Chapter 26

The world is a mysterious place filled with wonders and secrets beyond our ken. That’s why we feel so small and insignificant in the grand scheme of things when looking up at a majestic peak rising far above our heads or the countless waves rippling over the vast expanse of an endless blue sea.

Maybe that helped explain the pensive smile dancing on my face as I watched the shimmering ocean of lights winking in and out while night fell over the skyscrapers of Downtown LA. I tipped an appreciative nod to my only friend up here, the stone gargoyle who had been so gracious as to share his lofty, if lonely perch upon the parapet of the Walton-Morgan building, almost 80 floors above the desolate streets of the Financial District of Downtown Los Angeles.

The inert statue didn’t nod back, of course, but I hadn’t expected any differently. Shrugging, I gorged myself on the sinfully delicious slab of raw beef I held in my hand, courtesy of my visit to a certain cold foods storage warehouse. Finally, I felt human again - or as human as I could while happily chewing on raw, bloody meat. I wondered if other undead creatures were just sorely misunderstood creatures who simply loved all things red and juicy to the detriment of any other social conventions.

Speaking of such conventions, my attention was drawn back toward the gleaming burnished steel door at the center of the roof directly under me. A tall woman emerged from the doorway, walking forward with a steady, self-assured gait that I’d grown very familiar with during my old college days. My date for the night had arrived, and just in time too. How typical of her.

Upon reaching the middle of the roof, a rare smile flittered across her lips so fleetly that for a moment I wondered if it had merely been an optic illusion. Then it was gone and the grave lines returned to exert their tyranny upon features that would otherwise have been called devastatingly beautiful. As it was, Victoria Song truly lived up to the nickname she had earned within the first three weeks of her arrival upon campus: The Ice Queen.

Snow white skin without a hint of make-up did nothing but highlight the surpassing flawlessness of her features, though the dark orbs of her eyes were like chunks of ice suspended in the void of space for all the warmth that they exuded. Raven locks that fell to the small of her back were the only appeal to vanity that Victoria would allow herself. Everything else was both utilitarian in purpose and efficient with available resources. The sharp cut of her dark business slacks and a similarly plain if functional white cotton blouse worn under a uniformly black trench coat projected the image of the consummate power businesswoman - or a devoted agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigations.

Upon reaching the middle of the roof, she took a glance at her wristwatch and shook her head. Even from this far away, I could read her emotions as though she were an open book. Long years spent within the nearly claustrophobic confines of a college dorm will do that. I instantly spotted the slightly compressed lips that indicated her annoyance in a rare breach of the impassiveness she was renowned for in her circles. I could even glean that such an overt manifestation of her frustration could not be caused just by the tardiness of my arrival. I knew what rankled her most would have to be her own foolish acquiescence of my sudden request to meet.

“Right, Chuck?” I asked, tilting my head toward my new friend.

The stone gargoyle didn’t seem inclined to comment, so I took that for a begrudging yes. Chuck was forced to admit that even I had my moments of brilliance within the seemingly unfathomable depths of human interaction. Instead, his vacant eyes seemed to echo another question that nearly floated right past my mind before I picked up on it. I must be on a roll tonight.

“No, I’m not waiting just to spite her. That would be foolish, even for me. I just want to make sure she doesn’t have a tail. This whole situation with Allie has me on edge,” I confided, carefully scanning the rooftops of the buildings around us while taking a long whiff of the chilly night air.

Pollen, dust, hints of sulphur, a bit of ammonia gas; all in all, what I’d expect from a healthy lungful of good old cancer-inducing Los Angeles smog. No threatening human presence thus far, though my senses lingered uncomfortably long over the startlingly familiar scent of Vicky’s skin. That brought a pleasant surprise - herbal soap. Lavender, some citrus, and a hint of rose. It brought warm memories trickling back through invisible cracks in the past before I could stop them.

I shook off my silly smile and with a final wave toward my new friend, Chuck the Gargoyle, soared across the one-thousand foot high gap between our buildings and landed behind Vicky with an unceremonious thump.

To her credit, Victoria didn’t so much as twitch as she leveled the gleaming muzzle of a semi-automatic pistol and clicked the safety off while aiming straight toward the center of my head.

“Hey, Vicky. Long time no see, huh?” I said lamely, waving a hand.

My awkward salute didn’t earn any enthusiastic greetings at all, which I’d expected. Instead, Victoria scowled at me for a long moment before muttering something inaudible under her breath and putting the safety back on her gun before shoving it into the holster under her trenchcoat.

“It’s really you,” Victoria sighed, shaking her head in disbelief. “Do you have any idea how much trouble you’re in?”

“A little. That’s why the first thing I did was to call you,” I said, grinning broadly. “I did good this time, right?”

“I should just shoot you right now and get it all over with,” Victoria sighed while rolling her eyes. Suddenly, she whirled around and stalked over to me while glaring bloody murder at me from under scowling eyebrows, forcing me to back away with a nervous smile. “Four years. Four bloody years of complete silence and that’s all you have to say to me? ‘Hello, I need your help?’ What the hell is that even supposed to mean? No ‘Hi Victoria, sorry I cut you off completely from my life’ or ‘Victoria, I’m really sorry I’ve been such a heartless bastard’. No, instead I get a vague fucking reference to a random rooftop that I haven’t revisited in over.. Well, a long time, and you expect me to come here wagging my tail as though expecting a treat?”

The back of my head struck something hard and I realized I’d hit a wall and there was nowhere else to escape, but Victoria either hadn’t noticed or didn’t care because she didn’t relent in her advance until she stood glaring at me barely a couple of inches away from my breathless gaze.

“Well?” she urged with an impatient snarl, in a truly surprising display of anger. Loosely translated to regular people’s standards, such a demonstration would have included hoarse, throat-scraping shouting and a decent amount of neck-throttling while spraying froth wildly back and forth. “What would make you even think that I’d be willing to meet you, let alone offer any help?”

A moment of awkward silence stretched for what seemed like an eternity until I coughed to clear my throat, then I licked my lips and commented in as non-threatening a manner as possible, “Um, you’re here, aren’t you?”

I knew it was the wrong thing to say the moment the words tumbled out of my mouth. Apparently, my newly discovered confidence didn’t go hand-in-hand with a healthy survival instinct. As things stood, I was grateful when a flush of color bloomed across Victoria’s snowy cheeks and she gnashed her teeth together, looking as though she was on the brink of doing something uncharacteristically stupid which she would later sorely regret.

Strangely, the more the seconds passed and the longer I stared into the dark depths of her eyes, the closer her fiery red lips drew to me. More than once, I was compelled to point out such a fact to her but just barely refrained from doing so as my survival instinct belatedly kicked in. So, I just stood there like a rabbit frozen under the glare of a ferocious tigress when a loud coughing sound rang out from behind Victoria’s back and shattered the moment until its pieces lay scatted across the floor like broken beads of glass.

“Ahem, so you’re Kaizer. Victoria’s never spoken about you, so I’m glad to finally meet you.”

“Fuck off, Kelly. Not a good time,” Victoria growled under her breath, still watching me intently from a mere few inches away.

“Why do I feel like I must point out that my agreement to allow this meeting with a potential fugitive of the law was predicated upon the condition that I’d be allowed to supervise such a meeting in person?”

“So, you’re here and he’s here. Now you can kindly fuck off,” Victoria said, her eyes still blazing holes through my head.

“I hardly think that’s the proper escalation of events according to the manual, Vick-”

“Don’t you dare,” Victoria said in a low, husky tone that still sent chills up my spine.

Apparently, this Kelly guy wasn’t nearly as stupid as he sounded, going by the exchange thus far. Instead, he quickly backpedaled.

“Ahem, I mean, Victoria..” Another barely audible harrumph from Victoria and he relented with a heavy sigh. “Fine, agent Song. Are you happy now? Agent Song, you must know that I cannot possibly leave you alone with a wanted fugitive of the law and known collaborator of an enemy of the state.”

“I detect no physical likeness to the suspect identified as anomaly 02. Do you, agent Kelly?”

“You know I hate that name. Can’t you just call me Dexter like everyone else does? Even the chief relented ages ago. Why must you insist in calling me by that hideous disgrace of an Irish surname which made my days as a gangly African-American boy growing up in Inner Compton hell itself?”

“Because it is your proper surname, agent Kelly. Now, I’d appreciate if you could give us some privacy while I exchange some words with an old acquaintance.”

“It looked from here like you were planning on exchanging far more than ‘some words’, Vic.. ah, agent Song. And like it or not, we’re partners, so we’re supposed to be covering each others’ backs. By the way Kaizer, I’m Dexter Kelly, at your service. My friends call me Dexter.”

Victoria looked over her shoulder, presumably so that she could level the full weight of her displeasure upon someone else, which suited me just fine. I quickly slid sideways and waved a hand. Now that my vision wasn’t wholly consumed by the burning depths of Victoria’s scorching gaze, I could see her partner standing about twenty feet away. I’d smelled his presence before descending from my perch but it was closely mingled with Victoria’s own scent, so I’d assumed they were closely related in some way.

“Hi, glad to make your acquaintance. You’re Vicky’s partner?”

“Indeed I am,” Dexter replied with a wide grin. “And no amount of glaring is going to change that, agent Song.”

Dexter had an infectious grin that I found very personable, myself. He was taller than me by at least half a foot, with a robust physique that boasted wide shoulders and a narrow waist, which told me he spent a lot of time hitting the weights at the gym. He was a handsome man, with fine features and exuding an air of easy charm and bristling with a friendly appeal that struck a jarring contrast to Victoria’s sedate and unapproachable aura.

A small smile wormed its way onto my lips, one that was promptly discovered by Victoria when she flicked a glance back at me. A displeased twist of her own lips told me that she knew exactly what I was thinking and that I was right. Victoria had always attracted all kinds of potential suitors, but the ones she found most annoying of all were the classic popular jock types. The more blindingly handsome their smiles, more chiseled their physiques, and glibber their tongues, the more she couldn’t wait to dump them down a fiery chute to hell. It seemed as though even Victoria Song was to be foiled from time to time.

“I have to admit, you’re not what I expected of an FBI agent,” I said with an honest smile, doing my best to ignore Vicky’s scowl.

“I get that all the time,” Dexter said, chuckling affably while scratching his head. “Don’t believe all those silly movies. We’re nothing like those serious suit types that they depict us as. Hell, we even have our very own Magic the Gathering tournament twice a year.”

“Magic the what?” I said with a blank look.

“A childish card game meant to emulate high fantasy combat using magical spells, mythical beasts, and other imaginary paraphernalia,” Victoria said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “My request that it be banned on grounds that it erodes morale and proper etiquette within organizational standards hit an unexpected hitch with the recent paranormal events surfacing across the globe.”

“Events which by all accounts and evidence, seem to include your significant other, Kaizer,” Dexter said with a suggestive lift of his eyebrows.

Victoria was even more direct, suddenly whirling on me with another frown scrunching up her pretty face. “Just what the hell did you do this time, Kai?”

“Um, nothing! Let me explain, alright? I assume he can be trusted?” I asked her, twitching my eyebrows in Dexter’s direction.

“Mostly, no. Under certain specific conditions and very rare circumstances, such as this one, however.. Yes. Barely,” Victoria amended toward the end, begrudgingly.

“Hey, I’m right here listening, remember?”

“Oh, I know, agent Kelly.”

“Damn, that could really hurt my feelings..”

“Again, I know,” was Victoria’s cold reply.

“But fortunately, I’m made of sterner stuff,” Dexter continued with a sunny grin.

“More’s the pity,” Victoria muttered under her breath. “You were saying, Kai? I’ll have you know at least you picked a decent location for the meet, but you should relocate to safer premises if you hope to evade capture by the authorities.”

“Uh, then what are we still doing here? Let’s go!” I said, gesturing for her to lead the way.

Victoria just arched an eloquent eyebrow in my direction. “First, you explain what kind of mess you’ve gotten into. Then I’ll decide whether to arrest you right here and turn you in myself, or just throw you off the roof and be done with this whole unpleasant affair.”

I chuckled awkwardly, and was startled to find my nervous attempt to lighten the mood had been matched almost exactly by Dexter’s own hollow laugh. Damn, looks like both of us knew Victoria well enough that we weren’t sure whether she was just exaggerating or she really meant what she’d said - especially the whole throwing people to their screaming deaths part.

Well, at least that meant that they’d known each other long enough that I could trust Dexter. So, I launched into a brief summary of the events that had transpired during the past couple of months. I elaborated on the tragic events that took place during the Trial of the Orb under Keeper Charon and was startled by the lack of surprise on my listeners’ faces. Apparently, they weren’t called the Federal Bureau of Investigation for nothing. Of course, I didn’t include any mention of my return as an undead creature or any of my fragmented memories. I trusted Vicky but even I wasn’t that stupid.

“Damn, so your girl was the one that cracked the FBI database and extracted the file on the Orb Collective incident up in Alaska? That’s one ballsy girl. Do you know what kind of shitstorm the higher ups raised over that leak?”

Dexter’s words trailed off under Victoria’s withering gaze. “That’s hardly the kind of behavior a special agent should be encouraging, agent Kelly. This whole confession makes her a wanted felon and a confirmed fugitive from justice.”

“C’mon, Victoria. You’ve got to admit it’s damn impressive and hell, even romantic. She even created a false trail and left us holding nothing but a bunch of dead ends. Damn, I wish I’d met her before this..”

“Well, that’s kind of the whole point. I don’t know where she is after we were separated at the end of the trial and I need to find her,” I said plaintively.

“You do realize that there’s a good chance she’s turned into a demonic necromancer of pure evil who’s been slaughtering thousands of innocents while you’ve been unconscious?” Dexter asked.

I shook my head. “No, that can’t be my Alexia.”

“Do you have any proof other than your naive and irrational emotional assertion to the contrary, Kai?” Victoria asked in a neutral tone, as though administering a shot of badly needed medication.

“No, I don’t,” I had to admit, but then quickly shook my head. “Still, I know how to prove it.”

“How exactly would you go about doing that?” Dexter interjected.

“I know my girlfriend, and she wouldn’t just run around blowing up buildings and slaughtering people for no good reason. Just the fact that you’re both willing to sit here with me and listen to my explanation tells me that you believe that as well.”

Victoria’s brow wrinkled up as she frowned at me while Dexter broke out into outright laughter.

“Damn, he may be a civilian but he nailed you right there, Vic.. err, agent Song.”

Victoria chose to ignore her partner, craning her head toward me. “Is that what you think, Kai?”

Something in the way she spoke those words along with the sudden vulnerability in her eyes made me hesitate for a moment before I could respond.

“Vicky, I know you. Even after all these years, you still pick up your phone as though you’re the secretary of your own office. You still smell of the lavender soap tinted with rose from our college years. Hell, not even your hairstyle or your favorite black color has changed at all. You’re a creature of habit, not necessarily because you like it, but because it works and you don’t see any reason to change it.”

Through this all, Dexter interchanged between gaping looks at me and incredulous stares at Victoria. Vicky, on the other hand, didn’t twitch so much as a muscle, her eyes burning holes through my face. Still, I soldiered on before I could lose my nerve.

“So I know that no matter how close we used to be back then, you wouldn’t come to meet a possible fugitive of the law just based on his own desperate appeal for help alone. You’re too smart for that. You’ve always been one of the smartest people I’ve known and there must be a lot about what’s been going on that simply doesn’t square up. I want to know what it is, because the moment I find the source of it all, that’s where I’ll find my Alexia. So, it’s a simple equation and you’ve always been good at those. I find my Allie and you get your answers, while also helping out an old friend who badly needs you.”

For a long moment, Victoria watched me without any shift in her expression. Done with my piece, I calmly waited for her verdict. It was hard to know what passed behind those fathomless depths as the wind howled in our ears and the wan moon hovered impatiently over our heads.

In the end, it was Victoria who looked away first. Had that been a hint of moisture in her eyes? No, impossible. It must have been a trick of the light. Maybe it was due to my distraction, but the first words that came out of her mouth caught me completely by surprise.

“Is that really all you think of me, Kai?”

“Huh?”

I saw her hand coming as though from a mile away, so I can’t really say that she caught me by surprise. It would have been simplicity itself to casually lean out of the way or raise a hand to block the incoming blow. Unexpectedly, however, I chose neither of the two options. Instead, I stood there staring dumbly at her expanding hand as Victoria slapped me so hard that my first concern was whether she hadn’t fractured a bone in her hand against the solid rock I have for a head.

It was only when I caught the faint trail of tears rolling down her cheeks that I realized that Vicky had just slapped the shit out of me for no discernible reason at all.

“Uh..” I thought I should say something, but I was still dazedly trying to gather my thoughts together while my brains seemed determined to scramble everything until I couldn’t tell head from tails.

“Fine, I’ll help you. But after we find your.. Girlfriend, we’re done. Don’t ever call me again.”

With those ominous words, Victoria Song turned away and vanished inside the door, leaving me staring at her back like an idiot.

Dexter’s eyes were wide with sympathy, but his words quickly made me realize the sentiment wasn’t meant for me.

“Man, you’re a fucking idiot, you know that?”

“Huh?” I said again, uncomprehending.

“Damn, you still don’t have a clue of what just happened, do you?” he said, slowly shaking his head.

“I think I just hurt her feelings without meaning to,” I murmured, putting a hand to my face. “I’ll apologize later.”

“Damn, you ARE an idiot,” Dexter said, chuckling to himself. “Hell, I almost feel sorry for Victoria.”

“What are you on about?” I protested, scowling.

“Nothing you’d understand. Come on, let’s catch up before inspiration strikes her and she decides to burn the building while we’re both in it.”

We exchanged one long look and were startled to find that neither of us found the joke particularly funny. Especially since we weren’t sure it had been a joke in the first place.