Page 50 of Awry
“It’s grainy … can you sharpen up the footage?”Gigi whispers excitedly.Her voice now sounds even nearer, like maybe she’s leaning over Coda’s shoulder.
“Camera was too far away,” Coda snaps.“You’re lucky you can see this much over that wall.”
Gigi ignores Coda’s abrupt pissiness.I’ve never totally figured out if the two of them are actually lovers or just business partners.The interest in the hacker’s dick pic, but not necessarily the dick itself, just confuses that further— despite the owner of said dick being deemed ‘gorgeous,’ a term I’ve never heard Coda use to identify a male in all the years we’ve been working together.
“My phone?”I ask pointedly.
“Clean,” Coda pronounces.“Digital Adonis tried to sneak in a secondary and tertiary protocol.He really wants to know you, where you’ve been, and where you’re going.”
“Well, he’s going to be disappointed.”
“You know who he reminds me of …”
A long pause ensues.Then more typing.
I eye my gorgeous designer leather bag, getting really pissy about having to leave it behind as well.I retrieve my favorite vanilla-mint and cocoa-butter lip balm and a pair of sunglasses, leaving my e-reader and current sock knitting project.All my money and passport and everything else important is tied to my phone, and I can access my current reading with it as well, but I’m pissed about the cashmere-blend yarn and the walnut knitting needles.Both are limited edition, not the kind of thing I can just go online and reorder.
Though Coda might be able to —
“Yep,” the awry hacker gloats over the phone speaker.“Perfect match.Same fingerprints intersecting with some cleanup I did for you at least once before.Japan.2022.A retrieval you …fixed.”
Now that is a weird connection.But it didn’t necessarily mean anything.Talented techs got around.
“You pulled me into that job.Maybe AD is ghosting your trail.”I find some paper embossed with the motel logo and a cheap pen in the bedside drawer, dashing off a thank-you note for the mage brews to the healer who’d helped me.Doc, who is somehow clearer in my exhausted memory than Presh’s brothers.I have no doubt that between Presh and me, we’ve seriously dented the pack medic’s supply.
Coda snorts, then cackles.“AD.Get it?”
Gigi responds in the background, “I get —”
“Adonis dick!”Coda explains unnecessarily.
“Right,” Gigi huffs.“My IQ matches yours, you know.”
“Stupid online tests,” Coda mumbles belligerently.
I can’t get caught up listening to another round of their charged banter.“I’m heading out.”
“I’m always watching,” Coda says, trying to be creepy and definitely pulling it off.The awry hacker hangs up.
I don’t bother analyzing the postscript I add at the bottom of my note to Doc — or the whisper of power that flows through the pen, embedding into the paper as I write it.Because those words and whatever they portend are not meant for me to understand.But the universe apparently wants to give the medic a heads-up about something.
Choice, not fate, not love or devotion, twists the path.
And not always in the way intended.
That aspect of being the Conduit — random messages being filtered through my consciousness — isn’t new to me.I’ve learned to ignore it.Mostly.
I fold and tuck the note in between two of the empty potion bottles.I glance around the room once more, realizing that the second bed has been slept in.
While I was unconscious.
I step around and closer, just enough to examine the dent in the pillow.And I don’t even have to lay hands on the bed or bedding to pick up … essence.Apresence.
It takes a truly powerful person or entity to leave such a residual— and I’m not even usually attuned to such things.Well, the me from before three weeks ago wasn’t particularly attuned.The necklace that swings forward from my neck is evidence that things might be different in the Now.Either way, though, I’ve only ever felt that connection with an awry before.And almost exclusively within my own bloodline.
The fading essence, thepresence, on the second bed, isn’t awry in tenor, though.It’s … it’s more like the slipstream trails that Muta leaves when he’s particularly riled up.Or hungry.
Muta is an aspect of a god or a divine power fused into flesh.But divinity runs in the bloodlines of all the essence-imbued creatures in this world.Just more intensely in some.
