Logic won and I hurried into my bedroom, taking the coward’s way out. I shut the door, my whole body alive and tingling, my hands shaking. I got dressed quickly, feeling much safer fully dressed when Fate was so close by. I tugged on a pair of dark jeans that would fade into the night and the first dark tank top my fingers touched on in the drawer.
Fate was standing a few feet from the door when I came back out. “Do you have something with long sleeves?” he asked. The mood of a few minutes ago still hovered in the air between us, also evidenced by the slightly deeper sound of his voice, which was not quite back to normal yet.
I grabbed a dark sweatshirt I’d left on the dinette chair and tried to avoid his eyes. He was like some sex Medusa; if I didn’t look in his eyes it would all be okay.
“Let’s get going,” I said, looking to break the tension that was still there.
“Sure.” My words seemed to jolt him from whatever sexy trance he was in.
I followed him out of the condo and settling into our purpose for the evening somehow took the edge off of the mood, enough to make it bearable anyway.
“I’ll drive,” I said as we made our way to the parking lot.
His step faltered for a minute and I paused to look at him. “What?”
“You need a new car.”
I stared at my Honda. All the sheen was gone from her paint and there was rust eating away at her wheel wells. “I like my car.”
It was true that I hadn’t at first. I’d resented everyone else having a better car but now I was sort of used to her. We’d been through a lot, my Honda and me, and she’d always pulled through. She’d never once stalled at an inappropriate time. Not that she didn’t stall, but she seemed to know when she could slack off.
“We can’t go after people in this thing. It sticks out too much.” He had a look on his face like a kid with a plate of lima beans in front of him.
“And you think your car is more low key and appropriate?” I asked, pointing toward the flashy Porsche. “Trust me on this, no one’s looking at my old Honda.”
“That’s part of the problem, I don’t want to look at it either. I propose we get another car for the bucket list.”
I scrunched up my face, feeling bad at casting aside my old car. “I don’t know. It feels wrong somehow.”
“You don’t have AC. I can’t drive around like that.”
“I do have AC,” I said. “You just have to turn it off when you drive over thirty. Why? You think your fancy sports car makes you better?”
“What makes me better has nothing to do with my car. I just like to actually move forward when I hit the gas as opposed to how you occasionally slide backward.”
“That only happened once and we were on a hill!”
“Look, I’m not forcing you to ride in mine. I’m compromising. Me. Compromising. For you.” He raised his eyebrows, stressing with his expression how difficult this was for him.
“You do have a problem compromising.” I nodded in agreement.
“That wasn’t what you were supposed to say. I am not the only one with this problem. And if we are going to make it as a…team, you need to as well.”
I was fairly certain team was his second choice of words. Was he going to say friends? Coworkers? He was trying. I had to take what I could get.
But I wasn’t very fond of compromising either. I crossed my arms, sighed and I knew I must have had a puss on my face but I finally forced out the word, “Fine.”
“Was it really that bad?” he said, laughter in his tone.
“Yes.”
“There’s a used car lot around the corner. You can pick. Tonight we take the Honda. Tomorrow, we get a real car.”
He wasn’t exactly asking but I answered anyway. “Okay.”
Chapter Six
A lifetime ago—or more accurately, last month—I’d saved a man on a yacht. Thinking back on it now, it felt like a different person had done that. It had been my first “save” job, robbing someone from death’s hands—and by death’s hands, I mean the process of the body dying, not my buddy back at the office—so that I could deliver them into Malokin’s. He wanted them for his own nefarious needs, the exact details of which I had blissful ignorance of.
I’d never been a willing participant but Kitty’s life had been hanging over my head as Malokin’s noose had tightened around my neck. I hadn’t known until then how much I would hate being under someone’s thumb. How could I have? I’d never been a puppet before. If it hadn’t been for Kitty, I would’ve taken my chances and told Malokin to do his worst, even if that meant being strangled by the threads that held me.
And here I was now: new marina and agenda, same yacht and target. It wasn’t surprising that they had decided to move the yacht to a new location after what had happened.
I hesitated only a second before I turned off the engine, parked in a spot between a Mercedes and a Lamborghini.
Fate threw me a look that said, yeah, we blend, before climbing out of the car. The Honda was making some especially foul smells today so I followed quickly. He might have a point.
We walked through the parking lot and then toward the slips filled with boats.
One of the things I hated about remaining here, so close to where I’d been born and raised as a human, was it was filled with memories that flooded back when I least expected them. The last time I’d been at this marina was when my number could still be counted among the homo sapiens.
I’d gone on sailing trips from this place, back in better days when the only worries we’d had were if we’d brought enough booze and sandwiches. I wished those were the only things that came to mind now. I’d even settle for those memories to be the second or third of what came to mind, instead of being buried under a whole lot of ugly crap.
“This guy, this was the first time I did something for Malokin.” I walked down the dock, staring up at the changing sky and wondering about all of the things I still didn’t know. “It keeps me up at night wondering how my saves contributed to what’s happening now.” It might have been the most honest thing I’d ever uttered to Fate.
He looked at me as if he understood, right down to the sleepless nights. “Something was going on way before that. Maybe it helped him, maybe it didn’t, but this was coming either way.”
He sounded so sure of it that it was easy to cling to the belief he was correct. I remembered the day I went to Montreal on one of my first jobs. Things had seemed off then, even to my novice transfer sensibilities. “Maybe you’re right.”
“You know I’m right. I was searching for the cause way before you got involved.”
He had been. I’d thought at the time it was a fool’s errand. Now look at me; if he’d been a fool I was now a court jester dancing to the same tune.
“Even still, I didn’t help things.”
Fate stopped in the middle of the walk and grabbed my hand to stop me as well. “Kitty would be dead if you hadn’t done what you did. He would’ve killed her.”
“Would you have done it? Helped Malokin to save Kitty?” I asked.
He didn’t answer, and that was all I needed. I’d known anyway. As playful and flirty as this newer version of Fate could be, it hadn’t been that long ago for me to have forgotten what he’d been like when I’d arrived and what I knew he was deep down—black and white, all steel and sharp edges. He would’ve let Kitty die.
“You think I’m soft?” I didn’t know if it was a question or an accusation.
“No. Everyone has to follow their gut. You did the only thing you could live with.”
He looked at me like he believed in what he was saying, even if it was the exact opposite of how he would’ve dealt with it. I nodded and started walking again. So did he.
“Don’t judge your actions against mine. We’re different.”
Don’t judge. That was a joke. How could I not? Everyone judged whether we admitted to it or not, usually saving the harshest criticisms for ourselves.
“What about Murphy or Luck? What do you think they would’ve done?” I asked, fearing the worst. Was I the only one that didn’t have the heart to let her die? Or was what I called heart actually just human weakness? Maybe they were right; transfers were inferior.