Tainted Waters

by Leah Cutter

  I’d heard it all too many times before.

  Sam mutely offered a cup of her perfectly brewed coffee. I took it—would have insulted her if I didn’t—but I only took a small sip before I set it to the side.

  “So let’s talk,” I told her. I wasn’t about to make it easier for her, though I was just as aware that things were rocky between us.

  However, talking had never, ever, made anything better for me.

  “Things haven’t been great with us lately, have they?” Sam finally asked.

  I cocked my head to one side and gave her the once over. “I don’t know. You certainly seemed to enjoy last night.”

  Sam chuckled and shook her head. She even blushed a little.

  At least I’d made a lasting impression on her.

  “You know what I mean,” she said.

  I sighed. I did, but I didn’t. “I know the things that bug me,” I told her. “Like how we fight all the time over money.”

  “We don’t need to fight over money!” Sam said. “I have more than enough for us.”

  “And that’s just it,” I told her. “I don’t want to mooch off you.”

  “Why?” Sam asked. “Why don’t you just let me take care of you for a while, until you find a good job?”

  “What if I can never find a good job?” I asked her. “Are you willing to support me for years? Decades? Keep me in smokes and sex toys?”

  Sam looked away at that. “You’ll get a good job,” she insisted. “Someone will take you on as a PA.”

  “I might not,” I told her. “You know what those assholes have already said about me.”

  In addition to my not being trained, one of the contract companies had included a particularly nasty note in their rejection letter, claiming that I was a junkie, destined to go back to the drugs that had started me down this path. Plus, they assumed that I would blur the alternate timelines and couldn’t be trusted to follow just the one.

  None of it was true. I wasn’t addicted, not like Hunter. They hadn’t appreciated me pointing out that it had been the fucking government who’d addicted him in the first place.

  I wasn’t ever going to use those drugs again. I didn’t have a reason to.

  “They’ll come around,” Sam said. “I have another meeting—”

  “Promising more of your time to bargain for me and mine? No thank you,” I told her sharply.

  “But it might get your foot in the door,” Sam protested.

  “And you’ll end up resenting me even more,” I told her. “As you do now.”

  The words fell harshly onto the bed and the empty space between us.

  “I don’t resent you,” Sam told me after a bit.

  “Yes, you do. You resent that I don’t work as hard as you do,” I told her.

  “That’s not it,” Sam said.

  “Then what do you resent me for?” I asked reasonably.

  “It’s not—it’s just—” Sam sputtered.

  “Spit it out,” I told her. “I’m a big girl. I can take it.”

  “You don’t seem to appreciate just how fucking easy you have it!” Sam finally told me. “I had to work at my talent. Go through all the training. Be one of the blessed, and believe in it, or else I wouldn’t have been able to make it through. You know how high the suicide rate is?”

  “I know,” I told her gently.

  Her brother had been one of those who hadn’t made it. He’d also seen things that weren’t there. It was too late to figure out if he’d been crazy like me and Hunter, or just crazy.

  Sam’s guilt over him didn’t help our relationship either.

  “But you just want to waste your talent, doing nonsense things!” Sam exclaimed. “Not working for the consortium or any legit business. But in a sex & toy shop!”

  “I’ve tried getting a job,” I told her. “You know that.”

  “Yeah,” Sam said bitterly.

  Not hard enough echoed in the space between us.

  “It’s not as if those places advertise or anything,” I fumed. “Most of the jobs are only available from someone who knows someone.” The blessed were a fucking tightknit club, and they really didn’t want to invite me in. I was crazy, untrained, possibly untrainable.

  I didn’t know what she wanted from me. I could be pounding the pavement twenty–four/seven and I probably still wouldn’t turn up anything legit. How could I convince the right people that I was trustworthy?

  Sam didn’t have an answer to that either. We were both small fish in a fucking huge ocean.

  The Jacobson Consortium wouldn’t give me their blessing. So I couldn’t get a job.

  “I’ll go interview again,” I told her. “Apply at the same companies. Again. Okay?” Maybe something had opened up. Maybe someone would decide they could trust me.

  Because while I had my doubts about Sam’s and my longevity, I still wanted things to work out for us.

  “Okay,” Sam said. “Thanks.”

  I waited for her to make some kind of promise to me. To stop being such a hardass. To stop looking down her nose at me and how I’d come into my powers.

  To maybe trust me a little, too.

  But she didn’t say anything except to lean over, kiss my cheek, and head back into the bathroom, showering and primping to go do her own version of God’s work.

  While I had mine.

  I split without saying goodbye. I had to go see if I could find Hunter, see if he needed bailing out of jail, before I picked up my next shift at Chinaman Joe’s.

  It was the only honest work I currently had, whether Sam liked it or not.

  Ξ

  Jalal, from Hunter’s old residence, confirmed my assumption that Hunter was at the county jail, which happened to be downtown. I’d been there before, making bail for my friends, and had been detained there once when I’d been living on the street. I had some petty crimes listed on my juvenile record, but those had been sealed.

  I’d always wondered if the assholes who wouldn’t hire me had somehow gotten hold of those records.

  The facility had been rebuilt in the ’80s, all blocky concrete and impersonal. I’d always wondered if the hulking building was supposed to intimidate me or what. It stank, though, of the bums who streamed through the place. They needed a delousing station out front.

  The floor of the main lobby had been carried over from the older building, a great gray mosaic with the Hennepin County seal in the center of it.

  Looked like a fucking deathtrap to me, those blues spiraling out and drowning you. Would have hated coming here and staring at that floor if I’d been tripping.

  Of course, the first thing the cute Latino woman behind the counter asked for was Hunter’s full first and last name.

  How the fuck was I supposed to know that?

  “I’m sorry, I’ve never known it,” I told her. I gave her my best smile. “Can’t you just search for Hunter?”

  She glared at me, dark eyes flashing. She had her black hair pulled and slicked back into a tight bun, with bright red lipstick showing off her full lips.

  “Please?” I asked. “He’s a vet. And I’ve ever only called him Hunter.” I didn’t bat my eyelashes at her—only because I was pretty sure that wouldn’t have worked. I did lick my lips and smile again. “Pretty please?”

  She gave me a look that at another time would have cost me a couple of rounds for everyone at the bar. “Fine. Hunter, huh?” She gave a low whistle. “Well I’ll be. There actually is a Hunter here. Robert Hunter Liefson.”

  Robert Liefson, huh? Hunter did have that whole Scandihoovian look to him, with that white skin and pale eyes. I hadn’t thought he’d been raised in Minneapolis. But a name like that sure made him Minnesotan.

  “That’s probably him,” I told her.

  She gave me a card with a number on it. “You’ll have to submit to be being searched,” she said. “Go around to the left, past the elevators, to the line for the scanners. It’s like going through the lines at the airport,” she assur
ed me. “They’ll take his number and call him forward into the conversation hall. Shouldn’t be more than twenty minutes.”

  “Thank you,” I told her, giving her my best smile. “I really appreciate it.”

  She gave me an unexpected wink. “Glad I could help.”

  I didn’t notice until I was standing in the next line that there was a Post–it note with a phone number on the back of my numbered card.

  I shoved the Post–it into the front pocket of my shorts. I wasn’t about to cheat on Sam. That just wasn’t my style.

  Ξ

  The conversation hall was really just an open space with long tables bolted to the floor. Industrial–ugly benches matched the décor. The walls were prison gray. At least there was a window, though it had a steel mesh bolted to the front of it, and the glass itself was probably bulletproof.

  A family sat in one corner, Hispanic father whose wife, perhaps, and three kids had come to visit him. They spoke in quiet Spanish, low and desperate. A couple of tall black guys hung out in the opposite corner, talking with another guy in a suit—probably their lawyer.

  Only one other person waited like me—an older guy, gray and grizzled, in a baggy T–shirt that didn’t hide his bones. Had he come to see his son? His grandson?

  Then Hunter came into the room. He wore the prison orange outfit, short–sleeved. His eyes locked on me and bored into mine as the guard showed him to the seat opposite me. Hunter mutely offered up his manacled hands to the guard, who grunted and slipped off the cuffs. “You behave,” he told Hunter.

  Hunter mutely nodded, still just staring at me. “You’re here,” he said. “I didn’t see you coming here. Why?”

  “Good to see you too,” I told him. “I’d offer you a cigarette or something, but I doubt you’ve taken up smoking.”

  Hunter grimaced. “I’m sorry about the cops the other day,” he said. And he at least sounded sorry.

  More sorry than Sam had. But I couldn’t think about that now.

  I shrugged. “Seems as though you had your own issues with them.”

  “Worse,” Hunter said. “I didn’t do it,” he assured me.

  “Do what?” I asked. What had Hunter been accused of?

  “The cops found ghost tripper in my room at the halfway house,” Hunter said. His pale eyes drilled into me. “I didn’t put it there.”

  I blinked, surprised. I knew that Hunter had been clean—he’d been trying really hard to kick his habit. And I could always tell when he’d been tripping.

  “Why were you framed?” I asked. “Who framed you?”

  Hunter leaned his head closer to mine. I caught the eye of the guard and gave him an assuring glance before I leaned forward as well.

  “A disciple,” Hunter said fervently.

  “A what?” I asked.

  “A follower of the Great Old Ones. You know,” Hunter said. “The Elder Gods.”

  Crap. I looked carefully at Hunter. Had he started using again? He hadn’t sounded this crazy since just after he’d been taken by Loki.

  But his eyes were clear. Not scared like they used to be. And he didn’t seem as twitchy as I’d seen him before, though I was sure he’d categorized every entrance and exit and all the people in here and the three best ways to escape without killing too many people. As well as the three that involved killing everyone in the room, including me.

  Not to say that Hunter was ever calm, exactly.

  “What do you mean, Elder Gods?” I asked carefully. I’d seen the non–men who had been called to fight in Ragnarok, the giants and the Valkyrie. But I’d only ever seen the Norse Gods.

  Fuck. Hadn’t Odin mentioned some other pantheon?

  “They aren’t from our timeline. Or the future. They’re from another timeline. Close. Nearby.” Hunter scrunched up his face in frustration. “I can’t show it to you. But you’ll see them. Soon.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. Because I sure as hell wasn’t about to go looking for more gods.

  “When you start seeing the non–men,” Hunter said sagely.

  That made my heart drop all the way to the bottoms of my sandals. “Non–men? Like, from before?” I asked. When I’d seen the armies of the victorious slain marching off to war, to fight in Ragnarok.

  “Yes. No. Not exactly the same,” Hunter said. “They’re different. Less people–like.”

  “More giantlike?” I asked, remembering the men I’d seen who had been two stories high.

  “More monsterlike,” Hunter told me sagely.

  I didn’t want to believe Hunter. I knew he was a good pre–cog. A bit weird, seeing shit that wasn’t really there, that was part of some other world.

  Then again, so did I.

  “Swell,” I told Hunter, leaning back. “So when am I going to start seeing these non–men?”

  Hunter’s eyes grew shifty. He stopped looking directly at me. “Later,” he said.

  “When later?” I hated it when Hunter wasn’t direct.

  It meant that really bad shit was on the horizon.

  “Later,” was all that Hunter would say. “But you’ll make the right decision,” he added softly. “You always do.”

  ‘Thanks,” I told him.

  We both paused in what we had to say for a bit, the silence comfortable between us.

  Maybe I was stupid, but I think I was ready to forgive him.

  Maybe.

  “Look, is there anything I can do to help you get out of here?” I asked.

  Hunter gave me a grin that made him look younger. Certainly not innocent. But boyish, in a sense.

  “Nope. Got that all figured out,” he said.

  That sent a serious chill down my spine. “I meant with a lawyer—”

  “Got that covered too,” Hunter said. He stood up suddenly. “Goodbye, Cassie. You’ll always be my one true brother.”

  Goodbye? What the hell did that mean? It sounded like Hunter was going to go and get himself killed. “Hunter—Robert,” I said.

  I mean, I had to, right? Give him grief about his name at least once?

  Hunter turned and just glared at me. “We will see each other again,” he assured me. “And maybe not as ghosts.”

  Then he left.

  I don’t know why I stayed where I was for a minute. Maybe two. Thinking back over everything Hunter had just said. All the things he’d hinted at.

  I was damned if I would just let him die, though.

  I was about to go back to the desk and see if I could get another appointment to see Hunter. It might not be until the next day, but I was going to try.

  Might even call Michael John Adams and see if he’d look into Hunter’s shit for me.

  I can’t say that I was surprised when all the alarm bells suddenly went off. The doors in the visitation hall slammed shut and locked solid.

  “Prisoner escape,” came the announcement over the intercom system.

  No one had to tell me that it was Hunter.

  Ξ

  Took for–fucking–ever to get out of the jail. Cops wanted to blame me for Hunter’s escape, of course. But he hadn’t taken off until after he’d left the conversation hall. And as far as they could tell, I hadn’t handed him anything.

  Not like I would have cooperated. First thing I threatened to do was call my lawyer if they didn’t play nicely. I was tired of having to deal with their shit.

  But they let me go, out into the heat of the afternoon. Not many of the casual consumers remained on the sidewalks as I smoked and walked through the pedestrian malls. Most of them were in the gerbil runs, up above, never having to step foot outside of their perfectly climate–controlled environment.

  Couldn’t smoke up there, though, and I really needed the buzz before I started my shift.

  There would be three of us on that night—me, Travis, and the new girl, Laura. Travis was still wound a little too tightly for my taste, but I knew he was mostly harmless. He was a weekend warrior–wannabe, who was always trying to get me to bring Hunter into the
store.

  I would have thought Hunter would intimidate the shit out of Travis, but Travis knew the real deal when he saw it, and kept trying to be friends with Hunter.

  Hunter tolerated Travis like a puppy who was cute but who needed to be smacked on the nose with a rolled–up newspaper now and again, like most men.

  Laura was a Minnesota girl, whose grandparents were probably from the Old Country. She was almost as tall as I was, but unlike me, was a natural blonde, with broad shoulders and a horsey laugh. I figured she’d either last just one more week, or she’d end up being a lifer, like me and Amy.

  This was Laura’s first time working with the peepshows. Chinaman Joe only ran the peepshows Thursday through Saturday nights. Each girl had her own shtick, with costumes and characters, keeping the shows more about the entertainment and less about the stripping.

  I’d shown Laura the four stalls, each painted stomach–acid pink and about as wide as a bowling–alley lane. Customers sat in a pit on waterproof cushions that wouldn’t stain, while the girls danced above them, behind bulletproof glass, up and out of harm’s way.

  Tonight was Laura’s first time to run the clients, keep them in line, waiting their turn, entertain them a little so they didn’t get too bored or rowdy later with the girls.

  Since we didn’t serve alcohol, the girls could strip all the way down. They didn’t perform sexual acts on stage—which mainly meant they couldn’t show any kind of penetration—but they could do anything else. Chinaman Joe had paid for good sound equipment that the girls could turn all the way up, let their clients hear every moan and caught breath.

  I didn’t like hanging out at the peepshows much anymore. Too many bad memories, like finding out that Natasha, my ex, was dating Frieda the frigid bitch dancer. As well as finding Angie’s body in one of the stalls, killed by Loki, her soul stolen to make a Valkyrie to raise his army.

  But I had to keep an eye on Laura, tonight, as well as the usual tourists. Since the Aquatennial was coming, there were more than the usual number of tourists.

  Business was booming.

  Of course, the fact that we had air conditioning and sold cigarettes in addition to all the toys didn’t hurt.

  I ended up tag–teaming with Laura on the floor, keeping Travis behind the cash register. It was kind of funny—Laura’s eyes would get really big when someone flirted with her, then that would set off her horsey laugh. When that got louder and louder, it would be time for me to step in.