He popped down into view, his short, dark hair impeccably coiffed. He stared at me with intense eyes, and a knowing smile, as I blinked in surprise.
“Harry Graves?” I asked, my breath escaping me once more. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I’m here to drive you,” he said, with a muted smile. “And also …” His smile evaporated, and he grew still. Graves wasn’t a twitchy man, so this came with some serious sense of setting off alarm bells in my head. He breathed, and when he spoke, it came out as a low, dramatic proclamation. “I need your help.”
8.
Harry Graves was just standing outside my window, handsome face framed perfectly, a boyish smile on his actually-not-that-boyish face. And he’d brought me scotch before asking for my help.
A lesser woman might have melted.
Not me, though.
“Well, join the conga line forming for those needing my help,” I said as I jerked a thumb toward Cassidy, sitting in the back seat with a sour look on her face. I wondered if she wore it because she had no idea who Harry Graves was, or if she did know but was wondering what the hell he could possibly need my help for.
Gripping the bottle of scotch that Harry had gifted me in one hand, I took another quick nip before pushing the cork back in. The scotch tingled and had a good flavor. I faux-gargled with it for a second, then swallowed it down. “Oaky,” I said.
“That’s a lovely review of the scotch,” Eilish said, looking at me with serious doubts, “but, uhm—who is this fellow?”
Harry slipped around the front of the car and over to Eilish’s window where he dropped down and knocked on it. He bent so he could look in, and she was graced with a perfect view of his good looks. Very devil-may-care.
The scotch might have been affecting my judgment, because I couldn’t recall finding Harry quite as attractive as I was finding him now. Not that I’d ever found him unattractive, just …
Humm. He was, uh …
Tasty … now. Very tasty.
“This is Harry Graves,” I said, trying to put Eilish’s mind at ease. “He’s cool. He helped save the entire world once, and all metahumans another time.”
“I suppose I should be grateful for that, then,” Eilish said, staring out the window at him.
“Plus, I offered to drive,” Harry said, a little muffled by the window. “Thus sparing you the trouble, Ms. Eilish.”
“And he’s a mannerly one, too,” Eilish said, opening the door. “Sienna, would you kindly—”
“You can sit in the back,” I said, slurring a little. “I’m not moving.”
“By the way, Eilish,” Harry said, grinning, “I always thought of myself less like a Hugh Jackman, and more like a Kurt Russell.”
Eilish flushed. “I—I didn’t say that Hugh Jackman thing out loud, did I? Wasn’t I just thinking it?” She put her hands on her cheeks, which were tilting a hard red, like Cassidy on a normal day. “Wait,” she whirled around on me, “is he a telepath?”
“No,” I said, taking a leisurely sip of scotch and enjoying the burn, which felt less harsh than it had four sips ago. “He’s a Cassandra, so he can read your future. Probably picked out a probability of you saying it, like one percent or something.” I met Harry’s gaze, his grin wide. “He does that sometimes to show off.”
“She’s got the right of it,” Harry said, still grinning. “In your case, it was about a 0.001% chance of you saying that, but it was enough that I knew you were thinking it.” He shifted his gaze to Cassidy. “So you’ve never seen a Cassandra at work, Cassidy?”
Cassidy just blinked once, then, realizing he’d plucked her thought out of the probabilities, rolled with it. “I’ve only read anecdotes.” She leaned forward to me and didn’t even bother to whisper. “His power would be so useful to you. Why haven’t you absorbed him?”
I was feeling pretty relaxed before she went and said that. I caught Harry’s flinch of reluctance at her comment, and figured some of my possible responses to that must have been pretty epic. But instead of flying off the handle in an unmitigated display of drunken emotion (because I was soooo gone by now), instead I said, “Why didn’t you drink that super powers potion that President Harmon gave you for safekeeping?”
Cassidy blinked. “Because he would have scooped the brain right out of me and left me either dead or a vegetable. He doesn’t—didn’t—really suffer competitors, Sienna.”
“Oh.” I stared at her, having trouble holding my head up straight. “I thought maybe you realized the limits of power and decency … or something.” Eilish was surrendering her seat to my left, I realized, and Harry was slipping in. A few seconds later, I heard Eilish get in behind me, then slam the door as Harry started the engine.
“We’re going to—never mind,” Cassidy said, probably realizing that Harry already knew where we were going.
“Heading north,” Harry said, backing the car out of the space.
I glanced at our little beachfront condo. Sometimes, when I wasn’t too drunk, I did take scotch out onto the beach. Stared up at the stars. Walked with Reed. Or Augustus and Taneshia. Occasionally Eilish. The sand beneath my toes. My dyed hair blowing in the wind.
Scotch, neat, flowing down the back of my throat. Good times. Or, y’know … as good as I could expect at this point.
“How long is it going to take us to get to this Norfolk?” Eilish asked. “I say ‘this Norfolk’ because you know we’ve got our own.”
“Yes,” Cassidy said, a little acidly. “I did know that.”
“This is going to be so much fun,” Harry said, meta-low, so low I suspected only I could hear it.
“Heh,” I said, and all the levity went out of me.
I was on the road with Eilish, who followed me around like a co-dependent, with Harry Graves, who I didn’t really know that well and understood even less, and Cassidy Ellis, who usually hated me but now wanted to use me for revenge.
And somewhere out there was a meta who I apparently had to fight, and defeat … with none of the powers I’d once boasted.
“Good thing I packed the Walther,” I muttered, and put my head against the window as my brain rattled in my skull at a bump in the road. I looked out the window as we turned onto 30A, a few people walking down the sidewalks around me, heading to the beach or to the pools or just enjoying the brisk “not-really-winter, go home, Florida, you’re drunk,” air. (I might have been projecting there.)
“Anyone know any songs for the road?” Eilish asked, just a few notes too chipper for me.
I put my head against the window and felt the slow drag of unconsciousness pull me away. I didn’t want to be awake for this crap anyway.
9.
Jamie Barton
New York City