Cold Read online

  “Can I ask you something?” Burkitt asked, a little tentatively.

  “We just exhumed a corpse together in the dead of night,” I said. “If this isn’t the time for bold questions, when the hell is?”

  Burkitt chuckled. “You got chased by the agency for the last two years.”

  “That wasn’t a question.”

  “Why would you come to work for us after all that?” Burkitt asked.

  “Wow,” I said. “Now that was a question. Good one, too. You probably know there was some pressure on me.” I didn’t look at him, but he was eyeing me as he drove. “My background—well, I might have been innocent of what they accused me of, but I’m not innocent innocent, y’know?”

  “I didn’t think I missed a hearing on awarding you sainthood.”

  “You have to be dead to be a saint,” I said with an ironic smile, “and while I’m sure there are plenty of people who’d love for me to fulfill that condition…I’m no saint. Or saint-worthy, rather, even absent the death requirement. Though I do keep performing what you could consider miracles, I suppose.”

  Burkitt chuckled again. “I don’t hear a reason in there anywhere. Not a good one, anyway.”

  “Maybe I didn’t have a good reason to join,” I said. “Maybe blackmail, compulsion, whatever you want to call it—maybe that’s enough for now. That and knowing I’m doing something I should be doing anyway.”

  Burkitt just grunted. I didn’t know whether to take that as him believing me or not.

  I would have bet on not, though, if I had to. He didn’t strike me as a sucker.

  28.

  Getting Holloway into the lobby and elevator was an adventure and chore all its own.

  Burkitt dropped us under the hotel’s portico and offered to help, but I’d demurred. Getting Holloway upstairs and into his room should be easy enough for a metahuman like me, right?

  Wrong.

  So wrong.

  Sure, I dropped him off in a chair in the lobby while I handled check-in for both of us, and I got him picked up and into the elevator all right.

  “Need a luggage rack?” the front desk clerk had asked me when she’d seen him.

  “No,” I’d replied. Our luggage was already in our rooms, according to what the manager had told us when we’d dropped off earlier. All I needed to do was get Holloway to his room, open the door with the card key, and drop him unceremoniously on the bed. Hell, maybe I could even heave him like a sack of potatoes into the room’s entryway and be done with it. I had plans for this evening, after all, and they definitely didn’t include spending any more time with this yutz than I had to.

  I got him into the elevator still upright, and when the doors closed, I could see my reflection in the mirrored steel. The lines of my face were set hard, unamused, my RBF even more pronounced than usual, offset by a sheen of dirt that graced my features. My brow was a hard line and my lips matched it.

  After a second, I noticed Holloway’s eyes were open, and he was looking at me in the reflection. “You should…smile more,” he slurred.

  “You should drink less, Aaron Burr,” I said, “and shut your damned fool mouth before it gets you slapped.”

  He chuckled and I could feel the vibrato through his arm and where his side pressed against me. The elevator dinged to herald our arrival at the floor, and I pulled him out, looking for guidance. Our rooms were 4505 and 4507, and the signage at the T intersection ahead told me they lay to the right. I went in that direction, watching the numbers descend from 4525 down and let out a small curse under my breath.

  “You’re funny,” Holloway said, still mumbling.

  “You’re not,” I said, making sure I had the two key cards in my hand. I didn’t know which was which, but a quick try of each would do the trick. “Also, being this close to you? It’s making the chemical smell of your ass cream burn my eyes.”

  To this he did not respond, and I continued onward as fast as I could. It was well past eleven at night, and he was not particularly heavy but awkward as hell to carry. I reached room 4507 first and stumbled to a stop. I tried the first key card, waving it over the magnetic plate. It gave me a little red light to indicate I had gotten it wrong.

  Okay, fair enough. I flipped the key cards so the second was on top, ran it over the magnetic plate.

  Red light.

  “Sonofa…” Now what the hell was I supposed to do?

  I sent an unrequited glare at my partner, who was purring softly, as though he’d either fallen asleep in my arms or was aiming to be petted. I doubted it was the latter, as his eyes were currently closed, but either way I wanted him off my shoulder as soon as possible. He wasn’t that heavy, but I could still feel the circulation starting to cut off to my fingers on that side because of my awkward carrying position.

  For a moment I was afraid it was going to turn into a physical comedy routine as I tried to balance him with one hand while fiddling with the key cards with the other. If it started to look like that, though, I was probably going to shove his ass out the window at the end of the hall and be done with it.

  No, no. I took a deep breath. No more murder if possible. That was what I’d vowed to myself when I took this job. I was going to play by the rules, and that meant not taking the easy way out and shoving Captain Asscream out so he could enjoy the sensation of flight for a few seconds before his life came to an abrupt end.

  I tried the first key card again, holding a different side down this time. Red light.

  Then the second again, other side down.

  Green light.

  “Hallelujah,” I muttered, bringing Holloway around to push him into the darkened room ahead of me. I looked around for the light switch and found it behind the door, Holloway’s body blocking me from accessing it. “Crap.”

  Whatever, I could see in the half-light well enough. I dragged Holloway through the thin entry hall past the bathroom, his limp and insensate form offering little in the way of help or resistance. “Lightweight,” I said as I finally—finally—reached the bed with him. “Maybe if you’d spread those scotches out over a few hours instead of chugging them you’d be upright and moving right now.”

  I plopped him down on the bed and he rattled the frame with his landing. I rose, so happy to finally be done with my physical labors for the night. With a quick throw, I frisbeed his key card onto his unmoving form. “Here. You might need this tomorrow. If you make it out of bed in the morning.”

  As I turned to go, something stopped me.

  A hand. On my thigh.

  “What the hell?” Fingers were softly wrapped around the outside of my leg, clamping lightly as one of them rubbed back and forth. I looked down and followed the fingers to the hand, the hand back down the offending arm, and the damned arm back to—

  Holloway.

  He was leering at me, eyes half-closed, from the bed, his hand on my leg.

  “Okay,” I said, my internal heat spiking into dangerous ranges, “lose the fingers or lose the hand.”

  “I’d like to lose ’em—in you,” he said, and hooked his hand around my leg with a yank.

  I’d like to think that given my metahuman powers, my countless hours of training, fighting, preparation, battle, whatever—I’d have been ready for a drunken co-worker grabbing my leg in a darkened hotel room. That I could have been prepared for it, reacted effortlessly and easily, with a proportional response that satisfied the attack on my honor, but didn’t cause acres of collateral damage.

  But either he was stronger than he looked or I was tired from foiling a bank robbery, running Bourbon Street barefoot, digging up a grave and dragging his dumb ass all the way to here, because he pulled me off balance with almost no effort at all.

  I fell down on him with a cry of surprise and he grunted in pleasure or pain. I hoped the latter.

  He was all over me for a second in my surprise, wet lips on the side of my neck as I went through a cold splash of surprise that clawed down into my belly and turned hot. His hand found
my breast and suddenly I was burning, my face flushed and my stomach churning with disgust.

  “Get the fuck off me!” I slapped him in the groin with minimal power and heard him make a sound like a balloon pushing all its air out, squeaky and pained. Every muscle in his body clenched as he went defensive, and I fell off the bed and caught myself in a squat.

  Flexing my legs, I came back to my feet with my hands up, defensive and ready. I found Holloway holding his crotch, still making that squeaky noise, like he was trying to get air back into lungs that had been permanently deflated.

  “Why…did you…do that?” he managed to get out.

  “Because you grabbed and groped me and tried to pull me onto the bed with you, dipshit,” I said, backing away slowly. He didn’t look to be in a great position to grab me now, but then again, he’d surprised me the first time, and I didn’t intend to let it happen again.

  “I thought maybe you might want to…you know…blow off some steam after a long day.” He really labored to get the words out, sucking in breaths between gritted teeth.

  “Asswipe, I have run miles and moved earth, and capped it all off with carrying your dead drunk ass around New Orleans.” I had nothing but a glare for him. “The only thing I want at this point is to sleep.” I’d reached the hallway, but didn’t dare turn tail and run, even though he was in no condition to follow me. No chance in hell was I letting my guard down around a potential threat now that it had manifested itself in such a way. “And be assured,” I called back, though I could no longer see him, “even if I did want that, you’d be the last person I’d want it from at this point. Seriously, you’d be just behind Anthony Weiner and Harvey Weinstein on my list.”

  If he made a reply to that, I didn’t hear it. I opened the door and got out into the hallway as quickly as possible, shutting the door behind me as though it would prevent him from pursuing.

  Once I was out in the full light of the hallway, I paused, my breath coming in steady, heavy bursts. My pulse was in the redline, adrenaline spiked as it pumped through my veins. The world felt blurry around me, and I checked both sides of the hallway to be sure no one was out here, no other threats in proximity.

  There weren’t. I was alone.

  I checked my hand; the other keycard was, miraculously, still there, clenched between my fingers. With a wary eye on Holloway’s door, I moved over to mine haltingly, never daring to look away from his for fear it would burst open and disgorge the handsy monster that had just assailed me in a dark hotel room.

  Once in my own room, I turned on the lights, found my suitcase, and pulled my doorstop alarm out. Ten bucks or so, a neat little purchase I’d made on Amazon as soon as I’d gotten my New York apartment, which lacked an alarm of its own. I flipped the on switch, tested it, and a siren’s wail filled the air. That done, I dragged the desk chair over to the door and blocked it, then set the alarm up directly underneath the doorknob. If anyone tried to force open my door, it’d trigger the alarm and scream so loud it’d wake me, giving me a critical few seconds to engage.

  Then I propped the chair under the knob as well, wedging it in so if someone tried to come through the door, it’d be a lot harder for them.

  Once I’d taken these precautions, I stepped back from the door slowly, a few halting steps at a time. I shoved the window’s curtains and sheers closed and then pushed the desk squarely in front of it. That was the room’s only other potential entry point, and I’d just blocked it to the best of my ability. Sure, it was unlikely anyone would attack me via that route, but having been a former flight-capable meta myself, I knew firsthand it was hardly impossible. Hopefully they’d come right in the middle, where they’d slam into the desk.

  When all my preparations were finished, I sat down heavily on the bed. My heart was still thumping in my chest, and the stale, air-conditioned smell of the hotel room filled my nostrils. I looked at the door again, then the window, and ran through possible escape scenarios if there was a fire in the middle of the night.

  Then I sat there, on the bed, fully dressed, facing the door, for quite a while before I was finally able to calm myself enough to lie down.

  Even so, it was hours before I managed to get to sleep.

  29.

  Olivia

  “This looks like the spot,” I said to the officer who’d driven me out into the far edge of Las Vegas. They’d gotten a report about a meteor falling to the earth and impacting outside of town, and it hadn’t taken their top brass long to put two and two together and figure out that probably was the supervillain I’d accidentally launched out of the roof of Fremont Street.

  I stood on the edge of a small crater, no more than five feet by five feet, but with a clear, human-shaped impression plowed into the dirt. The blur had landed rather heavily, not a lot of roll or trail to the impact site. That suggested they’d gone largely up and down in a tight arc rather than a long, loose one that would have stretched the crater to be a lot longer in one direction.

  Ouch, either way.

  “How far away from Fremont Street are we?” I asked the cop, a patrolwoman named Dominguez who was about five foot nothing and looked grizzled as hell, like she’d been through the ringer a few times.

  “Eight, ten miles maybe, as the crow flies,” Dominguez said, not one to waste a lot of words. I’d figured that out about her very quickly on our ride over. “This is Spring Valley.”

  “And they just picked themselves up and dusted off and ran thataway,” I said, looking at a trail of dust that went off to my left. “What’s over there?” I pointed, because one of the Las Vegas suburbs looked to stretch out a few miles in that direction.

  “Summerlin South,” Dominguez said. And that was it.

  “Hookay,” I said, and made my way over to the speedster’s tracks. The sun was starting to sink below the horizon, and there wasn’t a lot to go on, track-wise. I’d taken a very basic course on this when I’d joined up with the agency, at Reed’s insistence, but other than a general direction the footprints were going, they didn’t really leave me anything to work with. The combination of the speedster’s fast tread with the blowback of dust that seemed to follow in their wake had erased most of the evidence that they’d even been here. “Looks like they survived the fall.”

  Dominguez just grunted.

  A cool, dry desert wind blew out of the east, from somewhere beyond the purpling sky on the horizon. I looked down into the crater and something caught the glint of the last rays of the sun beyond the western horizon.

  I scrambled down into the crater, feeling like I was climbing into a grave. Mine, maybe. At the bottom there was something small, smooth, about two inches across, buried in a thin layer of sand. I scooped it out and brushed it off; it was a card, a driver’s license for the state of Nevada. Or a fragment of one, at least, since the front had been scuffed so bad, I couldn’t see a picture or a first name. The last name was barely legible, though: Cruml. There might have once been more after the L, but it was gone now.

  “You mind running this, see if you can get a match?” I said, handing the card up to Dominguez.

  “Not a lot to run, here,” she said, but went for her shoulder-mounted mic anyway, as she walked away from the crater like I wasn’t even there.

  I climbed out and started to brush myself off, then stopped. Actually, if I could just…

  I waved a hand at myself, and my bubble activated, my clothes rustling. A cloud of dust blew out off me like I’d run a fan beneath my clothes, and when Dominguez turned around, I was coughing, waving a hand and blasting the dust off in small bursts. It had almost worked, my idea. “Any luck?” I asked, coughing through the residual desert dust.

  “They’ll get back to us,” Dominguez said. “Need a lift?”

  “Yeah,” I said. Veronika was going to be staying at the hospital for the night, anyway. She was fine, but they wanted to keep her for observation. I counted myself lucky I wasn’t in the same boat. “Might as well head back to my hotel.” I looked at th
e darkening horizon to the east. “Looks like we’re done for the night anyway.”

  30.

  Sienna

  I woke to the buzzing of my phone, and a New Orleans number glowing on the screen. I answered it and managed to get out a croaked, “Hello?”

  “Hey, it’s Burkitt. How’s it going?”

  “Better than Holloway’s morning, I hope.” I yawned, brushing stray hairs out from in front of my eyes. “That’s about all I’ve got for now.”

  Burkitt laughed on the other end. “I just dropped off my kids and I’m headed your way. Figured Holloway would be sleeping in and suffering, but that you’d be up by now. You a late-nighter?”

  “Not really,” I said, sitting up and massaging my face. “Dumbass decided last night that my kindhearted decision to deliver him to his bed intact and not dead meant I was super interested in letting him get with me, so that kind of screwed up my sleep schedule.”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line, and I realized that maybe I shouldn’t have said that. “Wow,” Burkitt finally said. “That guy is a hazard. You should report him for…well, everything, actually.”

  “Maybe I will,” I said, still trying to get awake. The other side of that was implied, too, because I was torn—Maybe I won’t.

  “Look, I was calling because I need to pick you up anyway and one of my favorite breakfast places is right by your hotel,” Burkitt said. “Figured I’d see if you wanted to go with me. I promise you no drinking or inappropriate behavior from me.”

  “You do seem like a lot more of a gentleman than that douchecanoe.” My stomach rumbled, and I realized for the first time since, well, when I was up until all hours thinking about everything, ever, that I hadn’t even finished dinner last night. I reached down and massaged my left foot and found a full and fresh layer of skin where last night there had been exposed muscle and fascia. “Hell yes. I’m starving.”