Out of the Box 7 - Sea Change (22 page)

And who were better symbols of that power, that elitism, than the world’s foremost guard dog—bitch, really—Sienna Nealon, and the most-loved meta celebrity in the nation, Kat Forrest?

Their tangential connection to Augustus Coleman was just the cherry on top, really. He wasn’t the power behind it all, anyway, he was just a guy who got caught up doing what Sienna Nealon had ordered him to do. He was a soldier, a sheep. These two were the real problem, the face of the enemy. It didn’t matter how pretty it was; once you destroyed that face, people would sit up and take notice.

Change was coming, Karl reflected, a smile twisting his pale face. Oh, yes, it was coming. And every step he took closer to the goal was like a return to that happiness he didn’t even think he could feel any more.

Disaster scenes weren’t the sort of thing that you could easily walk away from, especially if you were heavily involved in their creation. I was tired, ragged, and looked like shit, I was sure, but unfortunately the LAPD did not want me to leave MacArthur Park until I’d given a full statement. They didn’t even want me to see if I could help with rescue efforts—which I couldn’t, really. The shops that had been bombed had been hit with a pretty straightforward explosion that originated under the sidewalk outside. It had collapsed the storefronts, but most of the people caught in that had been killed straight up. I could see them dragging the body bags out and piling them up on the street for transport, leaving the ambulances sitting there with lights flashing, hoping for survivors they weren’t finding.

It was grim as hell, so I found a bench and sat down, waiting for my turn with the police. They’d assigned one officer to take statements, probably because that was all they could spare. The whole place was crawling with LAPD, enough to make me think the rest of the city was probably like Candyland for criminals today. I’d seen SWAT descend into the subway station, followed by a bunch more cops and emergency workers, and now I could hear their voices faintly as they surveyed my findings in the tunnel below.

Steven Clayton was giving his statement to the lone officer assigned to watch my little carnival, and I was just sitting on a bench, staring out at the muddy floor of the lake that was already starting to dry in the sun. The mist was gone, clearly evaporated enough that the air barely felt humid anymore. This place needed rain like it needed Redbeard to die: desperately, urgently, and as soon as possible.

Scott was positioned at a bench about a hundred feet from mine, Guy Friday lurking behind it, still standing, arms folded, in his most serious bodyguarding posture. He was watching Kat pace back and forth at the edge of the lake, as though he was worried she was going fall off and end up in the mud below. Personally, I wasn’t worried about that. I would have welcomed it because I’m petty. If she came close enough to me, I can’t guarantee I wouldn’t have given her a good shove myself.

“Stop looking at me that way,” Kat snapped, orbiting closer to me on her next pass. Her green eyes were narrowed, and I didn’t even know she’d seen me. She was pacing furiously, her feet leaving the occasional bloody stain on the concrete path ringing the empty lake.

“I’m supposed to watch you,” I said mildly, “you know—in case someone tries to kill you. Again.”

“You’re not watching me like that,” Kat snapped, slowing her walk, lingering about ten feet from me, apparently so she could get whatever was off her chest—it was a pretty minimal chest—uh, well, off it.

“How am I watching you?” I asked, my tone wending toward dark amusement. “Like Yancy over there? Because I think he might fancy you, Kat. Yancy fancies.” I chortled. “Come on. That’s good.”

“I can hear you,” Guy Friday said.

“And so?” I called back.

“None of this is funny,” Kat snapped back.

I looked over the ruin of the park. While it hadn’t exactly been the classiest of places when we’d arrived that morning, I couldn’t find fault with her assessment. “You’re right,” I said, accepting my chastening, “it’s not.”

“I’m not talking about this, either,” she said, waving a hand around to encompass all around us.

“Because … this
is
funny?” I asked her uncertainly, now without a clue as to what she was driving at.

“I’m talking about how you look at me, Sienna,” Kat said, and now she was almost spitting fury at me. I wanted to laugh again, from exhaustion and from the image of this little stick getting pissed at me after I came to LA and died trying to fight the guy who wanted to kill her—not really sure which of those was the worst part of this whole ordeal.

“How do I look at you, Kat?” I asked, my cynicism settling in for a good laugh. “Like you’re an idiot? Because that one’s really more on you than me—”

“Janus told me,” she said, puffing up with a sense of satisfaction like she was confronting me with my own personal kryptonite.

“Told you what?” I asked, more tired than curious. “That you were special? Because he sold me that line of bullshit, too, but fortunately he didn’t try and use it to sleep with me afterward—”

“He told me that you know,” Kat said, arching her eyebrows as though plainly I was aware of the big dramatic important thing of which she was speaking.

I racked my weary brain and camp up with goose eggs. “Kat … I have not the first clue what you’re on about.”

“Bullshit,” she said hotly.

Kat didn’t really swear very much so that one woke me up a little. Also, calling me a liar on a normal day was not wise. On a day like today? I envisioned myself making a speedy exit from this town, but not before clearing the ten seconds on my calendar that it would take to drop her down the big hole in front of me as I made my way home. I pictured her screaming as she disappeared into the darkness, skinny limbs flailing, and it calmed me enough to respond without violence. “Okay. Tell me what I know that you know that Janus told—” I paused, trying to disentangle what I’d just said. “Just tell me, Kat, so we can get on the same page with this argument you clearly want to have.”

“You’re painting me as the villain,” Kat said, snotty, turning her face away from me and looking to the heavens for either intervention or rain, neither of which was forthcoming. “Typical.”

“This is why I look at you like you’re an idiot, by the way,” I said, probably not salving the situation much.

“You look at me like I’m a damned steak and you’re hungry, Sienna,” Kat snapped.

I sighed. “Kat … I wouldn’t eat you if you were the last cut of meat on earth, all right? I’m not a cannibal, you don’t look very filling, and if you’re suggesting that I’m in any way harboring same-sex tendencies for you, you’re out of your damned mind. Also your ego is huge-normous. Like, it couldn’t fit in the Metlife Blimp, or the Metrodome, or Canada—”

“You know what happens if you absorb me,” Kat said, almost like it was a threat—to me, not her.

“Absorb you?” I stopped short of laughing. “I can barely stand to be around you for a day. If you think I want to live with you in my head, you’re even dumber than I’ve always suspected. I’d rather deal with Wolfe—”

Grrrr
…

“—or Bjorn—”

I am a tasty Nord. All meat—

“—or Eve—”

Ach du—!

“—or your irritating brother—”

HEY!

“—point is,” I said, “I don’t even like you, Kat.” I watched her face fall. “You’re a treacherous whore who’s thrown me under the bus with meta strength for her own good while pretending to be a friend. Want to absorb you?” I scoffed. “If Scott wasn’t here right now, if there wasn’t an obvious and imminent threat to innocent people, I’d let you die a cold and ugly death at the hands of Redbeard.”

“You can’t lie to me, Sienna,” Kat said, cold indignation breaking through her brittle facade that I’d just chipped away at. “If you absorb me …”

“I get an annoying voice in my head forever?” I snorted. “What a prize. Do I get your chlamydia, too, because, if so, bonanza—”

“You keep acting like you don’t know,” she said haughtily, “but he told you. I know he did. Acting like you don’t think about it—well, let’s just say you’re in the wrong town for bad acting, okay?”

“Or the very right one, considering how much of it you’re doing right now.” I paused, thinking about Janus’s conversation with me about Kat, about absorbing her. Oh. Wait, he had said—

Ohhhhhhh.

Right.

Something must have showed on my face, because Kat puffed up a little bigger. “Yeah. No need to fake your way through the scene anymore.”

I rolled my eyes. It was utterly genuine. I’d filed away the rest of what Janus had told me regarding what would happen if I absorbed Kat because—frankly—I didn’t give a shit. Absorbing a Persephone meant I could control my skin-based soul absorption powers rather than just have them work whenever I touched someone. And while that would have been kind of useful, I supposed, it wasn’t something I gave a lot of thought to anymore, because—well, I had better things to do, and I didn’t really want to absorb anyone, ever, let alone Kat Forrest, Queen of People-Who-Piss-Me-Off Town. “What you attribute to fakery might be better chalked up to not caring.”

“I know you look at me, thinking about it all the while,” Kat said, running a hand up herself in a very
ewwww
sort of way. I’m sure it would have looked great on film if her hair, makeup and dress weren’t almost as bad a wreck as the train below, but
Vanity Fair
and their wardrobe, hair and makeup people had long since fled this scene. “About how you could just live a normal life if you did that one thing—”

“Yeah, I’m sure that’s the only thing separating me from a normal life,” I muttered under my breath. “Just absorb you and it’s like a magic tonic that will make everything better—I won’t be a workaholic hated by the world anymore, sitting on the edge of being fired from my job and declared a public enemy, and all my relationship woes and baggage will miraculously be fixed because I’ll be able to have unprotected sex.” I nodded smartly. “It’ll probably bring my parents back from the dead, as well—”

“You’re such a bitch,” Kat said, utter loathing in her eyes as she turned to walk away.

“I’m sure it’ll fix that, too,” I called after her. “Come back! Let me absorb you, Kat! We will have a magical, extra-special awesome life together!” She stalked off past Scott, who watched her go with a frown, and Guy Friday, who met my gaze with arched eyebrows. “Ugh,” I said, and folded my own arms in front of me. “Why do I get stuck working with difficult people?”

“Law of attraction,” Steven Clayton said, stalking silently up behind me.

“I am not attracted to Kat, no matter what Yancy over there might be fantasizing—”

“That’s not what the law of attraction is about,” Steven said with a chuckle. “It’s a philosophy thing that went big a few years ago—‘You attract what you are.’ Therefore, positive, excited people attract themselves to positive, excited people and negative, angry folks—”

“Find many opportunities to punch the shit out of positive, excited people,” I finished for him, drawing a smile from him. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m in a bit of a mood.”

“You got PTSD?” he asked, jerking a thumb over his shoulder to indicate the hole to the tunnel. “Because that strikes me as the sort of thing that would do it.”

“I’m fine,” I said, broken record that I am. “Don’t you have … I dunno, work or something?”

“Let me tell you about my profession,” he said, cracking a smile, “when I work, it’s like … epically long days. But then I may have a month or two off in a row before I have to go and do a round of press tours and stuff. Right now, I got nothing until my next movie starts table reads next week.”

“Yeah, you look bored and idle,” I said, surveying him. “Thanks for the … uh … breath of life, I guess?”
The life-giving kiss,
I didn’t say. All remarks regarding slipping me the tongue were similarly not mentioned, though I was tempted to throw on a Guy Friday-esque expression and let one loose.

“You’re welcome,” he said. “You’re going to need to reload your gun, by the way.”

I frowned and felt instinctively for the Shadow in my holster. “Did you steal my sidearm?”

“That thing shoots like a dream,” he said by way of explanation. “Smoothest thing I’ve ever shot.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Wow. I didn’t expect you to …”

“Haven’t you seen my movies?” He grinned. “I shoot all kinds of guns in those. All loaded with blanks, but still.”

“Yeah, well,” I shrugged, “you’re an actor. You’re supposed to be able to pretend with the best of them.” I eyed him warily. “Also … you keep coming to my rescue.”

He gave a shrug of his own. “I was a lifeguard as a teenager. You keep falling in the water. This is just instinct for me.”

“Feels like more than that,” I said. “I mean … I’m not exactly the most popular person in the world at the moment. The tabloids alone—”

“Yeah,” he said, cutting me off. “About that … if truth were peanut dust, the tabloid stories I’ve read about myself wouldn’t even trigger the most allergic person on earth. So … I’m assuming that the same applies to their coverage of you.”

“Really? Because most people seem to operate from the assumption that where there’s smoke, there’s Sienna Nealon setting fire to something.” This was true.

“Don’t let ’em get you down,” Steven said with a smile that was warm and engaging, and made—uh, maybe just a little—one of my own spread slowly across my lips. “And about that drink …”

I fumbled for my cell phone and thumbed it on to exchange numbers. It did not light up, and I doubted it was from failing to charge it. “Dammit,” I said. “Lost another one.”

He pulled a little notebook and pen out of his jean pocket and opened it, ready to write. “Now, normally, my mother would kill me for giving a girl my number instead of asking for hers. But, since your phone is clearly inoperable, probably due to being fried by electricity, I’m just going to give you mine and passively wait by the phone until you call.” He finished writing with a flourish and then tore out a little rectangle of cream-colored paper and handed it to me. A phone number was written on it in nice handwriting. I took it tentatively, like a clown car was going to drive up at any second, run over my foot, and a whole circus full of the bastards was going to pile out and laugh at me for thinking the Sexiest Man in Hollywood was actually giving me his number.