A hand tanned a suspiciously orange color slapped the bar. "Who the hell do I have to screw to get a beer in this place?"
I considered and tilted my head toward Niko. "That," my brother commented coolly, "is almost as humorous as my fist inserted into your left nostril."
Giving up the taunting while I was still mobile, I fetched a brewski for leather boy. "There you go, Mr. Khan. No whoring of your body necessary."
Offset eyes gave me a disinterested once-over. After all, I wasn't a band babe. Hell, I wasn't even a woman. No record exec, no one who could advance his career in the slightest… just Joe Blow bartender, so far below the radar that I didn't even register.
His next beer I'd spit in.
He took a swig of the beer, wiping off the foam mustache with the back of his hand. "Friends of yours, Grainger? You're sure spending enough time over here. Thought we were going to do another sound check."
"We've done ten, Roy," Samuel said with only a glimmer of a strained quality to his patience. "The equipment's fine." Then he added under his breath, "It's your voice that's the problem."
It was the faintest whisper and passed by Genghis completely. Not by me, though. I had good ears too. Not pointed maybe, but sharper than ordinary. Not bothering to smother the sardonic quirk of my lips, I felt it widen into a full-fledged smirk when the singer hissed, "It's Genghis. Jesus Christ, Grainger." Finishing the beer in one long gulp, he slammed the mug down. "We're back on in five if you can tear yourself away."
I waved at his back as he disappeared into the crowd. "Nice guy. Salt of the earth. The stick up his ass is just a bonus."
"Let us not make light of the rectally challenged." Niko disposed of the mug with disdain, wiping his hand thoroughly on a towel afterward. "The condition is no doubt congenital. Completely beyond his control."
"You've got that right." Samuel stood and gave us a faintly apologetic grimace. "A born asshole. But it's his band, his van, and my cross to bear until a better gig comes along." Ramming hands into the pockets of his jeans, he aimed a jaundiced look at the makeshift stage where Genghis was waving an imperious hand. Turning back to Niko and me, he gave us a companionable nod. "See you guys Friday."
"Back for another show? Damn, seriously?" I couldn't keep a sliver of disbelief from my voice. They had packed the place, but still… make playing this hole-in-the-wall a regular thing? What the hell for?
A philosophical smile lightened Samuel's dark features. "It's a dump, no doubt. But the competition is fierce out there. Sometimes you take what you can get until something better comes along."
True. True words. But truer ones might be that sometimes you got out while the getting was good. But that was my motto and I didn't share it with Samuel. And I didn't tell him that by Friday Niko and I would be long gone. We'd be a soon forgotten memory, the same as we were to so many people already. Just ghosts. Because in a world of monsters, you had to be a ghost to survive.
Chapter Five
The next morning I was dressed and out before Niko. As events went, unprecedented wasn't the word. Desperate situations… I didn't have any illusions that my brother had slept soundly through my leaving. I wouldn't have even wanted him to, not with the threat of the Grendels looming. As it was, I simply skipped out on the last fifteen minutes of my watch duty. I knew Niko would wake up the moment I opened the front door, and more than that, he would know exactly where I had gone, and why. A note wasn't needed. But I didn't understand why my feet carried me there.
Or maybe I didn't want to.
It was too early for the soda shop to be open. I knew that. I also knew it would be open anyway. And I knew George would be waiting for me. How I knew, I couldn't say, and the headache that analyzing it would cause wasn't something I aspired to. So, as with so many things in my life, I let it go. I let it go and walked on.
When I reached the shop the security gate was already up and George was standing at the door. In a slim sweater of jumbled golds, reds, and browns and the silky sweep of a dark bronze skirt, she watched my approach with her arms wrapped around her waist. She looked older. Such a short time had passed since she'd been giggling and drinking her pineapple shake, yet it could've been years, from the haunted quality of her eyes. Through the glass, the bright copper of her hair was muted, the gold of her skin tarnished… a shadow of the Georgina I knew.
I stood and looked at her, just looked. It was easy to picture my hand rising to grasp the handle and pull the door open. I could see it so clearly, yet my hand didn't move from my side. Maybe it knew what part of me didn't want to admit. The door was locked. If I tried to open it, it wouldn't budge. I knew that in the same way I knew George would be here.
She didn't say anything, my girl. Not a word. She only watched me in return with a smile so wistful and fleeting that I might have imagined it. Then she leaned a few inches closer and her lips grazed the glass to frost it with her breath. In the fog her finger traced a few curving lines, simple and spare. And then she was gone. Disappearing into the gloom of the lightless shop, she was the autumn glitter of dying leaves and then she was nothing. Nothing to hold in your hand, nothing to catch the eye. Nothing at all.
Her breath the only thing left behind, my finger followed the same path hers had taken. I frowned. A car. She'd drawn a car. What the hell? As the glass warmed, even that vanished, the same as its maker. Knowing how it would end, I tried the door anyway. I'd been right.
Locked.
By the time I made it home Niko was up and packing. It was a ritual for him, done in just the same way every time. As for me… we'd been on the run for so long, Niko and me, that I'd stopped putting our personal touches on the places we stayed. Because in the end, that's all they were… places. They weren't homes, just disposable living space. Forget that and one day you might slow down; you might take the time to regret your loss. And if that happened, if you took one second to mourn what you were leaving behind, well, your ass was grass. Devil takes the hindmost, but Grendels went one better. They took the middlemost and even the front-runners if there was the smallest misstep.
All this bleak and impersonal existence might scar the soul, but hey, it was a nice bonus if you were a chronically lazy bastard like myself. Packing usually consisted of shoving my dirty laundry in a garbage bag and putting on my shoes. Sixty seconds max. The excruciatingly efficient Niko tended to take longer. That might've been surprising had he not had so many sharp pointy things to gather up. We didn't quite need a U-Haul for all his weapons, but it was a near thing.
Walking into his room, I leaned around him to extend a finger and run it along the smooth, silver satin of an elegant dagger. "The acid of skin is detrimental to the metal," Niko said mildly as he rolled another blade in a length of dark green felt. He didn't mention my absence and I was grateful for the restraint.
"And all the blood is like mother's milk," I snorted, raising a different and more eloquent finger for his perusal.
"Actually…" He curved his lips in a contemplative shadow of a smile. "Never mind."
I lowered my finger before he took the notion to treat it like a wishbone. "So when do we pull out, Master? In the morning?"
"Patience, Grasshopper." Rapping me reprovingly across the knuckles with the swaddled weapon, he went on. "He who makes haste risks falling from the path of enlightenment."
And suddenly George's good-bye to me made sense. Swearing, I fell back against the wall, the mattress creaking and complaining beneath me. "It's your car again, isn't it? Your goddamn hunk-of-junk car." The same hunk of junk I spent more than my fair share of time moving from one side of the street to the other to save it from the wrath of the boot.