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What the hell had he bought Tohr when he’d been here?
The food tasted really pretty good, and the Coke did juice him up, and as he sat by his little lonesome, he watched the folks come and go: An old man in a black suit with his white hair precisely tended to and his eyes bright in spite of his age. A woman with a long black braid down her back and a body that suggested she could meet a full-grown male more than halfway in a ground-game fight.
An English-looking gentleman in tweed and a cravat on the heavy arm of a Bounty-worthy lumberjack.
A pair of guys, one with dark hair and a Goth vibe, the other a redhead who was dressed like James Spader ca. Pretty in Pink.
“Where’s the dually baby carriage,” he said under his breath. “You’re slacking.”
As a couple consisting of a dark-haired man in a very nice jacket and tie and a blond woman who was dressed like she was going to the opera waltzed in, he tossed his napkin and crossed his arms over his chest. Given that the Creator was capable of great and grandiose things, why in the hell was He wasting His time corralling all these doppelgangers to a Mickey D’s at the side of the Northway in upstate New York on a random…
What day of the week was it?
He couldn’t immediately remember, and as part of his brain churned over the calendar, he shook his head at the vastness of hours ahead of and behind him—and then extrapolated the same for the eight billion people on the earth. So many lives being lived minute-by-minute, all of the cycles of birth and death churning in a constant consumption and release of energy on a rock ball hurtling through space. Reduced to its granular details, existence really was just a bunch of biology in a fruit salad of physics calculations, wasn’t it?
Utterly pointless in the grand scheme of things.
Except then there was love. Love was life to the dead, and make no mistake about it, a person could be a corpse even if they had a heartbeat.
Even if they were immortal.
When a fine-fellow-well-met with a Mohawk and an amethyst silk suit pimped into McDagger-con, Lassiter pulled a fuck-it and got to his feet. And the reason for the leavin’ was as ridiculous as this display of almost-theres.
Then again, he should be glad a nearly-Rahvyn wasn’t opening any doors and ordering a McFlurry.
He was liable to break in half—
“It was a Big Mac. Just what you’re eating the now.”
Lassiter froze in a crouch of bench evacuation. That voice. That… unforgettable voice.
Closing his eyes, he breathed in and smelled meadow flowers. And as he braced himself to look over, he couldn’t decide whether the Creator was merely being cruel or if destiny’s ultimate navigator was just going to make it fucking impossible for him to go black-hole on the job he’d taken from the Scribe Virgin.
“How do you know what I ordered him,” he asked roughly.
“Perhaps I should not have come,” she whispered in response.
Feeling like he was moving through quicksand, Lassiter twisted around—and lost the ability to speak. The female who was never far from his mind was really in front of him, no doppelganger this. No almost-there. No nearly-her.
As their eyes met over the single hamburger and empty cup on her tray, their connection snapped into place, no gaps in any seams, no rough edges, no bad angles.
Even though he knew they could never truly be together.
And God, if she’d been exquisite in his memory, she was heart-stopping in her actuality, her silver eyes wide as she stared up at him, her delicate face glowing, her platinum hair down over her shoulders in a waterfall of waves.
She made the world go away for him, and he was struck by an urge to speak his truth.
“Would you like fries with that,” he blurted as he stared down at his one and only love.
* * *
Wake up.
Lash’s eyes flipped open, and he threw a hand out—not toward the female who was sleeping next to him, but down the side of the bed, to the seam between the mattress and the box spring. For his gun. A knife. A baseball bat.
It was a reflexive move, the kind of thing he had done countless times. Back when he’d… been alive.
Retracting his arm, he scanned the open area. Nothing was out of place in and among the racks of couture… and there were no intruders popping from behind the privacy screen in the bathroom area or the white leather sofa in the center of the space… also no sounds or scents from out in the hall beyond.
Then again, the voice had sounded like his own.
He rotated his head on the satin pillow. The female next to him was in a deep sleep, one breast exposed by the ripple of sheets, her naturally red lips parted, her brunette hair glowing with copper highlights across her own pillow. She was a fucking smokeshow, a total dime. But all you needed were hair extensions and a good plastic surgeon and you could replicate her looks.
