by Lauren Esker
Are we going anywhere specific? A tropical island, perhaps? Or just trying to get as far as possible from the Coast Guard, the U.S. Navy, and anyone else who might try to arrest us?
One thing for sure: she was way out of her jurisdiction now.
Which, on the bright side, meant nobody to tell her "Jen, you can't do that" or "You need a warrant to go in there."
And she needed to get a move on, rather than hanging around here gaping at the view like a yokel and giving the redcaps all the time in the world to interrupt her.
So what else was up here? The windows didn't wrap all the way around. There was a door beside the elevators. It was unlocked and opened onto—shock!—another short corridor, and beyond that—
It was a good thing she peeked before opening the door more than a crack. She'd stumbled upon the place where off-duty redcaps hung out, and there were a number of them. In her brief glimpse she saw a bar with a couple of people at it, tables and couches, and someone typing on a laptop by the window.
A whole room full of off-duty crew members ... hmmm. Surely someone had to have a key card on them.
Gecko time, Jen thought.
She eyeballed the space under the door. Unlike the tighter-fitting doors on the passenger levels, it looked navigable. As quietly as possible, she slipped back out to the elevator lobby and retrieved her stuff, letting the elevator doors slide smoothly shut.
Hope I can get back ...
The most discreet spot she could find was behind a potted plant. She stuffed her shopping bags into the corner, joined a moment later by her clothing, and shifted.
It was a tight fit under the doors. She hoped she didn't have too much trouble squeezing through with the key card. One problem at a time, though. First: don't get spotted or stepped on. She'd had plenty of practice at it. Once inside the lounge, she scuttled along the wall and around the bottom of the bar. What she really needed was—aha. Someone who had decided to get comfy, taken off their uniform jacket, and draped it over the bar stool next to them.
She scurried up the bar stool and plunked into a pocket where she spied a bulge. Yep. Wallet. She pried it open with her gecko feet and licked her eyeballs to see better. Credit cards ... tempting but no. Aha! Bingo. She pried out the key card and clamped it in her mouth.
Congrats, dude, you just got pickpocketed by a gecko.
She popped up her head and looked around. The guy she'd pickpocketed, sitting on the bar stool next to her, had his elbows on the bar and wasn't paying attention. He also had a tidy little Glock in a shoulder holster. Fun folks.
Jen dropped to the floor, timed her run carefully, and scuttled doorward. She was going to be a lot more conspicuous with the key card in her mouth. She got under the first door with no problem, and was scuttling down the corridor when the door at the far end started to open.
Shit!
She put on a burst of speed and managed to get behind the door as it opened. Now don't look back ... The door clunked shut, and she squirmed frantically underneath and bolted across the elevator lobby carpet, back to her hiding space.
Behind the plant, she shifted and spit out the suddenly much tinier key card. "Bleh," she muttered, wiping her mouth. The corners of her mouth hurt from the pressure of the plastic.
She got dressed and used the pass code to get back into the elevator, which took her to Deck C with no problem—at least until she stepped out, startling a redcap who was watering one of the nearby plants. "Hey!" he said. "You're not supposed to be in there without an escort."
"A nice crew lady let me on at the shopping arcade," Jen chirped. "She had to get off on Deck B, but she pushed the button for me. Isn't that okay?"
"I guess so," he said, but he watched her as she left the lounge.
Jen went to her own room first. She held her breath as she swiped the card. With a soft clunk, her door unlocked, and she eased out the breath she'd been holding. She dropped her shopping bags just inside the door.
Sorry, Lucky, no need for gecko wall-crawling after all.
Thinking of Lucky made her wonder how he was faring downstairs. It was almost three; he would have been playing for two hours now. If all went well, she probably wouldn't see him until evening, maybe even the following morning.
She also noticed that he'd left the window of their suite open for her gecko-self, just in case. She did love a thoughtful man.
Good luck, she thought in his direction, and slipped out of her room into the corridor.
There was no one else in sight. She walked quickly to Marius's door and pressed her ear against it for a long moment before swiping the card.
The door opened on a room identical to theirs in layout and style. Jen darted inside and shut the door as quietly as she could.
All right. I'm in. Now what?
First order of business: make sure she was truly alone. She peeked into each of the bedrooms and the bathrooms. It looked like Marius had come alone; only one of the bedrooms appeared to be in use, and there was just one toothbrush and a few small, male toiletry items in the adjoining bathroom.
Also, as she returned to the common room from checking the unused bedroom, a light breeze made her realize the window was open. Jen stared at that for a minute before shaking her head and moving on.
You may have won the bet, Lucky, but I am definitely going to find out how you did it. Don't think I won't.
It was much harder to get a read on a person from a hotel room than from their actual house, but her impression of Marius was of a tidy, fastidious person. His wardrobe seemed to consist entirely of identical dark shirts and suits, all hung without a wrinkle. His toothbrush and razor were neatly aligned on the back of the sink.
The only personal items in the room were both on his bedside table: a dog-eared paperback novel, written in what she was pretty sure was Italian, and a potted plant with sprays of white flowers. Valerian, presumably. Stubby, truncated stems indicated where some of its flower umbels had been clipped off.
What kind of weirdo traveled with a live plant? The kind who wanted a fresh bouquet for their buttonhole every day, it seemed. Could the plant be a hiding place for something? Jen peered into the foliage and poked a finger into the dirt, even lifted the pot to see if it was anomalously heavy. She considered and reluctantly discarded the idea of dumping it out and examining the dirt. As far as she could tell, it was just a plant. An ugly plant, to boot. The pot contained not just one plant, but a whole clump of them, and they all had a scrawny, thistle-like appearance, looking more like a roadside weed than something a person would take on an oceanic cruise.
No wonder Roxy didn't bat an eye at the idea of a lucky gecko, if this is what most gamblers are like.
Jen turned her attention to the book, picking it up and leafing through the pages. The cover showed an airplane being menaced by hijackers—light action-suspense reading, presumably. In contrast to Marius's immaculate neatness in other areas of his life, the book was a cheap and messed-up used copy, with some passages underlined and stray pencil marks on the pages.
.... Or maybe not stray at all. Many of the pencil marks looked too neat and tidy to fit the overall sloppy appearance of the book. Some pages were ticked at the side, some at the top. Some were ticked more than once. Some pages had no markings at all.
A book code, Jen thought. She couldn't prove it, especially as she didn't read Italian, but she would bet Roxy's entire gambling fund that somewhere out there, someone else had a copy of the same book, and Marius was passing messages in a near-unbreakable yet dead simple code. You couldn't break a book code if you didn't have the book yourself, but if you did, all you had to do was read the indicated words or letters in the right order and you'd have the message.
Jen flipped to the copyright page and made a mental note of the copyright date and edition before putting it back. Tempting as it was to steal it for a while, he'd definitely notice if that went missing.
She performed a quick sweep of the standard hiding places in the suite, looking un
der drawers, in toilet tanks, and behind pictures on the walls. The shower curtain rod in the unused bathroom, a last-resort hiding spot of desperate druggies everywhere, was where she got a hit. When she unscrewed the rod and tilted it down, a small object slid out into her hand. It was a glass vial, about two inches long.
Her heart tripped over and she held it up to the light. She didn't unscrew the top, but that rainbow shimmer on the small amount of oily liquid inside was unmistakable.
Marius had his own supply of Dragon's Tears.
But he was also playing in a high-stakes poker game for a huge supply of the drug. What did that mean? Drug dealer moving into a new market? Addict looking for a lifetime supply? Her opposite number from a foreign law-enforcement agency, seeking the drug's origin just as she was? Marius didn't read like a cop to her, but she hadn't met any Italian cops before. Maybe they had a shifter agency that operated even further outside the normal bounds of the law than the SCB did.
She tucked the vial back into its hiding place and hopped down from the edge of the bathtub. If only she had a camera to document this. The book, in particular, she wished she could photograph to study in detail.
Maybe I could write down a few of the words, try to figure out what they mean. At least I can determine what kind of messages he's been passing.
There was a complimentary pad of paper and a pencil on the coffee table, both in a little holder to keep them from rolling around on rough seas. She'd just picked them up when she heard the sound of a key card sliding in the lock.
No time to hide. The door was already opening. She dropped the pencil and took three quick steps backward until her back hit the wall beside the window. She could go out the window as a gecko, but there would be no hiding the pile of clothing she left behind. Maybe she could talk her way out of it.
Somehow.
Marius, looking considerably more rumpled and tired than he had at breakfast, stopped dead in the doorway.
"Hi," Jen said in her cheeriest voice. "So, this is awkward."
Marius's lips compressed into a thin line. He stepped inside and let the door fall shut behind him with an ominous clunk. "What are you doing in my room? How did you get in here?"
There wasn't really a non-suspicious answer to that one.
It turns out my key card also works in your door, and I just happened to get our rooms mixed up ...
I was trying all the door handles in the hallway, and yours wasn't locked ...
I turned into a gecko and mistook your window for mine ...
Actually, if he really was some variety of shifter, that last one might be believed.
"So that's how it's going to be," he murmured, and shook his sleeve. Something small and slender slid out into his hand. Jen's eyes opened wide. She couldn't tell from here what it was (tiny zip gun? taser? poison dart thrower?) but it was some kind of weapon for sure, designed to slip past their hosts' pat-downs.
Marius made a quick movement with his weapon hand.
Jen clutched the windowsill and shifted, letting her altered mass flow to the position of her hand. As the world expanded rapidly around her, she heard something thunk into the wall where she'd been standing. Marius let out a startled curse.
Jen scuttled hastily out the window.
You weren't supposed to shift in front of normals. Not ever. She figured desperate times called for desperate measures, however.
The shifter PR cleanup crew is going to have some choice words for me when I get back to Seattle.
Glancing back, she saw Marius lean out the window. She tensed for evasive action, but he didn't try another shot. Maybe his little dart gun was a single-shot device. Maybe he just didn't think he could hit a moving gecko on the side of a building. Jen stuck out her gecko tongue at him and scuttled off hastily.
So what was in that thing? Poison? Sedative?
Who the fuck ARE you, Marius?
She scrambled through their open suite window and shifted as she leaped. She landed naked on her feet and realized in the same instant, with a cold shock, that she was not alone in the room. A strange woman was standing near the minibar.
Jen had a terrible moment when she thought she'd gone into the wrong room, but no, those were her shopping bags by the door. While she'd been searching Marius's room, this stranger had been poking around in hers.
Worse, the instant zing of shifter recognition hit Jen like a mallet between the eyes. This woman was one of her own kind, like Onyeka.
The other woman was olive-skinned and slender, with dark hair cut in a stylish bob. She wore a deep gold pantsuit and a delicate ruby-studded chain around her long neck. Everything about her screamed taste, refinement, and money. And yet, there was something familiar about her too. Had she been at breakfast? No, Jen would've felt the shifter connection then.
They stared at each other, and then the stranger bolted for the door.
"Hey!" Jen yelped.
The other woman lunged out the door and slammed it behind her. Jen reached it an instant later and yanked it open. She was just in time to hear another door slamming somewhere along the corridor.
She stood naked in the doorway, looking up and down the row of identical doors. The stranger's room couldn't have been that far away. Within a few doors of her own, at any rate.
She grabbed a robe from the bathroom and padded down the corridor, pausing at each door to listen. A rare few shifters could feel others' presence without being able to see them. Lucky clearly was able to, from the way he'd reacted to her on the Fair Lady. Jen was not that gifted, but that didn't stop her from listening at each door and straining her sense to the utmost, trying to feel that elusive glimmer of recognition. A lot of shifters said they recognized their own kind by smell, or something akin to a smell, but to Jen it felt more like the faint quiver when something brushes against the tiny hairs on your arm.
But she still couldn't do it through a closed door. She heard a shower running behind door #7, and someone rustling around faintly behind door #2, and made note of those. It was the silent rooms, though, that intrigued her even more. She stood for a long time outside #5, convinced that she could sense someone there, as if someone else might be pressed up against the other side of the door, listening to her—
"What on Earth are you doing?"
Roxy had come out of the neighboring suite, #3.
Jen did a quick cost-benefit analysis of the pros and cons of telling the truth. "Someone was in our room."
"Doing what?" Roxy asked, her flinty eyes sharp.
"I don't know. Searching the place, maybe? She went into one of these rooms, but I don't know which one."
"Dorian," Roxy said over her shoulder, and the henchman came out, wearing a tropical shirt and carrying a drink in one hand. "Sweep their room."
Dorian looked vaguely disgruntled, but he nodded and vanished back into the room, coming out a moment later with his bug-checking rig. Jen followed him. If the intruder had left any evidence, she wanted to see it.
"Caught in the shower?" Roxy inquired, drifting in after her with a glance at Jen's robe.
"Napping, actually," Jen lied glibly. "I was in the bedroom. I don't think she knew I was in the suite at all. I guess she must've assumed, with Lucky playing cards, the room would be empty."
"Not a safe assumption at all," Roxy said. "The losers have been coming back upstairs all afternoon, and by now, some of the winners too."
Jen wondered which of those two categories Marius fell into, and just what exactly was going to happen to the losers. "I'll keep that in mind."
As if to underscore the point, a door closed outside, somewhere down the hall. Jen dashed to the doorway to check if it was Gold Pantsuit, but the hallway was empty. It must have been another guest coming back.
Marius, she noted, hadn't come out to see about the commotion. He was probably still trying to figure out what she'd gotten up to in his suite.
"Two new bugs, ma'am," Dorian reported. "Minibar and bedroom lampshade."
"Ama
zing," Roxy murmured. "They never learn."
"I'd like to get dressed, if you don't mind," Jen said pointedly.
After she got them out of her suite, she dumped out the shopping bags and ripped the tags off. At least she had something to change into. She'd left her other clothes on Marius's floor, along with most of her remaining cash and, regrettably, the key card.
Which meant she'd just given Marius a skeleton key to any of the rooms. Nice one, Jen. A+ spying.
I hope Lucky's having a better afternoon than I am.
Chapter Eight
Lucky arrived in the Deck C lounge half an hour before his designated playing time. Mainly, he wanted to avoid Roxy trying to give him any more pre-game pep talks. And it might be interesting to see who showed up early.
Nearly everyone, it seemed. At breakfast the tone in the room had been one of cautious friendliness, but now wary hostility hung in the air. The casual little conversational groups had broken up; the spouses, assistants, and other hangers-on were absent. The only people in the lounge now were the gamblers, all of them solitary, holding cups of coffee they didn't bother drinking from and watching each other with hard, assessing eyes.
Marius strolled into the lounge a few minutes after Lucky took a seat in the corner. His head swiveled in Lucky's direction as if pulled by an invisible string, and once again Lucky felt that soft ping of connection between them.
Marius averted his eyes and went to the coffee machine as if that had been his plan all along.
Lucky had suspicions about Marius that he hadn't been able to voice to Jen. Since dragons existed in the world, perhaps other kinds of supposedly mythological creatures did as well. From Gorgons to sea serpents to vampires, maybe it was all real.
Marius did have a vampiric sort of look to him ...
