A cold feeling sprouted in the pit of my stomach, telling me exactly how this would end. “And?”
Andrea squared her shoulders and opened her mouth.
Nothing came out. She clamped it shut.
I waited.
Her face paled. She sat rigid, the mouth of her line tense. A faint reddish glow tinted her eyes—the hint of hyena sneaking through under pressure.
Andrea unclenched her teeth. Her voice came out completely flat, sifted through the sieve of her will until every last hint of emotion had been scrubbed from it.
“They awarded me Master-at-Arms and retired me due to being mentally unfit for duty. The official diagnosis is posttraumatic stress disorder. The decision is final and I can’t dispute it. I can’t even accuse them of discrimination, because my final orders don’t address the fact that I’m beastkin. They simply refused to acknowledge it, as if it weren’t an issue.”
Those fuckers. They didn’t just throw her out like a piece of garbage, they sent a message with her. If you’re not human, it doesn’t matter how good you are. We don’t want your ass.
“So.” Andrea took a deep breath and pushed the words out. “I failed.”
For Andrea the Order was more than simply a job. It was her life. She’d spent her childhood in a pack of shapeshifters who reviled her because her father was an animal and her mother was too weak to protect her. Every bone in Andrea’s body had been broken before she was ten years old. Andrea rejected all things shapeshifter. She locked that part of herself deep inside and dedicated her existence to becoming completely human, to stepping between the weak and the strong, and she was damn good at it. Now the Order had made her into a pariah. It was a monumental betrayal.
“Everything is gone.” Andrea forced a smile. Her face looked like it would shatter any second. “My job, my identity. If the cops had looked closer at my ID, they’d see it said RETIRED on it. People I thought were my friends won’t talk to me, like I’m a leper. When I came back to Atlanta, I called down to the chapter looking for Shane. He’d taken over the armory when I left. A couple of those weapons are my personal property. I want them back.”
Shane was a typical knight: no family to tie him down, top physical condition, competent, by the book. He and I didn’t get along, because he never could quite figure out where I fit into the Order’s hierarchy. But he and Andrea had hit it off. They were colleagues. Buddies even.
“How is he?” I asked.
Outrage sparked in Andrea’s eyes. “He wouldn’t talk to me. I know he was there, because Maxine took the call and you know how her voice gets all distant when she is talking in someone’s head at the same time? It was like that. She must’ve asked him if he wanted to talk to me and then she took a message. Shane hasn’t called me back either.”
“Shane is an asshole. I was riding back from a job once—it was raining so hard I could barely see—and he was jogging with his rucksack on. I asked him why. He told me that it was his day off and he was trying to take twenty seconds off his time so he could score an even three hundred on the PE scale. He has no brain of his own—he opens his mouth and the Order’s Code comes out.”
In a real fight the extra twenty seconds wouldn’t help him. I could kill him in one. Shane lacked the predatory instinct that turned a well-trained man into a killer. He treated each fight as a tournament match, where someone was totaling his points. And despite his obvious zeal, the Order recognized it, too. All knights started out as knight-defenders. The Order gave you ten years to distinguish yourself, and if you failed, at the end of your dime you became a master-defender, a rank-and-file knight. Shane clearly aimed higher than that, but he was nine years into his tenure with the Order, and Ted showed no signs of promoting him.
Andrea crossed her arms. “Shane is not the point. I don’t give a damn about Shane. He’s just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Anyway. After the hearing me and Grendel holed up in my place for a couple of weeks licking my wounds, but I can’t hide in my hole forever. And talking to the fur-face only gets you so far. Also, he eats things that are bad for him, like rugs and bathroom fixtures. He chewed a hole in my kitchen floor. In a completely flat surface.”
“It doesn’t surprise me.”
Just her and the freakishly large smelly poodle hiding in her apartment together. No friends, no visitors, nothing, just sitting there in her own misery, too proud to unload it on anybody else. It was something I would’ve done. Except now when I went home, someone was there waiting for me and he would turn the city inside out if I was more than a couple of hours late. But Andrea had nobody. Not even Raphael—she very carefully didn’t mention his name.
“I’ve got a dog-training book,” Andrea said. “It says Grendel needs mental stimulation, so I tried to train him, but I think he might be retarded. I figured you would want to see your dog eventually, so here we are. He’s probably eaten my dashboard by now.”
If she was lucky. If not, he would’ve also puked on the floor and then peed on it for a good measure. I leaned back. “So what now?”
Andrea shrugged her shoulders in a jerky, forced movement. Her voice was still a matter-of-fact monotone. “I don’t know. The Order offered me a pension. I told them to shove it up their asses. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve earned it, but I don’t want it.”
I wouldn’t have taken it either.
“I’ve got some money put away, so I don’t have to look for work right this second. Maybe I’ll take up fishing. I suppose eventually I’ll have to find something, probably in law enforcement. Just not now.
They’ll do background checks and I don’t want to deal with it.”
“Would you like to work here with me?”
Andrea stared at me.
“We have no clients and the pay is shit.”
She kept staring. I couldn’t even tell if she heard me.
“Even if business were booming, I still couldn’t afford to pay you what you’re worth.” No reaction.
“But if you don’t mind sitting in the office drinking motor oil coffee and bullshitting with me . . .”
Andrea put her hands over her face.
Ah crap. What do I do now? Do I say something, do I not say anything?
I kept talking, keeping my voice as light as I could manage. “I have an extra desk. If the PAD comes to shut us down, I might need sniper support, and I can’t shoot a cow from ten feet. We can turn our desks over and lob grenades at them when they storm the door . . .”
Andrea’s shoulders shook slightly.
She was crying. Fuck me. I sat there, not sure what to do with myself.
Andrea kept trembling, eerily quiet.
I got off my ass and came back with a handkerchief. Andrea took the hanky and pressed it to her face.
Pity would only make it worse. She wanted to keep her pride—it was all she had left and I had to help her preserve it. I pretended to drink my coffee and stare at my mug. Andrea pretended not to be crying, while trying to mop up her tears.
For a few minutes we sat like this, awkward and grimly determined to act like nothing was happening.
If I glared at this mug a moment longer, it would burst into flames from the sheer tension.
Andrea blew her nose. Her voice came out slightly hoarse. “Do you even have anything to shoot the PAD with?”
“I have an armory upstairs. The Pack gave me some guns and ammo. It’s in boxes to the left.”
Andrea paused. “In cardboard boxes?”
“Yeah.”
Andrea groaned.
“Hey, guns aren’t my thing. If they had brought me swords, that would be different. That’s where you come—”
Andrea got up and hugged me. It was a split-second hug, and then she was off, going upstairs, handkerchief in hand.
This best friend thing was seriously kicking my ass.
Upstairs something clanged.
Okay. I had to get on with the program. I took her keys from the table and went to get Grendel out of her truck before he demolished it.