Page 114 of Blow Me Down
Dammit, he was right. There was nothing I had done as a pirate that I wouldn’t do in real life… with the exception of running a couple of men through with a sword. Metaphysically speaking, though, all I had been doing was protecting the one I loved, and that I would do in a heartbeat. But it all boiled down to one thing—I was the same person no matter if I was in a virtual environment or a real one. And if I was the same, then Corbin…
“Call him,” I said as I gunned the engine. “Tell him we’re on the way over to see him, and he’d bloody well better have a damned good excuse for making me spend the night worrying!”
Holder grinned as he pulled out his cell phone. “God help him if he doesn’t.
Glad to see the real you back, Amy.”
Determination and reckless abandon filled me as I yanked the steering wheel, slamming my foot on the gas petal. Holder laughed as I said grimly, “He’s going to need all the divine intervention he can get if I find out he’s been yanking my chain!”
“I don’t doubt that he’ll live in mortal fear of your can of whoop ass, but I’m equally sure it won’t be necessary. He’s got it bad for you. Nothing short of global meltdown would keep him from you.”
I just wished I was as confident as Holder. I had a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach that something was seriously, horribly wrong.
Chapter 28
A rollicking band of pirates we,
Who, tired of tossing on the sea,
Are trying their hand at a burglaree,
With weapons grim and gory.
—Ibid, Act II
“I want a new stomach,” I said twenty minutes later as we stood outside the warm cream-colored brick house that sat on a bluff overlooking the turbulent, rocky northern California shore.
“It looks okay to me,” Holder said, giving my stomach a quick glance as he banged for a third time on the door. “You women are always obsessed with your weight. My wife has a few extra pounds, and I love it. Wouldn’t have her any other way. A man likes to have a woman with something to her, not one of those walking skeletons you see modeling clothes on the E! channel.”
“Boy, we need to bottle that attitude and sell it to every man in America,” I said, still worried but able to give Holder a little friendly punch in the arm to show him I appreciated the comment. “I was referring to the fact that my stomach is apparently psychic. Is the door locked?”
“Yeah, but”—Holder pulled out his big key ring again, poked through the keys until he found one he liked, then held it up with a triumphant grin—“I have a set of his keys. And don’t let your stomach dictate to you. He may not have answered the phone because he was in the shower, or taking a crap, or any number of other perfectly legitimate, non-stomach-worrying reasons.”
I let that go as I looked around the foyer of Corbin’s house. I don’t know what I had expected—computer-game machines at every table?—but the bright, modern, minimalist furniture, vaulted ceiling, and floor-to-ceiling windows along the ocean side of the house didn’t at all fit my idea of the house of a computer-game guru.
Until I turned around and saw the wall behind me covered in a variety of mounted swords. “Now, that’s Corbin.”
“Nice to see you smiling again,” Holder said before marching to the foot of a curved oak staircase. “Corb? You awake? I’ve got Amy here, and if you’re not down in exactly ten seconds to molest her as is her due, I get to keep her.”
I whapped him on the arm but held my breath, listening for any sounds of someone in the house. Despite his protests, I had seen a faint line of worry on Holder’s face when Corbin didn’t answer either his home phone or his cell phone on the drive to his house. Now here we were on the spot, and all I could hear was a whole lot of nothing.
“Maybe he’s got his headphones on,” Holder suggested, starting down the hall past the staircase. “His computer room is back here. We’ll sneak up on him and give him a heart attack, okay?”
I followed, my spirits spiraling downward with every step. Holder pushed open the door at the rear of the house, leading into what once must have been an atrium, but which was now a UV-filtered glass room full of computer equipment. A long table along the windows was filled with three different computers and related peripherals, while on the opposite side of the room, a large glass-fronted metal case squatted, a plasma screen monitor perched on top.
The room was Corbin-less.
“Hmm,” Holder said, his brow wrinkled with puzzlement. “I was sure he’d be here. Maybe he’s in the shower, like I said. Or he could be asleep after pulling an all-nighter. I’ll run upstairs and check.”
“Why does he have so many computers?” I asked, moving over to the nearest one, jogging the mouse so the screen blanker turned itself off.
“That one is his personal computer. It’s tied into the server and the Internet.
He manages the game from it. The other two computers are secure—the one farthest away runs Linux, for programming. And that middle one is devoted to rendering graphics, not that he does much of that. The server is behind you, in the air-conditioned rack. Be right back. If he’s asleep, I’ll let you come up and dump a bucket of cold water on him.”
I sat down in Corbin’s chair and looked at the computer screen, convinced from the empty silence of the house that Corbin wasn’t at home. Maybe he had gone to find me? I clicked to minimize a document full of technical computer info, and blinked at the sight of the Buckling Swashes client. It was the same as the VR model that had seemed to float on air, only this one was shown on the flat plasma computer monitor.
A little smile formed at the sight of the town square on Turtle’s Back. A line of icons to the left showed thumbnails of other spots in the game—a couple of ships, key shops and inns, and maps of three islands. I clicked on Corbin’sSamurai Squirreland noticed that even without the captain present, his crew was busily maintaining the ship—swabbing down the deck, mending rope and sails, even doing a bit of carpentry.
