Crash Morph: Gate Shifter Book Two

by JC Andrijeski

  “See,” I said, lowering my voice to a near whisper, even though no one stood near us. “It’s stuff like that, Nik. You can’t talk about stuff like that...not in public.”

  “I will stay with you from now on,” he said, not a trace of a question mark in his words. His still-dark eyes met mine. “And you will explain these things to me. I will listen to what you tell me, Dakota...but no more going out without protection. Not until the immediate threats are dealt with.” Probably feeling the anger rising in me at his words, he cut me off. “If you wish for me to obey you in these things, then you need to obey me in certain areas, too, Dakota. Gantry agrees with me. You are in danger...”

  Likely seeing the protest rising to my eyes and lips again, he cut me off a second time.

  “I do not only mean this person,” Nik said, his voice hard. “Although he has already said he intends to try and hurt you. I mean Razmun, too. I mean whoever has this contract out on you. I mean your own government...in addition to the people we know want you dead. Like it or not, your situation is changed. Pretending you can go back to your old life, only with me here, is delusional. So you must bend, too, Dakota. You must.”

  I heard the deeply stubborn note there, along with a flare of anger I probably felt through the lock.

  “A compromise,” he added, his voice still slightly hard.

  I shook my head, but didn’t bother to argue with him.

  Clearly, that wasn’t going to cut it for him.

  “A compromise, Dakota,” Nik said again.

  I gave him a look. “Fine. We’ll talk about it later, okay?”

  “You agree that this is both ways?”

  I let out a frustrated sigh. “Yes.”

  I mean, shit. What else could I say? I knew he was right, which was why I needed thinking time to regroup so I could argue with him.

  “Yes, I agree, Nik,” I said to his continued stare. “...In principle. But I’m not going to talk particulars with you right now. Or here. We’ll do that at home.”

  There was a pause.

  Then Nik nodded.

  I didn’t see anything in his expression relax.

  I found myself gritting my teeth when I remembered how little he’d listened to me when he had that Bundy guy dangling from the lamp post. Nik might say he would listen to me more, once I’d explained things to him, but I had my doubts. Nik barely toed the line when he’d been a slave, all of his pretend subservience aside. So yeah, hanging around with me clearly wouldn’t be enough to keep Nik from doing dangerous things.

  But I forgot about all of that when Nik spoke next.

  “I would very much like to talk to you about the status of personal matters between us,” Nik said. He made a motion I recognized from Palarine as a gesture of respect, almost an asking of permission. “Is it possible to request that of you now? Or would you rather if I asked again later? When we are more likely to be able to speak in private?”

  Jake burst out into a laugh, sounding more like his old self again.

  “I think you just did ask,” he told Nik cheerfully. Clapping both me and Nik on the shoulder with his arms and hands as he pulled us three of us closer together, Jake grinned at me. “Well, Dakota? Are you going to answer your yummy friend? Personally, I found it quite sexy when he stood up to you just now...even apart from taking on that demented ape all by himself.”

  Looking between the two of them, I felt my frustration worsen.

  Without a word, I extricated myself out from under Jake’s arm, sliding out of the space opposite of Nik before I turned, walking down the sidewalk on those ridiculous heels to get away from both of them.

  “Chicken!” Jake called after me good-naturedly.

  When I glanced back, however, Nik hadn’t moved.

  He watched me with narrowed eyes, a slight frown on his lips, and an expression that held more than a little frustration, too.

  6

  The Return of Razmun

  The three of us bussed it home.

  Once I got there, I spent about an hour comparing notes with Irene back at the house.

  Gantry showed up while I was still chewing on a sandwich from one of Irene’s rickety couches out on the porch. I’d just been sitting there, really, looking out over a view of the city and that stunning blue sky as it faded into indigo blue with the sunset.

  I’d learned a long time ago to take the time to appreciate weather like this. It wasn’t unheard of in Seattle, sure, but blue skies were far from a given.

  Anyway, I was still enjoying being on Earth.

  The city seemed to wake up when the sky cleared, partly because we all appreciated it, I suspect, but also because a lot of things that looked gray normally suddenly brightened with color. It could be difficult to remember what they even looked like under direct sunlight...or even what color they were...until the clouds cleared.

  Like Irene’s house for example.

  I remembered now that it was a peculiar shade of washed out, dingy, lime green, with peeling white trim gone gray with car exhaust and whatever else. It was a color you could only really get away with in a place with weather like Seattle’s.

  It also made me realize that the lime green thing was kind of a pervasive motif in Irene’s life in general. Although it still didn’t explain some of her choices in furniture.

  Tomorrow, I knew her house might well dim back to that blander, green-tinted gray. Even now, I could see mountain-shaped cumulous clouds massing over the water in the distance, fading from their dramatic oranges, reds and golds against that dark blue from the setting sun. By full nightfall, that cloud cover would be back to blanketing the city.

  I didn’t care. You really have to learn to live in the moment, when it comes to Seattle weather. Appreciate the now. Ignore the percentages.

  Besides, mostly I was just relieved beyond expression that I again wore what I considered normal clothes. Meaning no high heels, no skin-tight dress, no over-processed hair that might catch on fire if anyone lit a match too close to me. I stripped off all that gear and took a shower pretty much the minute I walked through Irene’s door, smiling under the hot water of her temperamental spigot like a little kid on Christmas.

  I’d already decided I’d had enough of trying to blend in at the modeling agency.

  Now that we had the employee files in our hands, I fully intended to dress like a regular human being if I had to go back there in person...whether Jake approved, or came with me, or not. Sitting cross-legged on the slightly moldy-smelling couch, munching on a tuna melt sandwich on rye bread and wearing black jeans, no shoes, and a silk-thin band t-shirt that was about to fall apart from countless washings, I was sharing a contented moment with the greater Seattle area, even knowing that my moment of peace would likely soon be broken.

  When Gantry tromped up the steps from the curb to the house in his motorcycle boots, he paused when he saw me sitting there. Glancing around to see if we were alone, he grinned in the general direction of my face and hair when he realized we were.

  “That’s an interesting look for you,” he said. “If you had any more make-up on, I might not have recognized you, Tonto.”

  I sighed a bit, realizing I must not have washed my face very well.

  Damned steamed mirrors.

  “I’m going for clown hooker,” I said. “Do you like?”

  “Crying clown hooker, I take it?” He quirked an eyebrow and one side of his mouth as he motioned towards his own face.

  I gave a mock-dramatic sigh. “Even clown hookers have bad days.”

  Gantry chuckled, walking over to join me on the couch. Sinking down to sit beside me, he was still smiling when he rested his arms on his thighs, letting his hands hang out over open air.

  “I hear you had an actual run-in with psycho-boy,” Gantry said, his smile fading somewhat. “That prick stockbroker. What’s his name...Evers.”

  I frowned, still munching my newest bite of sandwich. It hadn’t occurred to me until then that I’d forgotten the stockbrok
er’s real name. I’d gotten so used to calling him Bundy in my mind, his real name kind of lost its punch.

  “That’s right,” I said, remembering. “Michael Evers.”

  Gantry smiled, nudging me with his shoulder. “You say that like you’re hearing it for the first time. You didn’t forget this guy already?” Hesitating a second when I didn’t answer, he glanced at the door into Irene’s house, then said in a lower voice.

  “I hear your alien friend got a little overexcited. With Evers, I mean.”

  When I frowned through the chewing of the rye and tuna, Gantry shook his head, as if tired.

  “...You need to control him, Dakota,” Gantry said. “You need to explain to him that he can’t go postal on a bunch of suits in downtown Seattle. He’s going to get all of us in a shit-storm of trouble. As it is, if we were smart, we wouldn’t let the guy leave the house.”

  “I told him,” I said, giving Gantry a look.

  “Tell him again,” Gantry said, without missing a beat.

  Thinking for another minute, I contemplated arguing, then only shrugged, conceding his point. “Yeah,” I said, swallowing the rest of my mouthful. “Okay. I will. We’re supposed to talk about all of that, actually.”

  “Good,” Gantry said, relaxing a little. “...Not that I’m not grateful he’s got your back,” he added. “I saw a little bit of your friend in action. Let’s just say I wouldn’t want to piss him off.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, swallowing the last of my last bite. I glanced up at Gantry, letting him know I wasn’t teasing, not entirely. “...You wouldn’t.”

  “That wasn’t super subtle of you, either,” he added, his voice more of a mutter.

  I looked up, frowning a little, but his expression remained unapologetic.

  “Dakota, I told you to keep a low profile for awhile,” he said, sighing in exasperation. When I opened my mouth, he gave me a harder look, one with an overt warning. “I just said it. Yesterday. You shouldn’t take this job, if it’s going to make you visible, chica. I mean it. I said no field work, remember? There are people looking for you.”

  I gave Gantry an outraged laugh, but he cut me off before I could speak.

  “I mean it, Tonto,” he said. He caught hold of my arm, the same one attached to the hand that gripped my sandwich. “I’m worried about you. You need to keep your head down until I figure out who’s after you. Please.”

  “I am keeping my head down,” I said, pulling my arm away in annoyance.

  “Really? How is Nik physically threatening stock brokers on the street ‘low profile,’ exactly? Explain that to me.”

  “I’m not sure getting accosted by a serial killer on the sidewalk qualifies as ‘field work,’ either, G-Man,” I retorted, giving him another disbelieving stare. “Jeez. You act like Evers is my fault. What do you want me to do? Wear a burka?”

  Gantry didn’t smile.

  Instead, his face seemed to grow taut, right before he let out another exhale. I watched him as he seemed to wrestle back and forth before saying the next thing.

  “Dakota...”

  “I don’t want to talk about me and Nik, Gantry,” I cut in.

  “Are you sleeping with that thing?”

  “Thing?” I gave another humorless laugh, looking at him. “Nice, G-man.”

  “He isn’t human,” Gantry pointed out. “What would you call him? A pet?”

  I shook my head, but glanced back at the door to the house, in spite of myself. I lowered my voice. “I wouldn’t let him hear you calling him that, Gantry. I mean it.”

  “Just answer the question, Tonto.”

  “No,” I said, that time a little incredulously. “I’m absolutely not talking to you about me and Nik. Or my sex life. No way.”

  “Why not?” Gantry said. He clenched his hands on the tops of his thighs, drawing my eyes down. His voice sounded openly frustrated. “You’ve never kept secrets from me before.”

  “It’s not a secret,” I said, lowering the sandwich back to my lap. “It’s just none of your damned business. And I don’t have to explain why I don’t want to talk about it with you.”

  I could tell from Gantry’s face that my response didn’t satisfy him. Before he could figure out another way to ask me the same thing, Irene poked her head out the door.

  “You’ll want to come inside,” she said to me.

  She looked between us, and I could see from her face that she’d just noticed she’d interrupted something, but also that it was too late to un-interrupt it.

  “...It’s important,” she said, her voice more subdued. “Nihkil sees someone he knows. On television,” Irene added, as if it just occurred to her that she’d forgotten to tell us that part. “...Someone like him. He says you know him, too, Dakota.”

  Glancing at Gantry, I felt my mouth twist into a frown.

  Then I grabbed the lumpy armrest of the couch and hauled myself to my feet.

  Before I even got inside, I had a feeling I already knew who I would see.

  Sure enough, the first thing I saw when I rounded the corner into Irene’s sitting room, and glimpsed the concave surface of Irene’s old-fashioned, cathode-ray-tube television set that sat hunched in one corner of the room like an angry gorilla...was Razmun.

  Yeah, that Razmun.

  The guy who pretended to be human, and who pretended to be Nik’s only friend among the humans of Palarine. The guy who pretended to be keeping us safe from terrorist attacks while he organized and perpetrated them himself.

  The guy who blew up a bunch of mostly-innocent people during Nik’s trial to gain ownership of me and Nik from the Palarine military. The guy who later kidnapped us, threatened to kill me, and proceeded to tell Nik how he would be conscripted into Razmun’s terrorist army as Razmun’s personal, on-call gate-shifter.

  All of this was in the name of viva la revolution and death to the human scum and yadda yadda yadda. The usual terrorist crap.

  While Razmun might have some pretty legitimate reasons for feeling the way he did (centuries of slavery for his people, forcible conscription into the human military, morph being required to breed with humans to solve human infertility problems, being coerced into taking human owners as lock-mates and on and on), it didn’t really balance the scales, in my eyes. It also didn’t make him significantly less crazy than the crazies on Earth who strapped bombs to their chests and stepped into crowds of innocent people, thinking that was the answer.

  Needless to say, I wasn’t thrilled to see Razmun again.

  This happened to be Razmun’s human form, the one I once knew as Ledi, General Advisor to the Palarine Military Council.

  Watching Ledi speak into a microphone that a Seattle news reporter had thrust into his face was a pretty surreal experience, all in all.

  It took a few seconds more before I could get a handle on his words.

  “...Several of us saw it happen,” Razmun said seriously, answering a question posed by the reporter standing beside him.

  Razmun’s hazel eyes looked weirdly dramatic in the lights of the camera...but he looked, indisputably, human. He motioned towards a smoking building in the background, which I recognized as one on Yesler Street, in downtown Seattle.

  “...At least two of us saw a woman there,” Razmun said. “She left the building wearing a black backpack. She ran out right after the blast, along with two men wearing what looked like combat armor...”

  The reported looked at the camera, her face and mouth grim as she held a hand to her earpiece, speaking into her microphone. “For those of you just joining us, I’m here with our newest Council member candidate, Lars Falk, who happened to be inside the building working when the bomb went off. He is one of several claiming to see several persons of interest leave the scene wearing suspicious clothing, just prior to the blast going off...”

  “Councilman,” Gantry muttered next to me.

  My mind spun around the information, too. I shoved it aside a second later as the reporter turned back towards Razmun.<
br />
  Her mouth still set in a grim line, she said, “Can you tell us anything else, sir? Did any of the alleged suspects say or do anything when you saw them?”

  She thrust the microphone back under his mouth even as Razmun shook his head, his expression showing just the right mix of concerned citizen and shock.

  “No,” he said, as if thinking, staring past her into the burning building. “No...not that I can recall. They were running...and their clothing was strange, like I said. Especially for that time of night. I was between meetings and so in the hallway, or I may not have seen them at all. But I remember the woman’s face...” he said, trailing briefly. Shaking himself, as if still fighting shock, he added, “We’re hoping building security can retrieve the footage of the event. There is surveillance all throughout that building, since it it government owned, so it’s reasonable to believe that images of the perpetrator exist...”

  From the couch, I saw Nik stiffen.

  Or maybe I felt it.

  Giving him a questioning look, I glanced back at the screen when he didn’t return my gaze.

  Razmun was still talking, telling the reporter about how those of them who survived got out of the building, helping one another and carrying the injured to the fire exits. I have to admit, he was pretty compelling to listen to...and to watch...just as he had been on Palarine. The guy was a born politician, and his human form seemed to affecting the female reporter, even now, with the remnants of a bomb burning the building behind her.

  Meaning he was hot, yeah. He knew how to carry it with a quiet confidence that somehow made it all the more compelling.

  That time, Nik gave me a hard stare.

  I shrugged, unapologetic.

  It was true. Didn’t mean I wanted the guy or anything...far from it. But I couldn’t help noticing it. More than anything, I found it disturbing because I knew how far he might get with a combination of that and being a morph and having zero scruples.

  “...I’m just glad most of us got out all right,” Razmun was saying, even as I thought it. His eyes brightened then, right before he shook his head. “Not all of us did, of course. But I’d rather not talk about that now, if you don’t mind. I know some of their families...”