Four

Marie

Marie laughed. She'd been completely caught up in the practical considerations until Joe had delivered his irreverent summary. When he said it like that, it really did sound ill-advised.

"You don't have to come with me," she reminded him.

She didn't think he was going to leave at this point, but she preferred to always give the people around her an out. Call it a self-defense mechanism. Why that was, well, that was more complicated than she wanted to think about any time in the next decade.

"Oh, I'm not missing out on this," Joe assured her. His eyes glinted with mischief. "I love badly planned plans."

She wanted to protest, but really, this plan was impromptu and fraught with ways things could go wrong. It was a badly planned plan.

Kuro leaned in close at that moment, and every fiber of her being was aware of his proximity.

"Usually, Joe's the creator of said plans," he murmured, and Kuro's deeper voice sent delicious shivers down her back.

It was a good thing he hadn't said much, so far. Conversation with him did too many things to her that she'd rather not address in public.

Speaking of which, their person of interest had come to a stop. Apparently, the man remained in possession of enough of his mental faculties to remember that he commuted into downtown Seattle by bus. At this time of day, the bus stop wasn't super crowded, but there were a decent number of people around. She was starting to wonder if they were going to have to change their current tactic of just following and observing to something more proactive before someone else noticed just how abnormal this man was. A few people were already shooting sideways glances at the man and the way he stood rocking his weight from side to side, from one foot to the other, as if he was still walking even if he was standing still. Hopefully, they would conclude he was drunk.

Her companions slowed their pace. Joe brushed his knuckles over the back of her hand while Kuro gave a light tug just above her elbow of her other arm before letting his hand drop away. She came to a stop, choosing to take their wordless suggestion. They stood on either side of her, and she was reminded of the night she had met them and the way they had bracketed her up in the branches of a tree. It felt like they were keeping her safe, ready to catch her if she lost her balance, but equally ready to let her go if she made the choice to jump anyway. Maybe because of that, it felt even more okay to remain between them.

"What are the chances he's actually going to get on the right bus?" Kuro murmured, his voice only loud enough for the three of them to hear.

"It's not like we're going to know it's the right bus, no matter which one he gets on," Joe pointed out quietly.

"Maybe we shouldn't let him continue." Marie was all for reevaluating decisions when it made sense.

It felt like the risk of something going wrong was quickly escalating. A bus was an enclosed space, and their dead person wouldn't be on the move, but instead in a sort of holding pattern during the ride. She wondered if the lack of something to focus on, like walking somewhere, would mean the dead man would suddenly have the bandwidth to focus on something else. Like living, breathing humans who were passengers on the same bus. Any number of horror movies and television shows flashed through her mind with scenes of a bus crashed on the side of the road and everyone on it massacred. Their dead person wasn't acting like a zombie, one of the shuffling animated corpses driven by inexplicable hunger to feed on the living. Nor did it move like an undead servant, the way a zombie raised by a necromancer might have. This man had walked through the streets of downtown as if he was seeing another place, experiencing another environment. Something like the world they were all moving through, but not quite the same. The closest thing Marie could think of was when a human was given the Sight by Ashke's fairy dust. But her small fae friend wasn't anywhere nearby.

This was something different.

Maybe she should find a way to get this person back to the Darke Consortium, where there were other supernaturals available to mitigate the potential harm this dead person could do.

"I really don't think we should let him get on a bus," Joe said.

"Agreed." She could share at least that much of what she was thinking.

There were a lot more humans than supernaturals in the world. Even if both tended to gather in higher numbers in cities like Seattle, humans weren't aware of the supernatural community. There were a few trusted exceptions, but for the most part, people like her and her colleagues—and her new acquaintances—hid their paranormal natures.

If they could, they blended. If they couldn't, they existed in the shadows beneath the city streets or remained hidden by the blinding light reflecting off the city's high-rises. Either way, knowledge was a survival advantage, and humans didn't stand a chance of escaping unscathed when they didn't know what might try to eat them. Humans had a tendency to go about their daily lives confident in being the apex life-forms of this world, and it would shake the foundations of their existence to learn that not only was one type of predator hunting them, but several.

She bit her lower lip in thought. "It would be best to get him someplace away from the vulnerable populace."

"From humans, you mean." Amusement rippled in Kuro's voice.

"Doesn't your organization have colleagues that specialize in this?" Joe asked. "Fixers, I think you call them."

Marie let out a huff. "Yes, we have Fixers. But their purpose is damage control after any unfortunate incident results in the exposure of humans to paranormal occurrences. The teams are spread too thin to be expected to be proactive all the time. Part of the reason I get along with them well is because I do everything in my power to avoid needing them, rather than being sloppy and just expecting them to clean up after me."

Joe chuckled. "Ooh, that sounds like a story."

"The three of us are more than enough to discreetly isolate this person of interest without raising much alarm from the humans present at this time." Kuro stepped away from her side, exchanging a glance with Joe. "Why don't you get his attention and find out if you can coax him to move toward you? We'll bracket him from the sides, and the three of us can herd him into an alley. From there we can take him someplace more private."

Joe winked at her as he stepped away, mirroring Kuro's movement.

Marie opened her mouth to protest, then closed it, the words going unsaid. It was a simple enough strategy, and Kuro's reasoning wasn't incorrect. If anything, she would just be delaying them all to argue whether it was appropriate for them to work together in this moment. She shook her head. Her overthinking this was already making it harder than it needed to be.

"Excuse me," she called out. "Didn't I just meet you at Socrates Industries? Would you mind telling me if there's a more direct bus line to the building then taking the 50 and 120 lines from West Seattle?"

A few people turned their attention to her but glanced away again when they realized she wasn't talking to them. Her target, on the other hand, didn't acknowledge her at all. If he wasn't responding to her voice, she didn't have that many more options to get his attention. All of them required getting closer. And oh boy, she did not want to get within arm's reach. But she wasn't alone, and that helped her feel marginally better about what she was about to do.

She took a few steps forward, reaching a tentative hand out to tap the man on the shoulder.

An SUV came to an abrupt stop right there on the curb, directly where vehicles were not supposed to stop because they'd be in the way of the buses. Two more people in lab coats popped out of the back seat.

"There you are!" the older of the two newly arrived lab coats exclaimed. Gray hair and dark lipstick, with a feminine voice. Those were the brief impressions Marie got as the woman took their dead man walking by the arm.

"We thought we were all going to lunch together," said the other lab coat with a nervous chuckle. "But when we swung by your workspace to come get you, they said you'd left for the day. You said you definitely wanted to check out this restaurant, so we rushed to catch you before you left for home."

As the second lab coat, a middle-aged white man with brown hair and medium build, continued to chatter, the two of them tugged the dead man toward the SUV. A Black woman opened the front passenger-side door of the SUV and stepped out with a slim backpack in her right hand. She slung the backpack over her right shoulder and kept her right hand behind her, cradling the bottom of the backpack as she moved to hold the rear passenger door open for the trio.

Marie had to make a conscious effort not to narrow her eyes as she noted the very precise way the Black woman had moved. She had an air of fitness about her that seemed at odds with the trio of researchers wearing lab coats. One of Marie's colleagues and close friends, Thomas, had that vibe about him. It had nothing to do with being a supernatural, and everything to do with having some sort of military training. The woman's sharp gaze was sweeping the area and landed on Marie.

Marie gave her best vague and harmless smile, then glanced up at the bus map. Nothing to see here. Totally harmless. In moments, car doors closed, and the SUV smoothly merged into traffic.

Well, that was unexpected.

She had no idea what to do next. It wasn't like she could go after the dead man on foot. And she didn't have the means to instigate a car chase, either. She glanced around trying to come up with something clever in the moment, but there weren't even scooters or electric bikes available for rent via app. As if she wouldn't have been incredibly obvious following the vehicle if one had been available.

Couldn't you just conjure up some kind of solution?

The words popped into her head in her ex-friend's voice, and Marie mentally squashed the sentiment. It had been a mistake all those years ago to confide in the person she'd thought of as her best friend. Marie still immediately thought of what she would say in any moment of doubt or uncertainty, letting her live rent free in Marie's head even though they weren't friends anymore.

She was one of a few past acquaintances whose unrealistic expectations of Marie's witchcraft had no foundation in what she could actually do. That was before Marie learned not to lean into friendships so quickly, not to trust so much.

This current situation was not something Marie's particular magic could solve. Maybe if Bennett or Thomas or even Punch had been here, there would have been a better solution for following the vehicle. Hell, Ashke would have been able to follow the vehicle unseen without any problem at all. But Marie just wasn't that kind of supernatural.

Speaking of other kinds of supernaturals, she realized both Joe and Kuro were nowhere in her line of sight. It didn't mean they had gone, but it didn't mean they had stayed either. She decided to walk back to the Socrates Industries building to find out whatever she could. It was better than remaining there, confused. At least if she was on the move, she had a chance of gaining more information.

She made it about two city blocks before Joe and Kuro fell into step on either side of her. She felt short walking between them, and that didn't happen to her often, since she was a couple of inches taller than the average female-presenting person in the United States.

"The SUV already made it back to the building," Kuro said in a matter-of-fact tone. His hands were in his pants pockets as he walked casually beside her.

"It pulled up to a docking bay at the back of the building where they take large deliveries," Joe added, tipping his head toward her so a few of his tousled locks fell across his forehead.

Kuro's shoulder brushed hers as he leaned close. "We went up and followed along the rooftops to keep line of sight. Once there was no way to continue observing them, we came back for you."

She didn't know what to say. Confusion and gratitude and a little bit of frustration jumbled up inside her, mixed with a good dose of the fluttery sensation tickling the inside of her chest as she reacted to the warm tone in the last few words Kuro had said.

We came back for you.

Joe bumped her shoulder with his. "No one was screaming, and there didn't seem to be any kind of struggle inside the car. There's that, at least."

"Those other people seemed to know their colleague wasn't quite right." Marie decided to give in and join the conversation even if this whole thing was a little on the chaotic side. She should really be contacting her colleagues at the Darke Consortium to fill them in on what she'd witnessed.

"Shady," Joe said.

She fought the urge to smile and lost. "You're not wrong."

"What are you going to do next?" Kuro asked.

There were a lot of things she should do. She should call Bennett or Thomas or Duncan. She should head straight back to the Consortium manor. She absolutely should brain dump every detail she could remember about the entire incident and her meeting prior to it in case she had picked up on something that she didn't immediately understand the import of when it happened. She should plan what she'd be alert for the next time she returned to the company, because obviously her mundane contract had escalated into a matter for the Darke Consortium.

Magic was involved, of that there was no doubt. Considering the amulet she'd seen the dead man wearing earlier, she thought a magical object was involved. One of the primary missions of the Darke Consortium was to take objects of myth and magic—particularly dangerous ones—out of the hands of humans who could do themselves or others harm. There was already one dead body here, even if she had lost it. A body count definitely fell into the harm category.

"Wow," Joe said.

Coming up out of her deep thoughts, Marie looked at him with wide eyes. "What?"

He gave her a smirk, and there was a teasing glint to his eyes. "I can almost hear the gears turning in your head."

"Join us for lunch," Kuro said abruptly. There was a coaxing note to his words.

The fluttering was back, like a thousand butterflies inside her chest, each of them excitedly whispering random thoughts. Was she being asked out on a date? That was good, right? Was it even time for lunch? Well, didn't she like brunch anyway? Did it matter? Date! With just the one? Or both? Did she want to date just one of them? Which one? Did she have to choose? Why not both?

She took a deep breath and mentally stuffed every single butterfly as deep down inside herself as she possibly could. These two worked for an organization in direct opposition to the Darke Consortium. One of their colleagues had kidnapped and sold Peeraphan to a collector. In fact, Marie shouldn't forget these two had been a part of it.

The only reason she was giving them the time of day at all was because they had immediately regretted their part in the whole situation and helped Marie make it right. But as far as she knew, they were still working for an opposing interest. It would be too strong to say they were the enemy, per se, but the phrase "fraternizing with the enemy" was still coming to mind.

She gave Kuro and Joe what she hoped was a sufficiently serious look. "I think it's obvious that this is about to become a conflict of interest."

The corner of Kuro's mouth twitched upward slightly. "I disagree."

"Same," Joe added. "And if you join us for lunch, we'll give you our reasons why we should work together."