Oh man, he can’t still be carrying a torch for me, can he? I mean, we had it all out already, right? Yeah right, drawled my cynical self, a chain-smoking echo of my mother, who wore hair curlers like diamond tiaras and was a master at keeping her kids out of the house.
“Yes, Cole?” Vayl’s tone could’ve frozen a pitcher of lemonade.
“I just wanted to know what you thought about the security guards.” When Vayl gave him a blank look Cole’s shoulders bunched right back up. “What’ve you been doing in here all this time?” he asked me.
Before I could reply Vayl said, “The conversations that occur betweensverhamin andavhar are private. If information arises that concerns you, we will let you know.”
“That’s enough,” I told them both, holding out my hands, which immediately seemed kind of stupid. Did I really want to be the one standing in the middle of a pissing match? Ick. “If you boys can’t play nice I’m sending you to your rooms.”
Vayl raised an eyebrow as if to say,But I am already here .
I went on. “Cole makes a good point. I should’ve told you straight off that we went to scout out the festival, and while we were there I saw something funky.” I described the guard. Luckily that made Vayl forget all about how much he didn’t care for Cole. Which made his presence on our current mission something of a minor miracle. Enter the flaming ball of guilt who is me.
I’d met Cole on New Year’s Eve during a reconnaissance mission. His connection to our target’s wife had piqued Vayl’s interest. That attention had not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It had resulted in the burning of Cole’s office, his kidnapping and severe beating. At the end of that mission he’d held my hand in the dungeon below Club Undead, tears flowing unchecked down his battered face. “I’m so sorry,” he kept saying.
The pain of my injuries had nearly overwhelmed me. I badly wanted a paramedic with a needleful of morphine. But it helped to concentrate on the men, Cole on my left and Vayl, running soothing fingers through my hair, at my right.
“Why?” I asked, my voice raspy with barely checked agony.
“I should be in your spot. If you hadn’t pulled me off that bomb and taken my place—”
“She would have been fired,” Vayl told him.
I squeezed Cole’s hand. “And that really would’ve killed me.”
“But—”
I squeezed harder, making him wince. “You saved me just now. We’re even.”
But I hadn’t really felt that way. I still had a job, after all, while Cole’s was little more than a pile of ash. So when he visited me in the hospital a week later to ask for a recommendation, I called my boss, Pete, that afternoon.
“Does he know what he’s talking about?” Pete had asked.
“He was there for the big showdown. I can tell you he has no illusions,” I assured him. Then I listed all the reasons Cole would make an excellent agent. It took me quite a while. I finished with the two items I knew Pete couldn’t resist. “He currently knows seven languages and can pick up new ones in a snap because of his Sensitivity. Plus he’s an ace shooter. He started competing in high school. Still does when he can. And he rarely loses.”
“I thought you told me he was a private investigator. Isn’t there enough supernatural crime in Miami to keep him busy?”
“He doesn’t want to be a PI anymore. I tried to talk him out of this decision and realized he’s made it for all the right reasons. You know, Amanda Abn-Assan was a childhood friend of his. He said after losing her, he just can’t sit on the sidelines while somebody else chases down scumbags like her husband.”
Cole had just completed his first course of training when this mission came up. Since he spoke Chinese—and we didn’t—Pete figured he could help us out while we gave him some on-the-job experience. Vayl hadn’t seen it that way. I’d made some very intelligent, convincing arguments, none of which he’d bought. In the end I’d promised to personally drop off and pick up his dry-cleaning for a month, since he suspected the new delivery boy was rifling through his mail, and we had a deal.
I wondered idly if the shirt Vayl currently wore was a dry-clean-only model as he said, “I am not sure what kind ofother you detected, Jasmine. Maybe Cassandra will have a record.”
We all moved into the living area to check with her. But with so little data to give theEnkyklios , her portable library, we came up dry.
“My books may have something,” Cassandra said. “I’ll check them.”
“Thank you,” Vayl said graciously. He pulled a bag of blood out of the refrigerator and poured it into a mug. In our time together I’d learned that he liked to let it slowly warm to room temperature. He said nuking it burned away most of the flavor. And while I thought my skin should’ve crawled at learning those kinds of details, it didn’t, because it implied a trust I felt honored to have earned.
Our noise had awakened Bergman, who sat rubbing his eyes on the couch I had decided to dub Mary-Kate. Cassandra sat across from him on its twin, Ashley, already leafing through a heavy old tome whose pages were thick as postal paper. Cole grabbed a piece of gum from a green bowl on the table beside her couch (um, Ashley) and dropped down beside her.
“I’m researching,” she told him sternly. “No funny comments about the pictures.”
“But look at that guy! He’s clearly constipated.”
“He eats people’s brains!”
“Exactly!”
I took a seat beside Bergman and gave him the once-over. His nap hadn’t done him much good. Though he shouldn’t, he reminded me of a bereaved parent. He dreamed, incubated, birthed his inventions, and was very choosy about where he let them go to work. Knowing some lunatic currently wore his baby, and that the Raptor was circling overhead, waiting to swoop in and hook it, probably made him feel desperately helpless.
Vayl, still standing in the kitchen, leaned his elbows on the counter that backed the banquette. He didn’t even clear his throat and suddenly we all snapped to attention. He said, “Before we leave for the festival site, I want to complete your briefing on Bergman’s armor. I will ask him to explain the details of its workings in a moment. As he said, it is an incredibly advanced piece of biotechnology that physically binds with its carrier. Once they are united, the only ways you can separate the suit from its wearer are to kill him, or administer a chemical bath that fools the suit into thinking he is dead.”
“I take it Mr. Bubble isn’t manufacturing that particular brand of bath additive just yet?” asked Cole.
Bergman sat up, then laid his head against the back of Mary-Kate despondently. “That’s what the experiments at White Sands were about. They were trying to target which chemicals administered in which way would throw the suit into death response.”
“But they haven’t had any luck yet?” I asked.
Bergman shook his head.
“Is it that big of a deal?” Cole inquired. “We’re going to kill the guy anyway.”
“You can try,” moaned Bergman.
Vayl nodded. “Go on,” he urged as he took a sip from his mug.
Bergman looked at each of us in turn, shook his head, and ran a hand across the reddish brown grizzle that had appeared on his jaw sometime in the past twenty-two hours. As he spoke, he gazed out the window at the glaring lights of Moe’s gas station and the city beyond. “The armor will repel every kind of projectile in existence. It’s impervious to fire, can’t be shredded, and can withstand pressures equal to those found in the deepest parts of the ocean.”