AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Down at her waist, her hand snuck into her front pocket. The switchblade she carried with her came to her palm like it was answering a call, and her thumb searched for the knife’s release. Except she wasn’t going to do anything to him.
She wasn’t… going… to…
A strange pall came over her, her mind going numb to the point where her thoughts disintegrated as soon as she had them, threads of consciousness fraying until she couldn’t remember why she was here in the sea of humans, or what she was doing—
No, sheknewwhat she was doing. She was going to take out that human in black.
“I’m protecting the patrons,” she said. “I’m supposed to protect them…”
Zeroing in on the hallway to the bathrooms, she made the turn and—
There he was. Her target. The man with the brush cut, and the stubble, and the eyes that moved over the stupid innocents getting drunk and high like he was at a buffet.
Except she stopped short as she recognized the big human standing with him.
T’Marcus.
And then they both looked over at her with expectation. Like they wanted her to say something. Do something—just not with a switchblade.
“Hey, boss,” the man in black said. “How’m I doing?”
Xhex glanced over her shoulder and got braced to see someone else standing behind her, someone who had hired the—
Abruptly, her mind sputtered and coughed, hermemory engine coming back online. Turning to the men once again, she felt a stone-cold chill go through her—
The new hire. Bobby, the new hire.
She’d interviewed him two weeks ago. He and T’Marcus had served together in the Corps.
Bobby glanced at his friend like he was worried he’d done something wrong. “Ah… did I do something wrong?”
Xhex told her hand to release the switchblade and remove itself from her pocket. And in a feat of parallel processing, she also managed to reply to the question with some kind of word salad. She must have gotten the syllables right, too, because the guy smiled, and T’Marcus nodded with satisfaction.
“I’m taking a break for ten.” She made a show of checking her watch. “You’re in charge, T.”
The guy touched his right brow in a shadow of the salutes he’d no doubt given all his years in the military. “You got it, boss.”
Nodding like she had a clue what she was doing, she headed for her office and was glad it wasn’t far. Stepping into the concrete cell, she couldn’t wait to shut the door—and God, you’d have sworn the little box with its old-fashioned, elementary-school-marm desk and the black rolling chair she’d gotten from Home Depot was a deluxe spa. Not that the bass line of the music was dimmed much—that shit was running all the waydown to the foundation and all the way up into the rafters of the low ceiling.
But she was by herself. So that cut the volume on all kinds of things.
Sitting in her chair, she stared at the lock screen of her laptop. Lasers of pink and yellow, blue and lime green shot through a black background, and as she traced them with her eyes, she wondered what the cutoff was for seizure triggers. If the linear extensions were faster? Brighter?
Probably both.
And why in the hell was she thinking about that kind of thing anyway—
Well, considering she had been talking to herself, and playing spot-the-serial-killer with an honorable discharge who’d filled out a job application she herself had reviewed? Why not wonder about neurological hiccups.
Closing her eyes, she let her head fall back and thought of Blade. No wonder she was homicidal. Seeing him had scrambled her, and just because she was a little confused, and had just jumped to a minor conclusion—
“My grid is fine—”
A sudden burst of shouting percolated through the dull thump of the music, and as the discord registered, she groaned. It was the kind of thing that a human in her office, behind her desk, in her chair,wouldn’t have heard. But thanks to her keen ears, the Houston-we-have-a-problem was as obvious as a holler.
Whatever. T’Marcus and the new guy were going to have to deal with it.
It was why she’d hired them. Both.
