by Megan Hart
Wallowing.
In the bed that had been theirs? With another groan, he swung his legs over the side of the bed and got himself moving. Carol had been gone only a week, not even long enough for the scent of her to vanish from the sheets, although he’d washed them. Twice.
In the shower, Kent bent his head beneath the spray and let the hot water pound away at the knots in his shoulders. In the kitchen, he made himself a cup of terrible instant coffee because Carol had always been the one to get the first pot brewing. He grabbed a frozen egg sandwich, nuked it and burned his tongue.
“Shit!” He spit the mess into the sink and stayed there for a long moment with both hands on the stainless steel, head bowed. Waiting to...
What? Grieve? Mourn? Celebrate?
Whatever he was supposed to feel about the end of his four-year relationship, he wasn’t feeling any of it. All Carol’s leaving had done was point out to him how empty he’d been for a long time, and probably how empty he was going to stay for a lot longer.
It was not the best way to start the day, that was for sure, but a glance at his calendar when he got into work made it a little better. He had an appointment with Stephanie in about twenty minutes. Just enough time to grab a cup of marginally better coffee and a stale doughnut from the break room before getting back to his desk and pretending as if he wasn’t just waiting for her to walk through his door.
He’d been working, on and off, with Stephanie Adams for the past six months. She was one of the investigators on the fraud cases that had been plaguing Member’s Best for close to a year now. It had started with a few random account issues. Unauthorized withdrawals or transfers. Charges to the credit union’s debit or credit cards, stuff like that. The incidences had started becoming closer together and for greater amounts, which was when the board had called in an outside team to check for security breaches. They’d found no evidence of hackers. Nothing could be traced. It was becoming a real problem for the credit union, which had more than twenty branches throughout Pennsylvania.
Kent was not technically supposed to deal with stuff like this. His job was to oversee the general management of all the credit union’s branches. The board had decided that also meant liaising with the investigator to coordinate data regarding the thefts. Which meant he’d spent a lot of time with Ms. Adams over the past six months...and spent a lot of time ignoring that he liked her. Because, Carol.
Who’d left him.
Today Stephanie wore a pair of slim-fitting dark jeans topped with a black mesh sweater that hung off one shoulder. Black Docs on her feet, accented with a set of sparkly pink shoelaces. She slung her thick parka over the back of one chair and took a seat in the other, already pulling out a notepad from her shoulder bag.
“Morning,” Kent said mildly.
She looked up, a small crease in her brow fading as she smiled. “Hi. Morning. Sorry, I’m a little distracted. Got some news.”
“Bad news?”
She paused, then settled her notepad on one knee while she looked at him. “No. Why would you think...?”
“Sorry.” He shook his head, feeling dumb. “You meant news about the fraud. Not personal.”
“Oh. No. Nothing personal. But thanks for asking, in case it was.” Again she paused to look him over. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Sure.” Kent forced a smile and leaned back in his chair.
Stephanie shook her head. “You don’t seem okay. Did something else happen? Another account hacked?”
“Not so far today,” he said. Then he blurted out, “My girlfriend left me.”
“Oh, good! I mean, goodness,” Stephanie said. “Goodness me.”
It was such an odd thing for her to say, spoken in such a brightly robotic tone, that Kent laughed. Loudly. “What?”
“Oh, I just... That sucks, Kent. I’m sorry. Um...” She coughed, not meeting his gaze.
For a long few seconds of awkward silence, he simply stared at her while she fussed with her notepad. Good, she’d said. Good...as in...she was happy he was single, or what?
There’d been more than a few times in his life when Kent wished he was not so easily led by the ideas his little head got, despite what the one on his shoulders tried to tell it. Today was one of those times, and he cursed himself for it—he’d been single for, like, six freaking days, and even though it had been more like six weeks since he’d last gotten laid, that was no excuse.
Even if Stephanie did have the biggest, bluest eyes he’d ever seen. And that great laugh, coupled with a smile that would’ve made a priest say hallelujah and not because of a sermon. She was smart, too, on point with everything they’d ever worked on, even if she hadn’t yet been able to figure out who was stealing from the Member’s Best accounts.
“Right,” he said slowly. “So...should we talk about your updates, or...?”
“Right, right.” She coughed again, still not meeting his gaze as she fiddled with the notepad. When she did look up, she seemed uncomfortable to find him staring at her.
It of course made Kent feel like an ass to have been caught, so he looked away and it was a comedy of awkward silences and half-started sentences for the next minute until finally Stephanie laughed and shook her head. She cleared her throat.
She slid the notepad across his desk. “I’ve put together some possibilities of what’s been going on. See, at first, the perp was just taking small amounts out of accounts here and there. Nobody even noticed, or they chalked it up to some glitch, right?”
“Yeah.” He leaned to look at the names, dates and numbers on the pad.
An hour passed while they talked and Stephanie outlined what she’d been working on. How she’d been trying to connect the dots. She’d scooted her chair around to his side of the desk and was pointing at the notepad.
“Find the pattern,” she said. “If we can do that, we’ll find the douchecanoe who’s doing this, and hopefully before he really hits anyone hard.”
We, she’d said, and Kent hadn’t missed that. Not that it meant anything beyond the work relationship, of course. But still. It was nice to hear.
“Hey, I’m going out to grab some lunch,” he said with a glance at her. Sitting this close, he imagined for a moment he could feel the brush of her hair on his cheek. “You want to come out with me? We can keep looking for patterns.”
She tucked a strand of her dark hair behind one ear as she looked at him now, a small smile curving her lips. “Sure. I have some time. Where should we go?”
“How about The Gold Monkey?” It was a quiet little Middle Eastern place around the corner.
“Perfect.” She grinned at him, not moving away. Their eyes met. “I’m starving.”
CHAPTER 3
“It wasn’t a date,” Stephanie told her friend Denise on the phone as she got out of her car and headed into the Morningstar Mocha to pick up a couple bags of their specially blended herbal tea. She was a coffee fiend, no doubt, except when she was working a case that meant she had to spend more of her time sleeping than any one person should’ve been able to.
Denise handled scheduling and travel arrangements for Crew members who needed, as Stephanie had, to relocate in order to pursue cases. Stephanie had known her for years, though this was the first time she’d ever been assigned close enough to hang out with her in person. It had made the Pennsylvania winter a little more bearable for California girl Stephanie.
“He told you his girlfriend left him, then he asked you to an intimate little venue for fondue. Fondue is not work-related material, Stephanie.” Denise’s voice dipped low for a second, crackling, before getting clear again. “Sorry, I’ve got someone on the line waiting for hotel reservations in Moscow. My Russian’s pretty rusty. If I break off with you, it’s to deal with that.”
“I can let you go. I don’t have any updates or anything. I mean,
yeah, he’s cute. And now he’s single. But so what? I’m out of here as soon as I bust whoever’s doing this stuff, and I’m back to Los Angeles. And he’ll be here. So.” Stephanie shrugged, though Denise couldn’t see her. “I mean, anyway, he’s a normal.”
“Hey. I’m a normie!”
“You are so not normal,” Stephanie said with a laugh. Denise had no paranormal talents, true, but she’d been working with the Crew for long enough to have seen some seriously strange stuff. That left marks.
Denise rattled off a long string of something that sounded like Russian before saying, “I have to go. Fill me in later!”
“There’s nothing to—” Too late—Denise had disconnected.
Inside the shop, Stephanie ordered two bags of the tea, then leaned on the counter to wait. She pulled out her phone. No messages, not that she was expecting any. No new email, either. She casually thumbed open a Words with Buddies game, but it wasn’t her turn to play any of the rounds.
She people-watched instead.
She’d made the Morningstar Mocha one of her favorite stops, so she already knew a few of the regulars. Carlos was still tapping away on his novel over there by the windows. Tesla worked the counter, her spiky blond hair tipped with bright purple now. Her boyfriend, Charlie, had stopped in to bring her something in a brown paper bag that made her giggle, and watching them kiss, Stephanie had to turn away because that was a story that didn’t need her to make anything up about it.
There was another face, a kid of about sixteen, sitting in the back corner with a laptop open in front of him. The back of it was adorned with stickers from indie bands Stephanie had enjoyed a few times herself, mostly courtesy of her older brother, which made it a little strange to see them as decoration for someone at least ten years younger than she was. Still, it was going to be a few more minutes before her tea was ready, so Stephanie wandered over to take a closer look.
“Oh, wow,” she said. “Bangtastic Frogmen? Really? I didn’t think anyone else had ever heard of them.”
The kid, pale, eyes faintly circled by shadows, looked up at her through the fringe of black hair. A girl, not a boy as Stephanie had first assumed from the thin frame and baggy clothes. The girl gave Stephanie a blank look.
“Huh?”
“The...sticker.” Stephanie gestured. “Bangtastic Frogmen?”
The girl tipped the laptop’s lid to look at the assortment of stickers, then closed it firmly and put her hands on top of it. Her fingernails were bitten to the quick, so raw in places that Stephanie winced. “It’s... Yeah. They’re great.”
Great was not how Stephanie would’ve described the group, which had prided itself on being actually awful. Out-of-tune instruments, mumbled and incoherent lyrics. They’d made one album, so far as she knew, and while it had been played to death for a few months in her circle of middle-school friends, it had quickly been replaced by something a little more boy band. She eyed the girl.
“Front of Desperation? You listen to them, too?”
The girl began to put the laptop away, keeping her gaze from Stephanie’s. “Look, I just have the stickers, okay. I’m not a fan or anything. I just liked the way they looked.”
There was a ceramic mug on the table, one of the refillable ones. You could spend all day in the Mocha on a $2.99 cup of coffee, if you were so inclined. This girl had that sort of look. Come to think of it, there was something familiar about her, as though Stephanie had seen her before. Yet when she tried to remember if the girl was a Mocha regular, she somehow looked less familiar.
“Okay, no big.” Stephanie tried on a smile the girl didn’t return.
Behind the girl, on the wall, a large clock spun its hands. Frowning, Stephanie glanced at the menu pinned to the bulletin board next to it. For a second, literally one, the letters jumbled and merged, making it impossible to read. Automatically, Stephanie tapped her wrist three times with her forefinger, a trick she’d learned long ago to determine if she was awake or dreaming.
Awake.
But... “Hey, wait a second,” she said to the girl, who was now slinging her laptop bag over her shoulder and trying to inch past her.
“Tea’s up!” came a voice from behind the counter, and Stephanie turned. That was her order.
When she turned back, the girl had slipped out the front door and disappeared. Stephanie looked again at the clock and the menu, but both were fine. She was standing in the Morningstar Mocha for real, not in the Ephemeros, and she was drawing curious looks. She shook herself, just a little, and turned to the guy behind the counter.
“Who was that?”
He looked past her toward the door’s jingling bell overhead. “Who?”
“That girl. The one who was sitting there, in the corner.”
The guy shrugged. “I don’t know. There was a girl?”
“She must’ve been sitting here for a while. She had a refillable mug.” Stephanie pointed toward the table where the girl had been sitting but then let her hand fall to her side. “She had a Bangtastic Frogmen sticker.”
That earned her a weird look, so she took the bag of tea and peeked inside. She didn’t really like the way it tasted, but it did wonders for putting her to sleep when her body fought it. “Thanks.”
“I love the Sleepytime. Puts me right out.” The guy grinned.
Stephanie returned the smile absently, still thinking about the kid in the corner. Out on the street, heading for her car, she tried again to look and see if she could find the mysterious teen, but nope. The girl had vanished.
* * *
He had no reason to call her. They’d already had a meeting. Work related. Lunch had been a nice gesture; it didn’t mean anything.
He wasn’t ready to date. For sure. Right?
Grumbling to himself, Kent forced his way through a lackluster microwaved dinner and some bad TV, ticking off the seconds until he could make it into bed and give up to unconsciousness. If he were a drinking man, he’d have taken a few shots to help him along, but he made do with counting sheep.
He found himself unable to stop thinking of Stephanie instead.
When his phone buzzed, he snatched it up off the nightstand, thumbing the screen before he really paid attention to who was calling him. “Oh,” he said. “Carol.”
“Just calling to check in on you.”
Kent frowned. “I’m fine. Thanks.”
“I wanted to tell you that I’ll be sending someone to pick up the rest of my stuff that I left in the guest room. I’ll be at my mom’s for a while.” She paused. “How are you, really?”
He closed his eyes, thinking of the brightness of Stephanie’s laughter and how nice it had been to sit with her at lunch, enjoying the moment without any resentments hovering between them. No bad memories and all the possibilities of making good ones. How long had it been since he’d felt that way?
“Carol, I’m fine.”
“If you’re sure.” She didn’t sound convinced.
That, finally, pissed him off more than her sneaking away while he was at work had. “Look, I’m sure you think that I can’t survive without you, but the truth is, I think this is going to be good for both of us. Great, in fact.”
She didn’t have much to say to that. He took little satisfaction in her silence. It felt more like a standoff than anything else, and he was pretty damned tired of that feeling.
“Good night, Carol,” Kent said finally. “I’ll make sure to have your stuff by the front door for when the guy comes for it.”
“You know, you can call me...” she began but trailed off as though waiting for him to jump in with an answer.
This time, he didn’t say good-night.
This time, Kent said, “Goodbye.”
CHAPTER 4
Girls’ Night In. Denise had brought a bottle of wine and
they’d watched a couple chick flicks, chatting most of the way through them. By nine o’clock, though, Stephanie knew it was time to get to work.
Just one problem. She wasn’t tired at all. The wine had worn off, which was good, since she needed to be on top of her game in the dream world if she wanted to make sure she got a lead on this creep.
“Can’t Vadim prescribe you something?” Denise had never been able to shape anything in the Ephemeros, though she knew and believed it existed.
“He could, I guess. But I don’t want to rely on sleeping pills or anything to get me under. Makes it too hard to wake up if I have to, for one thing. But it also affects me inside, just the way it would out here. I mean, it makes me dream, but it interferes with the shaping.” Stephanie dragged a chip through the remnants of the queso dip and crunched it with a sigh. “I could try a food coma, I guess.”
Denise laughed. “Sure. But what else works? Booze?”
“Same as pills. Sure, it puts me under, but it makes it hard to work. And then there’s the hangover to deal with.”
“Ew. Gross.” Denise’s nose crinkled. She looked at the clock on the wall. “It’s early, that’s all.”
“Yeah, I know, but this guy’s targeting the elderly. A lot of them are asleep by now and then up at the odd hours.”
Denise nodded. “My grandma’s like that. She’ll be asleep in her chair by seven, but then she’s up at three and can’t get back to sleep until six or seven in the morning.”
“Yeah.” Stephanie crunched another chip, then sat back on the couch with a sigh. “Anyway, there’s no telling who this guy will target next, of course, but I’m having better luck earlier in the evening.”
“I guess I should let you get to it, then.” Denise slapped her knee and stood with a stretch and a yawn. She looked down at Stephanie with a slow, wicked grin. “I have a tried-and-true way I use to fall asleep when I can’t. But I’m not sure I should tell you what it is.”
