“Come again?”
“Hollyoak gives you what scares you, deep down in your guts. You can't even tell what's hiding there, but it can.” Marla's maternal gaze connects with mine, less quietly flirtatious than it was when I first arrived. She gives the room a cursory gaze. She doesn't look impressed, and for a moment I'm almost insulted. “A jail cell with no escape? That's never been any immortal's worst fear as far as I've seen, and I highly doubt it's Nate's.”
I laugh, this high-pitched cackle, thready and surreal. I don't even know where it comes from. “You know him that well, do you?”
Her answering smile is soft but secretive.
I wonder for a moment just whose secrets she's keeping.
She eases me to my feet and steers me to the bunk, sitting me down whether I like it or not. Her head tilts in a curious-puppy maneuver, and invisible fingertips skim the edges of my consciousness in a light airy touch that's meant to gentle a skittish mind as well as take a quick glimpse inside. I flinch, barely restraining myself from bolting for the still-secured door. The only fact that keeps me from doing so is that she doesn't seem to be reaching much deeper than the outermost borders of me, forced back the more she pushes.
I'm definitely not doing that on my own.
“There's a cloud in your head, you know,” she says, curious in a faint way. “Fog's thicker than beef gravy in there if you've got the power to peek in. No wonder nobody can tell it's not you.”
My breath shudders out of me, and I make a soft happy noise I don't intend anyone to hear.
“You think it's a side effect of the swap?” I blurt out.
She watches silently for a long moment as I run my hands over the battered denim of my jeans in a nervous gesture. I feel well in so many ways, a steady heartbeat and a settled stomach, but my racing mind more than makes up for it, churning in my head and trying to force me to wallow in dizziness.
“Could be,” Marla says. She stuffs her fists in her pockets and leans against the opposite wall. We could be at a backroads bar somewhere, the unvarnished floors covered with peanut shells and sawdust, Skynyrd on the jukebox and some unshaven biker fetching her a beer. It's a relaxing sight, whether she means it to be or not. “Could be someone else went poking around in there, too, while they were at it.”
My head bobs in a distracted nod, but my mind narrows in on that comment. It's not a possibility I care to entertain. It's easier – for me, at least – if there's only one person behind all of this.
After dwelling on that for a moment, I look up at her. “How long have I been in here?”
“Longer than you think,” she says. “A few hours, really, if you want to get technical. Time flows a bit oddly around here.”
“So what now?”
“Well, I can't keep you in here if you're not Nate Doe, no matter whose body you're wearing.”
“How do you know I wasn't in this body long before –”
She makes a sour face. “I'm not stupid.”
“I never said you were.”
Her eyebrow cocks sky high, her lips a brittle twist.
“You better not make me regret this, darlin',” she says.
There is no flash of light, no wave goodbye or grand display as she opens the door to my cell.
One minute, I rest on the cheap stiff linens of the cell's bunk. The next minute, I stand in the cozy interior of the greeting station, a crackling fire roaring up in the hearth to welcome me.
A large part of me wants to whoop and holler, to shout in triumph at having my freedom handed so casually back to me. The air feels as though it sweeps back into my smothered lungs in a rush. I wait for a minute, unable to stop a lunatic grin from crossing my face, fully expecting someone to appear out of thin air and order me back to my cell.
Instead, I'm left alone.
All alone, blissful and free.
Now to go retrieve my damn body.
19.
I emerge from the greeting station to find a taxi waiting for me.
I wish I could be more grateful that Marla would call a cab to get me back to the city, but something tells me this isn't some kind act of charity on her behalf, regardless of the fact that my immortality would be numb underneath the surface of my skin for the next couple of hours. The sooner I get back to the city, the sooner she doesn't have to deal with me anymore.
Or possibly, the sooner I can vacate Nate's body and move him back in.
I grimace as I slide into the back of the cab, trying not to imagine what Nate and Marla's relationship could possibly entail. He's practically my brother, for heaven's sake, certainly far closer to me than Graham's ever been. I can't begin to describe how much I'd prefer to avoid picturing the two of them circling each other like angry lions before shagging like bunnies, because that was certainly the impression I got from Marla.
My grimace deepens at the mental image.
In a weak sort of self-defense, I run through the recipe for cherry jalepeno tarts in my head.
The driver eyes me in the rear view. “Where to?”
A quarter-cup of confectioner's sugar, a quarter-teaspoon of almond extract …
I give him the first address that pops into my head. Nate's place may not be safe, but I'm not dumb enough to try the Rafters right now. I can't imagine the greeting I'd get there would be entirely welcoming, lack of substantial evidence or not.
Leaning my head against the back of the seat, I shut my eyes and slow my breathing, attempting to vent the unsettled sensation still racing through my veins. Apparently being immortal doesn't eliminate a monstrous case of anxiety brought on by a half a day locked away behind bars.
As we approach the city limits, crossing the ramp onto Keller Bridge, I figure with a frown that it might help if I check to make sure I have something on me to pay the driver with. I reach back and pull the battered brown leather wallet from my back pocket, flipping it open to reveal more than enough money for the fare.
The worn corners of a few photos peek out from one small sleeve of the wallet.
I bite my bottom lip, abject curiosity tearing at me.
It's a horrible invasion of privacy the way I see it, fishing through Nate's wallet for anything more than cab fare. But it's been that kind of a day, and if there's one thing he'll learn after living in my body for a day or so, it's that I can keep a secret better than almost anyone at this point.
A blue paperclip holds his SLB card and driver's license together on the top of the small pile of cards and photos, the rest a loose disorganized mess. There's no medical insurance card to be had, of course. The rest consists mostly of discount cards for mini-marts and coupons for every burger place and steakhouse in town, half of which feature the hastily scrawled names and phone numbers of girls who I imagine all have impossible times getting dating offers from guys who aren't trying to win bets. At least Nate might be serious about calling them back. Maybe.
The photos, however, come as a bit of a shock.
The top one is a picture of the two of us from before I left town, me in some slinky black number I'd managed to sneak past my mother's critical eye, Nate with one arm wrapped around my midsection as I curl in his lap, the two of us clearly intoxicated and flashing peace signs and bright smiles at the camera. The few underneath it are about what I'd expect to find in Nate's wallet. A grainy photo of him on the front page of the newspaper after saving a bus full of nuns from tilting off the Keller Bridge into the river. Him with his arm slung over a gorgeous brown horse that appears to be more interested in eating his hat. The Brigade at my dad's surprise birthday party.
The next two make me bite back a gasp.
The first is of Nate, dressed in a neat stiff suit He poses for a sepia-tinted daguerrotype with his hand resting on the shoulder of a homely round-faced young woman with a sweet smile and a long high-necked prairie dress.
The second is a more recent photo of a painting in some gallery, a portrait that has to be at least five hundred years old. The subject sports a ruffed collar and a secretive grin and a face that looks so painfully like Nate my blood goes cold with realization.
He's never told me. Not that he has to, of course, and not that it's all that important.
But that's what I get for assuming, I suppose.
I tuck the photos away, not all that keen to look at them and ponder for too long what they might imply, and remove enough cab fare and a substantial tip not long before the driver pulls up at the corner a block from Nate's place to let me out. Construction workers crowd the street, still clearing away the day-old debris from the robot attack.
The walk to Nate's apartment building isn't far, and it gives me a chance to clear my head. But it doesn't change the fact that it's still a walk rather than the comfortable immediacy of teleportation.
I tug at my hat as I pass the busy construction zone with more than a few hardhats joking around and whistling at women walking past. They're not going to catcall at me now, of course, not while I'm wearing an immortal male cowpoke. But Nate's face must have been all over the news while I was gone, plastered on every newspaper in the city in fresh sharp colors on the front page. If they have no problem treating random female passersby like worthless pretty meat puppets, I can't imagine they'd take a moral stand against beating the tar out of the guy who allegedly kidnapped Wavelength.
I finish adjusting my hat, the brim shading my eyes and most of my face, and keep walking.
Arriving at the apartment building doesn't result in the frantic escape that I expect to have to make upon opening the front door. While the entrance lounge is surprisingly empty, there still sits a lone security guard at the front desk, not quite as involved in sudoku or a handheld video game as most security guards I've encountered in my career.
He catches my eye. For a moment I tense up, expecting a hard time.
Instead, he tilts a respectful nod in my direction, and reaches over to buzz me into the elevator.
I'm not exactly positive I'd like to know the specifics of why a security guard in Nate's building might still be so accommodating after he's been released from kidnapping charges. But there's a lot about Nate I'm not sure I want to know, friend or not.
It's almost a bit of a shock by the time I unlock the door to Nate's apartment and step inside, half-expecting a trained army of ninjas to appear out of every nook and cranny to dismember me. It can't be this easy to just … just go home. It shouldn't be this easy. It doesn't bode well.
Neither does the fact that when I call out to see if anyone is home, no one answers.
Not that a trained army of ninjas would answer if called, of course, but they're not the ones I'm looking for.
I don't care how safe things may feel right now. I want my body back.
Which, of course, means getting it back from the person who currently has it, wherever he may be.
It certainly doesn't appear to be on the premises, although it would be difficult to tell if Nate had been here recently in my body considering the state of the place. Nate decorates his apartment like an oil baron attempting to be a cattle rancher, all expensive but worn leather furniture and more than a few decorative animal parts displayed on the walls. The problem is that whatever his interior decorating tastes may be, they're hidden under a disaster area the likes of which would make even Troy cringe.
I nearly gag as I pick up a dirty sock from the coffee table in the living room using the encrusted tines of the discarded fork lying on top of it.
“How does he live like this?” I murmur, then grimace and toss both the fork and the sock into the sloppy mass of stained laundry and grimy dishes currently coating the floor. “I suppose it helps, not being able to vomit.”
Maybe I should clean while I'm here. If I wasn't positive I'm about five minutes away from a friendly visit from the neighborhood goon squad, I just might, if only to save Nate from being devoured in his sleep by a rapacious slab of sentient garbage. Hey, you never know.
Nothing appears disturbed as far as I can tell. But it's entirely possible he's already managed to master my abilities to the point where he really doesn't need to disturb anything if he doesn't want to. Lord knows he's got enough life experience to handle it.
“Or so I assume,” I whisper, taking in the decided lack of photos on the wall with a wry smile.
Nate plays his cards close to his chest. I probably shouldn't find it as comforting a personality trait as I do, the deft way he conceals the staggering well of lies I know damn well he keeps to himself. Immortals don't have to lie about their age, never have to pretend they're fresh out of high school when they're actually a few thousand years older than those around them. They haven't had to fabricate nice, normal histories since the late 1600s, when the witch hunters called for the ungodly heads of the superhuman hero squads as well as those of the town's suspected heathens.
They don't have to lie about their pasts, but they don't necessarily have to tell the truth either.
Immortals can whirl into a town with their pockets bulging with their riches and their names in neon lights, but they can just as easily sneak in under the radar with a single knapsack and a friendly smile. Change does immortals good and they succumb to it often, passing themselves off as green wide-eyed youngsters. Maybe they're just off the ranch, still shaking sawdust and manure from the grooves in their boots.
Etiquette says it's impolite to question an immortal's given personal history. Practice tells me and every other hero that they'll tell you what you need to hear and elaborate on the rest.
Simply being near Nate's possessions feels like a profound violation, but this is the only remotely safe place which came to mind. I don't feel the urge to add rifling through his underwear drawer to the list of unpleasant and uncomfortable things I've slogged through lately.
A car horn honks, loud and shrill, and some warning instinct commands me to check it out.
I peer out the windows that face out onto the street, easily spotting the broad shoulders and defined chin of my father striding down the sidewalk even from all the way up here.
Nate's eyesight must be fantastic
, I think, the words darting almost frantically through my brain.
Social visit or life-threatening encounter?
I imagine, I realize wryly, there's no reason it can't be both at once.
My gaze darts around the apartment in a futile search for a way out. The easiest way would be the fire escape, of course, but even John Camden would know better than to ignore such an obvious exit. He may even be waiting down there out of view as we speak, killing time until I try something as amateur as scaling the fire escape to the sidewalk below. I'm tempted to simply make a flying leap from the window, but this high up the damn things are firmly sealed. Besides, it's not exactly an option I embrace.
So, trying to avoid him by going through the building, it is.
The front door of Nate's apartment faces the elevator, a common safety precaution among heroes. But I know there's another door in this apartment for a less traveled hallway accessible only in an emergency by heroes of the human and superhuman variety. Nate made joking references to the hallway on occasion, at least in my presence, calling it the only escape route at his disposal that might be even remotely as clever as my own.
Now it was just a matter of recalling which door in the apartment might lead there.
A normal person would probably have blocked it long ago with some obtrusive piece of furniture, but Nate has never been normal. I spot three doors that are distinct possibilities, but can't recall under my current level of stress just which one it might be.
Clenching my teeth in aggravation, I grab the doorknob of the closest door and yank it open, frantic to find an escape route.
Something tumbles out of the closet I've apparently discovered, a heavy weight that hits the floor with a solid thud. I can't quite claim my resulting shriek to be the least bit tough or manly, which presumably makes me look about as ridiculous as I feel.
A body. Why am I not the least bit shocked that it's a body?
My heart races, throbbing a steadily slowing tempo in my chest as I force myself to focus. It's not as if I've never seen a dead body before. It's not even like I haven't seen another one this week. It's simply a bit of a stunner to be attempting an escape only to be slowed by a corpse falling out of the wrong door. Granted, I'm the one who opened the wrong door in the first place, but still.
There's no denying that the body lying before me is dead, its stiff limbs ripe with rigor, its pallor a sick grayish tinge I recognize all too easily. Years away from the superhero life don't scrub the distinct stench of slowly rotting flesh from your memory. On the bright side, at least this particular body hasn't been boiled in acid or turned into a zombie or dressed in a monkey costume as some strange calling card. Supervillains have an odd way of making sure their kills will be correctly recorded, so even now I usually expect to find bodies done up in mime grease paint or trussed up in –
In a red satin dress and black patent-leather heels.