by Brie Tart
“He obviously never told you how much he wanted me to stay out of this stuff.” Lucy and Dylan sprang to mind, the ones she wanted to keep out of her mission. She could understand her uncle keeping her in the dark all those years so much better, now. If only he’d lived long enough for her to tell him. “I still don’t buy it.”
“You have good instincts.” His stoic mouth slipped into a self-effacing grin as he knelt and picked up his bullet from the floor. “You’re also rarity, Miss Carver, a living artifact. I’m not looking to ‘collect’ you or anything barmy like that, but I’d like to study you and see what you can do. You’ll make a good contact if you survive.”
That made enough sense for Helen to come back down, crossing her arms as she leaned against the nearest wall. The buzzing from the stairs faded, and she breathed easier. “So how’s this work? You tell me leads, and I follow them?”
“I don’t recommend going out on your own just yet. If I’m investing time in you, I’d like you to live past your first target.” He tucked the pistol in his pocket, leaving both hands free. “You need to learn a few fundamentals first.”
“And you’re gonna teach me?”
“Did you have someone else in mind?”
“You got a point. But I still need to make a living, especially with the bastards on my tail making it real hard.”
“Someone’s after you?”
“I got attacked right before my uncle got killed. Then yesterday somebody burnt down his agency with me inside.”
“Ah, I see why you’re pressed for funds.” Yoel pulled a leather wallet from his back pocket and took out a couple bills. Helen recognized Benjamin Franklin’s big mug on them. “I’ll compensate you for the lessons. Call it an internship.”
“All under the table? Cash?” Helen’s eyebrows went up as Yoel held out the money to her. Should she take it? The last thing she wanted was for him to treat her like a charity case. It was a tidy solution, though, where she’d be able to bring home proof she had “jobs” and chase Tommy’s killers at the same time.
“However you’d like it.” Yoel shrugged. “Make me a client of the agency if you want to make it official for tax purposes.”
“I’ll have to. My numbers guy would kill me if I didn’t have a paper trail.” Helen bit her lip as she went over and grabbed the money away. How would she spin this to Dylan? Maybe as a lucky surveillance case. They usually took the longest. She might be able to paint Yoel as someone with a cheating partner.
“Bring me the forms you need and let me know what story you decide on. I’ll play along.” He offered her an imitation smile, a guarded slip of a thing that didn’t reach his eyes. “We could even start now, if you’d like.”
Helen checked her phone, angling it away from Yoel so he wouldn’t see her favorite picture of Dylan and Lucy on her home screen. It was a shot she’d snuck up on them without any cheesy poses or forced smiles. Dylan had a two year old Lucy sitting in his lap as he showed her how to draw a stick figure. In the background, Tommy looked into Helen’s cell phone camera with a knowing smirk. Her eyes stung a little as she switched her focus from the image to the time. 6:27. If she left right away, she’d just make it for story time. “Nah, I’ve got somewhere to be.”
“I’ll see you when you’re ready to start, then.” Yoel offered her a short nod.
“Nice doin’ business with you.” Helen held her breath again as she hiked up those stairs, though the invisible forces making her itch so deep.
“Until next time,” Yoel said to Helen’s back. “We’ll see if you still think that once we start.”
CHAPTER 8
Yoel gave Helen a clean business card for “Daniel Middleton” and she rode back to the motel. As she pulled in, she checked her phone. 7:05 and she already had a couple missed calls and texts from Dylan. Shit. She parked her bike in the nearest empty spot and raced up to their room. She slipped the key card into the lock. It blinked red. She slid it again, slower this time. It flashed green.
“Hey, I’m home.” She barged in, panting from her sprint up. “I’m home.”
Dylan sat on the edge of Lucy’s bed. Her daughter was snuggled under the covers against a nest of fluffed pillows. Both of them swiveled around.
Lucy lit up and stuck her tongue out at her father. “Rwy’n ennill!”
“Rydych chi wedi ennill hyn.” Dylan wrapped Lucy in a loose headlock and noogied her hair. “Dyma’ch gwobr!”
“Dim yn deg!” Lucy whined as she kicked under her blanket and held onto Dylan’s arm. “Dywedasoch Swiss Rolls!”
“Nid wyf erioed wedi dweud pryd.” Dylan changed his tactics and tickled Lucy’s ribs instead. The room filled with her manic giggles.
“Can you two use American when I’m around?” Helen frowned at Dylan as his Welsh brought back the photo-copied image of his green card. How much didn’t she know about him? Maybe she’d figure that out through her lessons with Yoel.
“Daddy said Mam come back after bedtime! I win! Daddy owes me Swiss Rolls.” Lucy squirmed away from Dylan’s fingers and crawled out from under her covers as she offered her rough interpretation. The short girl stared at the floor from the edge of the bed like she was plotting how to scale down a cliff.
“I did my best, Shiny Girl.” Helen swooped in and scooped up her daughter.
“She wasn’t the only one worried,” Dylan said. “After a little forwarding around, the station secretary said you hadn’t been by.”
“Yeah, didn’t quite make it.” Helen hadn’t plotted the finer details of her cover story yet. Her mind raced trying to fill in the blank parts. “I ran into somebody.”
“What kind of somebody?” Dylan gave Helen a concerned once-over, probably checking for scrapes.
Lucy’s eyes got big and excited. “Mam story?”
“Not yet.” Helen adjusted Lucy to her other hip as she got the business card Yoel had handed her. It looked identical to the other card Tommy had left her, without her uncle’s chicken scratch note. “It’s a new client.”
“A stranger hired you out of nowhere?” Dylan flared his button nose as he took the card and turned it over.
“I had to stop for something.” The particulars of Helen’s excuse crowded together. She should’ve thought this through more. Did she need gas? Had “Daniel” been skulking around the pump? It had to be something Dylan couldn’t track in the bank account. “I was hungry and I overheard this guy talking on his phone to someone. They were arguing.” A loose story took shape, something she’d have to relay to Yoel next time she saw him for consistency’s sake. “It got pretty heated. He looked kind of fancy, so I asked what was wrong. He thinks his girlfriend is sneaking around, doing something or someone behind his back, even though they’ve been together for years, and he gives her everything she needs, yadda yadda. I offered to watch her for a few weeks. He gave me this and said to send along the contract.”
“He believed you on the spot?”
“I guess he’s desperate.”
“Or he wants in your pants.”
“He gave me a cash down payment.” Helen took the c-notes out of her pocket and waved them around. “Never asked to sleep with me once.”
“Hmm.” Dylan sniffed and set the card behind his ear. “Let me do some basic background on this guy. If he’s legit, I’ll send him a contract.”
“Tell me what you turn up.” And Helen meant it. Dylan had a way with the internet that went way deeper than her go-to Google search. “Can you have it by tomorrow? I’m supposed to interview him about the girlfriend.”
“Lucky break or not, you make promises too fast.” Dylan shook his finger at his girlfriend and patted the bed next to him. “Hand her over. She’s beat.”
Helen glanced down at Lucy. The girl had fallen asleep against her shoulder, breathing softly and drooling on her tank top. Lucy’s serene face brought a smile to Helen’s as she set her daughter on the bed. Dylan rearranged the covers around the girl so she had her cuddly fortress back.
/> “What was that about you betting against me, huh?” Helen dropped to a whisper as she started unzipping her boots. She needed to duck into a proper thrift store or military surplus and find some tougher alternatives, along with a cheap leather jacket.
“You always stay out late when you’re riding.” Dylan shrugged as he moved to the other side of the bed and took the TV remote. “And you don’t normally listen to me about staying safe, either.”
“Hey, I’m always fine, aren’t I?”
“This guy could’ve been a trap. He could still be one, just handing you money like that.”
“It was a public place, plenty of people around,” Helen said. Dylan wasn’t wrong. Her mysterious new ally was being helpful, probably too helpful. It could be a hoax by a really good con man preying on Helen’s desperation. Tommy had been so much better at reading people and seeing through their stories. “Is there something else I should look out for? Something you’re not telling me ‘cause it’ll keep me ‘safe’?”
“We’ve been over this already.” Dylan groaned and collapsed into his side of their bed as a catty reality show flashed across the TV. “I’m not getting into it anymore.”
“You’re the one talkin’ ‘bout traps from new clients, gettin’ twitchy whenever I mention leavin’ the room, sendin’ me a million texts when I’m five minutes late.” The Brooklyn in Helen’s voice thickened up as her frustration built. “If you can’t tell me nothin’, you need to trust me to handle myself.”
“Trust goes both ways, Hel.” All Dylan’s boyish playfulness switched to a cold maturity Helen had only seen in ex-military.
The intensity in his gaze cut her deep, even as her guilt flared up as strong as her temper. Something fractured in that moment. For years, her and Dylan had shared everything and built something steady for her to rely on. The dangerous secrets he refused to tell, no matter his reasons, tasted as bitter as the lies she told him. It altered the way she saw him, and skewed the way she thought they fit together.
If she fessed up, then Dylan—and the ones monitoring him—would jeopardize her mission. It was too late for her to turn back and forget. She was already neck-deep in it and sinking. Helen really was on her own.
She’d figure it out, she always did. And she’d keep her family out of the crossfire, somehow.
* * *
In a matter of hours, Dylan cleared Yoel’s “Daniel Middleton” identity to his satisfaction with his phone and a motel computer. The persona online said that the Scribe was a college boy about Helen’s age who’d finished his undergrad degrees at the University of Edinburgh, then went through grad school on and off at the University of Oxford. Dylan emailed over a copy of their boilerplate contract after adjusting for the fabricated backstory Helen gave. By the next morning, Yoel sent it back signed and notarized.
The deal they worked out gave Helen a few weeks to watch the make believe girlfriend and learn what Yoel had to teach her. Dylan agreed to stay home with Lucy while Helen went out for however many hours it would take a night. Everything seemed to fall into place better than Helen expected. She could only hope her lucky streak continued. She’d probably need it in the days to come.
Before riding off for her first session with Yoel, Helen teamed up with Dylan to tell Lucy an early goodnight story. She started it off describing her first bounty hunting job and played off the fictional twists Dylan added along the way. It left her with a warm bubble in her chest as she took a detour on the way to Yoel’s to find herself a thick leather jacket and a pair of decent riding boots. She could pretend that she was going out on a legitimate job and that everything would be okay. Pulling in front of Daath books with the sign in the window reading “Closed” and the inside dark popped her bubble with cold reality. If she wanted things to be okay, she had to learn a whole new set of rules to fix it.
She rapped her knuckles against the door. A few minutes passed where nothing moved on the other side of it. Where was Yoel? The sidewalk buzzed with night time activity as groups of young people milled about, and cars drove by on the tail end of rush hour. Plenty of witnesses hadn’t stopped Helen’s last attacker. She tried the door handle, but it only rattled when she pushed on it. Yoel hadn’t given her back the business card Tommy scribbled on, and Dylan kept the clean “Daniel Middleton” card for the agency’s records. She should’ve saved the number in her phone before handing it over. Rookie mistake.
Helen banged on the door with the side of her fist. Her danger sense stayed quiet as passersby threw her funny looks. Nothing outright hostile yet.
She peered through the store window again.
A tall shadow emerged from behind the book cases.
Helen went for the switchblade she still carried in her pocket.
The figure came into the light cast by the street lamps. He had an olive complexion with black-rimmed glasses and slicked black hair. Yoel.
The lock clicked, and he pulled the door open a crack. “Have some patience. I needed time to walk upstairs.”
“Yeah, while I’m standing here in front of a closed store like I’m casing the joint.” Helen let her shoulders relax, but she still white-knuckled that knife. “You gonna let me in?”
Yoel pulled the door open enough for Helen to slide through, then shut it behind her. He twisted the deadbolt back into place and went toward the basement. Helen followed after him. She shuddered on the stairs as she passed through the itchy energy. The feeling faded quicker than last time once she made it through.
Yoel went up to a stack of boxes and took a spiral notebook and pen from on top of them. Those boxes hadn’t been there the day before, maybe some new stock? He held out the notebook for Helen.
“You running this like a class?” Helen took it and uncapped the pen.
“Yes, and you’ll want to take notes. We have a lot to unpack,” Yoel started. “First, the basics. Fae, as they are commonly known in circles that know about them, are the beings and creatures of Western European folklore. That means you can expect them to come from the Celtic nations of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales; the Norse regions of Scandinavia, Germany, and Iceland…”
For the next hour, Helen settled cross-legged on the cement floor with the notebook in her lap. Yoel paced back and forth, gesturing as he spoke. He maintained eye contact with her as she gave him a blank stare. The longer he went on and on—about Seelie this and Unseelie that, magic and wards, chaos and order, the ins and outs of centuries old civilizations—the more she tuned him out. Her knees bounced like butterfly wings as she doodled S chains up and down her paper and tapped the tip of the pen to the beat of an Aerosmith song. It was high school all over again, sitting still in one place for over an hour before moving onto the next class and doing more of the same. She couldn’t fall back on that with Yoel, though. She needed to remember what he said so she could survive. Would it kill him to liven things up?
“—and that’s why they want to kill you.”
Helen snapped out of her trance. “What?”
“You’re not listening, are you?”
“There’s gotta be a cheat sheet version.”
“That was it.” Yoel pursed his mouth as his attention went from her bouncing knees to the tapping pen. “At least it didn’t put you to sleep.”
“Barely.”
“Hmm.” Yoel’s eyebrows went up. “What’s your highest level of education?”
“High school. Uncle Tommy wouldn’t let me work for him if I dropped out.”
“Favorite subject?”
“P.E.”
“Any extracurriculars?”
“Wrestling when we lived in Texas. That’s about it.”
“I should’ve guessed you would be more brawn than brain.”
“Hey, building a body this good takes a lot of mental discipline. You could do it too if you found a decent MMA gym with a coach, a ring, and good free weights.” Helen shrugged, but her knees went still. “You ever try learning something physical?”
“I stay active enou
gh to maintain my health. I’ve never had time for much else between my other activities.” Yoel adjusted his glasses and went to the nearest shelf of English-language paperbacks. “Perhaps if a lecture bores you, reading something will help you retain it better. You can ask questions as they come and take notes at your own pace.”
“Nah, that won’t help. It’s still sitting around doing nothing.” If he didn’t have any ideas to get them moving, maybe she could come up with one. “You can handle a gun, but have you ever thought what you’d do if somebody caught you without one?”
“The only sure way of survival, Miss Carver, retreat and regroup.” Yoel paused as he combed through the titles. “That’s not to say I have never thought about studying a martial art or two, for the mental benefits you mentioned.”
“Last I checked, I managed a purple in BJJ. I always liked kickboxing better, though. That Muay Thai shit is brutal.” Helen watched Yoel as she spoke, gauging his interest. “They’re full contact and helped me get outta plenty of scrapes.”
“I always like to keep more distance between myself and an enemy.” Yoel glanced over his shoulder at Helen, away from the books. “So you have actual experience with attackers outside of sanctioned fights?”
“I helped out in biker bar fights before. Earned me an offer to join a pretty liberal MC chapter once. Half the guys there threatened to mutiny on the spot.” Helen shed her jacket and tossed it by a stack of boxes. “I got an idea of how to spice this up.”
“I’m listening.” Yoel turned away from the bookshelves and hooked his thumbs in his pockets.
“How ‘bout we do some slow sparring and trade off talking.” Helen slipped off one of her boots as she spoke. “I’ll drill you on some basic moves while you explain all this crap. That way I can listen better ‘cause I’m moving, and you’re learning something out of the deal too.”
