21 Shades of Night, page 93
“No weapons!” I was shouting I realized, scared out of my wits.
All the while, my mind churned useless facts. People got shot doing stupid shit like this. More cops got shot in domestic disputes than during any other kind of call, which likely explained why the young cop’s hands shook as he cuffed me.
My eyes swept the oddly bright space until they lit on the person who had inspired all this drama, and that flame of irrational feeling ripped once more through my chest cavity, making it difficult to breathe, to think straight.
Jaden, my now ex-boyfriend, stood like a store mannequin, his eyes as wide as saucers in a pale face. He gripped the upper arm of his date, a voluptuous girl in a red vinyl dress, as if to steady himself. I looked at her, and the rage came back, intense enough to scare me. Breathing harder, I leaned against the wood, closing my eyes, trying to crush my own chest.
Feeling ripped through my center, animal-like—almost painful.
In my defense, I’d only heard about them that night, and the fact that their affair started three months earlier, while I’d been blissfully happy, thinking Jaden and I were mutually in love. According to his bass player, she’d started hanging out with them after shows, eventually winning him over with flattery, pouty lips and enormous tits.
She was babbling something to him and her friends now, half-hysterical, her arm bleeding profusely from where I’d slashed at her with the bottle, her red-painted lips another dark wound on her face.
I stared at them both, thinking, this can’t be real. It can’t be. This isn’t me.
But it was.
Chapter 1
SEERS
SO YEAH, I got arrested that September, and it pretty much changed everything.
Forever and ever... in my life, at least.
Why did it change everything, you might be wondering?
Well, not for the reasons you’re probably thinking.
Okay, yeah, it was really humiliating. I got thrown in jail for two nights. The cops treated me like some kind of PCP-smoking weirdo and wouldn’t let me call my mom for twenty-four hours. My mom flipped out. My brother Jon really flipped out. My friends all flipped out. I got a psych eval, as mandated by the state of California for all new violent offenders with no previous criminal records. I got a blood test... again. I had to pee in a jar.
Then, after all of that, I had to do community service. I couldn’t leave town. Worse, I had to check in with the authorities, and yes, wear a shiny new GPS bracelet that was even more awkward to explain when I finally got back to my job at Lucky Cat diner.
Who thankfully, by some miracle, hadn’t fired me.
None of that was the real issue, either, though.
The real problem, as they explained to me much, much later in time, was that I made myself visible. That little freak-out of mine with Jaden and the broken bottle and the bimbo band groupie was like sending up a great, big, noisy flare, one that got all the wrong people looking in my direction.
Why is that, you might be wondering?
Well, it’s simple. See, what I did was only crazy if you’re human.
If you’re not human, I was later to discover, it’s pretty much run-of-the-mill normal.
* * *
RIDING DOWN DIVISADERO Street towards my mom’s, I leaned against the cab’s window as it paused at a red light.
I’d been spacing out, not really paying attention to anything outside, when I realized that I was staring at someone.
She stared back at me, her sharp blue eyes eyes openly hostile. Framed with stiff dyed braids that came off her head like a white and orange headdress, her heart-shaped face had an almost unreal beauty to it, even beyond the heavy layer of foundation and eye make-up she wore. I read the name of the fetish bar on the marquee behind her, and realized abruptly what she must be. I’d heard about the place opening up, but hadn’t been by to see it like everyone else.
It just felt weird to me, I guess.
Gawking at seers, I mean... like they were animals.
The woman’s opaque blue eyes drank me in without apology or fear. Her hands rested on her hips over a white, lace bodysuit.
I receded into the cab’s seat so I would be less visible.
I caught the cabbie watching me in the rearview mirror and blushed.
“Yeah,” he commented flatly. “They got a few of them now.”
“I know,” I said. “I just... forgot.”
He didn’t seem to hear me, or care maybe.
“They just keep bringing more of them over here,” he complained. “Like we need our own damned glow-eye army. Fucking animals. I don’t trust ‘em... collared or not.” He glanced at me in the mirror. Looking over my tangled hair and hastily applied makeup, he smiled.
Maybe he thought the dishevelment was deliberate. I wondered if he’d think I was so sexy if he saw the GPS anklet I wore under my jeans, thanks to the nice people at the California Board of Corrections. I suspected probably not.
“You seen one before, honey?” he said.
“Yeah.” I glanced out surreptitiously, but the seer was no longer looking at me. Smiling seductively at a man on the street, she touched his arm as he passed. The man jerked away as if burnt, glaring at her.
The seer laughed, but I saw those blue eyes turn cold, predatory.
“Really?” the cabbie said. “Where?”
“At Oakland Coliseum. With my dad.” I couldn’t take my eyes off the seer. I found them fascinating, I couldn’t help it. “And on the street too. Downtown... you know. The ones that work for corporations and rich guys or whatever.”
The man nodded, absently. He’d already lost interest.
I ventured, “They’re allowed to just walk around like that? With no owner? What if she, you know... hurts someone?”
The cabbie pointed, tapping his window. “See that collar?”
I followed his pointing finger to the circle of brushed metal around the female’s neck. Finger-width, it had no markings I could see, other than the pulsing blue light at the base when she turned her head.
Feeling the cabbie watching me, I nodded.
He said, “They’re coded to the owner, see? They can’t do nothing with that on... blinds ‘em. They take it off when they’re, ah... you know, working.”
I nodded again.
I knew about the collars, of course.
I hadn't actually meant that, when I'd been asking about her being outside... I'd more been wondering why she was on the street without her owner in visual range. I’d always wondered why more seers didn’t simply run away, find some way to saw the collar off.
Then again, where would they go? If they tried to leave the country, SCARB or one of the local law enforcement agencies would track them down, drag them back to whoever had papers on them.
Even so, most seers I'd seen on the street had some kind of human chaperone with them; I'd assumed it was for a reason.
Not like I enjoyed seeing the whole seer-human dynamic in the first place. But seers were getting to be so common in the city, I guessed I needed to get used to it.
Lately, anyone with money seemed to have one.
They were the new high-status pet, I guess.
Sex and fetish shops specializing in seers had popped up all over town. If the laws changed or SCARB was loosening its controls, no one bothered to say so on the feeds. I did wonder that some of them wouldn’t be smart enough to figure out how to get the collars off.
Without their human owners, that is.
I almost understood the driver not being thrilled with the sudden influx of seers all over the city. Heck, maybe my brother Jon’s conspiracy stuff was true, about how the government was in secret collaboration with seers to mind-warp the rest of us. Jon was convinced we all might wake up one day inside a dream created by a bunch of seers to keep us all docile.
Looking at that female seer, though, I had trouble seeing her as colluding with anyone, much less a bunch of guys in suits.
No, she looked like she’d rather just shoot me in the head.
* * *
THE CABBIE DROPPED me off on Fell Street. He pulled up in front of the familiar, purple Victorian, and I transferred money to his cab number from my headset as I was sliding off the back seat. Trying to hurry, I slammed the door and promptly tripped over a dented juice bottle. Bending down to pick it up, I tossed the bottle in my mother’s neighbor’s yellow recycling carton, then noticed that the neighbor’s bin was empty, along with my mother’s section of curb.
Great. Another week of week-old garbage.
Digging my keys from my red vinyl jacket, I righted them to insert in the dead bolt lock... but the door was already open. A prickle of nerves ran up my spine. Had she been out today already? Or had the front door really been open all night?
I so wasn’t in the mood to deal with another of my mother’s benders.
Walking inside, I heard the television and sighed in relief.
I shut the door behind me loudly.
“Mom?” I headed for the sound of the t.v., dragging with me the bag of donuts and coffee I’d grabbed from the street vendor in front of the courthouse. Passing the dining room, I saw that she’d closed the drapes, which was strange, too.
My mother liked to watch the birds, even in the fog.
“Mom, you forgot the garbage again,” I said. Pausing, I raised my voice. “Tuesday, Mom. Remember? Every Tuesday. It never changes.”
No answer.
A prickle of misgiving touched my spine.
It already wanted to turn into annoyance, but I knew that annoyance was at least partly fear. Jesus, please tell me she’s not drunk. Please tell me she didn’t leave the television on when she left the front door unlocked, that she’s not in some bar right now, doing shots.
“Hey, Mom... I don't have a lot of time. I promised I'd come by, so I'm here... but I can't stay. I just wanted to make sure you were up. Aunt Carol's coming over. Remember...?”
When she didn't answer again, I felt that misgiving worsen. Moving faster down the hall, I stepped out into the living room, stopping when my eyes met a shock of skin sprawled on the paisley print couch.
“...Oh,” I said.
Sighing, half in relief and half in irritation, I crossed the remainder of the room, kicking aside an empty bottle that at least partly accounted for the smell from the faux-Indian carpet. Sitting on the squishy couch I’d loved as a kid, I sank so low I nearly got dumped on the floor.
I set down the coffee cup I had surfed to safety, and dropped the crumpled bag of donuts to the carpet. Sighing again, I leaned over to tap my mother’s bare back. The skin there was smooth and somehow younger than the rest of her, marked with tan lines from working in her garden.
“Mom? What are you doing?” I looked at the clock in exasperation. "I have to go."
I looked around at the open photo album, the crushed cigarette butts that she’d sworn up and down just two days ago that she no longer smoked, the faded, Mickey Mouse drinking glass that had once been Jon’s. I counted five butts in the plastic Waikiki ashtray with the hula girl painted on it, and at least two more in the bottom of Mickey’s glass.
The only thing I didn’t look at was the television, where the familiar voice of my father could be heard amid kid laughter and cheers.
The birthday video.
I had been four. That was before dad’s MS had been diagnosed, before he started losing weight, before he gave me the ceramic dolphin music box and promised he would never leave me. The day after he died, I smashed that box to a million pieces on the curb outside of our house. The next day, I moved out. I was seventeen.
“Mom?”
A muffled voice emerged from against my mother’s arm.
“You are an evil, evil child.”
“You going to church? Aunt Carol's coming, remember?”
“I don’t belong in church.”
“Sure you do.” I patted her back. “Where else does an old drunk go for repentance?”
My mother, Mia Taylor, raised her head. Bleary-eyed and pale, dark circles under her eyes, she looked old to me suddenly, in a way that brought a rush of what felt oddly like anger.
She also looked hurt. “You are evil. Did you bring coffee?”
“Yup. With the requisite sugar fat explosion, dunked in chocolate-flavored lard... your favorite.”
She was already reaching for the bag, her eyes faintly quizzical, like they always were when I cracked one of my dumb jokes. She unfurled the crinkled paper and peered inside.
Her voice grew timid. “Allie, will you go with me?”
I failed to completely stifle a snort.
“Come on, Mom. Conversion? This early in the morning?”
As I said it, my eyes made contact with the television.
There, my father held me in his arms, beaming so wide, his eyes so shining that I couldn’t help but feel him, hearing his laugh through the middle of my chest. Only after I could breathe again did I look at my mom. Her deer-like eyes were wide as she munched on the edge of a donut, chocolate frosting coating her small fingers.
“You’ve got to get past this,” I said, hating myself for saying it.
I knew in some ways, my mother’s grief was a lot more honest than mine. It was me who covered myself over in sharp laughs and dismissive shrugs. Or, in the words of the boyfriend before Jaden, a Puerto Rican from New York, I was “a cold white woman, made of ice.”
A faint nausea rose briefly, a pulse of warmth.
I disagree, a voice said softly in my mind.
I jumped, violently enough to make my mom look over.
“What’s wrong, baby?” she said. She patted my leg. “Are you okay, Allie-bird? You look like a goose walked on your grave.”
I forced my eyes back to the television, watched my dad lean down to help my four-year-old self blow out four pink candles on a cake with white, fluffy frosting. Four-year-old me looked up at twenty-eight-year-old me and beamed, wanting to be my friend.
But watching my younger self wrapped in the gnarled, work-worn hands of my father, I felt nothing but envy.
Chapter 2
MR. MONOCHROME
I HUNCHED OVER an espresso maker, trying to get the metal coffee filter with the pressed coffee crammed inside to fit the groove. I got it hooked somehow, managed to turn the handle a quarter turn, but it stuck there and wouldn’t budge.
In the background, I listened to the television over the bar. There, our recently-elected president spoke over the flash of cameras and odd cheer or laugh from the crush of reporters ringing him like fans at a rock concert.
The media used a parade of what my grandmother would have called “dimestore words” whenever they described President Daniel Caine. He was never just President Caine. He was “...charismatic, bold in speech, forty-something President Caine exuding reassurance, his dark chestnut hair shining as he speaks from the White House lawn, the flowers of overhanging trees blending with the honey-blond of his wife’s hair. We only wish we could show you his real appearance so you could see how presidential he truly looks...”
Refocusing on the espresso maker, I finally got the filter off and hooked back on the machine. Clicking it on, I waited for the red light, glancing up at the line of blue suits on the television. I noticed the scarf at the blond woman’s throat, the flash of teeth as the man’s avatar rocked his head back in a laugh.
I’d never really followed politics.
But Caine, the new national obsession, was hard to ignore.
Most of my gal pals found him clinically “hot.” I don’t know how they could tell, honestly, since we only ever saw avatars.
Even Jon liked him, and Jon didn’t like politicians... at least not successful ones. Liberals liked him. So did right-wingers. I found myself riveted whenever Caine spoke, but couldn’t say I liked him exactly.
Like all humans, he had to wear avatars when appearing in the public feeds. The rumor was, those avatars weren’t far off from his real appearance, though... hardly the norm for celebrities and politicians. He wore just enough to remain legal––meaning, enough that seers wouldn’t be able to track him based on his physical appearance. He didn’t even change his age, or make himself ridiculously handsome, like most celebrities did.
The press corp rumor was that he actually looked better in person.
“...I have every hope here, fellas.” Caine smiled and I felt a kind of exuded warmth. “That this new agreement will establish real stability in a previously turbulent part of the world. Create friends and trusted neighbors out of those who in the past were our enemies.” He paused for just the right beat of time. “You don’t think we’re going to let a few screwballs get in the way of that, now do you...?”
Laughter sparked through the crowd.
“President Caine!” My eyes followed the petite female avatar as she pushed her way to the front. “What will your response be to the terrorists?”
He smiled at her.
“Donna,” he said. “You know I can’t give you details.” He winked at the camera. “...But rest assured, harsh language will be involved. Very harsh language indeed.”
Another collective laugh rolled through the crush.
I leaned my back against the espresso machine, frowning.
Folding my arms, I focused on the dark-skinned, African-American avatar standing just behind Caine. High cheekbones rose above full lips below cat-shaped, amber eyes. His was an undeniably handsome face, one I had also heard mirrored the handsomeness of the man behind it. The female friends of mine who didn’t have a thing for Caine definitely had one for Ethan Wellington, Caine’s new Vice President.
My reactions to him were more mixed.
The guy had something, definitely.
Again, I couldn’t decide if I liked whatever that something was.
“...I truly believe that we are now laying the real foundations for peace and prosperity in the future,” Caine spoke out over the crowd. “Paving the way for a time when human being will no longer fight human being...”
