by Kelly Meding
He raised one slender, perfectly shaped eyebrow. “Your temper is going to get you into trouble, young lady.”
“It’s gotten me into trouble more times than I can count.” I inhaled, held the breath, then let it out through my nose. Wyatt had once called it a cleansing breath. It didn’t help. “Look, Mr. Jenner, I owe you shit, and I owe the rest of the Clans about the same. But I owe my life to Phineas and his people, and I will do my damnedest to protect them from the Triads, from vampires or goblins, and even from you.”
“They have nothing to fear from me,” Jenner said darkly.
“Says you. How the hell do I know for sure? I’ve known you for the grand total of thirty minutes, and to tell you the truth? Not impressed.”
“Your little attempt at reverse psychology is admirable but misplaced, Ms. Stone.”
Was that what I was doing?
“Even if you don’t believe her,” Phin said, “call the Elders to Assembly. Tell them what we’ve told you, and then let them decide. If nothing else, it will keep the other bi-shifters on alert for potential trouble.”
Jenner lowered his hands. They disappeared beneath the desk. He sat up straighter, some of his earlier disdain falling away. “I’ll alert the Assembly, but I can’t promise anything. Most likely they’ll vote to keep the matter internal. They don’t like to advertise weakness to the other races.”
I snorted. “Given what happened last week, I’d say you’re too late to keep a lid on that one.”
“Even so, I can make no promises as to their decision.”
“We had to come all the way out here for him to not tell me anything?” I asked Phin. “We could have done this over the phone.”
“Telephones can be tapped,” Jenner said. “I know my office is safe. I can’t say the same for other locations.”
Okay, he had a valid point. Dammit. I plucked a pen from the cup near his blotter and scribbled a phone number down next to last week’s date. “Call me if you get good news,” I said. “Otherwise, stay the hell out of my way.”
He stood; I’d forgotten how tall he was until I craned my neck to keep our gazes level. I tensed, unsure of his next action. He held nothing in his hands. They remained by his sides, no offer to shake. “The answers you want may not be as hidden as you think, Ms. Stone,” Jenner said. “We aren’t any more complicated than a simple fairy tale.”
I tried out that sentence several times but couldn’t make good sense of it. A casual “Good luck,” or even “Get the hell out of my office,” would have sufficed. Riddles wore me out.
“Yeah, okay,” I said.
“Thank you for seeing us,” Phin said.
“You really had to thank him?” I asked, after we’d left the public defender’s office behind and were once again on the sunny streets of downtown.
“Blanket rudeness isn’t in my repertoire, Evy,” he replied.
I rolled my eyes and leaned against the side of the car. “So we’re right back where we were, which is nowhere. The Assembly is a bust, and my only other lead isn’t doing anything useful until tomorrow night.”
“You’ve been working the investigative angle pretty well, but how about a more direct approach?”
“Meaning?”
“Who’s on your list of suspects?”
“The list of who’s not is a lot shorter.”
“So let’s whittle it down.”
“What do you suggest? Door-to-door interrogations?”
“If you want an apple, you don’t shake a pear tree.”
I blanched. Phin smiled.
Fifty years ago, the relocated train car had housed a popular diner. Once brilliant silver walls had faded to dusky gunmetal gray. Long lines of windows and a single arched door were boarded over, hiding any hint of the previously colorful glass and lights. Another landmark gone to pot, nestled between a struggling deli and a flower shop.
I hadn’t a clue why Phin had brought me here.
He walked up the cracked cement steps and grabbed the handle of a door held shut by a rusty padlock.
“Um, Phin?” I said.
The handle turned without the grind of old metal I’d expected. Hell, I hadn’t expected it to turn at all. The padlock disappeared as though it had never existed. Light, music, and the mouthwatering scent of fries and burgers drifted out of the open door. My jaw dropped.
Phin took my hand and led me inside. A faint buzz tickled the back of my neck as we passed over the threshold. I stared, slack-jawed, as we entered a bustling, sparkling diner that was right out of the past. The countertop shone. Bright neon lights ran along the ceiling, reflecting back on the shiny leather booths. Two cooks hovered over a crackling flattop, shouting at each other and waving spatulas in the air.
With room for about fifty and nearly full at three in the afternoon, the diner was anything but the decaying front visible from the street. Odder still, the crack-free windows showed perfect, sunlit views of the city street outside.
The door closed with the ding of a bell. A waitress in a blue apron sauntered over, heels clicking on the black-and-white checked linoleum. Her blond hair was speckled with various shades of brown and tan, but it was her bright copper irises that gave her away as a were-cat. Most wore contacts to pass among humans—not this one.
She gave me a brief once-over, then smiled brightly for Phin. “Hey, handsome,” she said, quite literally purring over him. “Why’d you bring the Sape?”
I bristled. I’d heard the insult in passing—a simple play on Homo sapiens—but never to my face. Phin squeezed my hand; I hadn’t realized he was still holding it. I let him, mostly for the look Kitty Cat gave me. Priceless.
“Why not?” Phin asked. “Did Annalee enact a ‘No humans’ policy since the last time I was here?”
“No such luck,” Kitty replied, without a hint of sarcasm. “There’s an empty booth in the back. I’ll bring you menus.”
Phin navigated our path through the crowded diner, weaving among patrons and dozens of conversations. I observed without staring and came to the simple conclusion I was the only person in the place who wasn’t a Dreg. Except for two vampires sitting quietly at the far end of the lunch counter, absorbed in their own chatter, the staff and clientele were exclusively were.
I slid into the back of the booth, facing the diner so I could keep an eye on comings and goings. Phin was grinning as he sat down. Before I could ask, the waitress returned with two menus. I looked at the laminated cover and snickered: “The Green Apple.”
“Drinks to start?” she asked.
“Coffee,” I replied without bothering to check the list. I’d smelled it faintly under the scents of fried foods.
“Wheat grass juice,” Phin said. “Thanks, Belle.”
“Coming up,” Belle said, and walked off.
“What the hell is wheat grass juice?” I asked.
“It’s good for you,” he said.
“So’s apple juice.” I’d be damned if the table didn’t have a mini-jukebox right next to the wall, nestled perfectly between a chrome napkin dispenser and the salt ’n’ pepper shakers. “What’re we doing here? Shaking apples? Meeting someone for information?”
“Lunch, Evy.”
I blinked. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, we’re eating lunch,” he said, like a patient schoolteacher. “Neither one of us has eaten since breakfast, and you’ll be much more effective if you’re not working off toaster-pastry fumes.”
“Okay, fair enough.” I was hungrier than I’d realized. “But why here, other than the obvious apple tree joke?”
“I like the food.”
“Bullshit.”
He tilted his head. “Are you judging the food before you’ve tried it? I assure you, it’s excellent.”
“No, I’m sure the food is great, but I call bullshit on that being your reason for bringing me to a diner that, one, obviously has a glamour on it for protection, and two, has a clientele that’s pretty exclusively Dr—nonhuman.”
“I admit, the glamour is to keep humans out,” Phin said. “We like having a few places to be among our own kind, without the threat of Triad interrogations or human interference.”
“Two things of which I’m both, Phin.”
“Call it another exercise in trust.”
I flopped against the back of the booth and surveyed the landscape. Two males and a female at the table next to ours. Male and female at the booth across from me. A woman and four children, all about the same age, diagonally from our booth—a litter joke raced through my head, but I kept it to myself. No one seemed to pay us much mind. If they knew I wasn’t one of them, they didn’t show it.
“Are you angry?” Phin asked.
I should have been angry. He knew I’d been a Hunter. I liked to control my environment, and I hated surprises. He’d taken me to an exclusively Dreg diner that humans couldn’t even see without first walking through the glamour, and then declared we were taking precious minutes out of our day to sit down and eat, when fast food was a smarter option.
Still … “No, I’m not.”
Belle returned with a round tray laden with a clay mug, a plate of creamers, a carafe of steaming coffee, and a juice glass of something thick and green. The green goo went to Phin. Belle put down the plate, the mug, then filled it to the brim.
“Ready to order yet?” she asked.
Phin shook his head. “Can we have a few minutes?”
Belle nodded and wandered off. I blew across the top of the coffee and sipped. Scorching goodness tore down my throat, strong and invigorating. I opened the menu. Glanced at the offerings. Cheeseburgers, steak sandwiches, bacon and eggs, club sandwiches, French fries—not a shocking thing listed.
“What is it?”
My head snapped up. “Huh?”
“For a moment, I thought your eyebrows were going to join your hairline. What surprised you?”
I closed the menu and pushed it away. “The food.”
“What about the food?”
“Looks like something I could get at Denny’s.”
There it was, that damned look. Furrowed brow, straight mouth, lips pressed so hard they disappeared. “You don’t really know much about us, do you?”
“Who? Weres?”
“Yes, Evy. Weres, Owlkins, and anything else you might want to call us.”
I placed my hands on the table, palms down, and sat up straight. “Look, I know I keep offending you with my word choices, but put your ass in my pants for a minute. The last four years of my life have been spent policing goblins and Halfies, and generally keeping the rest of the city off your collective scent. If it kills a human, I hunt it. If it’s a Dreg and it breaks a law, I kill it. Political correctness isn’t something I have a lot of time for.”
“Education is the greatest weapon we have against ignorance.”
For a non sequitur, that was pretty good, and it was a thought I’d had myself not long ago. He just should have saved it for a more relevant conversation. “This isn’t an interaction session, Phin. We aren’t battling ignorance.”
“Aren’t we? Humans have a long history of fearing what they don’t understand, and one of the biggest products of fear is hatred.”
There, laid out for me in a neat, gift-wrapped package, was the entire reason for this little exercise. Bring me to a were-owned and were-operated diner, let me see them in their natural habitat, and prove they were just like me so I wouldn’t fear them. So I wouldn’t hate them. As a civics lesson, it was somewhat effective. Only I wasn’t in school anymore.
“So you’re trying to do what?” I asked, tapping my fingertips on the plastic tabletop. “Educate me in the error of my Hunter ways? Show me how evil I’ve been for the last four years and what a fucked-up organization the Triads are?”
“More the latter than the former.”
“You had to bring me to lunch at a were-spot to do that?”
He traced his finger along the rim of his half-empty glass, three complete circles, and then stopped. “You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?” My voice rose a notch. I struggled to return it to a normal, less noticeable level. “For Christ’s sake, Phin, quit with the cryptic-speak and say what you brought me here to say. I don’t communicate well in code.”
“Maybe I didn’t want to eat in a Sape-owned diner. Did that occur to you?”
My hands curled into fists, which I kept pressed to the table on either side of the cooling mug of coffee. “In a what?”
“Exactly.”
“Ready to order?” Belle asked, her voice sneaking up on us.
Neither of us looked away, neither backing down.
“Cheeseburger, medium-well, no onions, fries,” I said.
Phin’s left eye twitched. “I’ll have the same.”
“Okay.” Belle turned the two-syllable word into at least four, spun on her heel, and clicked back into the crowd. Forgotten instantly.
“You humans have a fondness for labeling things,” Phin said. “Yet you get upset when the tables are turned and you’re similarly labeled. You really think we Dregs don’t call you things behind your back?”
“I’m not that stupid,” I said. “I just don’t often meet one who’ll say it to my face so casually.”
“Because you’ll kill them for it?” He asked the question as though my killing something for insulting me wasn’t unusual. Or even questionable.
Bastard. “That’s how you see me? Someone who kills because she feels like it, and consequences be damned?”
“It’s the reputation you’ve created among my people and others, Evy, you and the Triads. You create and enforce the laws, you don’t allow us to police ourselves, and when we do break a law, the Triads are sole judge, jury, and executioner.”
“This is our city, Phin. We’ll police your people as we see fit.” I couldn’t believe I was still sitting there, listening to him proselytize about what humans were doing wrong in the course of protecting our city. And the half-million human beings living in it. I couldn’t believe it, but I didn’t get up and leave. Leaving meant losing the argument.
Phin’s eyes narrowed. “Then don’t be surprised when others begin to resist your rule.”
My heart pounded in my ears. I leaned forward, elbows on the table, never looking away from him. Saw my own fury reflected in his eyes. “If you know something about tomorrow’s meet-up at Park Place, you’d better spill it now before they’re mopping your blood off the nice, clean floor.”
He snorted laughter. “And here I thought we’d begun to understand each other. That’s not what I meant. Not even close.”
“Then what? You want to join the Triads?”
“Is that unreasonable?”
For the second time in ten minutes, my jaw dropped. I searched his face for signs of jest, any hint he was being sarcastic, and found none. Just the same earnest sincerity and keen observation he’d had since I met him that morning. God, but that seemed a lifetime ago.
“Seriously?” I asked.
“You sound so surprised. You employ Gifted as both Hunters and Handlers. Why not Therians?”
“Therians?”
“More specifically, Therianthropes. The Clans, Evy. It’s what we call ourselves. Personally, I find the term ‘were’ a little insulting, considering your human history with the word. I’m not a wolf, and I don’t change under the full moon. I’m Therian. I’m also Assembly representative of the Coni Clan.”
Speechless, I forced myself to remain still and not give away anything I was thinking. Feeling. Confusion, frustration, and anger churned into a potent storm that threatened to unleash its fury. Tears pricked the corners of my eyes. I didn’t blink them away. My chest hurt from holding my breath.
Instead of shrieking, I managed some smidge of control and spoke barely above a whisper. “What. The fuck. Do you want. From me?”
The hard edges of his face seemed to soften, and his lips parted. Forthcoming words died in his mouth as a ruckus broke out on the
other side of the diner. I half stood, hand braced on the table, trying to peer past the heads of other folks who’d just started to stand. Phin shifted around in the booth, as curious as me.
“Get that talk on out of here,” Belle shouted, her voice ringing loudly over the buzz of hushed conversation and crackle of the flattop. “No one’s interested.”
“That why they’ve been hanging on my every word?” a male voice asked. Husky and thick. Couldn’t see him. “Because they’re not interested?”
“If they want to listen, let them listen outside,” Belle replied.
Someone moved and I finally spotted Belle, poised next to the counter, both hands on her hips. The target of her ire was still out of my sight, but the upturned angle of her head told me he was taller than her. And not intimidated by the were-cat waitress, if her shifting posture was any indicator.
“You going to kick out one of your own?” the dissenter asked.
Belle nodded. “And enjoy it, too.”
A squat man in a baseball cap got up from his table, leaving behind a woman and two small children and four ice cream sundaes. He turned the cap around backward and sidled up next to Belle, further obscuring my view of the drama. “Trouble here, Belle?” Ball Cap asked.
“We’re just talking,” the problem person said. “When did that become a crime in this city? Do we persecute our own now for supposed crimes? Isn’t that what the Triads are for?”
I bristled. Phin’s hand closed around my left wrist—the only thing that kept me from entering the fray. I focused on the warmth of his skin, the dual strength and softness in his touch, and kept myself grounded. Less likely to fly at someone—him included.
Conversation around the diner all but stopped as heads turned and previously oblivious patrons took notice. Someone nearby growled. The two Bloods at the far end of the counter were the only people ignoring the main event, uninterested in the were—no, Therian—standoff.
“Look,” Belle said, “I don’t care what you’re selling. This is a business, not a speech platform. Go stump on the sidewalk.”
“I believe I will, now that you’ve assisted me in a restaurant-wide announcement. Anyone who wants to hear more is free to meet me around the corner, by the green bench.”
