. Discreet file cabinets topped by aggressively healthy plants whose existence mystified Carey lined up under a wall of frosted glass windows. Two leather upholstered armchairs for the clients who never entered their offices were separated by a low glass table with yet another overly enthusiastic plant. Above them a blackboard-size glass-framed satellite picture of the Puget Sound area was covered with dry-erase marker circles and sticky notes.

  Separated from Carey’s clutter by as much floor real estate as possible, Marley’s ergonomically correct office chair sat before her aggressively modern desk. The polished glass top was bare except for a large flat-screen monitor, the in-box religiously boycotted by Carey, and one of those office phones with what Carey considered to be an insane number of buttons.

  Carey often thought the severely elegant desk reminded her of its owner. Marley was thirteen years her senior, but her flawless bone structure and elegant style would probably always make age irrelevant to her beauty. Although the elegant blonde’s appearance hadn’t changed noticeably in the decade Carey had known her, their relationship was far from Marley’s initial role as teacher to teenage twins Carey and Connor. As far as Carey knew, the older woman had never questioned or hesitated to assume the role of the adult in Carey’s life—although that adult was more annoyed aunt than parent figure.

  “You’d better not be touching anything on my desk.” Marley’s voice carried from the small attached kitchen. She came in carrying a pot of coffee with a pair of empty mugs hooked over two fingers, and stopped dead. “What happened to you?”

  “Another ARC runner that you said was going to be a piece of cake.” Carey flopped into her vintage wooden office chair, ignoring its creaking protest. “I chased that stupid little Leannán Sí through Fremont all the way to Gas Works Park. Enterprising types had a paintball tournament set up as a fundraiser, and we both ended up running right through some twelve-year-old kid’s birthday paintball party. And then the kids tried to save her from me, and some of those little monsters were darn good shots. If Feyala hadn’t been there, I would have lost her again.” Her smile was pure evil. “But nobody ever expects someone who looks like a skinny teenager to have the stopping power of a freight train.”

  “Well, when most people think of trolls, they picture something huge like that statue under the Aurora Bridge,” Marley replied reasonably.

  “Yeah, they just never see Feyala coming. That reminds me.” She pulled a damp scrap of paper from her back pocket. “Here’s Fey’s receipt. I had to pay her a toll for her help, of course.” Oblivious to the fact that she was covered in a rainbow of still-damp paint splotches, Carey anxiously pulled her iPad case from her backpack. “Anyway, then I had to escort Ms. Leigh Ann You-Don’t-Mind-If-I-Suck-The-Life-Out-Of-You-While-I’m-Your-Muse Shay to the Accords Offices. I was stuck there, covered in paintball drips and getting glared at by their receptionist, until that were-bitch in Accounting finally coughed up the check.”

  “Sow,” Marley commented absently, setting one of the coffees on a pile of Carey’s papers.

  “Who, me?”

  “The were-badgers in Accounting. The females are called sows.”

  “Damn right. But I wasn’t going to say that to their faces. You know. Badgers.”

  “Why didn’t you ask Claire? What good is having a best friend who’s Assistant Director of the Accords Agency if you don’t ask for her help?”

  “First of all, that wouldn’t be right. And yeah, I wouldn’t let that stop me if that same so-called friend wasn’t looking for blackmail material to make me attend the reunion she’s organizing for our Accords Academy class. A picture of this—” Carey waved a hand at her rainbow-splotched clothing and hair.

  “Oh, please.” Marley didn
’t look up as she entered the check amounts into her accounting program. “Like anybody who knows you hasn’t seen worse. And we both know that if Claire Danielsen decides you should go to that reunion, you may as well start picking out your dress and shoes right now.”

  Carey nodded glumly. “Well, at least I did save that stupid boy. But I have a bad feeling that when she gets to Null City, our little Leigh Ann will have a hell of a career in advertising.”

  She opened the iPad case and plugged in the power supply. “Frankie says hi. She’s going to Portland with Laurel, but they’ll be back for Beer Tuesday. I’m getting sick of Beer Tuesdays. Laurel will bitch about Seattle pizza not being as good as Chicago, Frankie will tell us some disgusting story about the latest demon she dissected, and Claire will be on my case about the reunion. I’ll have to arm wrestle everyone for the check, and you’ll sit there like you’re taking the whole thing down for meeting notes. I don’t know why I go.”

  “Brewhouse chili and micro beer?”

  “Oh, right. I’ll send them an email and tell them to be on time for once.” Her screen flickered to life, and Carey blew out a relieved breath.

  “Were you worried the iPad was damaged?” Marley sounded concerned.

  “No, I was worried that paintball tournament wouldn’t have any slots still open.”

  »»•««

  Carey balanced her coffee on a pile of Accords reports and leaned back. It had taken a couple years of fine-tuning the chair’s hydraulics and a fair amount of practice, but she could balance on the two rear legs, her own feet precisely positioned on the extended bottom desk drawer. Somehow the delicately achieved equilibrium brought out subtle nuances as she pulled on her harmonia gift to add connections to her mental game board.

  Her eyes were closed as she called up a familiar list, pausing after each to see if any connections lit up.

  Gaby. Nothing. Was her sister even still alive?

  Connor. Emptiness. Where are you, Twin?