Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Kit
I stared at the blinking cursor on the unfamiliar laptop, exhaustion sinking into my muscles like liquid mercury. The small green rectangle on the otherwise black screen blipped in and out of existence.
Blink. Blink. Blink.
It was almost hypnotizing. If I let my fatigued pupils focus on it long enough, maybe I’d enter a trance where my brain could finally chill out and all the mysteries of the Consilium, the ancient weapon we’d failed to keep out of their hands, and my strange powers would be mystically revealed to me.
Blink. Blink. Blink.
Or maybe not.
A car engine broke the silence, growing louder as it approached the building. I tore my eyes from the screen to peer through the blinds behind the desk where I sat. A pair of headlights cut through the early morning glow.
“Shit,” I mouthed silently. Was the owner of this house coming home?
Lienna and I couldn’t risk comfy stays in local hotels, not with the MPD searching every nook and cranny of the planet for us.
Lucky for me, I had a handy spectrum of Psychica skills to find us reasonably comfortable places to sleep—telepathy and clairsentience to locate empty houses and levitation to access unlocked windows or balconies.
It wasn’t particularly restful though, not when the absentee homeowners could return at any moment.
If that happened, I also had warps at my disposal, but I’d rather not run an invisi-bomb all night if I didn’t have to.
This wasn’t foreign territory for me. I mean, Oman certainly was.
But nighttime B&Es for the purpose of finding a safe place to sleep?
Been there, done that. I was kind of in my element: on the run, relying on street smarts and charm, committing harmless misdemeanors left and right to survive.
Kit Morris thrived on breaking the rules.
Lienna, with her history as a respectable, law-abiding member of society, was taking to our change in circumstances remarkably well. She might have a bright future in criminality if the whole saving-the-world-and-somehow-returning-to-our-normal-lives thing didn’t pan out.
My gut twisted. Lienna should be living her normal life—back in Vancouver, sleeping in her own apartment, doing brilliant work at the job she’d worked so hard to get. Not risking her neck every five minutes on this insane multi-continental odyssey.
The car passed the building, and its taillights disappeared into the depths of the village. I leaned back in my chair and returned my attention to the laptop.
Blink. Blink. Blink.
On the bed next to my lonely spot at the desk, Lienna stirred in her sleep, and every molecule in my body was instantly charged with fight-or-flight energy. What was wrong? Was she okay? Had she heard something I hadn’t?
She settled back onto the pillow, her breathing resuming its slumbering rhythm, and the charge storming my nervous system faded.
Every night, Lienna would play sentinel while I crashed hard into the rejuvenating embrace of the Sandman.
Then we’d switch, and I’d stand guard while she slept.
The split was slightly more in my favor, but only because Lienna refused to budge an inch on me sacrificing more sleep than her.
I needed fuel for my brain and body to sustain my myriad abilities and keep us alive.
She, on the other hand, could chant incantations in her sleep, or so she claimed.
The brutal schedule was darkening the circles under our eyes, but there was no avoiding it. International fugitives didn’t get to curl up on a queen mattress and trust that all the danger and madness pursuing them would take a break until they exited dreamland.
Alchemical potions were also out of the question. The kind that would help us sleep restfully left its users dangerously groggy if woken up early by, say, a middle-of-the-night ambush, and the kind that would banish our fatigue caused its users to crash hard after a day or two.
I turned in my chair to see the bed. Our current pad was a small bachelor-style apartment on the second floor of a squat building.
Whoever lived here was a tidy fellow, his kitchen sink empty of dishes, all his laundry folded, his bed made, and his work schedule written on a little calendar on his immaculately clean desk.
Lienna, as usual, was asleep on top of the blankets, still wearing her clothes from our midnight chase through the neighborhood with Daoud and his crew.
Her satchel was on the bed beside her, and she’d curled a hand around the shoulder strap.
Despite her ready-for-action posture, her face was relaxed, the spot between her eyebrows smoothed of the worried crease it so often had these days, and her soft lips slightly parted. I stared at her, entranced.
Toward the end of my brief but wonderful time with my foster-mom Gillian, she would often doze off in her favorite recliner in the living room.
I would lounge on the sofa, sometimes trying to distract myself with a book, but more often making sure she was still breathing.
Making sure the cancer hadn’t won yet. I remembered an ache deep in my chest, both hopeful and anxious—thankful that Gillian was momentarily free from pain, but terrified of the moment that freedom became permanent.
After Gillian, I hadn’t felt that ache again until two and a half months ago.
At that point, I was two weeks past my escape from New York—two dread-ridden, soul-crushing weeks in which I thought I’d never see the woman I loved again.
But Lienna, being Lienna, had refused to let a minor obstacle like me being the most wanted mythic alive keep us apart.
Overcoming impossible odds yet again, she found me on the streets of Copenhagen near the coffee shop where I’d asked her on our official first date.
The vision of her running toward me with tears streaking down her cheeks was so inconceivable, so agonizingly wonderful, that I thought I was warping her into existence out of desperate loneliness.
That night, we broke into a public library well after closing time and located a couple of oversized beanbags in the children’s nook.
Lienna fell asleep the instant she slumped into her bean-filled nest of luxurious comfort, and that was when the ache made its unexpected return, leaving me simultaneously buoyant and panicked, both grateful for and completely petrified by her presence.
In that dark and silent library, the whole weight of my circumstances seemed to collapse onto my shoulders.
The responsibility of standing guard while she slept, of protecting her when she was awake, of keeping everyone I cared about back in Vancouver safe, of defending the whole mythic world from the Consilium—it all loomed over me and shifted the ground under my feet.
And all that weight, all those feelings, were embodied in the form of the beautiful woman who was now asleep in an unwitting stranger’s bed twelve thousand kilometers from home, hoping to feel a bit more rested than she had the day before.
Blink. Blink. Blink.
I gave a bleary-eyed squint at that abominable cursor alone in the void of the laptop’s screen. Just as I reached for the touchpad, Lienna’s alarm sounded. She groaned, flailed an exhausted hand toward her phone, and turned off the insistent awake-o-horn.
“Good morning,” I whispered, pivoting my chair to see her properly while also keeping an eye on the view outside the window.
She gave me a tired smile. “What are you up to?”
I turned the laptop to show her the screen and its unhelpful emptiness.
“Ah.” She stood up, adjusted her sleep-rumpled clothes, and ambled over to stand behind me. “We haven’t heard from the mole since before New York. Maybe they aren’t doing the information-for-hire thing anymore.”
As she spoke, she settled her hands on my shoulders and kneaded my painfully tight neck. I slumped, the comfort of her touch melting the tension out of me more than the brief massage.
“Or maybe they finally got caught,” I muttered before forcing a more optimistic note into my voice. “They’re probably just working late at the precinct.”
She made a thoughtful—or maybe doubtful—noise and slid her hands from my shoulders down my chest. Her warm weight settled gently against my upper back, her arms curling around me and her cheek resting on my shoulder. Strands of her hair teased the side of my neck.
I covered her arms with mine, twining our fingers. My eyes closed—the first time I’d let them close for more than a blink since starting my watch—and I wanted to stay like this forever. Or better yet, throw us both into the bed, hold her close, and sleep for a few months.
“Have you checked for updates?” she asked softly.
“Not yet. I was waiting for you.” I kept my eyes closed, my fingers pressing into the soft skin of her hands. What if I spun the chair around and pulled her onto my lap? What if I kissed her with all the longing that burned inside my rib cage?
Another set of headlights flashed through the partially open blinds, shining through the thin skin of my eyelids. My eyes popped open. Neither Lienna nor I moved as we waited for the car to disappear down the road.
With a tired sigh, I disentangled one hand to operate the laptop’s touchpad. “Shall we see what the MPD has to say about me today?”
I opened a second browser window and split the screen so I could still see the mole chat. Navigating to the horrifically outdated, nineties-era MPD website, I entered one of our stolen logins. We’d swiped a whole set of agent IDs while procuring fake passports in Moldova.
Lienna settled her chin on my shoulder, watching as I one-hand-typed my name into the search bar and hit enter.
“Nothing from last night,” I confirmed once the page had loaded. “I guess our chat with Arif and Daoud worked.”
“Assuming they can convince the rest of their team to keep quiet.” She squinted at the screen. “Look, there’s a report about the Netherlands.”