“You don’t like the kind of surprises you’re regularly confronted with,” he said, looking me right in the eyes. “Villains popping up like a jack-in-the-box you never asked for. Enemies showing themselves at times you didn’t expect to see them. Governments turning on you, the press blindsiding you out of nowhere. But a normal surprise? Reed showing up when you least expect him to?” He smiled. “You like a good surprise every once in a while, Sienna Nealon. You just need to have more people in your life who give you the pleasant ones, instead of the unpleasant kind.”
“Huh,” I said, contemplating what he’d said. “Okay. Maybe.”
He just grinned and turned back to the road in time to bring the car back between the lines. “You wait and see.”
“Still,” I said, watching him out of the corner of my eye while crossing my arms and pretending to face forward, “I don’t think your need for help is going to fall into the category of ‘pleasant surprise,’ Harry.”
“Why would you think that?” he asked. He already knew the answer, the bastard.
“Because no one has ever asked me for help and it turned out to not be something horrific,” I said. “It’s never, ‘Hey, Sienna, help this little old lady cross the street.’ Or, ‘Babysit this lovely, charming kid who will give you no problems at all’—”
“I don’t think you’ve done much babysitting,” Harry said.
“I’ve watched Greg Vansen’s son Eddie on at least three occasions now,” I said. Greg and Morgan had been up to visit us twice since I’d come back from Scotland. I suspected Reed of trying to draw me out of my drinking shell. It had worked, inasmuch as I’d managed to postpone my normal five o’clock drink to after Eddie went to bed at eight. Progress, probably, by my brother’s standards. No need to mention that I hadn’t been unsupervised with Eddie during those visits. “That kid loves me.” Mostly true. I hadn’t stolen his soul, and he seemed to like to involve me in his Lego projects, even though he was much better at them than I was.
“Duly noted.”
“My point is, no one comes to Sienna Nealon for the easy stuff,” I said.
“I like how you’ve gotten to the point that referring to yourself in the third person is natural.”
“They come to me for crap no one else can solve, usually involving face punching.”
“How’s that face punching business going lately?” Harry asked.
“Poorly. I haven’t punched any faces in a while. My knuckles are getting soft.”
“Well, I come with opportunity, then,” Harry said.
“I didn’t say I wanted to get back to it!” But …
Of course I did. I missed punching people in the face. Only worthy people, people who had earned a good punch, of course.
“Don’t worry,” Harry said, prompting me to frown again. “All will be explained in time.”
And before I could respond to that bit of cryptic nonsense, Cassidy piped up. “I’ve got another hit on this attacker.”
I turned in my seat, twisting my neck and sending a shooting pain up to join the hangover headache. “Oof,” I said. “Where?”
“New York City,” Cassidy said, not looking up from the glow of the screen. It cast her in an even paler shade of white. She looked up, gaze flitting to me for just a second, watching my reaction. “Looks like he just beat the living hell out of an old friend of yours.” And she spun the computer around so I could see the headline emblazoned across the top of the screen.
I saw it … and my stomach dropped like we’d hit the world’s largest speedbump.
GRAVITY FALLS
Attack on local hero leaves her future in doubt—authorities are not saying whether Jamie Barton is even still alive.
11.
I sat in the passenger seat of the car heading down that Alabama back road, stunned. I’d seen Jamie Barton just a few months ago. She’d helped me escape from Scotland, helped save my life at a time when I wondered if I had any friends left. She’d been one of a couple of handfuls of people who’d put their lives on the line facing off against the strongest metahuman on the damned planet to help save my life.
Now she was possibly dead, and I didn’t have a damned clue what had happened.
“What the hell?” I asked, directing it to Cassidy.
She glanced up at me. “I’m looking.” And she drove her gaze down again.
I looked at Harry, who sat with pursed lips staring into the distance. “What do you know about this?”
Harry shrugged. “I don’t really know this Gravity gal.”
“It’s just Gravity now,” I said. “And I don’t care if you know her—do you know what happened?”
“I’ve been sitting here with you this whole time,” Harry said, turning to favor me with a boyish grin. “How would I—no, I don’t have an iota of an idea. I’d need to know this lady to be able to look into her future.”
My mind raced. “What about my future?”
He paused, just waiting. I wondered why, but after he didn’t speak, I lost patience. “Because I’m going to try and contact her, of course.”
“Of course you are,” Harry said. “How?”
“I don’t know, a phone call,” I said, my already exhausted patience somehow finding a further level of exhaustion to sink to. Post Marathon status, maybe. About to yell, “Nike! Nike!” before collapsing dead.
“I’m sure that’d be satisfying,” Harry said, “but what are the reasons you can’t do that—and what are the reasons you shouldn’t?”
I squinted at him, and he smiled. “What is this, twenty questions?”
“See, this is something you learn after a little time spent gazing the future,” Harry said, settling back, still paying most of his attention to me and not the road ahead. “I could have this whole conversation in advance of you by three whole sentences. I know everything you could possibly say—”
“Pine—” I started to interrupt.
“—apple,” he finished.
“—Sol,” I said spitefully. I totally had meant pineapple.
“So I could go ahead and skip most of our conversations,” Harry said, and he nudged the empty scotch bottle with an elbow, “just head you off in a way you’d never realize you’d even been … let’s call it ‘handled’—”
“Wh—”
“Because ‘manipulated’ is an ugly word,” Harry said. “That’s why.” He looked at me knowingly. “I could head you off at every conversational pass. I know what you’re going to say before you say it. Even the crazy stuff like—”
“Bene—” Cassidy piped up from the back.
“—ficient,” Harry finished for her.
“Mal—” she started to say.
“—volio,” Harry said.
“Very good,” Cassidy said coolly, then went back to typing.
“But if I have one side of the conversation, always,” Harry said, “it’s not really a conversation, is it? So, yeah, I play twenty questions with you. Fifty questions, or a hundred questions, even—and when I’m doing that, know that it’s not because I’m being a giant, throbbing hemorrhoid.” He cracked a grin. Charming. Damn him. “It’s because I actually do want to have a conversation with you, and because I don’t want to be a dick and act like I’m reading your mind when I’m really just excluding you from our talk by jumping ahead of you in time. Because doing that means I’m the only one learning anything in our conversation, and that seems unfair to you.”
“I want to know where you learned charm, Harry,” I said, after giving his little explanation a moment to digest. It sat well with me.
“Why?” He smirked. “You wouldn’t take any advice I have to give you in that area, would you?”
I grunted. He was right about that, too. “Fine. I want to talk to Gravity.”
“Why?”