Changeling (7 page)

“Have fun with the tour,” Gage finally said. He continued past, to the opposite hall, toward the War Room.

“How many others live here with you?” Noah asked.

“Five, so there’s six of us total,” I said. His jaw twitched, eyes darted in the direction Gage had just gone. “We’re all like a family.”

“I’d imagine so.”

“Why’s that?”

He froze, as if unsure of his next move—admit what he suspected, or play dumb. “Just that, you know, after everything you guys went through earlier this year . . .”

“Right.” My smile seemed to quell his nerves a bit.

“So are you going to show me?” he asked.

I blinked. “Show you?”

“The rest of the rooms that need fixtures.”

Duh. “Of course, come with me.”

Beneath the main staircase, we followed the right hall past the infirmary and a small alcove, through another door to the dining room. We had two folding tables and chairs set up, with plans to get something nicer and more permanent when construction was finished. The room was painted, the laminate floor laid down. All it needed was curtains and a chandelier of some sort. Exposed wiring hung from a gaping hole in the middle of the room.

“You know what you need here?” he said. “Two smaller fixtures instead of one big one. It’ll disperse the light more, make it look brighter and bigger. We have some classy ones in the shop. I think they’ll look nice in here.”

“Okay.”

He put down the toolbox and retrieved a notepad from his back pocket, jotted something down, then looked back up. “Next?”

The kitchen was a spacious area with two islands, a gigantic walk-in refrigerator, and two huge cupboards. We could store two years’ worth of food in there, easy. I imagined the previous owners liked to throw lavish parties with tons of food. He suggested only a few minor tweaks, and we moved
on. Two small storage rooms were empty, so we left them alone for now, and continued.

Our path cut back around toward the lobby, down the left passage and past the War Room and archives. I steered him along with no real explanation, and he didn’t ask.

“Are we just looking at the first floor today?” he asked. He sounded so professional I kept forgetting he was my age. Part of me wanted to ask why he was running the shop alone. The tactful part of my brain knew it was none of my business.

“No, we can go up. We haven’t really started working on the third floor or the attic yet, so we don’t have to check them out today.”

First upstairs stop was the lounge, site of that morning’s fire hazard. Noah inspected the hole and surrounding wiring.

“It won’t all have to be replaced,” he said. “Just a few of the wires, where they got singed. This one will need at least two ceiling fixtures, maybe a floor lamp or two for ambient lighting, in case you just want to curl up with a book and read.”

“I used to love that,” I said.

“Used to?”

I thought of my favorite chair, residing in my current bedroom. I’d pull it close to the dirty window in my dingy old apartment, curl up with a blanket and mug of tea, and read anything I could get my hands on. I wanted a library here one day, rife with the scents of wood, polish, old leather, and dusty paper.

Fingers snapped in front of my eyes. “Where’d you go?” he asked.

“Just thinking.”

“From the way you were smiling, it must have been a good thought.”

I looked away, embarrassed, but controlling the heat I allowed to escape to my face.

“Hey, you two!” Renee’s voice blasted through the room moments before she bounced in. And bounced was quite literal. She was so proud of her boob job, and her low tank top showed every curve and jiggle.

“Just wanted to catch you,” she said. “The light switch in my room doesn’t work. I mean, I have a lamp and that’s fine, but just so you know, it’s either the switch or outlet.”

“Thank you,” Noah said. He stared right at her. I couldn’t tell if it was her skin, her breasts, or both. If he had any doubts that we were the old Rangers, they should have been thoroughly squashed by her blue bustline. “I’ll be sure to check it out when we get there, Miss . . . ?”

“Renee.”

“Noah.”

“Very nice to meet you,” she purred. To me, she added, “Boy, Dal, when you pick them, you know how to pick them. The last electrician I met couldn’t keep his jeans up past his butt crack.”

He laughed, a pleasant sound that rumbled deeply in his chest. “I assure you, Renee, I don’t have that problem.”

I couldn’t imagine he did. As nice as he looked in his clothes, though, they didn’t seem quite right. He was at work, same as me, therefore in uniform—one he didn’t seem completely at ease in, despite his professional attitude. Did he wear a costume, as well? Was the real him somewhere underneath
that embroidered polo, waiting to be off the clock and free?

“Well, don’t let our Dahlia bore you too much, Noah.”

The barbed statement stung, even if Renee meant it as a joke. She flounced—bounced?—out of the room, long blond hair streaming behind her. She was a force, a presence in my life as strong as a thunderhead and as pleasant as a sleet storm. I drifted toward one of the large picture windows and gazed out onto the front lawn. It was badly in need of a mow and some grass vitamins—or whatever you give grass to make it green and thick.

“Does she always get to you like that?” Noah asked, so close that I jumped. His hand brushed my elbow.

“I am boring.” My breath created little clouds of vapor on the glass.

“You’re a superhero, Dahlia. How could that be boring?”

“I haven’t done anything heroic in my life.” The day I “came out” as a Meta, all I did was hide and cower while an explosion burned a news station to the ground. I let Teresa and Gage save me. I did nothing while their friend William Hill died—a death I could have prevented if I’d come out of my shock and tried to stop the inferno that had trapped him. How could I expect Renee to forgive me when I hadn’t forgiven myself for my part in William’s awful death?

Noah spun me around, gentle but firm, and searched my face. “I don’t think that’s true.”

“You don’t know me.”
Way to be defensive, Dal, great job.

“I’d like to.” Something unspoken lingered in his gaze,
strong enough to make me uncomfortable. I stepped around him and retreated a few steps.

“We should finish the inspection,” I said.

His eyes flashed, something hard, tired. “Yeah, sorry.”

On that note, we continued.

Noah took copious
notes on the rooms as we came and went. Our circuit took us the long way back around toward the staircase. The shared bathrooms were there, a feature left over from the days of taking in borders. It certainly showed the age of the mansion. He inspected another empty bedroom, and then turned toward a door in the corner of the hall, diagonal from the bathrooms.

“We missed one,” he said.

Quite on purpose. I had avoided taking him into my bedroom, fear pushing me into every other room on the floor first. It wasn’t until we were there that I realized my mistake. How would he interpret my actions in leaving my room for last? As if I expected to spend an inordinate amount of time there, alone with him.

Hell, Dahlia, he’s not going to try anything in a house full of people with enough power to pound him into a bloody pulp if he lays a hand on you.

I drummed up enough courage to turn the knob and push open the door. I said nothing as I stepped inside, followed closely by Noah. The door remained open, and he made no move to close it. My nervousness level dropped a few notches.

He wandered to the center of the room, eyes roving over every detail. “It isn’t very personal.”

“I don’t have a lot of stuff.” I pointed to the three cardboard boxes taking up space by the closet. “My life is in there. Mom and I didn’t have a lot of money. Old habits, I guess.”

Okay, so that was only partly true. My earliest years had been spent in a nice bungalow in Malibu, mortgage and rent free, and within walking distance of everything. I don’t recall it, because the entire neighborhood was destroyed in a mudslide when I was four years old. We lost the house, all of our possessions, including baby pictures and anything Mom once owned of sentimental value. I vaguely recall her crying herself to sleep in a cheap hotel room night after night, worrying about money and keeping us fed.

We survived, though. Come hell or high water, Mom made a good life for us. Staring at those cartons in the corner of my current bedroom made me miss her again. Miss her terribly. To cover, I indicated my monstrosity of a rocking chair. “I was thinking of a reading lamp to go with that. What do you think?”

He stroked the smooth, aged wicker of the chair’s back. “I like it. You need soft lighting, Dahlia. Frosted bulbs and ambience, not glaring overhead fluorescents. They don’t suit you.”

“How do you know what suits me?” I asked, more defensive than intended, but it rolled off him.

“Intuition. You learn how to read people in my line of work. After a while, it stops being about their choice of overhead or wall fixture, and it becomes about them. Expectations and needs. They desire something and I provide it.”

“Makes you sound like a pimp.”

“A pimp’s just another kind of salesman. Only what I sell isn’t illegal in thirty-seven states.” He chewed on the corner of his lip. “You know, of all the people I knew from school before I got sick, I remember you the most.”

My pulse rate increased. “Really?”
Wait, got sick?

“You took the accelerated classes, and you always sat on the west side of the cafeteria during lunch, closest to the exit. You always had a book in your hands, even if you weren’t reading it. You seemed to know what the hell Mrs. Sharpe was talking about in chemistry when I didn’t have a clue. People liked you, but you didn’t care about being popular.”

He remembered more about me as a teenager than I did about myself.

“When you moved over the summer, I was mad I never got up the courage to ask you out,” he said.

My lips parted, but no words came out. “Um, wow, thanks.”

He smiled warmly. “I want to make up for that and take you out to dinner tonight.”

Hello, conversation curveball.
Dinner? He was asking me out now? Eight years later? I gaped at him a moment before opening my mouth to reply. A bell tone came out.

Out of the hall. Once, twice, it sounded. Then static came from the intercom box mounted in the high corner of the room, installed for specific moments of crisis.

“War Room, everyone,” Teresa’s voice crackled over the box. “We’ve got a chemical fire downtown. Police are requesting our assistance containing it.”

Moment of crisis, check.

I exhaled hard. “Maybe I can get a rain check on dinner? This could take us a while to sort out.”

“Breakfast?” he asked, grinning since I hadn’t shot him down. “I know a great little diner, Mallory’s Table, out in Studio City. Good eggs, great coffee.”

“It’s a date.”

We headed downstairs, and I escorted Noah to the door. He glanced back once, as he climbed into the truck cab, and smiled. I waited for him to drive away, then turned and headed to the War Room and the job that awaited me.

Six

Crystal Street

W
hy is it always a fire?” I asked, watching smoke curl up into the blue sky, streaks of dirty gray against an otherwise cloudless atmosphere. Still two blocks away, and I could already smell it, hot and toxic and bitter.

In the seat next to me, Tempest shrugged. “Because flash floods are less common in the middle of big cities?”

“Smart-ass.”

“He’s not completely wrong,” Flex said from her seat in the very back with Onyx.

It was our first team outing in weeks, and everyone was suited up for it. Flex had poured herself into her fake-snakeskin stretch suit that moved with her ability to contort her body to serious extremes. Marco “Onyx” Mendoza’s uniform, manufactured by Rita McNally as a gift, was a new synthetic blend that worked with his shape-shifter abilities. Instead of ending up stark naked after a transformation, he would return to human form still fully clothed. It fit him like a second skin, showing every ripple of muscle and potential
bulge. He worked hard to maintain his physical perfection, almost to an obsessive level.

Everyone had hobbies.

No matter what we found at Crystal Street, I knew the majority of the work would ultimately fall to me. I could absorb massive amounts of heat, and a chemical fire would produce it in spades. Probably more than I could safely handle, and Trance had been very clear about that—only take what my body could absorb. Don’t overdo it, don’t hurt myself.

It was amusing advice coming from a woman who returned from almost every job with at least one wound. She wore her scars with pride, though, and never complained. Unless one of us got hurt; then we never heard the end of it. Endless lectures about taking care, using caution, et cetera.

“Don’t go begging for a natural disaster,” Trance said. “We live in a seismically unstable city, and you’re tempting an eight-point earthquake. We’re due, you know. That little shaker we had two days ago was nothing.”

We knew. Thirty years had passed since the last earthquake over six points on the Richter scale. Mother Nature was either moving house, or saving up for a big show in the near future.

Around the next corner, the disaster site came into clear view. This part of town housed dozens of warehouses, storage centers, and abandoned buildings and created perfect squatter housing. Just off I-5, the Crystal Street strip lined the southern side of the Arroyo Seco section of the Los Angeles River, providing a natural barrier against spreading fire. The
Southern Pacific Railroad cut a black line on the opposite riverbank.

We only had to keep the blaze from moving forward and sideways. A single warehouse about the size of a football field burned and smoked, flames leaping toward the sky. A brick building—a deserted factory, maybe—stood at the north, and a second warehouse of equal size bordered it on the south.

Police cars and a dozen uniforms kept the gaping crowd a safe distance from the blaze. Trance honked. They cleared a path. Heat struck me in the face the moment I opened the door and climbed out. Sharp odors of smoke and sulfur and gas curled the inside of my nose. My eyes tingled and teared up.