Marcus - Precinct 12

by Chloe Vincent

  Marcus didn't put it down, but at least he was no longer aiming it directly at her, and that was a start. "Why are you here?"

  She'd then proceeded to talk him down and explain what was happening and why she was there and that she'd just survived an attack and, yes, she was healed up quite well for having just been so badly injured, and no, she didn't want to go into how she was still alive, and no, he didn't have to change to make her any more comfortable, and yes, she wanted the case.

  * * *

  Adina stared blankly at Marcus from behind as he talked on set with some people, the memory of the night before a dizzy haze. The last time she'd seen him, he had almost taken her head off before they'd worked things out in a surprisingly decent negotiation. She'd gone back home, nursed her wounds, thought some, woke up the drowsy Alex with a call asking him to come with her to the set the next day, and tried to rationalize what had happened. It'd been a whirlwind, going from a violent attack to being saved by an old fling, to trying to save Marcus to find out he was more than fine, to this.

  She cleared her throat, preparing herself to talk to him. Mere hours ago, she'd been on her butt on the floor, pleading with him to not shoot her, and now she was supposed to be Mrs. Professional. This wasn't going to be easy.

  8

  Introductions

  Marcus felt like an idiot.

  He'd been working out, listening to some of his favorite jams, getting a good pump on, and he'd heard a crash. Naturally, his first thought wasn't that it was Adina coming to save him. Right away, he jumped straight to “the werewolf is back, I knew it.” He'd grabbed his shotgun that he'd bought right after the first attack and gone up to defend himself. Sure, he wasn't too experienced with real guns other than movie props. That was the whole point of a shotgun: taking the skill out of it. Any idiot could point the barrel in the general direction of the target and fire away. It was the perfect gun for his situation. If the werewolf showed up and tried to finish what it started, he wouldn't want to sit there and try to aim. He'd be coursing with adrenaline, his hands would be all jittery, and the last thing he wanted was to have to use skill and plan. No, he intended to spray and pray, and that's almost what he did to Adina.

  He'd thought about it all night and gone through it in his head a million times. He couldn't get the image of Adina, on her butt and relatively powerless, at his mercy, out of his head. It wasn't like she was begging for her life or anything, and based on what he'd learned, if he had shot her, she would've just gotten really pissed off and started beating him up for being so dense. But the truth was, for that split second, he'd been holding a gun pointed right at her and he had almost pulled the trigger. It was... weird, to say the least. He wasn't a naturally violent man. The past few weeks had been hellish on him. He could barely sleep anymore. It's why he'd been working out so late: he'd spent most of an hour in his bed, trying and failing to catch some z's, before giving up and deciding he might as well spend the time doing something productive.

  He was a little nervous to talk to her again. They'd agreed to speak on the set and he would introduce her to some of the people, and he'd given her clearance through security. He wasn’t worried like, “oh, no, I'm so scared to see her”; instead, it was more like “I almost shot her yesterday and I have no doubt our very next interaction will be incredibly uncomfortable”. Making it all the weirder, she'd caught him at a rather inopportune time, him having his shirt off and he wasn't exactly a guy that enjoyed being shirtless. When he was a kid, he'd been somewhat skinny and he'd never quite gotten over it despite feeling very comfortable in his own body. They'd both been at their most vulnerable: her, shielding herself and a hair's breadth away from catching a spray, and him, furious and completely ready to shoot an intruding werewolf that he imagined was there for his head. He certainly hadn't looked his best, and she was literally wearing rags. Not a shining moment for either of them. It was the equivalent of sharing too much personal information to an internet friend and then meeting for the first time in real life. Awkward. A little strange. Maybe they'd both be a little reserved, embarrassed to have been seen the way they'd been before.

  She was there.

  All of a sudden, while he was talking with some of his cast mates, without him really knowing how. He caught a whiff of her perfume and like a bolt of lightning from above, he knew she must have arrived. Frowning, not entirely sure how he'd smelled her unless she'd just poured perfume on her entire body that morning, he paused mid-sentence and glanced around. There! His eyes landed on her as she strode confidently through the set like a goddess in a pantsuit, bright blue eyes sharp and vigilant, a coy, elegant feel to each step, the very image of beauty and grace.

  "Earth to Marcus, Earth to Marcus," Ellie, the female costar of Precinct 12 and one of the people he'd been conversing with, declared half-jokingly. "You gonna finish that sentence, or just plan to stop halfway through like a weirdo?" When he didn't answer, he heard her continue. "Weirdo it is, I suppose."

  "He just needs to be wound up again," Herb, his stunt double, stated. "You know, like those little toys with the wind-up thing on the back. What the hell happened to those? I haven't seen one of them in years..."

  Marcus, not normally someone to be stunned by someone's appearance, didn't hear a lick of their conversation. It wasn't that he didn't care about Herb's interpretation of the increasingly digital world. It was as though he were a sailor and he was being called by a siren, except the siren had on an Apple Watch and had her hair back in a ponytail. Again, without his permission, he found himself utterly fascinated by Adina. He'd met tons of starlets, tons of absolutely beautiful women that could knock anyone out of the park, but every time he seemed to look at her, he felt a deeper connection to her. She acted so serious and so tough, but he'd seen it in her eyes every time they'd talked: she was kind under there, vulnerable. She put up this big protective barrier, but why? What had happened to her? In the few times that he'd gotten a glimpse, he'd been charmed by her beautiful smile. Why didn't she show it more? Sure, moments away from getting blasted by a shotgun wasn't exactly the best time to expect someone to smile, but there'd been other occasions where it almost looked like she was enjoying talking to him and his heart lit up, but a kind of sadness or pain would flash through her eyes and she'd shut down, as though remembering something long ago in her past.

  He was overthinking the hell out of it. He had a habit of romanticizing things, but ever since he'd talked to her at the agency and she'd told him no, he'd caught himself thinking about her, wishing he had another chance to talk to her. Well, here it was: his chance. He wished it was under better circumstances, but he wouldn't complain. There was someone amazing under there. Maybe, if he was friendly enough, she'd be comfortable enough to come out. Without even trying, she was sexy. She seemed to know it, but at the same time, be completely oblivious. He was determined to find out more, and hopefully not get torn to shreds by a werewolf in the process.

  While walking across the room in his general direction, their eyes met and a strange, indescribable emotion surfaced from deep inside him before scampering off and hiding when big, bad embarrassment showed up. The last time they'd seen each other had been rough, and his mind elected to take that moment to remind him. By the look in her eyes, she was doing the exact same thing. She put a smile on her face, a professional one, but one nonetheless. He instantly did the same. He excused himself from the group and met her halfway.

  He ducked the awkward “do I hug, do I handshake” thing by sticking his hand out and politely greeting her. "Adina, great to see you!" he said, meaning it. His eyes drifted to the Irish guy he'd met and completely forgotten about at the agency office. He tried to call forth the guy's name and came up blank, so he winged it and shook his hand too. "Hey-hey, didn't know you'd be coming along. Welcome, welcome. How are you?"

  Without waiting for an answer, Marcus scanned Adina from head to toe and tried to avoid looking creepy doing it. "Are you..." he leaned in so as not to be heard, "heal
ed up? You doing okay?"

  The best way to break the awkwardness was to be friendly and genial, which was great because that was his personality to start with. Lucky. Less lucky was the fact that there was absolutely no way to start a conversation by quietly leaning in and asking about health issues without making it weird. He regretted it the moment the words came out of his mouth. He hadn't come across like the nice dude genuinely worried about whether she had recovered from being attacked. He probably came off as the odd aunt who always brought terrible pharmacy toys to birthday parties and tugged everyone's cheek affectionately and who was entirely too loud about health problems, making everyone groan when they saw her coming. He didn't want to be the odd aunt. That was not, even remotely, the role he wanted to fill, not that filling anything—or anyone—was on his mind as he looked at the gorgeous girl in front of him and wondered why he had to say the wrong thing instantly.

  The good news was that she didn't seem to take it the wrong way and, after a little while, the strangeness between them had returned to her just being especially distant and nothing more. Crisis averted. He took her over to the cast and introduced her and Alex to some of the cast members. He tried his best to let them converse and not interfere too much. This was like watching a real-life version of his show. There'd been a brutal attack, and now, the detectives were hot on the case. The only difference was that this time, instead of it being his grouchy Detective Lewis character, the detective was Adina. He liked the real-life version much more.

  On a more practical note, it was interesting to watch her work. While Alex mostly ogled the crowd with entertainingly childish delight, Adina was honed in like a bird of prey scouring the ground for an unlucky little beastie. Sharp. Poised. Focused. Though she couldn't have been any more of a perfect conversationalist and none of it felt particularly forced, he knew she was learning and thinking, ruling out candidates and making mental notes. It was the same thing his character did, except this was real and happening right in front of his face. He sat back and enjoyed watching it play out, though he tossed in a joke or a sentence every now and then just to keep everything moving.

  What was she thinking?

  * * *

  Adina thought that she had been right the first go-around about Hollywood.

  She'd convinced herself halfheartedly that Hollywood wouldn't be as bad and as annoying as it was the last time she'd been there, mostly just so she wouldn't dislike the idea of getting back in there with all the stars and starlets again. Bunch of fat-ego, tight-bodied, judgmental pricks. It felt like the only person who wanted her there was Marcus. Oh, sure, the people he introduced her to were pleasant enough to the outside observer, but to someone with mind-reading abilities, Adina was getting a crash course on why she liked animals more than humans.

  Ellie, the female costar, played a fun character on stage. She was energetic and bubbly and the opposite of Detective Lewis in every way. They played off each other in a fun way. In person, she spent most of the time checking out Alex. No big problem there. That was totally fine. Alex was a good-looking dude. Funny. Nice. Upbeat. No, Adina had no problems with that. She took offense to the fact that Ellie spent half the conversation eying him and the other half of the conversation thinking about Adina as a rival. It was funny, the place that perceived rivalry hit in terms of emotion. It had a lot of elements of jealousy, spite, frustration, that kind of thing, but it showed up completely different. It was annoying enough that Adina was tempted to just say, "Hold on, hold on. Ellie, he's all yours. He's just my associate. We're not in a relationship." Through the chat, things got bad for Ellie. She started off relatively calm, then she went down the whole mood set associated with attraction to Alex: they entered the rivalry phase, and then tragedy struck for Ellie as she must have judged herself against her "rival" and judged herself inferior, bringing in all kinds of sad emotions that wouldn't just get out of the way so Adina could focus on the conversation, then indignation hit as she evidently decided that that was no way to treat herself and she started thinking all kinds of mean and nasty thoughts about Adina while cheerily congratulating her on creating the agency and telling her that it was so wonderful to hear someone "making it in this tough world".

  Gah.

  There were, in fact, two conversations going on between Adina and Ellie. One was the surface level and it sounded and looked completely normal. The other was the emotional chat and that one was full of passion. It sucked. Adina couldn't call her on her emotions and tell her off no matter how much hostility Ellie ended up clearly feeling towards her. It just wasn't right, no more than it would have been right to tell Alex how hot Ellie thought he was. It was a breach of reality. If Ellie had gone out and said the things she was feeling, that was a different story, but invading other people's thoughts, their feelings, without really wanting to was a complete invasion of privacy.

  As if Ellie's outward friendliness and internal, absurd rivalry wasn't annoying enough, Herb over there spent most of the time hungry and thinking about food. Adina wasn't a mind reader. She couldn't pick up exactly what he wanted to eat, but Herb was a simple man—his thoughts were focused on one thing and one thing only: something to eat. When she tapped into him a couple times during the talk to see how he was feeling, to see if he was nervous like a man with something to hide, to see if she found the same sort of rage that she had from the werewolf, all she found was hunger. He must've skipped breakfast, because every time she checked in, his stomach and his mind were one. He obviously didn't much care about the topics, which was fine. She hated seeing into people's personal lives, but every now and then, when dealing with enough people like Ellie, it was nice to run into someone who's sole goal was to find a burger.

  It was exhausting. She'd spent way too long surveying people to check for abnormal emotions that day. The only person she hadn't much checked was Marcus, not only because she was too burned out from everyone else to want to try, but because Marcus was a client and she rarely wanted to know what people were thinking. Sometimes, she'd catch a whiff of a certain feeling without trying to. She'd caught some happiness from him when they'd locked eyes, and that had made her feel good, but she didn't want to push too far. That was the way to learn people's secrets, and she didn't want to think poorly of him from getting too in-depth to his thoughts. Sexuality was big. Attraction, for whatever reason, fell into its own category. Someone could be furious and she'd know they were furious and not much more. Someone could be depressed and she'd know that, not much more. It was the same thing with all the other emotions except, unfortunately, one. Horny? Sometimes, she got to catch little glimpses of the exact thing they were thinking about, probably because they were so focused on it that it formed a mental picture. She'd learned about entirely too many weird fetishes to ever want to test someone. Marcus was fine just where he was: a normal, nice guy without any secrets that she knew about. She wanted to know nothing more.

  9

  Investigation

  The rest of the introductions were about as boring as Adina had feared.

  She'd been hoping, maybe even praying that she'd get a good reading off someone before the day was over. But, despite spending the next few hours talking with various members of the set, she was no closer to finding the real villain. She'd gotten no real readings off anyone, nothing that made anyone more suspicious than anyone else. Some people liked her. Others didn't, even though a couple pretended to think she was great while secretly disliking her. That was fine. What wasn't fine was that she spent an entire day talking to a bunch of vapid, shallow idiots and pretending to get along with them just to see if anyone accidentally made themselves out to be guilty. The sheer intensity of the emotion that she'd seen on the night she'd been attacked wasn't there. All she had was frustrating chatter with the usual, boring emotions.

  To make matters more annoying, she felt like crap. Her body's regenerative factor worked a bit like a computer: if she had one document open in Word, the equivalent of her spraining her ankle, she was pe
rfectly fine and everything worked great. Breaking a toe? That was like doing a hefty internet download. She'd be able to handle it, no problem, but it'd be a moderate strain on her. What had happened to her from the attack was the equivalent of having 71 internet tabs open, all of them downloading a movie, with slow internet, while she had a bunch of viruses, and while she ran a graphics-intensive game in the background. Her computer would die. That's what her body was doing—even though she was alive, it had struggled hard to get as far as it did for her to be alive. Now, she had overheated and every part of her was sore, and some of the more intricate stuff was finally healing up. Her lung still felt strange, a couple of her hip bones felt out of place, and otherwise she felt like shit. If she had nothing to do, she'd sit at home and take a rare day off to heal up. With everything going on, she was instead standing on a Hollywood set, somewhere she absolutely despised being, pretending to make conversation and act happy even though she was quite aware of how unhealed she still was, and it only got worse the more time she spent on her feet moving around. She knew that was part of why Alex had been so eager to go: to protect her. He knew she wouldn't be at her best yet, and that she was entirely too stubborn to admit it.