Night Forbidden (3 page)

Where there was smoke, there could be a whole blazing fire if you didn’t waste time beating around the bush. He grinned to himself.

Jade finished her set, took a bow, then left the stage, Elliott following her. In her wake came recorded music, bar music. Some things never changed.

Vaughn lifted a finger, and Cindy reappeared with three more beers for the table as Fence shifted in his seat to look over again at the sun goddess. And lo and behold, she was laughing at something one of her companions said, and she looked even more glorious and enticing.

And then, as her laughter subsided and she settled back in her seat, humor still lighting her features, her gaze scanned the room and she looked right at him.

She almost caught him by surprise, but he was good at this. He met her eyes purposely and gave a little nod of hello, followed by a smile. To his satisfaction, she tipped her head in that way women did, lifting her chin as she held his gaze for just long enough to acknowledge the interest. And then she looked away.

He wasn’t certain if that was a little smile playing about the corners of her mouth or was just a trick of the low light. Either way, he liked it.

“She’s not from around here,” Vaughn said, obviously noticing the exchange. “I think she comes from up the coast, a ways on the northeast curve.”

“Wonder what she’s doing here. And for how long,” Fence said, considering his next move. Send a drink, or take himself over and strike up a conversation? If she was leaving soon, he didn’t have time to waste.

“I could go on over and do my duty as a good public servant and welcome them to our town,” Vaughn said. “And you could go with me.”

Got your eye on one of them yourself? Or do you just want to keep me away from Marley?
Either way, he’d play. “Sure.”

His fingers curled around the cool glass, and he and Vaughn wove their way through the heavy round tables and the assortment of mismatched chairs that clustered between them. Whether it was a sign or not, “California Girls” was the tune of choice blaring through the speakers—the Beach Boys’ version. An oldie but a goodie . . . but every single track on whatever CD or iPod that had been found was an oldie to the people here. To them, it was all the same: ancient history.

Fence swallowed the lump in his throat along with a big swig of beer and focused on the here and now as they approached the table.

“Mayor Rogan,” said one of the ladies, who seemed more than a little thrilled about their visitor. “And you’re the one named Fence, right?” She had to shout to be heard over the music.

Before Fence could reply, she was leaning over to her friends to explain, “He’s one of that group who saved Sam Pinglett’s kid from the gangas when those teenagers got lost. It was a few months back, remember? They’re practically heroes here in Envy,” she added with a big, welcoming smile. “All five of them.”

Fence took that as an invitation to sit, and since time was a-wasting, he snagged a chair from a nearby table and straddled it backward, resting his hands on the back. Since there wasn’t a seat directly next to the sun goddess, he sat so he was across from her. “Well, I wouldn’t say heroes,” he said, a little niggle of discomfort trickling down his spine. “We just did what anyone would have done.”
Some of us, anyway.

He took another drink of his beer and pushed away the sour thoughts that threatened to ruin his evening. Yeah, he’d nearly fucked up . . . but he hadn’t, and he’d gotten Benji back from her zombie abductor in the end.

The sun goddess was looking at him from behind the rim of her glass, and he was itching to talk her up. But his mama had taught him manners, so instead Fence smiled at the woman sitting to his left, who was one of the teachers in Envy’s hundred-pupil school. “How’s it going, Donna? You working on trinomials yet? Or still only on those boring binomials?”

She laughed and patted his arm, leaning closer. “What, you have a strong preference?”

“The way I look at it, anything with three is always better than something with two, you know, sugar.” He grinned. He’d always been really good in math, and found that ability helpful in his navigation with the sky charts, as well as plotting with geographic maps—particularly now, in this horribly altered world.

The devastation had not only shifted the Earth’s axes, but it also changed the climate of the Nevadan desert, and somehow a landmass the size of Texas had appeared in the Pacific Ocean not too far off the coast of where California once was. Any compasses or maps he’d had or could find, as well as his knowledge of astronomy and the geography of the western United States, had become frighteningly fallible.

“Well, we’d love you to come back and do that talk about constellations and how to recognize and navigate using the stars again. The students really enjoyed it, and the ones who missed it have been begging us to have you back. When you started arranging them in the position of the Big Dipper, and made Andrew the North Star, they thought that was the funniest thing.” She was shaking her head in amused affection.

“No problem,” he told her, noticing with delight that the sun goddess seemed to be listening to their conversation. “Just let me know when.”

“All right. And I heard you got up there and sang with Jade one night,” Donna said, quickly changing the subject, as if to keep his attention on her. “Too bad I missed it. I heard you were really good.”

“I can carry a tune,” he said with a smile, thinking about Lenny’s mournful harmonica accompaniment over many a campfire. “As long as it’s the right one.”

To his relief, the waitress came over with a tray of drinks and stepped between their chairs, giving him an opportunity to shift his attention to the sun goddess.

“So you’re not from around here, Vaughn tells me,” he said, noticing the very faint sprinkling of freckles over her high cheekbones, and the blond tips of her dark eyelashes. She had green-brown eyes and long, slender hands, but her nails were bitten down short. She’d probably be almost as tall as he was when she stood. Tall and lithe, but not skin and bones, judging from the peek of collarbone from behind her scoop neck shirt.

“No, just visiting for a few days,” she replied. “I’m going home tomorrow.” She settled back a little bit in her chair and gave him a bold, speculative look. “So you’re a hero, are you? And a math whiz?
And
an astronomer. Oh, and you can sing.” A little smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. “Is there anything else?”

“What can I say . . . I’m multitalented. And that’s not even the half of it.” He smiled, long and slow, the way the ladies liked it.

“So how’d you get a name like Fence?”

He shrugged and leaned a bit closer.
Mmm.
She smelled good too. Sunny, like lemons. Warm, like something else. “I never tell that story on a first date,” he said. “But maybe I could make an exception.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t want you to make an exception for me,” she replied, giving him back a lethal smile of her own. One that sent a surprise little twinge darting deep in his belly. “But how about if I guess how you got the nickname, and if I get it right, I win?”

“Well, now, sugar, it would depend what the prize is. But I’m certain,” he said, dropping his voice into its lowest range of bass, “we could agree on something.”

She continued to contemplate him, and Donna was left to gape, her attention ping-ponging between them.

“I could really use a new saddle for my horse,” the sun goddess said, and he swore she gave him a
look
.

Fence almost swallowed his tongue. “So you do a lot of . . .
riding
?” he asked. He couldn’t help it. It just slipped out. But he stopped himself from making any further comments about horses and being hung like one.

“Okay then . . . well, let me think,” she said, interrupting the runaway train of his thoughts. Probably a good thing. “The first thing that comes to mind regarding a nickname like Fence is that you’re
really
good with a sword,” she said, her voice smooth with dusk, her eyes meeting his.

It was all he could do to keep his expression cool.

“But,” she continued before he could speak, “that’s sort of obvious. And you don’t seem like an obvious sort of guy, Fence, so . . .”

Was that a compliment or a little parry and thrust of her own? Fence couldn’t hold back a smile this time, and he felt his eyelids go a bit droopy with an edge of seduction.

“ . . . maybe you can’t ever make up your mind about things? That you sit on the fence all the time?”

Ouch.
That was definitely another parry and thrust, but instead of being offended, he still found her wit amusing. A smart woman with a killer body, who held her own. “I don’t know . . . there are certain things I’m pretty sure about,” he replied, holding her gaze. “No fence-sitting here.”

Her eyes danced. “All right, then, am I getting warm?”

“Smokin’, baby,” he said, and liked the way her eyes widened briefly.

“A guy with a name like Fence,” she said, mulling, her fingers drumming on the table as she copped a speculative look. “Could it be because you build a lot of fences around you? Close people off, keep them away?”

Okay, that was a direct hit. Di-
rect
. He felt a little breathless at her accuracy, and at the same time stimulated in all the best ways. “What, are you psychic?” he replied, allowing a bit of seriousness into his joke. “But who doesn’t have secrets, walls of protection built around them?” he asked, sinking into a more sympathetic tone, making certain he didn’t sound defensive. “Don’t you?”

Her eyes flared again, and he felt her withdraw a bit.
Hmmm.
A direct hit of his own.

“Maybe,” she said, recovering. Her eyes narrowed and he could almost see the wheels turning. “Could be you weren’t watching where you were going and you ran into a fence?”

He shook his head, chuckling a little.
Closer
, but still way off. “Can we go back to the sword part?” he asked, reaching out with one of his large, brown fingers to caress her slender, golden ones. “I kinda liked the direction you were going there.”

She chuckled and left her fingers beneath his feather-light stroking. “Somehow I’m not surprised.”

Before he could respond, an unusual sound caught his attention and Fence turned as Vaughn rose to his feet. A man and woman were hurrying across the tavern with an air of urgency, and Vaughn moved to meet them.

Immediately, Fence shifted from flirtation to high alert. Almost everyone stopped what they were doing, watching and listening from their tables. With a quickly murmured, “Excuse me,” he got to his feet and wended his way toward Vaughn, catching bits of whispered conversation as he went:

“ . . . zombies?”

“ . . . better check on the kids, Maddy . . .”

“ . . . tiger attack last week . . .”

“ . . . at the gate? Don’t they have guards . . .”

Fence wasn’t surprised that no one seemed concerned enough to mention the Strangers. But that was because most of the people in the room—hell, most of the people everywhere, both in Envy and outside of its walls—had no idea what sort of threat the Strangers were.

Most of them had no idea that the teens Fence, Elliott, and the others had rescued from the zombies were about to be sold into slavery to the Strangers—for everything from breeding purposes to hard labor. And that Jade had spent five years in captivity with one of the three leaders of the Strangers, and seen and experienced a variety of horrors at their hands. Most important of all, other than the members of the Resistance, no one realized that this group of immortals had somehow been involved with the Change fifty years ago, and would do anything necessary to keep their mortal counterparts from banding together and becoming strong again.

Even now, decades after the beginning of the twenty-first century, people still lived in blissful ignorance of the evils that went on around them. They still believed lies that were told to them over and over until somehow they became truths.
What you don’t know will, yes, indeed, hurt you.

Fence shivered. There were times when he wished he
didn’t
know the truth himself. Knowing that the very same people who’d caused widespread devastation still lived, still walked on this soil and pretended to be like everyone else, was almost too much to bear. These people had destroyed his family, his friends, and everyone and everything he had ever known.

It killed him that he hadn’t been able to do anything about it yet. None of them had. The Resistance was still young, and out of necessity a carefully kept secret. Although, now that Quent had stolen the crystal right from under the inner circle of the Elite, Fence wasn’t certain how much longer they would remain secret.

As he approached, Vaughn was saying, “You found something on the beach?”

The woman replied, “Yes, washed up there. We thought you should know. It’s really odd-looking.”

“We’d better take a look.”

Fence turned as he saw the sun goddess out of the corner of his eye. She’d stood, along with her friends, and, like everyone else in the room, seemed to be listening intently.

“Looks like something strange washed up on the shore,” Vaughn said to him. “You coming?”

“Damn straight.” Despite the fact that the very word “shore” sent a little ripple of awareness through him, Fence was game. As long as he didn’t have to get
into
the ocean, it’d be cool.

The mayor’s words seemed to be an invitation for several other people to rise from their chairs and start to filter from the pub. Obviously, entertainment was cheap here in Envy.

Fence turned to see the sun goddess inching her way awkwardly around the table, squeezing between chairs and the wall, and he waited for her to come around.

“How about we check out whatever this is, then we do a little dancing under the moonlight?” he said with his slow smile. “I could teach you how to fence, and maybe you’ll figure out my nickname.”

The words had just come out of his mouth, and they were still hanging there between them when he noticed the funny way she was moving, even now that she’d emerged from behind the table. Then he saw her leg, bared by the cargo shorts she wore.