Another One Bites the Dust

by Jennifer Rardin

  Vayl had fished some socks out of a drawer and sat on the bed to put them on. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  Great, I’d hurt him and he was asking after my welfare. Typical. “Yeah, look, I’m sorry I made you talk about that stuff. It’s none of my business—”

  “Actually, it is. As my avhar you should be privy to all my secrets, past and present.” His lips twisted. “It is just that, there are so many to tell. And very few of them are pleasant.”

  “Well, by all means, take your time. I know, maybe every couple of weeks we can have a slumber party. You can come over to my apartment and we’ll play Truth or Dare. You can let a couple juicy ones slip while we gossip about how Cassandra wears too much jewelry and Cole always smells like grape bubble gum.” An image came to mind of Vayl wearing SpongeBob SquarePants pajamas and pink fuzzy slippers and I started to giggle. When I got a load of the confused look on his face I laughed even louder. The sharp rap on the door didn’t stop me, but the look on Cole’s face when he stepped in did. He looked pissed. When he saw that Vayl and I were practically on opposite sides of the room his shoulders dropped and his fists opened.

  Oh man, he can’t still be carrying a torch for me, can he? I mean, we had it all out already, right? Yeah right, drawled my cynical self, a chain-smoking echo of my mother, who wore hair curlers like diamond tiaras and was a master at keeping her kids out of the house.

  “Yes, Cole?” Vayl’s tone could’ve frozen a pitcher of lemonade.

  “I just wanted to know what you thought about the security guards.” When Vayl gave him a blank look Cole’s shoulders bunched right back up. “What’ve you been doing in here all this time?” he asked me.

  Before I could reply Vayl said, “The conversations that occur between sverhamin and avhar are private. If information arises that concerns you, we will let you know.”

  “That’s enough,” I told them both, holding out my hands, which immediately seemed kind of stupid. Did I really want to be the one standing in the middle of a pissing match? Ick. “If you boys can’t play nice I’m sending you to your rooms.”

  Vayl raised an eyebrow as if to say, But I am already here.

  I went on. “Cole makes a good point. I should’ve told you straight off that we went to scout out the festival, and while we were there I saw something funky.” I described the guard. Luckily that made Vayl forget all about how much he didn’t care for Cole. Which made his presence on our current mission something of a minor miracle. Enter the flaming ball of guilt who is me.

  I’d met Cole on New Year’s Eve during a reconnaissance mission. His connection to our target’s wife had piqued Vayl’s interest. That attention had not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It had resulted in the burning of Cole’s office, his kidnapping and severe beating. At the end of that mission he’d held my hand in the dungeon below Club Undead, tears flowing unchecked down his battered face. “I’m so sorry,” he kept saying.

  The pain of my injuries had nearly overwhelmed me. I badly wanted a paramedic with a needleful of morphine. But it helped to concentrate on the men, Cole on my left and Vayl, running soothing fingers through my hair, at my right.

  “Why?” I asked, my voice raspy with barely checked agony.

  “I should be in your spot. If you hadn’t pulled me off that bomb and taken my place—”

  “She would have been fired,” Vayl told him.

  I squeezed Cole’s hand. “And that really would’ve killed me.”

  “But—”

  I squeezed harder, making him wince. “You saved me just now. We’re even.”

  But I hadn’t really felt that way. I still had a job, after all, while Cole’s was little more than a pile of ash. So when he visited me in the hospital a week later to ask for a recommendation, I called my boss, Pete, that afternoon.

  “Does he know what he’s talking about?” Pete had asked.

  “He was there for the big showdown. I can tell you he has no illusions,” I assured him. Then I listed all the reasons Cole would make an excellent agent. It took me quite a while. I finished with the two items I knew Pete couldn’t resist. “He currently knows seven languages and can pick up new ones in a snap because of his Sensitivity. Plus he’s an ace shooter. He started competing in high school. Still does when he can. And he rarely loses.”

  “I thought you told me he was a private investigator. Isn’t there enough supernatural crime in Miami to keep him busy?”

  “He doesn’t want to be a PI anymore. I tried to talk him out of this decision and realized he’s made it for all the right reasons. You know, Amanda Abn-Assan was a childhood friend of his. He said after losing her, he just can’t sit on the sidelines while somebody else chases down scumbags like her husband.”

  Cole had just completed his first course of training when this mission came up. Since he spoke Chinese—and we didn’t—Pete figured he could help us out while we gave him some on-the-job experience. Vayl hadn’t seen it that way. I’d made some very intelligent, convincing arguments, none of which he’d bought. In the end I’d promised to personally drop off and pick up his dry-cleaning for a month, since he suspected the new delivery boy was rifling through his mail, and we had a deal.

  I wondered idly if the shirt Vayl currently wore was a dry-clean-only model as he said, “I am not sure what kind of other you detected, Jasmine. Maybe Cassandra will have a record.”

  We all moved into the living area to check with her. But with so little data to give the Enkyklios, her portable library, we came up dry.

  “My books may have something,” Cassandra said. “I’ll check them.”

  “Thank you,” Vayl said graciously. He pulled a bag of blood out of the refrigerator and poured it into a mug. In our time together I’d learned that he liked to let it slowly warm to room temperature. He said nuking it burned away most of the flavor. And while I thought my skin should’ve crawled at learning those kinds of details, it didn’t, because it implied a trust I felt honored to have earned.

  Our noise had awakened Bergman, who sat rubbing his eyes on the couch I had decided to dub Mary-Kate. Cassandra sat across from him on its twin, Ashley, already leafing through a heavy old tome whose pages were thick as postal paper. Cole grabbed a piece of gum from a green bowl on the table beside her couch (um, Ashley) and dropped down beside her.

  “I’m researching,” she told him sternly. “No funny comments about the pictures.”

  “But look at that guy! He’s clearly constipated.”

  “He eats people’s brains!”

  “Exactly!”

  I took a seat beside Bergman and gave him the once-over. His nap hadn’t done him much good. Though he shouldn’t, he reminded me of a bereaved parent. He dreamed, incubated, birthed his inventions, and was very choosy about where he let them go to work. Knowing some lunatic currently wore his baby, and that the Raptor was circling overhead, waiting to swoop in and hook it, probably made him feel desperately helpless.

  Vayl, still standing in the kitchen, leaned his elbows on the counter that backed the banquette. He didn’t even clear his throat and suddenly we all snapped to attention. He said, “Before we leave for the festival site, I want to complete your briefing on Bergman’s armor. I will ask him to explain the details of its workings in a moment. As he said, it is an incredibly advanced piece of biotechnology that physically binds with its carrier. Once they are united, the only ways you can separate the suit from its wearer are to kill him, or administer a chemical bath that fools the suit into thinking he is dead.”

  “I take it Mr. Bubble isn’t manufacturing that particular brand of bath additive just yet?” asked Cole.

  Bergman sat up, then laid his head against the back of Mary-Kate despondently. “That’s what the experiments at White Sands were about. They were trying to target which chemicals administered in which way would throw the suit into death response.”

  “But they haven’t had any luck yet?” I asked.

  Bergman shook his head.

&n
bsp; “Is it that big of a deal?” Cole inquired. “We’re going to kill the guy anyway.”

  “You can try,” moaned Bergman.

  Vayl nodded. “Go on,” he urged as he took a sip from his mug.

  Bergman looked at each of us in turn, shook his head, and ran a hand across the reddish brown grizzle that had appeared on his jaw sometime in the past twenty-two hours. As he spoke, he gazed out the window at the glaring lights of Moe’s gas station and the city beyond. “The armor will repel every kind of projectile in existence. It’s impervious to fire, can’t be shredded, and can withstand pressures equal to those found in the deepest parts of the ocean.”

  “What about cold?” I asked, feeling a rush of pleasure as Vayl looked at me proudly. Maybe his greatest power was the ability to leech heat from an area so fast people had frozen to death inside his circle of influence.

  But Bergman shook his head again. “Cold will slow it down, but not destroy it.”

  “Water?” Cole ventured.

  “When the hood is closed, the armor becomes self-contained. It has its own internal breathing system that functions just fine when it’s immersed.”

  “Tell us more about this hood,” I said.

  “It activates automatically when it perceives the wearer’s in danger. It’s the only part of the armor that can be deactivated at will. The rest is permanent.”

  Cassandra stirred. “You’ve begun at the end when the most important details may be at the beginning. What does this armor look like?”

  Bergman shrugged. “We’ve had it on all kinds of animals, including fish, cats, and monkeys. It’s looked different on each one, probably because it binds differently to each depending on body chemistry, physical size, species type—”

  Cassandra waved her hand impatiently, making Bergman crook his eyebrows with frustration. “A general overview, if you please,” she said.

  “Scales,” said Bergman. “The material is made up of thousands of individual units that are physically and chemically bonded together. The colors vary as widely as the texture. On the fish it was rough, almost like steel wool. On the chimp it was softer, more elastic.”

  “Is it just a defensive thing?” asked Cole. Another excellent question. My, weren’t we just operating on all cylinders this evening?

  “No.” Bergman’s eyes filled with passion as he described offensive capabilities that only made me shudder because I had to find a way around them. “When the hood is activated, the wearer can ignite volatile chemicals that are contained in the nostril cavities.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked. “Are you telling us the guy can breathe fire?”

  “Exactly.”

  “What else?” Vayl demanded.

  “Contact poison in the claws that paralyzes the victim. Detachable spikes carried along the back that are so well balanced they can be launched to hit targets accurately at forty feet.”

  “And when they hit?” I asked.

  “They explode.”

  I felt my shoulders droop. Holy crap! This one is definitely Mission Sucks-Out-the—

  Vayl interrupted my thought, which was probably just as well. No sense in depressing myself any more than necessary. “We knew it would be difficult,” he said. “But that is why this task has been assigned to us. We can do this. And we will.”

  Somehow that little pep talk allowed us to move to other issues. As Cole drove us to the site, we discussed the stage setup. It would take place tonight while Vayl could help. We talked about the show, realizing we’d probably have to spend the entire day tomorrow practicing in order to present anything remotely entertaining. And I privately wondered how a 291-year-old vampire and a thousand-year-old Seer didn’t seem at all familiar with the creature I’d seen pretending to be human today.

  CHAPTER THREE

  As we pulled into our space, Cole and I noticed the Winter Festival setup had chugged ahead, making steady progress since our recent visit. We all agreed our parking spot seemed ideal, situated as it was where the mulched walkway almost met the seawall before it turned back north toward a series of craft and game booths that led to Chien-Lung’s Chinese acrobats’ half-inflated building.

  Cole parked the RV south of the walk, parallel to the seawall, and we began to unload the trailer. A barbecue cook-off site stood so close to our performance location that if we stretched we’d hit a grill. But that meant we could let them take care of outdoor lighting for our customers. Several gray-headed gentlemen wearing ball caps and stained aprons had already strung yards of pink-shaded patio lights across the area. Now they were moving in several green-painted picnic tables.

  Still, as we carried poles, canvas (probably something Pete had ripped off an old tent revival preacher), more poles, tons of wooden slats, and absolutely no directions whatsoever from the trailer to the tent-erection site, it was apparent we’d have enough room for our purposes. As long as one of us could figure out how to put the damn thing together.

  Already the bickering had begun. Cole picked up two poles and connected them.

  “Cole!” snapped Bergman. “You need to put them all in piles first. That way you know what you have!”

  “We have poles and canvas, dude. You stick the little end in the big end.” He demonstrated on another pair. “It’s like magic how they go together.”

  Bergman looked at Vayl. “You tell him.”

  Cole gave his imagined rival a smirk. “I’m thinking you know how a tent goes up by now, Vayl.”

  Cassandra decided to bail first. “I need to do some research. Weird-faced man, you know,” she murmured, and disappeared into the RV.

  That woman is brilliant. I turned to follow her.

  “Where are you going?” demanded Vayl.

  Quick, think of a marvelous excuse he’ll totally swallow. Aha! “To practice. Unlike you guys, I haven’t tried my particular talent since Granny May signed me up for belly-dancing classes when I was fifteen.” And, by the way, why the hell did I consent to that? Or decide I loved it? Never mind, he’s buying it. In fact, he seems to be hot on the idea. Are his eyes glowing? And is Cole’s tongue hanging out? This is why I didn’t want to dance in the first place! “Anyway,” I rushed on. “I’m going to find a private place where nobody can see to laugh at me while you beat this tent”—or, more likely, these two idiots—“into submission.”

  “Aah,” said Vayl. He took a couple of steps toward me, got hopelessly entangled in a mound of canvas, and stalled. But that didn’t stop his eyes from roaming. “Believe me, Jasmine, no one who sees you dance would ever dream of laughing.”

  “I could come with you,” Cole offered. “You know, give you some tips. Run the camera. Maybe oil your hips for you when they get rusty.”

  I couldn’t help it: I started to laugh. It was a combination of Vayl bristling like a threatened porcupine while Cole wiggled his eyebrows suggestively and Bergman stealthily organized the poles just like he wanted them.

  “I’ll be over there,” I said, pointing west, where you could just make out a strip of white sand where the seawall stopped and a series of abandoned piers began. “By myself.”

  And I was alone for about an hour. Then this couple came strolling by, making enough noise that I didn’t totally humiliate myself in front of them. I couldn’t see them well. Didn’t need to. They were holding hands. Kissing every fifth step or so. Smitten. And suddenly my brain cut the power to my knees.

  I plopped down, watching like a starstruck fan as the lovers strode across the sand in front of me. It was the laughter that did it, transforming me from watcher into participant. Suddenly I was part of the couple, reliving a moment I hadn’t dared to remember until now.

  Matt and I had taken our first real vacation together, a trip to Hawaii, to celebrate his twenty-ninth birthday. The night after we landed on the island we’d walked the beach, arm in arm, the boom of the surf echoing the music from a distant luau. Lights from hotels, bars, and all-night parties gave the evening an effervescent sort of glow. We pass
ed other couples, whole families even, but it was as if we moved within our own love-lit world. If a giant marlin had swept out of the ocean and offered us three wishes I wouldn’t have been surprised. It was that kind of evening. Magical.

  We’d walked the length of a pier lit by tiki torches. At the very end, a table dressed in china and crystal awaited us. We ate like royalty under the shelter of a thatch-roofed gazebo. And after dessert we danced to the music of a four-man reggae band called the B-tones.

  “This is amazing,” I breathed as Matt held me close, moving me to the sultry rhythms of a song whose name I never learned.

  He pulled back far enough to look into my eyes. “You’re amazing.” He smiled, his teeth extra white against the natural deep tan of his skin. “But not so observant.”

  “No?”

  He shook his head, pulled his hand out of my clasp, took a ring off his pinky, and held it in front of my face. “I really thought at some point you’d ask me why I was wearing a girl’s engagement ring.”

  “Have you had that on all night?”

  He grinned. “Only since dessert.”

  Then I realized what he’d just said. “Are you—are we—”

  “Say yes, Jaz.”

  I’d screamed, and jumped up and down, and jumped on him, and made him jump up and down with me, which turned out to be pretty funny. At which point he put the ring on my finger. It was a full-carat pear-shaped emerald. “For my green-eyed vixen,” Matt had said before he kissed me breathless.

  I still had that ring. Carried it with me everywhere, in fact. I slipped my hand into the left pocket of my jeans. My seamstress had sewn a silver key ring into these, and indeed, every pair of pants I owned. A similar key ring attached the band of my emerald to the one in my pocket so I never had to go anywhere without it.

  “Thank you, ma’am. Enjoy your stay.” I blinked. What . . . happened? Where am I?

  Across a wide, shiny counter stood a smiling young clerk wearing a blue blazer and a name tag that said, THE FOUR SEASONS AND JUNIE TAYLOR WELCOME YOU. In my hand I held a receipt for room 219 and the key card.