Out of the Box 7 - Sea Change (13 page)

Also, I was nobody’s beast of burden, let alone Kat’s. If she’d asked me to carry a suitcase for her, I would have shown her exactly where she could carry it, but it would have required the removal of the stick already residing there first.

“I’ll be in the master suite,” Kat said, making a noise that told us just how put out she was by having to leave her rental house behind in order to hide here in this posh hotel. There were no cameras present, either; they were still gathering footage of the cops and firemen back at the site of the attack. I’d overheard Taggert telling her to do a “confessional booth” video on her phone before she called it a night, and a little piece of my already shrunken soul died.

“Umm,” Scott said, gesturing to the suitcases in his hands.

“Follow her up,” Taggert said, making an obvious motion toward the staircase Kat was already climbing, Karyn following meekly behind her. “You can drop my bags here.” He unbuttoned his jacket. “Then when you’re done bringing Kitten’s up, you can come back and put mine in my suite.” Awww, Taggert. So close to genuine humanity there for a quarter second, but not really.

Scott, however, did nothing more forceful than shoot me a disbelieving look before shrugging and doing as commanded. I watched with a little disbelief of my own, and then my phone buzzed.

Ricardo

A glorious woman such as you should not spend the night alone
.

“Oh, if only I were, Dick,” I muttered and then felt the awkward presence of Taggert sidling closer to me, grinning. “Whoa. That’s close enough.” He stopped as though nothing were unusual about what he was doing. For all I knew, there wasn’t anything unusual about it. He was likely a weird creeper to everyone.

“We should talk,” he said nonchalantly, placing his hands on his hips and pushing back his jacket. It was kind of a Superman pose, but he really lacked the classic good looks to pull it off. Also, the decency of Clark Kent. Or even Grant Ward, come to think of it.

“So talk,” I said, eyeing him like he was going to slowly ooze his slime-puddle self over and mess up my boots. It was a real danger, I judged. “I have ears and can hear you from here.”

“Why don’t you come into my suite and we can talk a little more privately?” he asked, still grinning. My boots were safe, but the rest of me was feeling crawly at the mere suggestion.

“This seems like a fine spot. Kat will probably have Scott and Karyn unpacking for her, and that’ll take at least a year.”

“We need to talk about the security precautions for tomorrow’s
Vanity Fair
shoot,” Taggert said.

“Oh, I’ve got that covered,” I said. “She’s not going.”

Taggert raised an eyebrow. It looked painful, like he was warring hard against the botulinum toxin to make that happen. “The hell you say.”

“The hell I say,” I agreed. “She needs to keep a low profile.” I shot an appraising glance around the suite. “This isn’t helping, but at least it’s not public and totally exposed.” Well, sort of. For a guy who could walk through walls, nothing was all that private.

“We checked in under a false name,” Taggert pointed out.

“Yeah, no one will ever guess that Pamela Isley is actually Kat,” I deadpanned. They for real had done that at the check-in desk. Reed would have shat upon the Persian carpet just before the desk had he been here.

“There are a lot of nice hotels in this town,” Taggert shrugged, taking off his jacket while he was making the motion. He casually tossed it over the arm of the velvety couch and stretched, showing off his utter lack of pecs under his polo shirt. Less yoga, more weight, dude-bro. “What are the chances he’d find her at this specific one?”

“I don’t know,” I said sourly. “Ask me in the morning if we haven’t had a sudden case of Kat euthanasia.”

“No cameras here anyway,” he said, shrugging like it didn’t mean a thing. “If he was gonna attack, he’d be better off waiting until the shoot.”

“Thank you for making my argument for me,” I said, arms folded in front of my chest. “Cancel the shoot.”

“Can’t,” he said, smiling impishly. Much like that elf from Rudolph, I was going to be a dentist yet. “Do you know how long this cover shoot has been in the works? Months and months. Everyone wants it. It’s a big get.”

“You know what else is a big ‘get’? Death. It’s huge. Pretty much consumes the whole rest of your life, damages the plans you’ve made for the coming weeks and months and years. Cancel the shoot, or be prepared to cancel a whole lot more stuff in the future.”

“I’d rather die than cancel the
Vanity Fair
shoot,” Kat said stiffly, staring at us over the balcony above. She had a look on her face telling me she was serious.

“Be careful what you wish for,” I said.

“We’re doing it, and that’s final,” she said. She sniffed and then disappeared back toward what I presumed to be her room. I could hear faint noises up there like drawers being opened and closed. It would appear my sarcastic prediction of her putting Scott and Karyn to her unpacking had held some water. Uhh … no pun intended. Poor Scott.

“Yes, it might end up being final,” I said, staring at the balcony where she’d stood. “So very, very final.”

“Come on,” Taggert said, beckoning me forward as he slowly started to make his way to the open double doors to the room behind him. “We’ll talk about it a little more.”

“What’s wrong with right here?” I asked, a little afraid of the answer.

“There’s no shower here,” he said, grinning again. “And I need one. You, too. We can talk while—”

“Okaayyy,” I said, one step from throwing up my hands (to keep me from knocking out all his teeth). “Yeah. No.”

He broadened his grin and took a step closer as I mentally drew a circle around myself that I determined would constitute the point where the law would consider him to be crossing into the territory of a threat. “You know what I need right now?”

“I don’t know, a lifetime supply of Valtrex?”

He actually grinned wider, the bastard. “Are you slut-shaming me?”

Oh, God. By the look on his face, I realized that not only had he tried this routine with other women before but it had actually
worked
. And probably often, judging by how casual about it he seemed; there was no nervousness, no hand-caught-in-the-cookie-jar guilt, not even the playful illusion of it that anyone with decency might have tossed out as a defense. Just a wry admission that he was a horny old man hitting on a much younger woman. And this bastard didn’t even have any power over me. It occurred to me that given his position, that likely wasn’t the case most of the time.

The circle of violence I drew around myself broadened in an instant. “If the micro-penis-sized condom fits,” I said, low and menacing.

“Oh, you don’t want to play,” Taggert said, looking hurt. “Such a shame. That’s all right, though. I was hoping maybe you and Kitten could show me how good a friends you are later—”

“OH, YUCK!” I made a vomiting noise that was drawing nearer to being real with every passing moment. I should have realized that this lecher would prey on anyone, but somehow the realization that Kat—I didn’t even like her, but EWWWWW—at least Janus I could sort of understand, because he was a decent enough guy underneath the old. “You and Kat?” I asked before realizing that I didn’t actually want to hear whatever came next.

“She understands how it is,” he said. “She’s—well, you know, she’s just great. She’s got an old soul—”

“You have no idea.”

“—Sometimes a man just needs a favor, and I’ve certainly granted her more than a few—”

I wanted to vomit for realsies. You know how right before you’re super nauseous, you almost pray for the vomiting to happen, just to get it over with? And how sometimes, afterwards, it feels better, like maybe you expunged the horror from your system? I really hoped for that moment of purgation, even though I didn’t think that the sickness of the mind that Taggert’s revelation had just forced upon me had even a chance of being purged through vomiting. If I had, I wouldn’t have even hesitated, I would have stuck my finger so far down my throat with meta speed that I might have given myself an accidental tonsillectomy.

“I can see you’re thinking about it,” Taggert said with that same grin.

“And I wish I wasn’t,” I said, “I wish I could take away my own memories with my power, instead of just being able to take away other peoples’. I would give away my powers and let someone else take this memory and then shoot them in the head with high caliber hollow-points until their brains were splattered all over the floor, and then I would mop them up, douse the bucket and the floor and wall with gasoline and burn it, then nuke the building afterward just to be sure the memory was gone from this earth for good.”

Taggert had his lips pressed together tightly; I had finally wiped the grin off his face. “So … no shower, then?”

“Even if you weren’t absolutely the most appalling man I’ve met even tonight—and that’s saying something, because you’re in the running with Captain Redbeard the invidious man and Dick-o, the worst first date of all time—I am still not getting Kat’s sloppy seconds.” Scott appeared at the balcony above and started making his way across the windows, ending up in the room across from Kat’s. I made a face. “Again.”

“Have it your way, then,” Taggert said coolly and strode off to the doors of his suite. He closed them both on himself, mustering a grin again, but this one seemed more … fake? “If you change your mind …”

“Then I’ll be sure to throw myself out the window over there,” I gestured toward the plate glass to my right, “and not use my powers.”

He shrugged like it was no big thing and closed the door. I didn’t hear the click of a lock, and it bothered me.

My phone buzzed again.

Ricardo

Call me. We should do breakfast. You are captivating and I must see you again.

“Oh, for—” I said, tossing my phone, surprisingly gently, onto the nearest chair. I turned, expecting to find my room under where Scott’s was, but—

Aw, hell.

There was nothing but a kitchenette there.

Karyn came down the stairs just then, all mousy and head-down. “Umm,” I said, trying to intercept her, “this suite is short a room.”

She didn’t stop. She was beelining for the door after what was probably a long and degrading day which doubtlessly had her questioning her life choices. “There’s a couch,” she said, not bothering to stop and do something for me like—I dunno, kill Taggert and burn his corpse and personal possessions so I could have his room, or tell Kat she could have the couch, because the person protecting her should be treated like a guest, or just give me a half-second’s commiseration about being treated like the ass end of this shit show—anything, really.

Nope, Karyn went out the door and didn’t even bother to tell me to lock it behind her. I did it anyway, though, loafing around, not quite willing yet to accept the hard truth that my logical mind was forcing on me. I didn’t want to, not after this night.

Ughhhh.

I was the bodyguard. I was protecting Kat, whom I loathed but thought of as a victim now that I knew—EWWW EWWW EWWWWWW—what price she’d paid for fame.

And now I had to sleep on her couch.

“You’d at least better be comfortable,” I muttered to the couch, as if it could hear me.

It wasn’t.

“I hate this town,” I said, the lights glittering at me from beyond the window even after I’d turned off all the ones in the suite. The honking of an angry car horn somewhere below seemed to agree with me, and I passed out before the kink in my neck from the shitty pillow could give me a neck-ache.

Karl had a house set up in the Elysium neighborhood, a perfect little hidey-hole, or a bolt-hole as his benefactor called it. It had almost no furniture, but the air mattress he had to sleep on was in the middle of the smallest room in the house, and that Karl found immensely soothing.

It was a perfect little lair for scheming his schemes, for imagining how things were going to go. He’d already seen his face on the news, the footage blurry and all shaky-cam, like these people had never filmed an action scene before. It didn’t make him happy, exactly, because Karl didn’t really feel happiness anymore, but he got a rough sense of satisfaction out of it, a cold feeling of victory, like he was rubbing it in their faces even now. It wasn’t the big triumph yet, the one that would show them all, but it was pretty good.

The air mattress was a nice touch. He could have slept on the floor; it was nice to have even that kind of surface to rest on after months of—well, of what he’d dealt with. It was springy enough, light enough, especially in its half-deflated state, to mimic a little of what he’d learned to love.

He still couldn’t sleep, though. No, he was too wired. Months of planning had led up to this day. And even though this day was over, the next ones—the ones of reckoning—they were going to be even better.

When he closed his eyes, he pictured the looks on their faces—Kat Forrest’s had been good, a mixture of stunned disbelief and terror. She was a leech. She was disgusting.

Sienna Nealon’s hadn’t been quite so satisfying, but ripping her up had been. It had been so good, dumping her in the pool and then leaving her behind to watch as he blew up the house. She’d been so damned smug through their whole tête-à-tête; it had been nice wiping that off her face when he’d ripped into her muscles. Hopefully she was a little scared now, that she was feeling wronged like he’d been. It was just a taste of what was to come.

He was the righteous one in this exchange. Her little puppet, Augustus, had imprisoned him in the earth for months. MONTHS. He’d been doing his job, and that shit had just ripped the ground out from underneath him—HIM.

What had followed had been hell. What he’d been through was something no one else had been through. The horror was a raw nerve, easy to touch but hard to handle, searing, irritated skin left burnt and hanging in the wind. Or, no, not the wind, not really.

Karl felt the shame, the acidic singe in his gullet as his heartburn flared again. He heard a gunshot in the distance, and he sat up on the air mattress, looking down at his gaunt, emaciated arms, naked under the sheet. He pulled it off, the warm night making it irrelevant. His thighs were painfully thin, even now, like forearms. He’d been a big guy once, well put-together.