Love for the Cold-Blooded. Or

by Alex Gabriel

  Cea frowned and drew breath as though to say something, but then only jumped a little and glared over at Zen, for some reason. Whatever. Sisters.

  “Also, the cavemen would totally kick the astronauts’ asses, and nobody should date anyone who doesn’t get that. And lastly, never date anyone who thinks you’re a hooker, no matter how hot he is. And how adorably awkward and — surprisingly fun and interesting and sweet. And good in bed…” Pat trailed off morosely, which was probably for the best because he had the vague feeling he’d gotten sidetracked.

  “Hear, hear,” Cea said staunchly, nodding in grim agreement. Pat nodded back at her. She knew what was what.

  “This guy thought you were a hooker…?”

  Cea kicked Zen. She just straight up leaned back into her corner of the couch, braced herself with the hand that wasn’t holding vodka with lime, and kicked Zen in the leg. Mom would not have approved. Not even a little bit. Pat’s shocked “Cea!” was entirely lost in the ensuing scuffle, which was shorter than usual because neither of Pat’s sisters were fool enough to spill their drinks.

  As far as Pat could tell, it was a draw, although it ended with Zen still talking, so maybe she’d won after all. “No, but seriously. Stop that, Boadicea, you are behaving like an infant! Patrick, who exactly are we talking about here?”

  Cea kicked Zen again, and then the two of them went off to whisper in the corner near the door that Pat liked to think of as the hall. It wasn’t exactly a big secret who the subject of the discussion was, even before they started shooting not-very-surreptitious glances his way.

  Whatever. Let them glance at him. He was awesome. Pat took the opportunity to grab the undefended bottle and take another drink.

  After that, events turned hazy and blurred. He was pretty sure there was singing involved at some point, though, and that the song of choice was the angry woman’s hymn to independence and kicking bothersome guys in the nuts.

  ~~~~~

  Pat’s sisters appeared to believe that the situation required coddling. In turn, coddling involved giving Pat candy, romantic comedies set in high schools, and alcohol. Also telling Pat that he was sweet (“in a retarded puppy way”, quoth Zen, but she was grinning and ruffling his hair fondly as she said it, meaning she was officially just kidding) and loyal and dedicated, not to mention good-looking and generally super awesome. Even Hell sent Pat some angry music and excellent chocolate, though she was too busy to drop by in person.

  None of which Pat was going to object to, obviously. It did seem slightly exaggerated, though, especially when Zen roped Delilah into it, having her turn up mid-afternoon with vegan muffins and tales of how much her loser ex-boyfriend sucked. (Which was not news to anyone, seriously. That dude had been a trainwreck from beginning to end, and Pat was glad Delilah was finally in agreement with the rest of the world.)

  Nice as it was to be coddled, Pat wasn’t sure how it was meant to make Nick see that Pat hadn’t done anything wrong by mostly accidentally impersonating a — a companion. But hey, free candy and music. He wasn’t about to complain.

  “Anyone who doesn’t apprec- appr- any damn idiot who’s too blind to see you’re really fucking great is someone you don’t have to cry for,” Delilah said staunchly.

  “Sing it, Lilah,” Pat agreed, and pretended not to notice her eyes were shining with unshed tears.

  They had another drink.

  If you believed Pat’s sisters, his unnamed low mood did actually have a name: They called it being lovesick. Zen had even said he was heartbroken. Pat didn’t know about that, though. Who’d said anything about love? He and Nick hadn’t even actually been dating, just hanging out and having sex. No hearts, all genitals. And Nick had pretty much been operating under false assumptions the entire time.

  Except for that one time, with the party and the making out and the early morning junk food run. Pat paying Nick twenty bucks had been symbolic, a gesture to get the lingering specter of companionship out of the way. They’d both known they were hanging out for no other reason than that they wanted to, that time. And when they’d almost had sex… that had been the same deal.

  Had that been a date? Pat hadn’t been on enough dates to be sure — certainly not dates that awesome. That entire evening had been a complete first in Pat’s book. In Nick’s, too, Pat was sure of it.

  Even now, he still couldn’t figure out what he might have said to make Nick see he hadn’t meant to do anything wrong, hadn’t meant to deceive or hurt him. He could figure out even less which moment in the chain of events that had led to that confrontation in the kitchen would have been the right one to say, “oh, by the way, I’m not a hooker at all and I will totally do you free of charge”. Had there ever been a moment that wouldn’t have made Nick look at Pat with horrified realization, distant devastation and numb shock?

  As though he didn’t know Pat at all. As though he’d lost someone he cared about, and it was Pat’s fault.

  “We’re great, Patpat,” Delilah assured him, leaning heavily into his side. “We are the most fun. The most attractive. The best. Losers who are too sad and imperspe- im-per-cep-tive to see that? Those are the losers. Who lose.”

  Pat made a vaguely affirmative sound and put a supportive arm around Delilah’s shoulders. She was warm and soft and smelled of flowers and rum, and it occurred to Pat that not long ago, he’d had a rather embarrassing crush on her. Now that she was right here, though, all gorgeous and awesome and singing his praises, Pat just… wasn’t feeling it.

  Not that he would have made a move right now, when they were both halfway to plastered. But he could imagine the possibility being there, now that Delilah had finally gotten rid of her loser ex. They liked each other, they were both single… in theory, they could date each other and properly appreciate each other’s awesomeness. Alternately, they could also have a torrid meaningless affair to distract themselves from their misery. Why not, right?

  “Dibs on the last muffin,” Delilah declared, and gave him her charming, sweetly quirky little grin as she leaned forward to snag it from the sofa table.

  The only reason why not was that Pat didn’t want to. Delilah might not want to either, of course, but even if she did, Pat wasn’t interested. Not anymore. Not right now. Maybe not ever again.

  Thing was, Nick might have been operating under false assumptions, but Pat hadn’t been.

  Chapter Nine

  Walk softly and carry a mind control ray, or something equally cool.

  It got better eventually. It — that was what Pat was going with to indicate the bad mood (or lovesickness or heartbreak or whatever). It even turned out to have some fringe benefits. After the interminable first weekend, Pat threw himself into his studies and Got Shit Done. He got a head start on all of his papers for the semester, and studied and read up so extensively that he could have aced the still far-off end-of-term exams then and there. He trained and swam and worked out until Coach announced he was moving him up to third string in the next swim meet, to give him a chance to try out his new and improved times in a tournament setting.

  Pat also finished up his urban utopia and turned it in as an entry in the university’s cityscape planning contest. The contest was intended for grad students, but hey, Pat’s city was wicked cool, down to a perfectly balanced castle moat ecosystem.

  And lastly, to his complete surprise, Pat discovered that minioning could be far more interesting than he’d thought. Previously, his stints as a minion had mainly consisted of stuff like:

  getting weird stains out of spandex outfits (better not to think about it, really),

  picking up coffee (in Pat’s experience, challengers were neurotically particular about coffee, and were liable to throw fits over too much caramel sirup in their hand-ground kopi lupak), and

  scrubbing the floors of dank, uncomfortable secret lairs (most challengers were traditionalists and believed that their headquarters had to be as depressing as humanly possible, infused with the soul-destroying charm of an abandoned
missile silo).

  Sir Toby wore black tie evening dress rather than spandex, preferred tea to coffee, and addressed the lair issue by renting out an office building in the banking district. If you asked Pat, this was an absolutely brilliant move. It made for a lair that was so much more comfortable and convenient than an abandoned factory or warehouse, to say nothing of the forgotten underground military particle accelerator Crimson Ranger had used that one time, or the ridiculously clammy underwater jellyfish research station (The Shark), or the eery crumbling monastery on a remote snowy mountaintop (every pretentious challenger with delusions of coolness in the history of ever).

  Another factor that played into Pat’s new and improved minioning experience was that he was climbing up through the minion ranks every bit as quickly as Cat. Now that he wasn’t just slacking off waiting for his shift to end, he speedily advanced past laundry and cleaning duty and was awarded prestigious tasks like driving Hell and Sir Toby about while they scouted for locations. Sir Toby’s car was a gleaming old limousine with tinted windows and a polished wood and leather interior, and driving it made Pat feel like he was in a black and white movie.

  Pat even got to team up with Cat for some solo missions, for which he was issued a laser ray that he secretly spent an hour testing out in a remote bit of forest while making sizzling sound effects out of the side of his mouth. No one saw him do it, so it was cool. Plausible deniability and all that.

  Anyway, Pat would take smuggling books out of the physic’s department’s no-book-leaves-the-building library over buying stain remover any day. It actually turned out to be pretty fun, particularly since he and Cat devised the strategy themselves, and it was a perfect success. Pat simply surreptitiously opened a window and tossed the books down to Cat, who was standing in the shrubbery below wearing a voluminous black coat to smuggle them in. The coat was the most dangerous thing about the operation, as it turned out; Cat tripped over it when making her get-away and wrenched her knee a bit. Other than that, though, the scheme went off without a hitch, and Pat was proud of avoiding the necessity of stunning the attending student in her booth at the entrance with a laser ray. That would have been way over the top in terms of drama, not to mention disruptive in a library setting.

  (Pat was going to bring the books back once all this was over, needless to say. He wasn’t the kind of bastard who stole books from libraries; they were just borrowing them. He’d already sworn in Cat as his accomplice, and they’d just do the window thing again in reverse, with her putting the books into a satchel he’d pull up on a rope.)

  With all of that going on, Pat sometimes managed to forget why his world was so bleak and tired these days.

  Sometimes.

  ~~~~~

  “Minions,” Sir Toby intoned, beaming benevolently through his distinguished — if somewhat walrussy — mustache. “The day of reckoning is fast approaching! Soon it will be time to transport the dread Mind Control Ray to City Hall. In a mere two hours, I will unite it with the Crystal of Power. I am but one testing cycle away from stepping onto the road to victory!”

  The tech minions gathered in the lair’s audience chamber cheered wildly. Pat really liked how the former conference room had turned out — all glass walls, mysterious gleaming apparati and modern techy challenger flair. On its central plinth, the Mind Control Ray looked almost like a space shuttle ready for take-off. Except of course way smaller, and with a rocket-launcher-like ray gun thing in the place of the shuttle. Plus the support structures were far more streamlined and elegant. Whatever, it looked really cool, was the point.

  “Now it is time for me to induct you into the mysteries of the Mind Control Ray, or MCR for short. It’s a sturdy and user-friendly device, and by the time your fellow minions assemble for the Crystal Ceremony, you will all be able to operate it, as well as to troubleshoot and overcome the most common superhero-related problems. Let us begin!”

  Most challengers jealously guarded all knowledge of their Secret Weapon™ to the point where only they themselves knew where the off switch was, which generally came back to bite them in the butt in the end. Pat was impressed at Sir Toby’s ability to delegate. He really was amazing to work for.

  Of course, having thought that, Pat was immediately plunged into an hours-long stretch of horrible boredom as Sir Toby launched into his lesson, which went straight over Pat’s head from the beginning. Pat wasn’t a tech minion (thank the gods), so he didn’t have to actually understand the technical workings of the MCR. He did feel it would have been bad form for Sir Toby’s honorary bodyguard to fall asleep on the job, however.

  A stern-looking girl had just asked a tortuously convoluted question that Pat hadn’t understood a single word of (unless you counted “if”, “the” and possibly “calibrate”) when Pat’s phone vibrated in his pocket. He seized the diversion gratefully, slipping out into the hall to take the call. It wasn’t as though Sir Toby needed a bodyguard when surrounded by his adoring geek squad, anyway. (It also wasn’t as though Pat was actually qualified to be a bodyguard, even though he’d been practicing his menacing scowl. That was fine, though; the honorary bodyguard position was entirely symbolic. It just wouldn’t have been right for a challenger of Sir Toby’s stature to go about alone.)

  Regardless of how glad he was for the respite, Pat should still have checked caller ID. Hindsight, how thou art ever twenty-twenty.

  “Mr. West,” Assistant House Manager Suze said, efficiently forcing the name into doing double duty as a greeting, the way she always did. “We’re going to need you to come in briefly next week. The mansion’s AI is being updated, and we need a sample of all employees’ voices so they can be linked to their non-vocal access.”

  “Uh?” Pat responded intelligently. Wait. What?

  She sighed impatiently. “It’s all well and good to take a month off, Mr. West, although I hope you realize what difficulties your lengthy recuperation is causing for the rest of us. But you are still an employee of the Andersen Estate, even in your free time. This is not the kind of job that you assume and discard like a mantle, to wear a mere eight hours a day. This is a calling. A fundamental part of who you are. In this instance, that means I expect you to be there early, and to be sure not to overexert your voice in any way prior to the recording session.”

  “Errr,” Pat said. Questions were rushing him so quickly he couldn’t manage a more articulate response. Why hadn’t Nick fired his ass? How had Pat gotten a month off when he’d never applied for a leave, and when always before, even a day or two off had been difficult to wrangle? Why did Suze think Pat needed a reminder not to overexert his voice? Why on earth was Pat still —

  “I’ve put you down for ten o’clock next Tuesday. Good day, Mr. West.”

  “Uh, yes, thank you,” Patrick managed. “You too, AHM Wainwright.”

  Voice samples for the AI. Clearly, voice control was being extended into the mansion’s non-residential areas. Nick had outed Pat as a night manager impersonating a companion, and the consequences were that the AI was getting voice recognition in the night kitchen, and Pat was not fired?

  “Keep in mind that superheroes are predictable,” Sir Toby was saying as Pat made his dazed way back into the lair’s main hall. “Keep your head and don’t panic, and you can guide the encounter to minimize damage at the very least. In terms of the MCR, that means that —”

  Predictable? Yeah right. Pat would never have predicted this in a million years.

  Cea must have arranged for Pat to have a month off, giving him the option of returning to his job with the Andersen Estate. It was totally something she’d do — and her skills of regulation wrangling also accounted for the unprecedented length of the leave. But that still didn’t explain why Pat still had a job in the first place.

  A storm of enthusiastic applause broke from the tech minions, an odd external echo to the confused hope surging into Pat. The tech tutorial was over; the lair would have to be readied for the Crystal Ceremony now.

  Pat did
his best to drag his head back to the present as Sir Toby swept through the room, regally accepting his minions’ gushing accolades. And, ah yes, there were the catering minions, following along after Hell and Cat like particularly well-dressed ducklings.

  Did Pat want to work as Nick’s night manager again? Circumstances had changed so drastically… he’d just feel wary and guilty and awful all the time. He should quit, really, except that he didn’t want to do that, either. It would be too final — and how could he voluntarily break off this connection he unexpectedly still had to Nick? Wouldn’t that mean rejecting Nick’s gesture of not firing him…

  “Catalina and Patrick,” Hell said, stepping up to him with Cat at her side. Her expression was cool and businesslike, but Pat knew her well enough to read the warmth in her eyes. “The two of you have earned a place by Sir Toby’s side as he unveils the Crystal of Power. Come along, Patpat.”

  Pat trailed along meekly to stand a step behind and to the side of Sir Toby, immediately in front of the tall gleaming shape of the MCR. By now, the room had filled with minions, all of them clad in their minion uniforms and looking excited and expectant.

  A low murmur ran through the crowded lair as Sir Toby produced a large, gleaming crystal box. It was rather gaudy, really, or at least it would have been if something inside it hadn’t been glowing with a deep, eldritch glow that — for the first time — gave Pat an idea of what the word actually meant. Provided, of course, that “eldritch” really did refer to a weird throbbing glow that was simultaneously possessed of both all imaginable colors, and none at all.

  “Minions,” Sir Toby intoned sonorously. He spoke quietly, but his voice carried to every last corner of the room, buoyed by sheer charisma. The silence was absolute, every minion frozen in awed anticipation. “It is time for the Crystal of Power to be unveiled. Prepare yourselves, for what you are about to witness has not been seen by mortal eyes in a hundred years. Fought over by ancient rulers, buried in the tomb of a mighty warrior queen, carried back into our world by the intrepid hands of explorers who died fighting for their treasure, and lost once again in the resting place of an ancient god, who awaits the world’s end in caverns of diamond and bone — until I set it free, to once again shape the fate of the world, now under my command.”