by Jackie May
“So those teeth on her necklace, those are vampire teeth, and that gives her the aura of a vampire?”
“Supposedly.”
“And that also lets her see this Deep world shit?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe she doesn’t see it as much as feel it, but who cares?” He fidgets with the hat in his hands. “I don’t have any reason not to trust her. She already said she’ll stay out of the interrogation altogether if Arael Moaz comes in to the Agency at midnight.”
That’s true. I recall the disappointment in Arael’s face when he asked Hillerman if she would be at the Agency with him tonight and she said no. “And if he doesn’t come in?”
Gorgeous considers it with eyes focused on his hat. “I don’t know. I don’t know, Shayne. These kinds of things happen. It gets messy, the lines between us. Underworlders using human weapons, demons using human bodies, threats that spill over into the human public. Whose jurisdiction is it? How much longer can we keep things separate?”
I snatch his hat away, so he’ll look me in the eye. “You want to let them deal with underworld business?”
“No. But there will come a time—and probably not too far off—when we won’t have an option anymore.”
“Now you sound like Hillerman. You know what she said to me?” I hand his hat back. “She said, ‘How long before the government decides that keeping the underworld hidden is a risk to national security?’”
“And you’d never asked yourself that before?”
I don’t like his sharp tone, or the mocking look in his eyes. Scoffing at a naïve child. Maybe I am childish. I definitely feel like pouting.
Nick smiles. “Look at you, all worked up, railing against the system. It’s like you’ve been doing this for years.”
“I guess being blown up will do that.”
“And all you wanted was a meal ticket. Lots of easier jobs, you know.”
Oh, spare me the kid gloves. I’m not through yet. “It’s not fair that they hire people like Hillerman, with so much bias against underworlders.”
“Against demons.”
“To her, we’re all the same.”
“Not all,” he says, and then he delivers a shocker: “She put in a formal request for your transfer. Underworld Task Force. She wants to call you up to the big game.”
“Hillerman?”
“Says she’s never worked with anybody else like you.”
“Anybody as gullible as me, maybe.”
“Quick thinker, takes direction well, doesn’t buckle under pressure—these are her words. And I don’t know what all went down in the East Side today, but she said she knows of several bank robbers who would not be doing time right now if you’d been their getaway driver.”
Her praise angers me. Maybe because I’m starting to see it less as praise and more like manipulation. She’s not complimenting me, she’s only sizing me up, like some tool she thinks might be handy later on. Or maybe I’m pissed because, of all the people here, Hillerman is the last I’d hoped to impress. Oh, the two-faced, stone-cold bitch wants to recruit me? Gee, thanks. Meanwhile, my own family and friends and bosses all think I’m a total screwup.
“Join the task force? Hell no. Everybody hates the feds, and now I see why. Look, if Hillerman says something nice—about anything—then she just wants something, she’s trying to pull one over on you. Why would she even…it’s against the rules to recruit underworlders. They can’t. There’s a treaty or something.”
“There is.” Nick raises his shoulders, then lets them drop. “But what if that’s changing?”
“Is it?”
“No, but what if…” He searches for words. “Maybe the reason for the treaty doesn’t apply so much to you.” A vague urge to be offended pings at the back of my mind. With a few seconds I could have pinpointed the insult, but just in case I might be too damn thick, Gorgeous clarifies: “In their eyes, you’re barely an underworlder at all. As far as threats go, I mean. You don’t have any powers, like vampires or sorcerers, and your shifted form isn’t a monster. In human terms, you’re smart, you’re fast, you’re good-looking—”
“And yet, you wouldn’t even hire me until this morning, when nobody else would take out your garbage.”
“That’s different. I’m talking about diplomacy—”
“Oh, I hear you loud and clear, don’t worry. What you’re saying is that I’m more than human, but not enough to be underworld. I don’t really belong anywhere, is that it?”
“To them! To them maybe you’re something beyond, but still acceptable. What if they did want to out us someday? No, not even if, but when. Who do we want controlling that story? One of their Hillermans, or one of you?”
I walk away, because despite my obvious rage at his comments, he’s not backpedaling. He doesn’t—and he never will—feel that he’s just shoved his foot in his mouth, which means he’ll only get annoyed at my immature, selfish response to what he surely considers “the bigger picture.”
His voice carries after me. “There’s a bigger picture here, Shayne!”
Ohhhhh! As I stride past the fire, I mentally dare anybody—and especially Mom—to say one word to me, just one word, or a hint of a frown, try it, I dare you! Nolan, of course, seems up to the challenge. His red-checkered lumberjack shirt is headed straight for me, like a matador’s flag waving in front of a bull.
I dare you!
“Shayne, stop.”
I DARE YOU! Shit, where am I even going? In front of me is unit #4. I want #2. I make a hard right turn. Nolan follows.
“Shayne, someone needs to tell us what the hell’s going on.”
“Talk to Gorgeous.”
“I don’t wanna talk to Gorgeous.”
“I’m going inside, and I don’t invite you in.”
“I don’t wanna go in.”
“Good.”
Wow, yeah, so we sound mature.
I stop beneath the awning on the wood porch Dad built around our unit ages ago. The long planks don’t just creek, they sink beneath our feet, like a trampoline.
“What about your arm?” he asks, reaching for it.
I jerk away with a slight wince. “What about it?”
“They brought a healer? Are you high yet?”
“No.” But I can feel it coming on. Healers are used as sparingly as possible, since the stimulating aftereffect of their magic can be highly addictive.
“You get dizzy when you’re high,” he says.
“Congratulations, you know all the most intimate details of my life.” He wishes.
“Give me a break, Shayne. We don’t know anything about you anymore. You’re gone for weeks at a time. When you do come here, it’s in and out, only when you need something, or somebody’s been shot, and now suddenly the Agency director shows up here with Nick Gorgeous? FBI? Police? We thought it had something to do with what happened last night. Ben’s thinking they’re here for him, so he took off into the woods. Too bad he can’t climb trees, right?”
Okay. I’m done. “You need to stop following me around.”
But Nolan rattles on. “And Ray’s pissed, because nobody even asked him if all these people could come into our territory.”
“Oh yes, because Madison West and Nick Gorgeous are so used to asking permission.”
“Are you working with them?”
“Mostly I’ve just been a really great chauffeur. Oh, the Crap-pile’s been shot, by the way.”
His body tenses. “Shot by who?” I can tell he wants to reach out and shake me.
“But don’t worry, all your work under the hood was gangbusters. Clearly it’s the car they should be recruiting, not me.” Nolan and I are parents, it’s true, of a bouncing baby Crap-pile. I paid for her, but he did all the motor work that makes her purr, so we have sort of a dual custody thing going on. He takes her out once in a while (without moving the seat), but it’s me she lives with.
When I open the door to the house, he huffs, “Hey—”
“Oh, you know, I think I am feeling dizzy,” I mock.
“Did you ever think maybe people are just worried about you, Shayne?”
Even though I know I’ll regret being such a bitch later, I can’t stop myself from putting him on the spot. “Yeah? People are worried about me, or just you?”
His mouth opens. He blinks a few times. He turns to gesture at the crowd standing around the fire, then changes his mind.
“I don’t need people to worry about me, Nolan. What I need is for you, and Ben, both of you, to stop following me.”
I shut the door and pace the living room of unit #2 in an ugly mood—the kind of pent up, raging frustration that usually ends with me scrolling through the contacts in my phone for some smitten guy I’ve turned down over and over again, just saving him up for a time when I need to be fawned over.
Our mobile home is long and narrow and overstuffed with a hodge-podge of furniture collected over the last few decades, never thrown out, never replaced with newer, better-looking things. Navigating the space is like picking your way through a precarious maze; books stacked to the ceiling on the coffee table; a wobbly wire rack full of mostly empty CD cases; couches and chairs, fake plants; a few real but dead plants; lamps on top of magazines on top of end tables; and a narrow desk without drawers, crammed into a corner behind a curio cabinet. On the desk is a bulky, square computer monitor.
I wedge myself behind the curio cabinet, perch my butt carefully on a rolling stool with one missing wheel, and tap the space bar on a keyboard, waking the monitor from sleep. Into an Internet browser search, I type every word I know about Special Agent Hillerman.
Hillerman. Latina. FBI. Tattoos. Fetish. Demons.
I try to recall what Arael Moaz had said about her. I know he called her famous, but why? Something from a long time ago, because he had said she was small, a girl. Something about fighting. She was a fighter. He’d also mentioned some demon names, but I can’t remember those. I delete everything and go simpler.
Hillerman. Girl. Fighter.
I press enter. The browser window flashes white, then fills with link after link to articles about a girl named Charlotte Hayes. The third article in the list is titled “The Girl Who Fought Back.” Those were Arael’s exact words, weren’t they? Sure pegged you right. Beside the links are several pictures, most of them the same photo from what I guess to be a high school yearbook. The photo is Special Agent Hillerman, only she’s so young—maybe sixteen or seventeen—and very soft-looking: full cheeks crowding a pleasant smile; round, liquid eyes.
According to the article, “The Girl Who Fought Back” was Charlotte Hayes, a seventeen-year-old student at Culver High School in Los Angeles. During the homecoming football game, she was kidnapped from behind the bleachers by a serial creep named Ezra Cabe. Back at his apartment, he only got half of Charlotte’s clothes off before she broke away to his kitchen, grabbed a knife, and rammed it beneath his chin, killing the bastard.
The police search of Cabe’s place revealed a house of horrors—materials for demonic rituals, books on the occult, and two other girls—catatonic and malnourished—held prisoner in boarded up rooms. The girls later told police of many times when they weren’t chained or locked in. They could have escaped but were too frightened to even think about it. Only Charlotte, not yet groomed, had the will to resist.
Those other two girls didn’t last long on the outside. I skim through later articles detailing a bizarre string of occurrences. Three months after being released from captivity, both girls were killed in apparent suicides. And there’s more—something about Ezra Cabe’s ex-wife trying to kill Charlotte Hayes’s boyfriend. But I don’t finish the rest of that, because I’m stunned by the boyfriend’s name.
Matthew Hillerman.
New search: Charlotte Hayes and Matthew Hillerman.
There they are in a tabloid photo, Charlotte wearing glasses. Her hair is darker than it is now, a rich brown. She’s older than the yearbook photo, but still soft, even a little plump. Beneath the short sleeves of her shirt is clean, non-illustrated skin. Her face is twisted into an irritated scowl directed at the paparazzi.
Towering next to her, according to the caption, is her “beau” Matthew Hillerman, who could easily pass for a Viking warrior if only he wore a leather hide and not a cut-off T-shirt for a Death metal band. Long blond hair is pulled back tight against his scalp, revealing shaved sides above his ears. The angles of his face are chiseled from stone, his jaw hidden behind a blond beard that is braided at his chin. His thick, muscled arms are sleeved with tattoos I recognize—a black widow sinking its fangs into his bicep; sword-wielding warrior angels on his shoulders. They’re not exactly the same—Matthew doesn’t have the haunted tree with black crows—but it’s obvious that Special Agent Hillerman—the one I know—has tried to recreate his art.
The Agent Hillerman I’ve been working with is, in a physical sense, a combination of Charlotte Hayes and Matthew Hillerman. Charlotte is the base, the canvas, on which she has painted Matthew Hillerman—his ripped muscles, his exact tableau of tattoos, his same hair color and style. She has his last name and a wedding ring. I think of Brenner wearing all those shirts and ties his sister bought him. Desperately trying to hold on to a memory.
Even if Agent Hillerman’s deduction about Brenner and his sister is wrong (and I don’t think it is), aren’t I safe to assume that she only came to that conclusion so quickly because the same explanation is true about her own past? If so, a story is suggested. Charlotte Hayes became entangled in the underworld by this Ezra Cabe asshole, who was obviously some sort of demon. Maybe she saw things at his place. Maybe she went looking for answers later.
I see more articles—from years after her kidnapping—about Charlotte’s involvement with another missing woman and a cult in the woods; there’s a picture of Charlotte’s left hand with the pinkie finger missing, which the caption says is due to a freak coyote attack. Okay, so she has run-ins with the underworld, getting in deeper, searching it out, like Brenner. She eventually marries Matthew Hillerman, accepts his wedding ring and last name. And then…
How had Hillerman said it? There’s only one way for humans to find out about the underworld, and that’s through terror and tragedy and death.
Out of the corner of my eye, I catch movement. With a startled spasm, my knees bang the underside of the desk, which knocks into the curio cabinet, rattling the glass.
“Bunica!” I whine.
My great-grandmother shuffles out of the bedroom hallway with one eye popping out of its socket, and the other a flattened slit beneath a plunging eyebrow. It’s a look that could either be astonishment or constipation. Since she’s pointing urgently down the hallway, I go with the first option. As I get closer to her, I perceive a sparkle in her one bulging eye, and a quiver in the corners of her mouth. She’s not astonished or constipated. She’s tittering with glee.
“What is it, Bunica?”
She won’t say, so I wander down the hall until a voice stops me. It’s Brenner, coming from my bedroom, where I’d told him he could go to wash up. His voice is low and melancholy. He takes several deep, calming breaths. There’s a pause, silence, and then he says, “It’s actually a lot easier than I thought. Talking to you like this.”
He’s on the phone? But then why’s Bunica so delighted? Unless he’s naked? I peek around the doorframe. No, he’s not naked. And not on the phone.
My bedroom has a sliding glass door leading outside to the creek and the edge of Newport Woods. The door is open, and Brenner sits on wood steps outside, giving his full attention to a scrawny brown fox sniffing for food in the ivy.
And to that fox—I’m not kidding—to that fox he’s saying, “You’re smaller than I thought…I guess because you’re tall for a woman, in real life. Well, not…this is still real life, too, I guess, but—”
Wait, he thinks that scruffy little…but that’s a boy fox. I erupt with laughter and try to grip the doorframe, but I miss and fall over.
Yeah. I’m high.
“Did you think that was me?”
The look on his face sends me into fits again. I throw myself down on the bed.
“I know, but what are the odds,” he defends earnestly, “of being at the house of a…you know, and then seeing one, you’re going to assume…”
“Assume what, that it’s a girl fox?”
Deer in headlights. “Was that…?”
I roll my face into a pillow to muffle my laugh.
“Well, it’s not like I’d be looking there. I thought it was you.”
“Oh my gosh, okay.” I roll onto my knees and take off my Tigers jacket. Beneath that is a Tigers T-shirt. I peel that over my head, and beneath that is the Tigers logo tattoo on my rib cage.
Brenner turns to the woods. “I can go.”
“No,” I say, pulling my bra down along my arms. “I want to show you my brush.” It sounds dirty, and I mean it to. High, remember?
I kick my shoes off on the way to shut my bedroom door. A memory sparks of Mom’s voice, exasperated (what else?), warning me that she better not ever catch me closing my bedroom door with a boy inside. As if I couldn’t just take one leap from those steps outside and be lost in the woods all night with a boy.
“Hey, I showed you off to the entire East Side, remember? I think this is only fair.” I push jeans and panties down my long legs and kick the pile of clothes at him, just so he knows I’m completely naked. Still, he doesn’t try to look at me.
Do I want him to? In that ugly mood, reckless why not way, yeah, but not desperately. The carefree Brenner who sat breezing with me at the Monolith poker table, yeah, but not necessarily this Brenner. I don’t know, it’s confusing, like dating a hot guy who has an identical twin who’s much more fun to be around, but he only visited once for Christmas, just long enough for you to see what you could have had if your half of the twins weren’t broken.
Bleh, this stuff is much too perplexing for the animal side now shouting for my full attention.
So I shift into my fox. Bounding past Brenner, I pounce high off the steps, twist into a torpedo dive to the ground, and bounce up again, bucking like a bronco. When I spin to a stop, mouth open, tongue lolling, he is looking at me with a childish wonder that makes me want to laugh again. But foxes can’t laugh, so I leap around in circles instead.
