“No,” I told Sonny after a few moments. “That bastard’s eaten enough of my sugar to thank him for a hundred helpful notes to hot-ass men in suits.” Tapping the pencil on the desk twice, I sighed out an oath and scribbled the only thing that was really important.
Dear Candy Thief,
Are you sticking around? Do I need to start buying twice as many Twinkies?
—Gwen
Sonny and I headed back into the kitchen, where I stuck the note to the fridge and pulled out some of the food Chloe had made me. It was vegetables, but she’d saved my life; it seemed rude to let her food go to waste.
***
The next morning I headed into work early. I had missed too many appointments to count recently and I had a lot to catch up on. I was planning on calling each of my clients personally and offering them make-up appointments to help assuage my guilt. I was even willing to come in early or stay late where necessary. If Loraine wanted to see me four days this week, I would armor my empathy against her depression and give her all the tissue in the office. Chloe insisted that no one had been outraged when she’d canceled or rescheduled, but I still felt bad.
As I flipped on the kettle and stepped out of the records room, I realized that I’d never actually dealt with the payment that had been given to me by Laurel and Hardy. I eyed it suspiciously, wondering if Chloe, with her sudden wealth of preternatural knowledge, would know what it was or what I should do with it.
Deciding I was a little too nervous to risk opening the box and having my face eaten off—which would not have surprised me, considering recent events—I picked it up gingerly, carried it to my office, and locked it in my file cabinet. I stared down at the wooden drawer for what could probably be considered an unnecessarily paranoid amount of time before I let my breath out and decided I was safe.
I turned my computer on, leaned back, and waited for it to power up. My gaze fell on a pink sticky note on the side of my pen cup. I grabbed the square and read it over without hesitation.
You should definitely buy twice as many Twinkies! And you should memorize the fridge. I won’t be around all the time, but the fridge has everything you need to know.
“The entire fridge?” I demanded, thinking of the hundreds of messages that had been left. Rolling my eyes, I mumbled, “Fat chance.”
Crumpling up the paper, I went to toss it in my trashcan. Just as, I’m sure, the candy thief had meant it to happen, I noticed another message stuck to the side of the bin. I grabbed it, sighing at the note that said, Don’t roll your eyes. You'd be dead several times over if it weren't for me.
I crumpled that paper up, too, tossed it in the can, and turned back to find that I hadn’t previously noticed my top middle drawer was cracked open. There was a note there, too, and I had to pull the drawer open to read it. The entire thing had been filled with unwrapped Skittles, Tootsie Rolls, and a few wafer cookies. The scribbles on the note above said, A bribe, then. Trust me on this. I can’t be around all the time and you’re going to need those insights.
“Well, that’s not ominous at all,” I said with a gulp, glancing at the locked file cabinet in case the blue box got any ideas. When nothing happened, I turned to consider how dusty my drawer had been before buckets of loose sweets had taken up residence. Deciding I didn’t care, I reached in and stuffed a handful of my free bounty into my mouth. I was on my third handful when the outer door opened and Chloe called my name.
“In here!” I said, barely audibly.
I got two more mouthfuls down before Chloe stepped in, noticed I was eating candy at seven in the morning, and sighed.
“Is that chocolate?”
“No,” I said around a hunk of the same. Chloe rolled her eyes and I wished I hadn’t crumpled the candy thief’s second note. She made her way around my desk, her eyes going wide when she saw my haul.
“What’s all this?”
Instead of answering, I handed her the third note with one hand and reached in to grab more candy with the other. Chloe slapped my reaching hand before she took the note, reading it over with a slight crinkle in her brow.
“The candy thief left you... candy?”
“A bribe. He’s good.” When I reached for it again, she knocked my hands away and shut the drawer with her knee, leaning against the desk so I’d have to bump her leg to get at it again. I frowned down at the drawer, willing the candy to teleport to my tongue.
“So you have a guardian angel now?” Chloe asked. I shrugged, finished chewing, and swallowed the last of the candy before speaking.
“Maybe. I guess. I tried asking it why it kept bothering me and it gave me some nonsense about keeping me alive.”
Chloe's eyes went wide. “You don’t seem concerned.”
“You didn’t, either, remember? You wanted to feed it peanuts. Which, if it wanted peanuts instead of Twinkies, I’d be thrilled.”
“Well—” Before she could get any further, I spun my chair slightly to face her, pointing up into her face.
“Speaking of being concerned, what the hell, Chloe? A few days ago you were squeaking in terror when Laurel and Hardy showed up and then you’re pulling a gun on a demon and going Van Helsing on a vampire. What happened?”
Discomfort rumbled like a storm, but her expression remained mild. After a few seconds, she shrugged, her gaze focused on the floor as if she’d spotted something worth considering. She reached to grab it before I could see what it was and tossed it in the trash. When she leaned back against the desk again, I couldn’t help but notice she wasn't blocking me from my drawer full of candy anymore. I decided to play it cool, but I was itching to get back at the mixture. The thief really knew his candy pairings. If there was such a thing as a sugar sommelier, I was betting the thief was the best in the world.
“I grew up in Bremerton,” Chloe said after a few seconds, as if that explained it all. I frowned when she didn’t elaborate.
“And?”
“You know.” She waved her hand and I shook my head.
“I never know anything. I can’t even answer questions on Celebrity Jeopardy. Who do you think you’re talking to here?” Despite the fact that I was convinced Chloe would stop me, I yanked open the drawer and reached in. Chloe blew out a breath, her eyes roaming to the window for a second before she shrugged and made a noncommittal sound.
“It’s weird up there. Portland’s got nothing on us. If you know where to look, that is. I went to school with several kids like you, actually.”
“Empaths?” I managed. Chloe frowned at my garbled speech, plucked a tissue from the mini-box on my desk, and dabbed at my chin.
“You’re drooling.”
“Of course I am,” I managed before swallowing. “This is delicious. I repeat? Empaths?”
“Only in one case. There were two girls and one guy. Your kind seem to be mostly ladies, from what I've seen. Now, Daniel could sort of see sounds, even when they were well outside his hearing range. It was like synaesthesia.” I opened my mouth to ask. “Google it,” she said before continuing. I shut my mouth. “But it was more than that. We used to play this game where he’d write down three phrases in Morse code and we’d go to our classrooms and tap one of the phrases out. Even though we were all several classrooms away from him and we were just knocking gently, he could always pick it up.”
“And then one day you needed to shoot him?”
“What? No!” Chloe shook her head, laughing fitfully as if she hadn’t expected my comment to be funny. “I just knew from when I was a kid that there were other… things out there. It wasn’t just them, either. I went to school with a werewolf and a troll, too. Half-troll, so she looked mostly normal, but still.”
“A troll?” I demanded, my jaw dropping open. “Trolls exist?”
“Pretty sure all sorts of things exist.”
“But—”
“Once I saw you were in danger,” she interrupted just forcefully enough to shut me up, “I had to jump in. I had a gun, I used it. You know me.” She
waved her hand like it was no big deal. “When things go to shit, I really shine. I go into ass-kicking mode. How many insurance companies have tried to stiff you on a technicality?”
“But—” I tried again. Chloe pressed on.
“What are you expecting me to say, Gwen? That I’m covertly with the Secret Service and working for you is only a cover? You see me nearly every day. Have I ever touched my ear and said, ‘The Eagle has landed’ in a shifty whisper?” Chloe grinned, reaching down to shut the drawer before wagging her brows. “Enough of this, now; my childhood is boring. Let’s talk something interesting, like how you’re dating Mel.”
“Ugh!” I spat, snarling at the very idea. Chloe dissolved into a fit of giggles.
“You two went on a date! You spent the night at his house! That’s dating, my friend.”
“We didn’t date! It wasn’t a date! We had some wine and we each made a pizza. His was better than mine, so I took it. You don’t take someone’s pizza if you’re dating them.”
“So you’re saying he ate your pie?”
I scowled up at her, yanked the candy drawer out petulantly, and shoved at her with my other hand. “Get out. I have candy to eat. You have insurance companies to yell at.”
“Well, call me if you need dating advice.”
“I’ll call you if I start to consider dating Mel so you can shoot me.”
“Think of all the homemade pizza you could eat!” Chloe said, hopping to her feet. I swung out toward her like I’d hit her, but she dodged easily, giggling as she skirted the desk. “You have a nine-fifteen to start, but I’ll let you know if I have to go save the president and can’t stay that long.”
“Get out!” I repeated, grabbing for more candy. Chloe winked and danced out the door, pulling it almost closed. I snarled after her, deciding that if she was dumb enough to think I could be into Mel, she was much too stupid to be hiding some big, secret life from me.
As I munched irately on my tangy, chocolaty, wafery bundle of deliciousness, I considered the last week, wherein I’d been hired by fairies, bewitched by a demon, nearly seduced by a werewolf, kidnapped by a vampire, and rescued by my gun-toting best friend. All things considered, sharing pizza and wine with Mel hadn’t been the worst thing to happen, but I wasn’t going to tell Chloe that.
Mixed Feelings (Empathy in the PPNW Book 1) Page 25
