Natural Consequences (13 page)

“Sending.”

“Christ,” grumbled Colleen, “you two are like a couple kids passing notes in class. Why don’t you just speak up?”

“Gimme a second,” Hauser said.

Amber heard the toilet flush and water running from the sink in the bathroom.
Doug Bridger stepped out then, drying his hands with a paper towel. “Anything yet?”

“Joe told us to sit down and shut up,” Colleen answered.

“No, he didn’t,” Keeley corrected.

“I said gimme a second,” Hauser repeated.

“See?” Colleen gestured to Hauser. “That’s Hauser-speak for ‘sit down and shut up.’”

“Figured,” nodded
Doug. He sat down beside Amber. “Still feeling okay?”

“Shouldn’t I be?”

He shrugged a bit. “I’ve only done that a few times. Have any of your recollections changed? Any of your impressions?”

Amber considered it, then shook her head. “No. Jason seems like a decent guy. Friends seem like that, too. Lorelei… I didn’t find her threatening or frightening, but s
omething about her isn’t normal.”

“You said that Lorelei was incredibly attractive.”

Amber frowned. “I’ve never been attracted to women. I don’t think it was that. More like I knew she was attractive without actually being attracted to her, y’know? Like seeing a hot movie star on screen and knowing she’s sexy.”

“Never been able to see male movie stars that way,”
Doug shrugged.

Amber
rolled her eyes. “Of course not. You’re a guy.” She ventured the question that had been on her mind ever since she got back: “So are you a wizard or what?”

“No,” he said, shrugging again, “I’m a nerd. I went for my masters in ancient history and
got researching superstitions and mysticism. I came at it from the standpoint that maybe it wasn’t all silly nonsense, just to get some insight into the people who practiced it. Then I figured out it was for real, and that I could actually use some of it.”

“So you joined the FBI?”

“I recruited him,” Colleen said, still looking up at the ceiling. “Everybody has a story for how they got here.”

“I don’t,” muttered
Lanier.

“Okay,” Colleen conceded, “
Matt doesn’t. We just needed a computer guy, so we recruited him from the white collar crime division.”

“Time to focus, people,” Hauser spoke up. “
All these guys were good school boys right up through graduation. Drew has been arrested a couple times, probably just for being black in the wrong neighborhoods,” Hauser scowled. “Past that, they’re all perfectly clean… except every one of them has some little bad ass quality about him. Cohen’s the mildest—he’s listed on the rolls for a bunch of NRA-certified shooting courses at a local gun shop. Drew Jones has a black belt in kung fu. Wade Reinhardt graduated a semester early from high school to enlist in the Army. Looks like a nice record of service, but some of it’s classified… and for a kid with eighteen months in the airborne, that just doesn’t wash.

“And then here’s Alex Carlisle.
Last month, he and some girl escaped being kidnapped by gang bangers. Carlisle put two of them in the hospital while getting shot himself, but it was a miraculously light wound. And he’s allegedly this Lorelei woman’s boyfriend.”

Hauser looked up from his screen then, sweeping the room with his eyes to look over each of his agents. “
Reinhardt’s had his own place since he was discharged in September… but the others have all just recently moved out of their parents’ homes.

“
Mystery woman surrounds herself with a bunch of young, malleable bad-asses of limited financial means, and then all of Seattle’s vampires just up and disappear? Yeah. I’d say we’re gonna be in town for a little while.”

Amber sat in her white graduation gown, her hat still on her head, wishing she had someone to talk to or laugh with while the principal droned on. She ought to have been surrounded by friends. Everyone else was. Instead, she
sat surrounded by classmates, which was not remotely the same.

Some of the hats around her were decorated with paint and glitter and glued-on shimmering beads. The boy to her left, who had been suspended three time
s this year alone for fighting and who regularly insulted his teachers, had a makeshift lei of candy hanging around his neck, bought for him by parents who apparently felt graduating high school was some huge accomplishment. The girl on Amber’s right hadn’t looked up from her cell phone since they’d sat down. Amber remembered sharing an essay with her in freshman English, just to show her how the five-paragraph format was done, only to be confronted by their angry teacher who couldn’t help but notice that the same essay had turned up twice in his in-box, once in Amber’s name and once with the other girl’s.

The girl texted to a friend, “Sittin next 2 skankula,” and never once turned to her left to look Amber in the eye or say a thing to her.

A boy and girl seated in front of her alternately held hands and hugged and giggled through the ceremony. When names of fellow students were called, they frequently shouted out “I love you” or cheered or whistled with great affection.

One of them had asked Amber in class, point blank and in front of everyone as if it wasn’t an insult, if she was a dyke and that was why she
never had a boyfriend. The other had literally pushed Amber down a flight of stairs between classes and only barely acted like it was an accident.

None of the obvious explanations for the
petty, pointless cruelty of children applied. Amber was not at all ugly, or overweight, or queer or disabled. She did not have low social skills. She didn’t smell bad or dress funny. Nothing aside from academic achievement set her apart from her peers, and surely others who’d achieved more suffered less derision. Sometimes students would treat her decently, or at least with indifference, but it seemed only because they sometimes forgot to be mean. Teenagers couldn’t be asked to be consistent. Amber never knew why her classmates shut her out.

The cheers continued. Amber’s row was called. They walked to the front of the field as they had during rehearsal, many of them waving and receiving call-outs from the stands. Amber looked up to the
bleachers, wondering if Dad had his camera ready. The only reason she had to go through with this whole ceremony was to get pictures for her grandmother. Otherwise, she’d have skipped it, just like she skipped the end-of-the-year carnival for four years running, and the homecoming game, and the prom. It wasn’t like she’d ever been asked to any dances, except once on account of a dare.

The boy with the candy lei got a huge pop of cheers and applause from both the stands and the assembled graduates when his name was called. Amber waited, and heard her name, and
then heard nothing. Her father was doubtlessly too focused on getting the picture to shout out anything.

Running Start
had cut her time in that hellhole in half for her last two years. She traded three hours of her day with snotty teenagers to instead be with older students—adults—who had more important things to do than socialize with a teen. She made no real connections, but never regretted the choice. At least nobody at the community college used her as the butt of a joke.

Amber accepted her diploma without a smile, and wondered—not for the last time—what it was like to have friends.

“Joe, there’s something else I’ve been meaning to say. I haven’t been sure how to bring it up, but I figure I’d better just come out with it.”

Hauser didn’t look away from the road. He merely continued up 45
th
, trapped between an overly-optimistic bicyclist and a bus as they crawled up the short hill. “So come out with it,” he grunted.

It was more or less the response she’d expected. Amber
felt less like an FBI agent and more like the daughter of an irritable father. It was a ridiculous comparison, of course; Hauser hardly resembled either of her parents with his strict, almost military demeanor. He was demanding and firm like they were, but the flavor was all different.

She had to suck it up. This wasn’t about daddy issues; this was about her job.

“I think Jason—Cohen—is attracted to me.”

Again, Hauser grunted. “Figured he would be. You’re a girl and you’re into all
the same nerd stuff. He probably doesn’t find much of that.”

Muscles in her jaw clenched up. Her hand balled into a fist. Something in her stomach rolled around, wanting to get out, and it wasn’t her breakfast. She stomped on her instinct to retaliate.
He’s a goon
, she thought.
He doesn’t even realize how many ways he just insulted me. Don’t let this turn into a thing.

“I’m pretty sure I can keep it to ‘just friends’ and he’ll still want to hang out with me,” she continued, “
so I don’t think it’ll blow the connection—“

“But you probably won’t get as much info that way, and not as quickly,” Hauser finished for her.

“Yeah,” she muttered.

“Agent Maddox, we’ve already gone to a lot of trouble and expense to establish this cover. You didn’t see this as a potential problem in the beginning?”

“Before I made contact, we thought he was seeing those girls in all his pictures on Face—“

“But he’s not anymore. He’s a nineteen-year-old guy. What do you think he’s interested in more than anything else? It damn sure doesn’t seem to me like
it’s football. Like I said before, we don’t have much of a rulebook for this task force. We need every edge we can get. Do you think you can do this job?”

Amber tried not to seethe.
Bad enough that he wouldn’t give her a straight answer, but being interrupted just made her angrier. “That’s not what I’m saying, I just wanted to know what I’m supposed to do if—“

“You don’t commit any felonies. You don’t commit any other crimes that aren’t necessary to maintain your cover.
Past that, the only question is how much you can handle.” He turned into the north entrance to the university campus, steering for the first available parking lot. “This is an inherently dangerous assignment, Agent Maddox. We’re all exposing ourselves to worse things than bullets here, and you most of all. Every one of us knows that. But we’re here and we’re on the job, and we’re all gonna have to take some risks and make some sacrifices.

“This is the real deal, Amber. This is what we do. The question is whether or not you’re up for that?”

He pulled around a section of parked cars, making no effort to find a space for himself. This was only a drop-off. Amber would have to walk the rest of the way across campus in the rain.

It was only then that he looked at her. “You
made contact ahead of anyone’s expectations. You’ve already dug up matters worth investigation, and you held your cover together even after that woman monkeyed with your brain. That’s all outstanding work. But we’re gonna need more and we’re gonna need it soon. Are you ready to do what it takes?”

Once again, Amber instinctively bit down on her first reply. She didn’t know which made her angrier: that Hauser clearly considered a fake romantic entanglement to be well within the bounds of reasonable expectations—regardless of how Amber felt about being the one involved—or that Hauser pointedly didn’t give explicit instructions one way or the other.
Or his passive-aggressive way of daring her to accept whatever came her way.

She could ask him point blank, she knew, but she had no reason to expect anything more than another non-answer. “I’ll handle it,” she said, hoisting her backpack as she stepped out of the car. “Don’t worry about me.”

“Page us with updates when you can,” Hauser reminded as he drove away.

“It’s called ‘texting,’ asshole,” muttered Amber.

The walk to the lecture hall didn’t do much to lift her spirits. She trudged through the constant drizzle, thinking back to earlier years on this same campus, in this same weather, and wondered if it was just her lot in life to be here. That she would always love her alma mater was never in doubt, but there were reasons why she left her hometown. LA wasn’t like this; when it rained, it rained, and then the sun came out again. Morning clouds usually all burned away by the afternoon. Hell, it was still warm down there, too.

P
eople didn’t patronize her in LA, either. She encountered the random tactless supervisor or co-worker, but it hadn’t taken long to establish herself in the lab. Her first year as an actual agent went well. She’d taken her lumps. Paid her dues. Didn’t need anyone telling her what was the ‘real deal’ as if she thought someone had given her a cover identity and an apartment to just fuck around with.

She glanced toward Bagley Hall and remembered her father asking her if she had reconsidered pushing on
with graduate studies and becoming a
real
scientist. Because, again, nothing she had done up until then was anything but fucking around, right? All her double major did was qualify her for the next step up.

The way Dad’s eyes spun when she told him she’d been hired on by the Bureau’s research lab…

A growl rumbled somewhere in her throat. Okay. Fine. Maybe daddy issues couldn’t be completely written off. Whatthefuckever.

She loved
the university. This place opened up the world for her. It ushered her into adulthood. Opportunities. Freedom. Her first decent friendships since middle school. None of that meant she wanted to come back, let alone so soon. And certainly not to take Composition for Topics in Social Science.

Amber
drug herself out of her grumbling thoughts as she arrived at her class. Thankfully, Jason caught her eye and waved. He sat in the back here just like he had in the lecture hall. That was good. There was also an empty seat beside him, which was excellent. Amber went through the same introduction with this professor—scratch that, with this grad student instructor—as she had with the TA the day before. Again, she found few objections.

Get your head in the game, girl. He’s right there
.

At least he’s a nice enough guy so far
.

Finished with her introductions, Amber shuffled to the back of the classroom, dumped her bag and slumped into her seat. She glanced up at Jason and muttered, “Hi,” before she turned around again to dig out her notebook and a pen.

“You look like you just got out of a shitty conversation,” he observed. Amber looked up, finding nothing but a sympathetic smile in his eyes.

“What? No,” she chuckled. He kept his gaze on her, waiting for her to say more. “No, I just—it’s nothing, I mean—what?”

“Nothing,” Jason shrugged. “I’m listening. I don’t want to interrupt.”

Amber blinked.
He’d meant that. It wasn’t a cheap line or a ploy. He meant it. He was a genuinely nice guy. Lorelei’s words echoed in her head:
He listened to me
.

“Is it obvious?”
Amber asked.

“Shot in the dark. I don’t know you well enough to guess what might be bugging you, but I figure most people have parents.”

She held back her grin long enough to look away. He was still looking at her.

Unbidden and unasked for its opinion, a tiny voice within her admitted that she liked it.

“I had a nice time last night,” she said.

His reaction wasn’t what she expected.
He seemed chagrined, embarrassed, pleased and amused at himself all at once. “Yeah, that didn’t quite go how I hoped,” Jason muttered.

“It was fine.” They heard a noise at the front of the classroom as their instructor got set up and ready to go. Amber considered, with a sinking feeling, that this assignment could go on for a
while. She might well need to maintain her cover faithfully for the foreseeable future. That meant actually following the course material and doing the assignments.
Like writing research papers and essays. Great.

“What other classes do you have today?” she asked.

“Just one, right after this.”

“Welcome back, people,” said the instructor, who then began to drone on about something or other.

“You wanna hang out later?” Amber hissed.

“Well, I don’t wan
t to seem all clingy or needy, but hell yeah.”

She grinned, nodded back in confirmation, and then turned her attention to the instructor and his PowerPoint slides.
Waking up had been rough, as had her commute. Thus far, Jason’s eagerness to spend more time with her was her sole accomplishment for the morning. Now Amber needed a way to keep herself awake through Mr. Grad Student and his lecture.

Three minutes in, a tiny slip of paper appeared on her desk. She glanced over to Jason, who completed his stretch as if nothing untoward had prompted it. She turned over the note. It read, “Such a bullshit subject. I’m going back to real sciences next quarter. Quarks or GTFO.”

Her heart jumped. She pushed it back down. Just because he said and did all the right things didn’t make him any older or any less of a person of interest in a Federal investigation.