I stood up at the same time as Sarge. Tiffany wrapped her dragon-like wings around her body, covering her face up to her eyes. Mai’s alien ermine made a flurry of outraged sounds—think squeaky dog toy being devoured by an alligator.
“Enough, dammit,” I snapped. “Gavin, stop being such a prick and ease down. Stefan, you can tell your drunken mermaid story later.” I glared around at everyone involved, skipping Jake. “Let’s try and behave like professionals, especially in front of guests.” I made air quote marks around the word professionals. “Otherwise, no dessert for anybody.”
My words on dessert sliced through the building tension with the finality of Alexander the Great severing the Gordian knot.
“Yes, Mom.” Gavin grinned and sat down again.
I gave him a flat stare. Must. Keep. Temper. In. Check.
Rafe cut in. “Don’t worry, Captain. You’re a total MILF. Mammal I’d Like to Fuck.”
I hovered two seconds from nuclear explosion when Jake began to speak.
“All right,” he said, his voice restrained. “I’ll tell you about the time I air-dropped into a Belize jungle to help take down a nightmare that had crawled out of the depths of the Great Blue Hole.”
All heads turned to him. It fell so quiet I could hear the A/C whooshing through the vents and the muted hum from the lights in the copper and iron chandelier. I slowly sat back down and picked up my fork.
“What’s a Great Blue Hole?” Tiffany’s eyes widened and she leaned toward him. “Is it like the Bermuda Triangle?”
“No,” Jake answered. “It’s an underwater sinkhole. From the air it looks like a huge blue circle. And it’s deep. JSOC sent me as a force multiplier for a team of Belize commandos, training, support, that kind of thing. We went into the jungle to check out a report that a village had disappeared. We found the village empty. Everyone, gone. Even the chickens were nowhere to be found. We’d found a Roanoke Colony of the rainforest.”
“What happened then?” Tiffany clutched at the edges of her wings.
“We tried to solve the mystery—”
“Like Scooby-Doo,” Gavin suggested.
“—and we found huge trails of slime inside the villager huts and covering the dirt paths. The place stank like pineapple and brine. The unit commander came to me to talk about following the trail into the jungle, and then something massive crashed out of the deep rainforest shade. Bright yellow. Huge, shapeless, translucent and quivering. It had no eyes, but rippled and wobbled as it moved toward us. At first I thought it some kind of giant amoeba, but it never stopped its slow, disturbing jiggle…” He paused and gulped down the last of his wine. He snatched one of the beer bottles out of Gavin’s Seahawks ice chest (Gavin being too lazy to walk the seventy feet back to the kitchen refrigerator to get more beer). A breathless silence hung in the room.
Jake’s eyes stared unseeing into the distance. He took a swig of beer, and I wondered how the hell I’d ended up stuck with wine.
“The reek of pineapples and low tide poured off the monster. The Belize commandos opened up with assault rifles, but the bullets just lodged inside with no effect, as if they were shooting into ballistic gelatin. The creature rolled over the top of one commando, trapping him in its gelatinous core, drowning him in yellow goo.”
“How did you triumph?” Hanzo asked.
“We started to pull back, but the thing absorbed another commando.” Jake gave a half shrug. “I went in after him before he could get sucked into its core. Hacked my way into its cool, yielding surface with my bayonet, dragged the commando back out and shoved an incendiary grenade into the hole I’d cut.”
Sarge grunted. “Nice.”
“Yeah. Incinerated a good chunk of that wobbling bastard. The rest of it tried to jiggle its way back to the ocean, smoking and bubbling and losing pieces along the way, but I called in an airstrike. Two F-15s dropped a bunch of Mark 77s and napalmed it down to ashes.” Jake took a long drink from his beer. “From that day forward, whenever I see a gelatin dessert, I douse it with lighter fluid and send it back to hell.”
A long moment of quiet drew out. I could think of nothing witty to say. What kind of iron will did it take to cut your way into a man-eating blob and rescue some grunt you didn’t even know? And then incendiary grenades… I shuddered a little in pleasure and then threw a guilty glance around the table to make sure nobody had noticed.
“Sweet,” Gavin said. “A carnivorous jelly from the black depths of the sea. Where’s
Mystery Science Theater 3000
when you need it?”
Rafe snorted. “I preferred
Elvira
. More impressive mammaries. She stirred all kinds of tingly feelings within my furry loins.”
“Rafe, please,” I said. “Not everything in this world is about your dick.”
“That’s not what she said.”
“How fast can you heal third-degree burns, Rafe? Fast? Hold on then, because this is gonna hurt you a helluva lot more than it’s gonna hurt me.”
Tiffany broke in before I could make good on my threat. “Is that why you took this mission, Captain Sanders? You want to kill this necromancer for making gelatin?”
Jake gave another shrug but didn’t look at any of us. “Gelatin and zombies. The goddamn end of the world.”
“Speaking of the end of the world,” Rafe said. “Here’s a fun fact. You can starve to death eating gelatin. It has zero essential amino acids.”
The conversation turned to other topics, but I didn’t join in. I kept busy shoveling food in, replaying Jake’s story in my mind. Maybe…just maybe I’d been wrong about him. A guy like that wouldn’t be interested in deposing me and seizing the reins. A guy like that, a guy who would follow you
inside
a monster and then blow the fucker up, well, that was a helluva guy to have around.
Jake caught me looking at him once. He held my gaze, and I didn’t glance away.
I might have smiled and nodded my respect.
He might have smiled and nodded back.
I walked back alone to my room after dinner, feeling like I’d eaten too much and not giving a damn. Running footsteps pounded the tile behind me, and I wheeled around to face them. By habit, I reached out to touch my magic and shifted into a fighting stance.
Hanzo rounded the corner at a full run. He saw me, and his eyes flared wide. He drew up short, sliding to a stop on the tile just out of kicking range. Ninja delusions or not, there were no flies on that boy. I slowly dropped my guard. Releasing the power I’d summoned was more difficult, since it always felt as if I lost something, became less substantial, less
alive
when I let it go.
“What’s up, Hanzo? Ultimate Fighting Championship on TV or something?” I tried to appear interested, but right now I just couldn’t muster any excitement about watching men beat the shit out of each other. I felt damn exhausted. Just being in the room with Jake made me feel all DEFCON 1. Him and his damn story. And even if I
had
liked it, it’d gone on too long.
“A moment of your time, Captain. If you would do me the honor.”
“This isn’t about turning the med center into a tearoom again, is it? Because my answer is still no. You can perform tea ceremonies on your own time and dime.”
He shook his head. “No, this isn’t about
chanoyu
. I have a solution to the problem which stands before us indomitable, like Mount Fuji swathed in morning mist.”
“All right. Look. No offense. You know I love you. You know you’re a vital part of this team, and you know I don’t want to crush your dreams. But would you stop talking like some half-assed samurai movie? Just talk normally around me. There’s no one else here to impress.”
“But I like talking that way.”
Time to hand out the hard truths. “I hate to tell you this, but you sound like a white guy with a very shallow concept of pseudo-Confucius speak. It gets old. Really fast.”
“All right then. I see.” He swallowed. Opened his mouth and closed it again. He tried to smile and failed, and turned to walk away.
Ah crap. A surge of guilt swept through me like a flash flood. I reached out and touched his arm before he could get more than a step away. He stopped and looked back.
“What was your solution, Hanzo? You didn’t tell me.”
“Do you really want to hear it?” he asked. “I thought—”
“Of course I want to hear it. I just don’t want to hear it in mangled haiku.”
“You’ll love it. Listen, you mentioned we had all these costs. Why don’t we just do this mission the easy way?”
Oh God. Here it comes.
“What’s the easy way?”
He grinned. “Let me use my ninjitsu skills. I’ll infiltrate that factory at night. Find where the necromancer’s sleeping, use the thing where you drip poison down a dangling waxed string into his mouth. I then escape through the shadows, and an easy job is complete. No headaches for you.” He paused. “Maybe a bonus for me.”
I took a deep breath. Counted to ten. Let the air out in a slow, steady exhale. “No.”
Surprise flashed across his face. “But it’s perfect. Ninjas are flawless assassins.”
I took another deep breath, counted to twenty and again let it out. “What about all the zombies? This job is as much about pest control as taking down the necromancer.”
“I’ll have my katana and my shuriken. You’ll be able to walk across the Columbia River on the zombie heads my blade will sever.”
Looked like the respite from ninja-speak only lasted for thirty-second intervals. “Hanzo, I think the time has come to let go of the ninja thing. What’s it been? Three years since you started it? When was the last time you actually hit something with a shuriken?”
“What are you saying?” His voice cracked on the last word. I felt like a total ass, but I was determined to make a clean cut here. This ninja delusion had grown dangerous.
“I’m saying that you’re on this team as a healer…and you work the main gun on the Bradley, but just until we up our roster a bit, so never mind that. You’re the best healer I’ve ever seen. We’ve never lost one of our injured—and that’s
directly
related to you. So why can’t you be happy with what you are?”
“Maybe because I don’t like what I am.”
I blinked. Hanzo looked away, jaw clenched, and stared at one of the art prints on the wall. I reached out and touched his shoulder again. “We don’t get to choose our talents. We have to go with what we’re given.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re a walking flamethrower. I have to heal people—people that
other
people break. It’s the warriors that get all the respect, all the love.”
“You’re wrong. I want to live in a world with more healers and fewer people running around breaking each other.”
His hand slashed downward in dismissal, and his scowl deepened. “Like that will ever happen. I can be a master ninja if I keep trying. It’s all about training, and I have the iron will—just the same as you.” He took a steadying breath. “Besides, Mai likes ninjas.”
News to me. Mai seemed more fascinated with furry things sporting pink noses and lots of teeth. “How do you know that?”
“I, uh, overheard her talking on the phone once. And anyway,
everybody
loves ninjas. Nobody ever messes with a shinobi.
Women
love ninjas. They’re like cowboys with swords.”
Some pop-psych book claimed men and women came from different planets, and I wasn’t going to make Uranus jokes about the guys. The whole idea stank like cow manure in the sun. Men and women came from different
dimensions
. I didn’t know how to reintroduce Hanzo to reality, so I ignored his cowboy/ninja comparison before my mind melted into a puddle of microwaved cheese.
“Tell you what,” I said, keeping my voice soft. “You want more attention from Mai, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So stop trying to sound like you’re some half-assed Asian philosopher, stop hanging out at the Japanese Gardens hoping she’ll notice and ask to go, stop drinking green tea when you think she might be looking, stop collecting ornamental fans and talking about cherry blossoms, and just
be yourself
. See where that gets you.”
“It doesn’t get me anywhere, Captain. That’s the problem.”
I sighed. “Don’t worry about it now. But you
will
go in with the rest of the team,
not
solo. Bring your katana, I don’t care, because I know I can count on you to patch people up when we’re inside and going live and the blood’s flowing down the floor drains.” I squeezed his shoulder. “We’re a team, and you’re a vital part of it. So enough of this solo talk.”
“All right.” He managed a weak smile. “I’ll think about what you said. You’re missing an opportunity—”
I opened my mouth to interrupt, but he hurried on.
“—but I see where you’re coming from. Thanks, Captain.”
He turned again and started to leave, but I called out after him. “Hey, Hanzo. One more thing.”
He paused and looked back.
“What do you think about the new guy? Captain Sanders.”
“He’s not ninja…” He paused and rubbed a thumb over his lower lip. “But I think he just might be samurai.”
Back to the whiskey. The Chivas burned a little going down, but I loved the lazy warmth spreading throughout my body once it hit my stomach. I leaned against my balcony rail, swirling my glass so the ice cubes rattled, enjoying the quiet and the cool air. The rain had left off for now, and the sky, while not cloudless, had huge gaps in the cloud cover, so I held hope the celestial water faucet would remain off for a few hours. I’d had to sluice off water droplets from the rail before resting against it, but the metal remained cold and wet. I’d glanced over the rail to the lower levels more than once, hoping to catch another glimpse of Jake, but the balconies stayed empty.