“Dear Life, when I said ‘Can my day get any worse’ it was a rhetorical question not a challenge.”
From the T-shirt collection of Anna Collins
He knew I was a thief.
He knew I had a twin, and that I’d used her as my alibi.
Crap, crap, crap!
I had just opened the window to slip out of Colette’s room when I heard the voice of my Disney prince. No, he’s not mine, I mentally corrected with a surprisingly painful pinch. Not if I wanted to remain at liberty.
He knew Colette’s address, and he knew her name. How long until he found me? Actually, with Cipher Security at his back, he could already have my name and address and have people at my studio waiting for me.
Crap!
I sat on the bed and forced myself to calm down and think. Okay, I’d just decided to go to Boston, so that was what I needed to do, immediately. Cipher wasn’t the cops, so they wouldn’t necessarily have the airports watched – that took too many resources. I had my messenger bag with me, which had my wallet, keys, a cell phone charger, and a clean T-shirt – because a person never knew when spaghetti bolognese was going to jump off their plate. I was wearing my favorite jeans, engineer boots, and the leather, fleece-lined bike jacket I’d splurged on, so I just needed socks, underwear, a couple more shirts, and something to wear while I did laundry.
My heart was hammering in my chest as I raided Colette’s dresser drawers. Socks – I took three pair. Underwear – no, I’d buy new ones. I grabbed an extra bra for when the one I was wearing got stinky, plus two T-shirts I’d given her for Christmas that didn’t look like they’d ever been worn. To be fair, they were my style, not hers, but I remained hopeful that I could convert her to my subversive ways. She had more yoga pants than I had statement shirts, which probably said something less “down with the patriarchy” and more “up with all parts prone to sagging.” I took a pair of those, plus a hand-knit sweater our mother had made when we were sixteen. Mine had been worn to rags years before, while Colette’s was still pristine. I tied the sweater around my waist, rolled the rest of the clothes into tight little sausage rolls that fit in my bag, and then looked around Colette’s room for anything else I might need.
I couldn’t hear Darius’s voice anymore, though Colette was still talking to someone. If he decided to push his way in …
I slid Madame Auguste back inside the portfolio, zipped it closed, and threaded the handles through the strap of my messenger bag. I didn’t know where The Sisters painting was, but I wouldn’t leave Madame where she could point her finger at my sister and yell, “She did it!”
I was down the fire escape ladder and three alleys away when the panic finally loosened its grip on my rational brain. I’d had the vague plan of getting to the airport and buying a ticket to Boston, but the logistics of it had been elusive during my mad dash and dodge through the alleys away from Colette’s building. I’d just slowed down to an unremarkable, head-down, eyes-zipping-everywhere-for-signs-of-Darius’s-truck stroll when my cell phone vibrated in my pocket.
I almost panicked again for one brief second until I remembered that he didn’t have my number. Then I looked at the screen and the panic sat back down.
“What’s up, Spark?” I said, relieved to see the number of the Dungeon Master on my screen.
“You’re late,” he said without preamble.
“I’m not coming today.”
“Yes you are. I wrote a campaign specifically for Honor. She has to be here. It’s a moral imperative.” I had met Sparky online through a Dungeons and Dragons game finder site and had joined his weekly game as soon as I moved to Chicago.
“Honor doesn’t do moral imperatives,” I said as I considered my best options for getting to the airport.
“Honor is all about moral imperatives, and you know it,” he said impatiently. “Okay, here’s the real reason you need to come.”
I smirked. Sparky was like that kid who couldn’t keep a secret if his life depended on it. He was just too excited about everything not to share it with his friends, and I considered myself pretty lucky to be a peripheral one, even if it was just because of Honor.
“I’m trying to lure a friend of mine into the game, and she and Honor have that whole kick-ass heroine thing going on, so I wanted them to meet,” he said.
I scowled. “You want your friend to meet my imaginary character because they have a lot in common? Thanks, Spark. You really know how to make a girl feel seen.” I didn’t know why I let his words hurt even a little bit. I mean, it’s why I created Honor in the first place – to be the girl I wished I could be.
“Come on, you know I didn’t mean it like that. Honor is your avatar, which means she’s kind of an extension of you. I just think Shane would be more likely to join our game if she knew you played too.”
“I’m on my way to Boston to do a job,” I said, despite being slightly intrigued at the idea of meeting someone like Honor in real life.
“When do you leave?”
I checked my watch. “I don’t know. Depends on when I can get to the airport.”
“You don’t have a ticket?” I could hear his computer keyboard clacking in the background. “Southwest leaves Midway at 6:45 and 9:10. You won’t make the 6:45, but I’ll take you in time for the 9:10 if you come here now.”
I looked around, trying not to imagine Darius driving around the neighborhood searching the streets for me, or parked outside my studio with a warrant for my arrest.
Sparky almost whined. “Come on, Anna. Taylor and Ashley are on their way over with bacon-wrapped little smokies, and if you don’t leave now, you won’t make it in time to get any.”
“Ok, that’s just mean,” I growled. Actually, my stomach growled. In another life, I might have had dinner with a Disney prince tonight, but instead I was running away from home.
I sighed. “Fine,” I said, realizing I meant it. If I couldn’t have dinner with a prince, I’d have D&D and bacon-wrapped smokies. Ashley drizzled them with brown sugar, making them pretty much just bacon candy. She also had a cupcake-baking habit, and I was always happy to help her dispose of the evidence. So, besides bacon and D&D, going to Sparky’s gave me a place to lay low where Cipher wouldn’t find me.
I hung up my phone and shoved it in my back pocket, then caught a bus to Sparky’s neighborhood. Fifteen minutes later I could smell the bacon in the freight elevator.
“Get your hands off my smokies, William!” I called out as I hoisted the freight door of the elevator and stepped into his loft. Ashley had just lifted the foil off the platter she’d brought, and I could tell Sparky already had three or four stuffed into his mouth.
“Back away slowly, Spark,” I said in my most menacing voice, as I tried not to laugh at the expression of busted on his face.
Bill “Sparky” Spracher was about my age, 6’2”, and looked a little bit like Chris Pratt on a really good day (his, not Chris Pratt’s). He was a crazy-smart bio-mechanical engineer, and his loft always looked to me like a cross between Caractacus Potts’ workshop in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the warehouse for the company that did special effects for Tron.
Sparky grinned and put his hands up theatrically as he swallowed the bacon smokies in his mouth. “I was just testing them to make sure they lived up to your standards, Anna-banana.”
“I haven’t had dinner, and you’re in danger of losing fingers,” I growled at him before turning to Ashley with an admiring visual sweep of her outfit. “I wish I could do girly like you do, Ash. That’s a fantastic dress.”
Ashley was gorgeous, and the fairy lights in her eyes sparkled with every smile. The skirt of her knee-length, 1950s-style dress flared in a perfect bell as she gave a twirl. “I made strawberry cupcakes for dessert and frosted them to match it,” she said, flashing a fairy-lit smile at me.
“Ashley?” I said as I popped a bacon-wrapped smokie in my mouth. “Martha Stewart called and said she wants her talent back.”
“Well, she can’t have it. I’ll need it when I take over her empire.”
I hi-fived her, grabbed another bacon smokie, and dropped my bag and the portfolio in a corner next to a mannequin dressed like Wonder Woman, whose weird fashion hands had been replaced with robotic ones. I was proud that I only jumped a little bit when the hand at her hip moved.
“Um, Sparky? Why is the hand opening and closing like it wants to punch me?”
He looked up from the plate of Ashley’s cupcakes he was holding and licked pink frosting off his finger. “Diana’s testing five-finger joint durability. Be glad it’s not the day for middle digit isolation.” He shuddered theatrically. “It’s pretty tough to come back from being flipped off by Wonder Woman.”
I got myself a sparkling water from the mini fridge. “Taylor? Ashley? There’s lemonade, bubbly water, and fruity iced tea in here if you want any.”
Ashley’s husband, Taylor, was a sports reporter for a Chicago suburb’s local newspaper, and he looked and talked the part of an athlete. He was 6’4” and a sports superfan, but I had witnessed him hit his head on the corners of walls, and stumble over the dust bunnies on the floor enough times that I could see the signs of the kid who grew too fast to learn proper coordination. He was also the biggest gentleman I knew, and he adored his wife, so he came to get her lemonade himself.
“Have any good cases lately, Anna?” Taylor’s tone was always cheerful, even when our D&D games got intense and his character took damage from Arkhan the Cruel or a White Dragon Wyrmling.
“I ran a bail-jumper down the main street of a town outside Lansing a few weeks ago. He was crazy fast, and I ended up having to grab some kid’s bicycle off his lawn to catch him. The kid’s mother yelled at me for ten minutes until I gave the kid five bucks for the bike rental.”
He smirked and clinked the neck of his lemonade to the neck of my water bottle. “Well done.”
“What about you? Any good interviews lately?”
“I met Bill Russell the other day. He signed a ball for me,” Taylor said happily.
Ashley came over to join us and slipped under her husband’s arm. “Taylor’s sports memorabilia collection gets much more attention than my signed book collection does.”
“Nothing is more important than your signed book collection.” Taylor looked at his wife with such tenderness that I almost “awww’d” out loud.
“Okay, guys, ick. Too many,” Sparky called from the gaming table where he was placing bowls with chips and dip.
The freight elevator groaned into place, and the metal gate was lifted by a woman who stepped into the loft like she owned the place. She had the kind of classic beauty that would have fit right in with models from the 1970s, but she was way more interesting than her looks. She was tall, so maybe it was the confidence that height added, but I finally recognized it when she smiled at Sparky.
She was magnetic.
“Shane! You came!” Sparky had a bubbly happiness in his voice that sounded like pop rocks in soda.
“Are you kidding? I was never cool enough to play D&D in elementary school. I had to see what I’ve been missing,” she said, in a voice that sounded like it should be served on the rocks.
I decided then and there that I wanted to be her when I grew up.
Ashley went straight up to her and shook her hand. “I’m Ashley, and this is my husband Taylor, and if you’re hungry, you need to horde some food before Bill and Anna eat it all.”
“Bill and—” Shane looked at me, seemed to study me, and then a slow smile crossed her face. “Sorry, I always forget that Sparky has a name.”
“Shane, meet Anna Collins, bounty hunter,” Sparky said brightly. He handed Shane a glass of red wine, then turned to me. “Shane’s a P.I.”
“I thought bounty hunting was illegal in Illinois,” Shane said to me as Sparky ushered us all to the gaming table he’d set up on a cleared-off workbench in his loft.
“It is. But I’ve been collecting licenses from most of the Midwest and eastern U.S. since I graduated from college, and being able to cross state lines has gotten me enough work that I can live pretty much anywhere.”
“She’s heading to Boston tonight to catch bad guys,” Sparky said as he straddled a chair between me and Shane. She gave us a speculating look for a moment until Taylor piped in with his customary enthusiasm.
“I was just there to have lunch with my friend at The Globe. Five bucks says it snows while you’re there.” Ashley rolled her eyes at Taylor’s bet. His “five bucks” statements were legendary, and I was pretty sure he owed me about thirty-five dollars at this point.
“You don’t carry a gun when you’re bounty hunting, do you?” Ashley asked as she passed the last of the bacon smokies around the table.
I shook my head. “Too hard to transport, and I wouldn’t want to accidentally shoot someone just because they made me chase them. Martial arts and handcuffs are usually enough.”
“Yeah, I’m not a firearms person either,” Shane interjected. “And Sparky keeps finding new and inventive ways to stick blades in my legs.”
“Um, really?” I asked, staring between my friend and this fabulous woman.
Shane laughed at the expression on my face. “He designs my prosthetics, and has decided I’m his crash test dummy for whatever MacGyver leg he dreams up in his large and twisted brain. Speaking of legs, Spark, can I get another one of the Amp’d Gear sleeves? I haven’t had a hot spot or a blister since I started wearing the one you gave me.”
“Yeah, sure. Those guys have designed a foot you can wear with flip-flops, by the way.”
“Yes, please,” she said with a grin before turning to me and Ashley. “I don’t miss the leg as much as I miss the shoes.” She said it with a sigh, and Ashley nodded as if to say, the struggle is real.
Two hours later, we were all comrades in arms, and after hugs all around, we disbanded until the next adventure. Taylor and Ashley left first, hand in hand, which was probably the same way they’d arrived. Shane’s eyes moved from me, not moving from the chair into which I’d slunk down in exhaustion, to Sparky, who was putting bottles and cans into the recycling bin. She stood up with a smile and held out her hand.
“It was really nice to meet you, Anna. Sparky was right, you are pretty kick-ass.”
I laughed. “He said the same thing about you.” I closed my eyes and sighed, then hoisted myself out of the chair and picked up the portfolio and my bag. “Ready, Spark?”
“I need to grab my coat. Can we give you a ride anywhere?” he said to Shane as he called the elevator for her. I sank back into the chair.
Shane gave Sparky a hug and whispered something in his ear. The surprise on his face as she closed the elevator gate made me wonder what she’d said. When she had descended out of listening range, Sparky burst into laughter.
“What’s funny?” I grumbled from my exhausted stupor.
“Shane thinks we’re together,” he said, still chuckling. “She said we make a great couple.”
I wrinkled my nose. “No we don’t. I’m too weird for you, and you’re too …” I waved my hand in an up-and-down assessment, from his pink Croc-wearing feet to the tips of his messy Calvin-and-Hobbes hair, “…many for me,” I finished vaguely.
“Right?” he agreed.
“Hey! You don’t have to agree with me. You could pretend to pine a little for the love that will never be,” I groused.
“I suck at pining,” he said cheerfully. “When Shane hooked up with Gabriel I pined for like, three minutes, and those are three minutes I’ll never get back. Life’s too short to pine.”
I sighed dramatically. “She’s tall, she’s beautiful, and of course she has a boyfriend. He’s probably as pretty as she is, and they do yoga together in slow motion on the beach as her hair flips in the wind and he worships—”
“Dude.” Sparky’s word screeched a halt to the soundtrack that was swelling in my imagination. “They’re not slow-motion people. They’re in-motion people. They’re like, badass private security agents who take down corrupt dickheads and have the feds on speed dial.”
“I thought you said she’s a P.I.,” I said, with a growing sense of uncomfortable prickles on my skin.
“She is,” Sparky said, “but she got hired by Cipher Security when she and Gabriel worked a case together.”
“She works for Cipher?” I whispered.
He shot me a strange look. “Yeah.”
The mental image of a Disney prince that I’d locked behind the door of possibility suddenly burst into the room of my imagination, and the memory of him wasn’t just in my head, it was in all my senses too. The scent of spices in his hair, the taste of his skin, the sound of laughter in his voice, and the feeling of his fingers trailing down my arms and tracing the path of the chills he inspired – it all washed over me in a tidal wave of sense memory and blended right in with the danger I could be in from yet another Cipher agent, who knew I was leaving town, and who may or may not be able to connect me to my sister.
I groaned. “Let’s go.”
Sparky still looked worried, but he pulled on his coat as we waited for the elevator. “You sure you’re okay, Anna-banana?”
I pulled a smile out of the acting lessons closet and put it on with what I hoped looked like sincerity. “I’m cool. How about you? Do you think you’ll survive our break-up okay?”
He grinned at that. “Oh yeah, I’m already plotting how to spin that to my advantage the next time I meet someone with potential.”
“Nobody wants to hear about the heartbreaks, Spark,” I said as we got in the freight elevator.
“True. But when you come out on the other side of heartbreak, you’re a survivor. And if you can have a sense of humor about it, you’re like one of those Kintsugi teacups, with pretty gold lines where you patched yourself up,” he said, beaming.
I shook my head in wonder. “You wear pink Crocs and you know Japanese pottery techniques. You’re so cool.”
He snorted. “You have no idea.”
The grin on my face faded as soon as I stepped out into the night. The handsome Disney prince still sat in my imagination, but he had a frown on his face as he looked at me from the shadows.