Defender Cave Bear: Protection, Inc: Defenders # 1

by Chant, Zoe

  She nodded. “I hacked into the VA computer system and then their own personal computers, collected the evidence, and sent it to the FBI and a bunch of journalists. And that’s what Override does. It’s illegal, but it’s to stop people who are doing much worse things than a little spying on the bad guys.”

  Now that Pete had gotten to know her a bit, her confession didn’t quite surprise him. Of course she’d take it upon herself to risk jail time to help strangers, solely because she saw it as the right thing to do.

  “So that’s me!” Tirzah threw out her hands. “The notorious Override!”

  Pete heard the nervousness underlying her bravado. Hoping she could see his sincerity, he looked into the depths of her brown eyes and said, “Listen to me, Tirzah. Sometimes what’s legal isn’t what’s right. Legal isn’t important to me anymore. Right is. If you need to go against the law because it’s the right thing to do, well…” Pete bit back the impulse to say, “Me too.”

  No. He could never tell her what he’d done. Pete might not be computer-smart enough to understand exactly how Tirzah did her thing, but he knew it basically came down to illegal typing. If she’d ever done anything violent in her life, he’d eat his pizza delivery box. He could hear her confession, but his would do nothing but scare and horrify her. And that would be the last he’d ever see of those gorgeous brown eyes.

  “…I got no problem with it,” he concluded. “Personally, I think you ought to get a medal. You did what needed to be done and no one else was doing. Now, tell me why you need a bodyguard.”

  Chapter 5

  Tirzah began with her encounter with “Jerry.” Pete was a good listener, occasionally asking questions that served to jog her memory or get her to focus on details that she hadn’t thought were important enough to include but which Pete clearly found relevant.

  He didn’t speak as she told him how Jerry had locked her in, but she could sense his building anger like a heat haze in the air around him. And when she said that she realized that Jerry was going to kill her, Pete interrupted.

  “You don’t have to worry about him. I’ll protect you.”

  She stared at him, taken aback. “I haven’t even finished my story. And, um, it involves you. Sort of. I mean even more than me spying on you. You might not want to make any promises till you hear it all.”

  The heat haze feeling intensified. Pete’s voice was low and dangerous as he said, “You said that asshole meant to kill you. I believe it. As far as me protecting you is concerned, that’s all that matters. If you still want to hire me, you got me. And if you don’t want me, then I’ll take you to the Defenders office and you can pick someone else from my team. They’re kind of, uh…”

  She watched him struggle for words, too fascinated to stop him. Was he going to mention hellhounds or circus acrobats?

  “…different,” he concluded. “But very competent. You’d be safe with any of them.”

  “I want you, Pete.” The instant she said it, she realized that it sounded like the most blatant innuendo. Her cheeks flamed. “So, um, thanks for the offer! Anyway, back to me locked in with Jerry in Sucks To Be You Square…”

  When she described running over Jerry’s toes, Pete said, “Right on!” and held up his hand in a high-five gesture. She slapped it. The solid crack of their palms meeting sent a pleasant shock through Tirzah’s body.

  Pete rocked back slightly, his eyes widening as if he’d grabbed a live wire. The dog tags he wore on a chain around his neck clinked together. Then he snatched up his coffee mug so fast that some slopped over the rim and bent his head way down to drink, hiding his face.

  She continued her story. But when she got to the contents of the Apex file, she stopped, feeling awkward about talking about Pete to Pete. “I have it here. You can read it for yourself.”

  She went to her desk, opened the file, came back with the laptop, and handed it to him. Pete began to read, the bluish light reflected in his eyes. And then Tirzah realized what she’d done.

  Normally, she wouldn’t let anyone else touch her laptop. But instead of printing the file and giving him the paper or emailing it to him for him to read on his phone, she’d passed him her entire laptop without so much as a twinge of concern.

  Even now that she’d had that thought, she didn’t worry that he’d try to peek at anything but the file she’d opened for him. For all that he’d barged into her apartment, he’d obviously meant it when he’d said he’d never go into her bedroom without permission. Tracking her down had been a job, nothing personal; all he’d known about her was that she’d been spying on him. But her bedroom was intimate space, and there he wouldn’t intrude without an invitation.

  He’s an old-fashioned gentleman, she thought. I didn’t know they made them any more.

  Pete was either a very slow or very thorough reader. Or else, like Tirzah, he needed to read the file multiple times before it sank in. Her coffee had cooled by the time he finally looked up.

  “You believe this file?” Pete asked.

  In reply, Tirzah pried Batcat off her shoulder, earning herself several more scratches, and held her up until she launched herself off Tirzah’s hand and vanished into the spare room. Black hairs slowly floated down in her wake, caught in the slanting rays of sunlight through the closed blinds.

  Pete spread his hands. “Fair enough.”

  “So,” Tirzah said, when he didn’t add more. “You can turn into a cave bear.”

  He nodded.

  Fascinated, she blurted out, “Can you show me?”

  “No!” Pete started halfway up out of his chair, nearly dropping the laptop.

  They both grabbed for it at the same moment, and both caught it. Their hands touched. His were so tense that his tendons felt like steel cables. He froze momentarily, and she actually heard his startled inhale. Then he sank back down into the chair and passed it over to her.

  “No,” he repeated, and went on shaking his head wordlessly in what had become a very heavy silence. At last, he said, “You don’t ever want to see that... that beast.”

  Tirzah was so curious about his reaction that she wanted to see it even more, or at least to know why he thought she shouldn’t. But it was obviously all so tied up with something incredibly traumatic that she didn’t want to push. To give him a break, she went on with her own story.

  “So there I was, reading that file for the fifteenth time in the middle of the night, when something teeny and furry and black smacked right into my window…”

  As she went on with the tale of how she’d acquired Batcat, the atmosphere lightened, and when she got to Batcat’s appropriation of her entire slab of lox, he actually laughed. He went on chuckling as she explained how she’d hijacked his computer, then described her two days of unbelievable boredom waiting for him to turn it on.

  “I was still waiting when you busted in,” Tirzah concluded.

  “Right. About that. Your apartment isn’t very secure. I walked right in.”

  “I’m surprised there wasn’t anyone outside the building. It’s usually got people hanging out.”

  “There was. I put on a pizza delivery jacket and carried two empty boxes.”

  “Oh.” An unpleasant heaviness settled into Tirzah’s stomach. “I’d been hoping my nosy neighbors would put off anyone coming after me.”

  “Maybe they have. It’s been a couple days. But I wouldn’t count on that lasting forever.”

  “What do we do then? A hotel?” Tirzah caught herself looking nervously around the apartment. She felt so safe in it, and she knew she could get around in it. That wouldn’t necessarily be true of anywhere else.

  A yowl and a thud made both of them start. It was followed by a series of flapping sounds, thuds, and frantic meows. Pete went to investigate, with Tirzah following.

  She gave an exasperated sigh at the sight of her bedroom door, which was open just wide enough to let in a very small kitten. “I could’ve sworn I closed it. Nuisancy cat! She gets into everything.”


  Pete was blocking her way, standing in the doorway and giving her an excellent view of his long legs and extremely fine backside. She cleared her throat, and he stepped aside, plastering himself against the wall to let her pass.

  Tirzah went into the bedroom, and immediately burst out laughing.

  “What is it?” Pete asked. “Need any help?”

  “I need you to take a look at my ridiculous kitten before I rescue her from her latest predicament. And yeah. I might also need some help.”

  Pete came in and also began to laugh.

  Batcat had methodically yanked all the pillows on Tirzah’s bed out of their cases, and dragged the cases on to the floor. Presumably in the middle of whatever the next step in her cunning plan was going to be, she’d gotten inside one of the pillowcases—a particularly nerdy Star Wars one—and had failed to figure out that the way in was also the way out. And so the disembodied and mostly flat head of Darth Vader was flying around the bedroom, meowing loudly.

  Tirzah made a grab for it, but missed. “I’m going to order a butterfly net.”

  “Good idea. Maybe get a fruit picker too.”

  Pete reached up, snagged Darth Vader by the throat, and turned the case inside out, freeing Batcat. The ungrateful kitten spat at him, then arrowed to Tirzah, landed on her shoulder with all claws deployed to the maximum, and burrowed into her hair.

  “Ow! It’s like living with a raccoon. With wings.”

  “I was just thinking it’s like living with a toddler,” Pete said. “With wings.”

  Tirzah looked ruefully at the mess on the floor. “This is why she’s not allowed in my bedroom. At least she didn’t get into the dollhouses.”

  Oops. Naturally, that prompted Pete to look at them. Tirzah’s face burned as the manliest man she had ever met walked over to examine her dollhouse collection. She could just imagine what he was thinking, that she was a case of arrested development or the world’s biggest nerd (well, that was possibly true) or a plain old weirdo (also probably true) or—

  “Love the ninja house,” Pete said.

  “You do?” Tirzah brightened.

  She went over to join him as he examined it. She’d put her entire collection of ninja action figures into an antique pink dollhouse. Black-clad ninjas crouched atop four-post beds, shuriken dangling from their fists, where more black-clad ninjas peacefully slept. Ninjas sat around a dining room table on which a feast had been laid, daggers poised to slice hams and stab loaves of bread. Ninjas took baths fully clad, slid down banisters, stood balanced on the saddle of a rocking horse, perched atop mantelpieces, and crouched resentfully in a playpen.

  “It’s great,” Pete said. “Makes me think I should take out my old action figures and give them a place to live in.”

  She grinned. “You totally should. Where are they now? In a bunch of dusty boxes in a closet?”

  “Yeah. What’s the point of that, huh?”

  “If you have them, you should enjoy them.”

  “Right.” He moved on to the next house over, which was a rare miniature of a big top circus. In the stage area, six dolls in frilly dresses balanced in a precarious pyramid with a rearing bear with a top hat standing over them. The stadium seating was completely filled with an entranced audience of porcelain elephants, lions, tigers, seals, and bears.

  Pete laughed. “Love it.”

  “See, that’s what you should do with your action figures. Have some fun with them. What are they, toy soldiers?”

  “Superheroes mostly. Batman, Superman, X-Men, that sort of thing. I was thinking maybe a military base. Make them go through an obstacle course, do rifle training, that sort of thing.”

  Inwardly, Tirzah rejoiced. So the manly man’s man was a secret nerd, just like her. Or maybe not even that secret. He hadn’t sounded the slightest bit embarrassed.

  “You can find stuff like that online,” she said.

  He waved off the suggestion. “Nah, nah. If I do it, I’ll build it myself. It’d be more fun.”

  “Build it yourself? Out of… clay? Legos?”

  “Wood. And string, I guess, for the ropes course. Wire for the fences. Yeah, I should do that. Later. Right now, the work I need to do is on your place. I can get some things from the office to make it safer. And I’ll stay with you, of course.”

  A flock of butterflies took flight in Tirzah’s stomach. Pete was going to stay with her. Of course she’d known any bodyguard would, but that was before she’d met her bodyguard. And then a completely different set of butterflies, or rather evil red-eyed moths, joined them at the thought of Pete leaving her alone, even for a brief office trip.

  “While you’re gone—” Tirzah began.

  Pete shook his head. “I’m not going anywhere without you. You’re coming with me. And so’s Batcat, if you have a carrier.”

  Tirzah had, in fact, ordered a carrier with two layers of black wire mesh, advertised as being for extremely escape-prone cats, which obviously Batcat was given what she must have escaped to get to Tirzah. The mesh also had the advantage of being impossible to see into.

  She hauled Batcat out of her hair, losing some of it in the process, and held her firmly as she told Pete, “It’s in the closet. Not the one you hid in, the one in here.”

  Pete retrieved it. Just as Tirzah had guessed, Batcat did her best impression of the Tasmanian Devil at the sight of it, hissing, spitting, thrashing, and flapping. Pete held the carrier door open, Tirzah shoved Batcat in, and Pete slammed and latched the door.

  “You carry her around before?” Pete asked.

  Tirzah shook her head. “I assume she learned what they were… wherever she came from. I don’t want to pry into, uh, anything you don’t want me prying into. But any time you want to tell me… whatever you want to me… about that, I’d really like to know.”

  Pete made a noncommittal noise.

  “You did promise,” Tirzah reminded him.

  “Yeah, I did.” He sighed. “I’ll tell you. Just not right now, okay? Let’s get to my office, come back, get everything squared away, and then I’ll tell you what I can.”

  “Is anyone else going to be at the office?”

  “God, I hope not,” Pete said in heartfelt tones.

  “You can’t see into the carrier,” Tirzah pointed out.

  “Wasn’t what I meant. Though actually, if none of the guys are there, I might have to call one or two of them. I’m not much of a tech guy, but some of them are.”

  “Ooh,” Tirzah said. “That should be fun. Well, fun for me.”

  “Oh, right.” Pete chuckled. “You and Carter might actually get along. You can talk about computer… stuff.”

  “And my neighbors? They’re going to see me leave with a cat carrier and the pizza delivery guy. How do I explain that?”

  “The carrier’s not a problem.” He went into the hall closet he’d hid in and took out Tirzah’s biggest suitcase. “I’ll put it inside this, just long enough to get it to my car. It’s thick enough that no one will hear her meow. As for me…”

  In the brief pause while Pete took a breath, Tirzah tried to think of any possible explanation for his 24-7 presence other than that he was her new boyfriend. She failed to come up with any that were actually plausible, after ruling out “roommate who accompanied her on strolls” and “personal assistant who lived with her,” neither of which made sense.

  Boyfriend it was, then. But how would she explain how she’d gone from dating to him moving in with her without ever saying a word about him and without him ever having come over before? A long-distance internet romance? Esther would probably hire a private eye to investigate Pete to see if he was a scammer or a serial killer or had a wife in every major American city, and then…

  “…that’s up to you,” Pete concluded. “We could come up with some kind of cover story, if you want. Or we say I’m your bodyguard because you have a stalker, which is true. You can describe Jerry to them, so they can alert me if they see him. They’re already protecting you; might a
s well get them working on our team.”

  Tirzah blinked. She was so used to keeping everything Override-related a secret, not to mention Batcat, that it hadn’t even occurred to her to simply tell the truth about Pete. But he was right: in this case, honesty really was the best policy.

  “Let’s do that,” she said. “If they’re delaying me too much, you hurry me on. Say I have to go to the office.”

  They left the apartment together. To Tirzah’s relief, the first person they ran into was Dalisay, the Navy vet, who clearly recognized a kindred spirit in Pete and took in their explanation with a businesslike nod.

  “I’ll tip off the rest of the building,” Dalisay said. “Save you the trouble.”

  “Thanks for your trouble,” said Tirzah.

  They hurried out of the apartment and to Pete’s car, where he popped open the suitcase to a series of indignant meows and stashed the carrier in the backseat. Tirzah slid into the front seat, lifting in her bad right leg, then instructed Pete in folding her wheelchair to fit it into the trunk.

  It was the first time she’d been in a car in months. She occasionally took taxis, as the subway could be hard to navigate with a wheelchair, but almost everything she wanted or needed was either already in her neighborhood or could be brought to her. But as she rode with Pete, she couldn’t help thinking of her car, gathering dust. She really needed to sell it if she wasn’t ever going to use it. But if she sold it, then she’d be admitting that she wasn’t ever going to use it.

  I’m not missing anything by not driving, she told herself as Pete, swearing under his breath, maneuvered around a traffic jam consisting of a double-parked car, and an extremely slow bus. An electric scooter came careening out of nowhere, forcing him to slam on the brakes. As its rider flipped Pete off before speeding away (illegally, on the sidewalk), she thought, Yeah. Really not missing anything.

  “Asshole!” Pete yelled, his face darkening with blood. Tirzah half-expected to see steam jet out of his ears. “Man, I hate it when people get away with that sort of crap. He could’ve really hurt someone.”