Trace (TraceWorld Book 1) (9 page)

An uncomfortable silence followed. It wasn’t the fact of the raw fish—Nola had eaten sushi and sashimi before—but seeing the animal traumatized and then dying before her eyes was something entirely new. Whether she felt any “life force” at all, she definitely felt a queasy horror. She wondered fleetingly whether this was the twisted covert operation of a radical animal rights organization.

Not everyone found it distasteful, however. “That was awesome!” bubbled a woman to Nola’s left.

The man next to the bubbly woman nodded in emphatic agreement. “Next up: steak tartare!”

“Not just yet,” Grayson whispered to Nola, pointing.

Another chef walked in, cradling in his arms a surprised-looking duck. Nola’s stomach clenched fist-tight.

“Worst date ever, huh?” Grayson said. “So what
do
you think so far?”

“I think this may be what finally turns me vegetarian,” she blurted.

He grinned, but she could tell that even he looked considerably less than delighted with the proceedings. That begged the question: why on earth had they come here? Perhaps even more important, why on earth did she
stay
? Nothing was keeping her there. She didn’t owe Grayson anything. But every time she glanced at him, she felt like she was being challenged. It was as if he fully expected her to walk out, as if he had already pegged her for someone who didn’t take risks. That rankled her. She couldn’t have that. She turned defiantly away from him and faced the next course.

The dinner went on, and on and on. There had been the duck, beheaded in mid-quack, followed by a wide-eyed rabbit. Each time a kill was made, the animal was moved immediately behind a screen and out of their view. The idea, Nola realized, was for the diners to experience the thrill of the death but not all the yuckiness that happens between death and special of the day—though they could still hear thrashing and slicing, still smell blood and fear.

Between the fowl and meat courses there had been
chapulines
, Mexican grasshoppers usually eaten flash-fried but in this case still jumping as they were popped into each diner’s mouth. Oddly, it was the
chapulines
that led to her suggestion that they have a drink after the meal—not because the spiky legs twitching against her tongue had grossed her out but because the insects had left an unpleasant metallic taste in her mouth. She didn’t know whether he accepted this reason or if he believed she had been shaken up by the experience and needed alcohol to soothe her nerves; either way, he willingly suggested the martini bar across the street, where cool juniper and briny olives could wash away the blood and the bug parts.

“So you didn’t get anything out of it?” he pressed her once they’d gotten their drinks. His voice was neutral rather than disappointed, but he was watching her face carefully.

“Uh, that would be a big
no
.” What else could she say? Part of her wanted to rail at him for endorsing such hideous barbarism, but that would be hypocritical. After all, she had participated as well, and as any animal rights activist would tell her, she’d been participating all her life, albeit in a state of denial, by condoning the slaughter of animals in cruel ways for meat. What was the difference?

To her surprise, she saw that he was smiling again, and not in a pitying or sneering way. “They call it
Manger la Vie
. It’s a kind of secret society of epicurean thrill-seekers who like to ‘eat on the edge,’ I think their motto goes. A friend told me about it and put my name on the members’ list, but I’ve never been to one of their dinners until now. And no, I didn’t enjoy it either. I don’t get animal trace. I don’t think people can. Did you?”

“No,” she said, beginning to feel heated from anger and not just alcohol. “But I knew that already. So did you. So why—”

“I know—why did we bother? The same reason as everyone else: curiosity. An essential component of the human condition.”

“Curiosity doesn’t always need to be satisfied, especially if it involves torturing live animals.” She hated sounding so priggish, but he seemed to be forcing her to take a stand.

“And if it doesn’t? If it only involves a fascination with something most people would prefer to avoid, like death?”

Of course she should have known what this was really about: trace, and his need for it. “There’s more to it than that.”

“Who exactly am I hurting by doing what I do? No one gets killed, not even bugs. Few people even know trace exists. I’m not stealing anything belonging to anyone. You might as well accuse me of stealing the oxygen provided by my houseplants.”

“You don’t have to hurt someone directly to be doing something wrong,” she said. “What about the peeping tom? He can say his victims don’t know he’s watching them undress, so what’s the harm? But it’s a violation nonetheless. What’s more,” she added, calling upon knowledge she’d gained from work and hoping she sounded authoritative, “most peeping Toms secretly hope they get caught—sometimes not so secretly. The peeping is only part of the thrill. Many of them admit they enjoy it even more when their victims realize they’re being watched.”

“The dead can’t know,” he said bluntly.

She didn’t flinch. “I’m not sentimental about the dead, Grayson. I’ve never believed in putting living people through life-threatening situations in order to bring back the bodies of soldiers who died in combat zones, for example. Yeah, I’d probably feel differently if a member of my family were involved, but that’s not the issue. If other people knew what you were doing, don’t you think they’d be upset?”

“People get upset over a lot of things they don’t understand. Anything that challenges their own limited way of thinking seems wrong to them. People who worship different gods, love different people, have a different physical appearance, however superficially—all become persecuted out of ignorance. The people you work with don’t understand what
you
do, right? I imagine that results in a lot of bad behavior at your expense.”

She drained the last of her martini and set the glass in the exact center of her napkin. “What I do helps people. What you do helps yourself. You turn this into something solely self-interested.”

“Your lofty goals are just as self-serving as mine, and I’m not hurting anyone by what I do any more than you are. We are the same. If you believe I’m in the wrong, you should believe
you
are wrong as well.”

“OK, yes, I enjoy my work, so there is selfishness involved. But it is
work
. You sound like someone trying to justify a so-called ‘victimless crime.’ Funny thing about that, Grayson: those crimes almost always do have victims. You just choose not to see them.”

He finished his martini as well and leaned toward her with a look of amusement. “You’ve had quite an opportunity to be critical of what I do. Now it’s my turn. What I do may disgust you, but what you do I find, frankly, pathetic.”

It seemed like a strange word to use, but she didn’t want to encourage him by questioning him about it, instead picking her olives out of the glass and making a great production of chomping on them one at a time. It hardly mattered; he didn’t need encouragement.

“You find trace, Nola, but you don’t even get anything out of it. I find that a colossal waste.”

“You make me sound like a truffle pig,” Nola said dryly.

He laughed. “Perhaps. No, actually it’s worse than that. Pigs appreciate truffles; they are simply denied the reward for hunting them down. You deny yourself.”

The way he said that—huskily, almost like a come-on—it was as if he were chiding her for playing hard-to-get. Her thoughts turned abruptly from the conversation to the fact of this . . . date, or whatever it was. There was truth and relevance in his last three words that he couldn’t have realized, because at the age of 27, Nola had never experienced what she would consider a serious long-term relationship and was starting to wonder if she ever would—or, more to the point, if she even wanted to. There had been one guy for two years in college, because they had mutual friends and that was what you did in college until you realized with a cold panic that no way did you want to take this beyond graduation day. After that, a few dates here, a fling there, desire followed by disappointment, regrets followed by relief. She knew her track record, knew she always started out aloof and distant from men who pursued her, pushed her for more, and after she gave them more, they inevitably left her wrecked when they decided they preferred the aloof-and-distant Nola. She
was
denying herself, in fact. She couldn’t handle those emotions right now. It was possible that her crush on Dalton was part of this: he was unavailable, so there was zero risk. Perhaps it was the same with trace. If she dealt with it only in a strictly regulated fashion—working with the police—she could control it, not let it get out of hand.

And Grayson now mocked her for that attitude.

But trace was not love or passion. Trace was, to Grayson, a controlled substance, he an addict. Absorbing the residue of violence, of brutality, of death—it was hard not to be judgmental about all that, not to find him sick, twisted, morally depraved.

She said nothing, though she was sure he could read judgment on her face, in her very posture, and it amused him. He put a twenty and a ten on the bar (how much had those martinis been, anyway, she found herself wondering ridiculously) and said, “If you don’t mind, I have one more place to take you this evening, as befits its general theme.”

He leaned forward and whispered an address into her ear. It wasn’t his address, or hers, though there was something vaguely familiar about it. Leaning back, he added, casually, “You can follow me in your car and veer off any time you want.” With that he got up from his barstool and walked out the door without looking back to see if she would follow.

She had a box cutter in her coat pocket and a one-button auto-dial to a special police number that would put her ahead of anyone dialing 911. She was prepared, inordinately so, for the worst. She could handle this. Why, then, did she feel like she was moving toward something out of her control?

And why did she willingly move toward it?

___________

It was the hospice center. He couldn’t possibly have known about her grandfather, yet there they were.

“Tell me what you feel,” he said.

I feel like telling you to go fuck yourself
. Why the hell did he take her here? How could he know? She forced calm on herself. He didn’t know. Obviously, he wanted to make a point by bringing her someplace where they could experience the presence of trace, and it wasn’t like there were a lot of these places in town, after all. He didn’t know her past. He didn’t know her. As she continued to study his face in silence, she felt more confident. He
didn’t
know her. He knew what
he
was experiencing right then but had no clue about her. She was entirely separate from him—from everybody, in an isolation she had worked very hard to achieve.

“What do you feel?” he repeated softly.

Nothing
. No, not quite nothing—as always, the slight sensation of a breeze, or someone whispering. Unsettling, to a degree, but not jarring, and certainly not electrifying or titillating or whatever Grayson found it to be. A ripple, quickly gone. That was all.

She wasn’t sure whether to be disappointed or relieved.

8

Over lunch Tuesday at La Cucina Feliz with her friend Nadine Marrero, the clerk at the police station, they got to talking about couples, relationships, and marriage. Nadine was the one friend Nola felt comfortable doing the girl-talk thing with, mostly because Nadine offered far more than clichés about there being no good men left who weren’t married or gay. They got on to the topic by talking about Jeb Crawford’s upcoming engagement party and, when it was clear they had nothing snarky to say about Jeb or his fiancée, moved on to discussing their parents’ awful marriages. When Nola noted her complete inability to understand why her folks had ever gotten together, Nadine gave her a look. “Sweetie. Your dad’s hot and your mom still gives teenage boys hard-ons. Why do you
think
they got together?”

That startled Nola. “Ew. Did you have to remind me that my folks once had sex?” But she had to admit its truth. “My father told me once they named me Nola because they’d honeymooned in New Orleans and I was conceived there. I was, like, six years old when he told me this. Great way to introduce your kid to the birds and bees.”

“Is that really how you got your name?”

“Not even close. They went camping in the Adirondacks for their honeymoon. My mother has never left the state, far as I can tell. And I was born four years after they were married, not nine months.”

“Then why did they choose Nola? It’s a great name, by the way, but yeah, makes me think of New Orleans right away.”

Nola rolled her eyes. “Mom’s idea. She saw ‘NOLA’ in a magazine and thought it sounded pretty. She had no idea it was a nickname for New Orleans, and Dad never bothered to tell her. I think she still doesn’t know. He probably thinks of it as his private joke on her. They aren’t exactly the best at communication, my folks.”

“Yeah, well, communication is overrated.” Nadine snorted. “I can’t remember the last time a guy whistled at me and said, ‘Hey, baby, nice conversational topic.’”

Nola nearly choked on a tortilla chip.

Nadine giggled and then leaned forward over her taco salad conspiratorially. “Sometimes when Dalton’s talking to me? I want to say, oh, no, honey, don’t talk right now, I just want to look at you. Don’t ruin it, please.” They shrieked with laughter, drawing the curious stares of the uniforms at the next table. “No, seriously,” Nadine continued, leaning back. “You got any pictures of your folks when they were dating? I bet they were a gorgeous couple.”

“Yes, they were, and now they look gorgeous in each half of those photos my mother took the scissors to. Looking gorgeous was about the only thing they had in common.”