Unless things had really changed for him over the summer.
“Sometimes I wonder how you have time for all of those.” Sunshine shook her head as we left the store.
“They don’t take that long to read…How was your date, by the way?”
I knew from the expression on Sunshine’s face that that was the question she had been waiting for me to ask since she first stepped into the store. I prepared myself for venting.
“I have given up on men,” she said, voice dropping melodramatically.
“Oh…um, again?”
“It’s different now!” Sunshine shook her head. “I’m tough. I can take a few disappointing dates, but this guy!”
“Wasn’t he the one from your chemistry class? Evan?”
“Ugh, Evan. Sorry, trying to wipe everything about him from my mind. He complained that I wasn’t ‘ladylike’ enough. Seriously, who says that anymore?”
I winced.
“That sounds…uncomfortable.”
“You have no idea. I had to leave before dessert. Dessert! And we were going to go to my favorite Italian bakery over on—”
Something very large and solid smacked against my outer shoulder, sending me stumbling. My eyes widened as I watched the bag of comics fall from my hands and spill all over the sidewalk.
“Crap,” I said, dropping to my knees.
“Oh, Jesus. I’m so sorry.”
An additional pair of knees landed next to mine. I froze when I realized that they weren’t encased in Sunshine’s tights, and that they belonged to someone with a distinctly masculine shape.
The Hunter Davies comic (thankfully still protected by plastic) grasped in my hand, I turned to my left to witness the most gorgeous set of forearms I had ever seen.
Since I don’t live in a CW show, wonderfully buff men just don’t bump into me every day. After several seconds of blatantly objectifying this stranger, I bothered to look up at his face.
And it was also pretty damn nice.
The newcomer was a white guy in his mid-twenties. He had dark hair that curled slightly at the ends, a strong jaw, and lightly tanned skin. His nose was slightly crooked, which weirdly suited his face.
When I turned to him, his attention was on the ground as he reached for the final few comics. Then, he turned to me, and for a moment I could only contemplate how society just doesn’t appreciate a good pair of dark-brown eyes.
“Here you go,” he said. “Really sorry about that again. I guess I have a lot on my mind. Are you okay?”
My response?
“Um…”
“Thank you,” Sunshine said, once it became obvious that my brain wasn’t up for forming complete sentences. Or words. “We should have been looking where we were going.”
“You’re just saying that to be nice,” the guy said, rising to his feet. He reached out a hand to take mine.
“No…it was our fault,” I managed to blurt out as I took his hand in my own. Hmmm…Rather firm grip.
“Nah, pretty girls distract me,” he said with a grin.
I felt my face go warm. Embarrassment washed over me, turning my skin an even deeper shade of red.
It has been pointed out that I don’t quite meet the geek stereotype (well, at least by the people who have a hard time wrapping their heads around the concept of a Japanese-American nerd who’s not into anime). But there was one area where I inadvertently embraced the stereotype wholeheartedly.
I couldn’t talk to guys.
It wasn’t as if I was completely untrained in the world of men, having had a couple of serious relationships in the past, thank you very much. The problem was when everything was new. Hell, I struggled to converse with unfamiliar people in general. When you added in the element of attraction, it was a miracle I could even talk.
And as cute as the image of a blushing girl sounds, trust me, it’s not.
“Well…thanks,” I repeated, “for helping me back up and all.”
I tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and ducked my head. Now I wished I had kept that big hat of Sunshine’s. At least it would have covered my face, somewhat.
“Don’t forget these.”
I looked up to see my comics still in his hands.
“Thanks,” I said, blinking in surprise.
“Superhero fan?” he asked as I accepted the comics and hugged them to my chest.
“Yeah. Since I was a kid.”
“My kid sister’s into them too,” he replied. “My name is Alex, by the way.”
“Dawn,” I said. “Do you…like comics?”
“I’ve never tried them.” He shrugged. “I always assumed they were kinda simplistic. Black and white. Heroes and villains.”
I shook my head. “Actually, they’re a lot more complicated than you’d think.”
“Really?” Alex raised his eyebrows. “Well I guess I need to be re-educated.”
“Um…sure.” I somehow mustered up the guts to let out a small smile. “Thanks again.”
“Ah…anytime,” he said, a vague look of puzzlement on his face.
And with that, I turned and began walking back down the sidewalk before my face could turn red again. I heard the quick tap tap of heels as Sunshine made her way next to me.
“You did it again,” she said.
“Um…what?”
“That thing. You know, when someone leaves an obvious opening to continue the conversation, only to have you completely shut them down.”
“I don’t know what—”
“He was totally into you.”
“What?”
I spun around, half-tripping over my own two feet in the process. Alex was walking in the other direction, his attention on his smart phone.
“No,” I said. “He’s on his phone.”
“I’m talking about before. He introduced himself, made a comment about you being pretty—”
“He wasn’t talking about me.”
“He was looking at you. So it would be logical to assume that he was also talking about you. Then, he tried to start a conversation about a topic that was clearly meaningful to you, given the massive stack of comics you’re carrying. Oh, and that line about being re-educated? He had smoochies on the mind.”
“Since when does re-education equal romance? I thought that meant brainwashing.”
“It’s all about context!” Sunshine threw up her hands. There was a moment of silence as we started to walk down the street again. “Anyway, sorry if I’m being pushy. I know that it hasn’t been long since, well…”
Her voice drifted off. I glanced over to see her fidgeting uncomfortably with her backpack strap. Of course, it had been a little while since Mark and I had finished up. But, as Sunshine had said, it was all about context.
I sighed, shoving those memories where they belonged, locked away in the back of my brain.
It did make me realize one thing, though. Alex had asked for my name. Meaning he hadn’t recognized me. It had been a nice change, for once.
3
Alex
Well, you can’t win them all.
I turned around to watch Dawn and her friend walk away, her glossy black hair swaying as she moved. I shook my head. In my line of work, you don’t come across many pretty girls. Or at least ones I would want to ask out to dinner. And Dawn seemed like my type. Short, sweet, liked to read, and cute when she blushed? It had looked like a sign that maybe I wasn’t out of the dating pool quite yet. And then she had turned on her heel and walked away, proving I wasn’t as good at reading signs as I thought I was.
It was probably for the best. If her reading choices were any indication, I wasn’t exactly her type.
I turned my attention back to my phone. A text message showed up on the screen.
“We have a new target,” it said. “Be here by seven? Normal hazard pay applies.”
I typed in the Y key and pressed the send button before slipping the device back in my pocket.
I could mourn missed opportunities later.
For now, I had bigger things on my mind.
I hit the B2 button on the only functioning elevator in the Grand Bailey Hotel. The hotel had been open for a century before going under twenty years back. Since then, it had been abandoned, and for good reason. A bunch of the stairs had collapsed. The subbasements were mostly underwater. And if you ventured into the actual upper levels, you ran the risk of falling through the floors. As far as villainous hideouts go, it was pretty much as low-rent as possible.
But what Calypso lacked in décor, she more than made up for in numbers.
The elevator rumbled slightly as it made its descent. It had done a lot more than that my first week here, until Calypso had recruited some sort of repairman to keep her safest egress functioning. I had encountered him a few times. He was old and white-haired, friendly. It almost made you forget about the glossy, half-dazed look that arose in his eyes whenever Calypso’s name came up. The sight of it never failed to unnerve me.
Time to put it away…
As the elevator slowly made its way down, I took the moment to prepare myself for the job ahead. When I first started working for Calypso, I had kept what was important, the image of my sisters, in the front of my mind. They were why I had taken this job in the first place, after all. I couldn’t exactly cobble together mortgage payments with my paychecks from Colossus Fitness, never mind the rest of the bills. It hadn’t taken too long before I realized that thinking of my sisters only made things worse. Claire and Mariah were the loved ones of Alex Gage. And Calypso didn’t need Alex Gage in her army.
If she had, she wouldn’t have given me a different name.
So with every floor that passed, I locked away the pieces of myself too precious to bring into a job. I started with simple things. The sight of that pretty girl. The satisfaction I had felt after getting in a good workout earlier that day. Then I went deeper. My little sister, Mariah, bent over a pile of textbooks. Or my even younger sister, Claire, her face frozen in a permanent scowl. And then there was my final memory of my mother, lying on a hospital bed, attached to more tubes than I could count, telling me not to worry because God never gives you anything more than you can handle.
By the time I reached my floor, my face had hardened, my typical easy smile long gone. Suddenly the T-shirt and sweatpants I wore felt wrong, the clothing of another man.
I needed to get my uniform.
I pushed open the gate and stepped out onto a long, empty hallway lit by fluorescent lights. As I made my way across, the only thing I could hear was my own footsteps.
I wasn’t familiar with how the Grand Bailey had been run back when it was still a hotel, but it was obvious that this level had been staff-only. I turned left into what had been some sort of locker room. Even with the occasional puddle of murky water, it reminded me of high school. All that was missing was the slamming of locker doors and the laughter of students as they made their way to sports practice or to hang out with friends after school. I, on the other hand, had gone to the basement, where I had met up with the janitor for my after-school job. It often involved scraping chewed gum off the bottoms of desk chairs.
My work with Calypso, while far from legit, wasn’t that demeaning.
I found my way to a tall, skinny locker marked “431.” There was no lock, of course. The people who worked for Calypso weren’t the types to stray. The door let out a creak as I opened it and stared down its contents. Body armor, enough of it to fit my six-foot-five, heavily muscled frame, filled the locker. The top shelf held a helmet, the slit for my eyes covered in tinted glass. The only thing exposed would be my jaw. The armor and helmet were all in shades of gray, but at night, they looked black.
I placed my gym bag on the floor and reached for the armor.
Five minutes before seven, I walked into what had once been an underground parking garage, my helmet tucked under my arm. There were about thirty people already there, dressed in everything from business suits to ripped jeans. Some looked old enough to be living off of social security, while others were college-aged, their spotless Bailey U gear marking them as privileged rich kids. But while the group of them couldn’t have looked less diverse, one thing tied them together.
Their wide, glassy eyes.
“I’ve heard She’s planning something big.”
“Things are really moving forward.”
“The Mistress…”
I made my way past them to the front of the room, where a Smart Board stood, its screen covered in an array of images. In the garage, with its scuffed-up, oil-stained floors, it looked completely out of place.
But nothing could look as out of place as the woman who stood in front of it.
I don’t think Calypso owned a single piece of clothing that didn’t fit her perfectly. Her dress was made out of some sort of snakeskin type of fabric, and hit a few inches above the knee. Her matching shoes gave her multiple inches of height, although she fell far short of my own six-foot-five. Her blond hair was arranged in glossy curls, cascading down her back. She didn’t look at me as I stepped toward her, her gaze half-focused on the Smart Board in front of her, her middle and index fingers raised to her lips. But I didn’t need to meet her eyes to know what they looked like.
“Calypso,” I said with a nod.
“Faultline. On time, as always.” Her response was in her usual half-dazed, disconnected manner. I was used to it by now, but in the beginning, I often found myself wondering if she even realized who she was talking to.
“Is this the job?” I said, nodding toward the headshot in the center of the screen. It looked like a picture someone might take for a corporate website, a man dressed in a fancy suit and tie. He was African American, probably in his mid-fifties, and the shape of his face indicated that he was overweight. His hair and beard were speckled with gray.
“Arthur Hamilton,” Calypso replied, voice quiet. “He’s an attorney who works in the Commerce Center. Rather…successful.”
“Is it a robbery?” I glanced at the images next to the headshot. They were floor plans and notes about the security system.
Calypso turned toward me.
“No, I want you to bring him to me.”
I couldn’t help it. I felt a shiver run through me as her gaze hit mine, as could happened when I was unprepared for it. Her eyes were a strange, pale shade of green that went darker along the edge of the irises. Most people found her eyes to be beautiful, but I could never get over their lack of warmth.
And I knew what she could do with just the right look.
“Lemme talk. Lemme talk to Her. I—”
The annoyed protests of a man cut above the din of the crowd. I turned away from Calypso, whose gaze had gone distant once again.
I frowned. It was Matthew O’Sullivan, usually just called Sully. I recognized the dark hair and mustache right away. While Calypso’s drones came from all walks of life, Sully’s was known for being a little more…unsavory. In and out of jail since his teenage years, his rap sheet included theft, breaking and entering, and more violent crimes. While Calypso’s drones were, in theory, willing to do anything for her, Sully was one of the few with some real experience, which was why the fading bruises on his face didn’t faze me. While the crazy edge that came with The Curse clearly existed in this man, he was usually calm, albeit grumpy.
Today he looked disturbed.
“Don’t have to drag me…just need to talk…”
He pushed back against the two big guys who brought him forward. Bouncers, I assumed. I was sizable myself, and could only imagine the caloric intake required to bring these two muscle-bound fellows to their massive sizes.
They drew close, and Sully stumbled forward, muttering a curse under his breath. Calypso kept her back to them, remaining perfectly still.
“Mistress.” Sully straightened up. “Been askin’ to talk to you for days.”
“Have you?”
As she spoke, her voice was cool and detached, barely above a whisper. The room fell silent anyway.
“Yes,” he said. “The Dana Peterson job. It’s not my—”
“Not your fault?”
Sully scowled.
“Course it isn’t. Was all Martha! Should have seen how she was drivin’. All over the road. Hittin’ that fuckin’ light post.” He shook his head. “And Marty? Useless. Got in the way the entire time.”
I heard a sharp intake of breath. I looked across the crowd to see Marty Tong. It was rare to see him without a shit-eating grin on his face. Now he exchanged a nervous glance with Noel, a fellow Bailey U student and recent recruit.
Taking a closer look at Sully, I put the pieces together in my mind. Dana Peterson was some random dude who had almost been abducted while walking home from work the previous Friday. Two of his attackers had stumbled away right before the police had arrived, but the driver had been left behind, unconscious. The accident explained the bruises on Sully’s face, and the outcome clarified his stench and greasy hair. It had been a while since he had taken a shower. Probably a sign that Calypso had stuck him in one of the old hotel rooms. You know, the ones with the half-collapsed floors.
Of course, that hadn’t been the only thing I remembered hearing about the story. The only reason Peterson had gotten away was—
“Woulda been fine if it weren’t for that costumed bitch,” Sully said. “Little Miss Red and Black. The one that keeps showing up on the news rescuing puppies from burnin’ buildings and shit. Stronger than she looks, that one. Tore the door right off the van. Took out Marty like it was nothin’.”
“And what of Martha?”
Sully blinked.
“Martha.” He paused. “I saw her in the car. Not like she was dead.”
“Of course not. She’s spent the past five days in police custody.”
“Oh well that’s…” Sully frowned. “She wouldn’t say anything. Martha’s loyal—”
“Her loyalty is not suspect.” Calypso examined her fingernails. “Yours, on the other hand…”
“Me?” Sully blinked several times. “Mistress, I’ve been loyal to you from the beginning. Done everything you’ve asked. Would do more…” He paused, licking his lips. “I got Peterson in the van. Even pulled Marty from the wreckage. Useless as he was—”
Red and Black Page 3
