Sanctuary fic: "Untold Things" - PG-13 [Kate]
TITLE: Untold Things
SUMMARY: Kate's not proud of everything she's done.
RATING: PG-13
CHARACTERS: Kate, Henry, Will, Big Guy
CATEGORY: character study
WORD COUNT: ~3,500
WARNINGS: ( warnings) Scenarios containing schoolyard bullying, self-termination.
DISCLAIMER: Kate Freelander and co aren't mine, this is just some fun, and I make no money from writing these characters.
NOTES: Right, so this was my idea for the sfaflashfic challenge 'Secrets'. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to finish it before the deadline, so it's just going to halfamoon's Celebration Of Female Characters. It's rather dark in parts; she's not exactly a tame lion. (Yes, I think I am going to use that phrase for Kate. Helen, on the other hand, would be the opposite: a creature that was supposed to be tamed to the hand and went slightly feral instead... The Cat That Walks Alone, perhaps?)
Untold Things
Kate's never told Henry about the month her family left Chicago.
--
The Big Guy brings the mail around while she's helping Henry with a security upgrade in his lab. Well, she's doing the security upgrade, while he's purring over MOL-E like a guy with a serious hard on for his weapon.
"Hank? You need to get out more."
"Ah, but MOL-E's my special girl. She's my precious."
"Shouldn't you be pronouncing that with two 'S's?"
Henry grins and strokes the weapon like Gollum over the One Ring. Kate rolls her eyes, but smiles as she goes back to executing the upgrade scripts. He could have done this himself and let her play with MOL-E, but no. Boys and their toys.
Movement at the door turns their heads, but it's just the Big Guy, coming in with packages under his arm. "Mail."
Kate avoids receiving mail at the Sanctuary wherever possible, so she doesn't have anything in the pickup. Henry, on the other hand, gets a long, flat box that the Big Guy holds up. Only Hank has his hands full with MOL-E and there isn't a spare bit of space for it to go.
She takes it from the Big Guy, and hefts it in her hand. It's pretty light and doesn't feel very solid. Not electronics, then. "What is this?"
Henry is trying to set a new record for putting MOL-E back on her charger as Kate turns it over, noting the return address, the postmark, the 'do not bend' and 'fragile' stickers. He nearly snatches it out of her hands.
"Oh, man, it's arrived!"
"Yes, it has." Kate says, holding it back. "And what exactly is 'it'?"
"Give it to me and I'll show you!"
He clears a space and starts taking the box apart with exquisite care. It's like watching one of Magnus' surgeries take place - painstaking and very very precise.
"You're making me think you've got a rusalka caul in there," Kate says, taking a break from watching him peeeeel off the tape as though it's made of diamond or something.
"Oh, this is just as rare!"
He lifts the lid with something like holy awe and his eyes light up. Kate peers at the rather tatty looking comic-book sitting inside a precisely-cut foam cushion and feels her stomach lurch a little.
"First edition?"
"Oh yeah. Adventure Heroes #10 - the introduction of the Diabolical Duo!"
Kate winces, but Henry's too involved in admiring his new acquisition to notice.
--
His name was Derek Baker, and he was a huge nerd. The kids would call him 'Der-der-derek,' in thick, slow accents and he was the butt of every joke around school.
Kate was nine and 'acting out' according to the school counsellor. Her mom was busy with Thad, who was a noisy, sleepless baby, and she was bored and missing her dad. And Derek annoyed her with his too-quiet voice and his too-blunt stare and his inability to realise when someone wasn't listening to him ramble on about whatever topic he'd gotten into his head.
This one day, Derek had been particularly annoying - chattering on about something Kate wasn't listening to. She was tired because Thad had screamed all night, and angry because her mom was thinking of moving away from Chicago and heading east and Kate didn't want to leave.
So when Mitch Hadrell cornered her at lunch, she was ripe for mischief.
"Hey, Freelander! Bet you can't sneak this leaky bottle into Der-der-derek's backpack without him noticing!"
"Of course I can," she said, nonchalant. Mitch was one of the best looking boys in the class, after all.
"Bet you ten dollars you can't."
Kate sniffed. "Do you even have ten dollars?"
He pulled it from his pocket and waved it around. "It's all yours if you can get this," he brandished the full bottle of water, "into Dorkhead's backpack."
She snatched the bottle and the bill. "You get it back if I fail," she said and dodged when he lunged for her. "A Freelander keeps her word." That had been her dad's phrase, too. A Freelander keeps his word, Katie. As they say here, you dance with the one what brung you.
It was easy peasy.
"Hey Derek, whatcha doing?"
"I got this comic book!" He brandished the cover, red and gold and blue at her, apparently delighted that someone was taking an interest in him. "See? It's called Adventure Heroes #10!"
"Yeah, nice," she said, dutifully looking over at the brightly-inked pages and leaning back a little as though to look over his shoulder while she angled to drop the bottle into his open bag behind him. "So it's a really old comic book? Why don't you just get a new one at the comic book store?"
"It's not just an old comic book!" He peered at her, offended by her ignorance. "It's the first appearance of the Diabolical Duo! They're new in this chapter, although they're not new anymore. They've been around for nearly thirty years, causing trouble for Powerman and his friends!"
"Right. I forgot." Not that Kate had known in the first place. Not that she cared. But by now, the bottle was safely in the bag, so she put her hands back in her lap and wiped them surreptitiously on her jeans. She smiled and nodded as he went on about how much his dad had paid for the book and how he wasn't supposed to bring it to school, but he was going to take such good care of it - things that were pretty boring.
Kate resisted rolling her eyes, tuned him out, and made good her escape just as soon as she could.
Mitch Hadrell and his buddies thought she was okay after that.
But Derek burst into tears when he saw her the next day and never spoke to her again.
A month later, Kate's family moved to Detroit.
--
Kate's never told Will about the drugstore robbery.
--
She's up in her hideaway with her laptop when Will drifts in. She glances up from her tables of market prices on several items that she might be able to persaude Magnus to pay for if she plays her cards right. The double-take is hammed up for fun - he’s dressed in shirt and tie with his jacket hanging over his arm.
"Looking pretty snazzy there, Z-man."
He smiles, but it's halfhearted as he loosens his tie. "I had a funeral to go to. Stan O’Farrow."
Oh. That was today? Kate manages not to grimace, manages to remember to breathe. "You knew him?"
He shrugs. "Not very well. We weren't exactly buddies." His eyes drift across the sunlit room, skimming furniture and knick knacks. "My ex knew his wife pretty well, though."
“How is she? His wife, not your ex." She adds the qualification on more to make him smile than because he might think she's asking after his ex-girlfriend..
A half-smile tilts the corners of his mouth before it fades. "She's coping. I guess. As much as you cope when you've been held hostage and get out to find your husband's dead. The department has people to get her trauma counselling, but..."
"It's not enough." Kate can imagine. And she can imagine the kids now, the realisation that their dad won't be coming home ever again, feeling the loss like a slap in the face.
"At least they were found."
Will says it like a mantra, like it's something he can cling to, even if other things are going pear-shaped. It’s a side of him she doesn’t see too often - the more emotionally open side. More since the incident with the macri in Mumbai, but still pretty rare.
"No leads on Mr. Mysterious?"
He glances around the room again, his eyes narrowing a little as he takes in the bright space - comfy rugs and well-worn furniture. It's not a formal workspace like his or Magnus' offices, but then the kind of work Kate does tends to avoid papertrails and formal categorising.
"They've got no leads, no hints. Neither she nor the kids ever saw his face, just a hood and robes. You guys didn't see him at all?"
Kate shook her head. She doesn't like remembering the way O’Farrow cowered, collapsing like someone had cut his strings, the way he convulsed before his body relaxed into death. "He was staring past us up onto the roof, but when we turned, there wasn't anyone there."
Will opens his mouth. Shuts it. And Kate looks up at him, her eyes sharp and narrow. "What?"
He shuffles his feet. It's never a good sign. "I was thinking on the way home from the funeral. You say you didn't see him, but there are things we notice without realising it. If you were willing to do a memory recall exercise - a kind of hypnosis..."
Kate blinks. "No."
"Kate--"
"Save it. The answer's no. And it's always going to be no." There is no way she's going to let anyone rummage around her subconscious. Especially not a cop. Or ex-cop.
He holds up his hands. "Okay, I just thought I'd ask." But there’s a distance now, none of the openness of before.
Kate regrets the distance, but she doesn’t apologise.
At least this time there wasn’t any blood.
--
By the time she was sixteen, Kate was well on the way to being an accomplished thief.
Shoplifting was easy - no challenge to it. The trick was being aware of what you wanted, not taking more than you could carry, and knowing how to hold yourself on the way out. It was just panache, and having the sense to pick the right time.
Technology was something she learned along the way - both the capabilities of hers and the limits of theirs. Besides, procedure never kept up with the pace of technology, and the trick was to think of the holes faster than they did, and pick the right time to move.
And when things went wrong, to get the fuck out.
Things went very wrong very fast at the drugstore.
She’d been running with those guys for nearly two months, the youngest and the tech-head; nicknamed ‘Indie’ since she wasn't about to give them her real name. That was how these things worked. And she didn't want her exploits to trace back to her mom and Thad.
It started with the alarm codes. Kate swore at the laptop several times, ran her breaker program again to the tune of no love, and then leaped back when Della shot the door up.
Glass shattered everywhere, a few fragments spilling across the precious laptop. "What are you doing?"
"Della--" Tim protested.
"I'm getting us in since little Indie can't!"
"You're gonna get us in trouble with the cops!"
"Fuck the cops! Are you gonna help or are you gonna whine, Timmy?"
This wasn’t the plan. The plan was organised and prepared. But Della had been twitchy of late, with the wild-eyed look that said she was using. Kate didn't use and didn't approve - not that that meant shit around here. She was the youngest of the gang, the tech-smart one. The one to get them in and out without alarms.
That was what she should've been.
Later on, when she was driving too-carefully down the road in a stolen car, all she could think was that this was her fault. If her code breakers had worked they’d have been in and out with the goods before the young cop spotted the flashing light on his way home from the precinct and came to investigate. She wouldn’t have been surprised. He wouldn’t have been shot by Della.
And Kate wouldn’t have dropped to her knees beside the bleeding cop, trying to staunch the wound while her senses screamed that she should run, run, run before she got caught and ended up with a charge sheet at sixteen.
The others fled without looking back. Kate never saw them again.
Self-preservation and fear tried to take front seat; she shoved them to the back.
Maybe he was a cop, but he wasn't gonna bleed out on her watch. Not if Kate had anything to say about it. It was a drugstore, for God's sake. There was everything from plastic gloves to medication - not that she was going to get that detailed.
Kate created a makeshift tourniquet from bandages and weighed down a display unit to press against the wound. But she only just got out ahead of the security guard and ended up boosting a car several parking lots away. Her hands shook as she hotwired the old Escort, but she steadied once she had her hands on the wheel. She had to.
Now, self-preservation took over. She needed a plan. She needed to get out of town. And she needed somewhere to stay.
Family friends provided a temporary refuge - Parvi and Sunil scolded her for running away and not telling her mom, but they took her in without question, which was more important.
The cop survived, so she heard.
And two weeks later, Kate headed for Montreal.
--
Kate's never told the Big Guy about the succubus.
--
It's August in Florida. The temperatures are clearing 100 easy, and the salt air off the Gulf is making her think of margaritas and buffed and tanned hunks down by the beach. At least until they get to the warehouses.
The first thing that greets her nose is the stench of the place. No air conditioning here - it's a bakehouse. "My God."
Beside her, the Big Guy huffs. “Needs cleaning.”
“I don’t even want to think what the cages are like,” Kate says.
Problem is that she doesn't have to think what the cages are like - she can see what they are, perfectly well.
"This doesn't make sense," she mutters as she hauls up a small cage in which an Inferior Quetzalcoatl is shuffling around and around, his 'feathers' lank in the heat and humidity. "If this is their merch, they should've been taking better care of it."
"Don't care. Money's money."
"Yeah, but this little guy?" She holds up the Quetzalcoatl cage. "Like this, he'll fetch, oh, two, maybe three grand. You groom him properly, get him through the molt so he's got his plumage back, he'll fetch five or six. That's easily double the price for a little extra work."
"And you always did the extra?" The ironic look is probably supposed to shame her.
"Of course!" Kate never saw the point in mistreating your goods.
She goes out to put the Quetzalcoatl in the truck and lets him nip at her fingertips before tapping him fondly on the brow, then heads back into the stench of the warehouse.
And finds the Big Guy kneeling beside an abnormal curled up in what looks like pain. The body's humanoid, but arms are insectile, with pincers that Kate wouldn't like to end up fighting against. The head is long and pointed like the Alien, only with large, bulbuous eyes, green as moss. Those eyes flicker to her then back to the Big Guy, who glances at her and huffs.
"A friend. Can we get you anything?"
The abnormal makes a huff, not unlike the Big Guy’s ones. And Kate, beginning to turn away to see to some of the other smaller creatures, pauses as he rears back.
"Magnus can--"
A huff interrupts him, and one delicate, insectile limb brushes across the abdomen, the claws opening as though to show the spread of something through the body.
"What?" Kate asks, although she can guess.
"The liver has already broken down into poisons."
"So it's dying?"
"By slow degrees." The Big Guy huffs as he looks up at Kate. "Zhe is asking for mercy."
She swallows. "Can we give it?"
"There's a box with a red handle in the van, behind the passenger seat. Second syringe from the left - with a blue cap on the tip."
Kate finds the box where he says, finds the syringe as he describes it. Her hands don't shake as she takes it to the Big Guy and the dying abnormal.
She never traded in the intelligent ones - nothing that could ask her why. It was only that last job when the Cabal demanded not just animals or Abnormals, but people; and that was because they had her over a barrel, and it was jump or be pushed.
This time, she makes herself watch.
--
It was a club in New York, flashing lights, pounding music, and a backstairs entry down to a storage space below full of boxes labelled with everything from medical supplies to electronic goods.
Kate didn't ask, just waited where she was told to wait. Still, she couldn't help peering around the room, curious but not minded to explore at the cost of this job. The music was still audible down here, but muted. If they kept the offices down here, the rooms were probably soundproofed - useful for working, among other things.
Deep in the back of the storage area, something metal clattered to the ground - not a crash or a smash, but the tinkle of something spilling small, metallic pieces all around.
Silence.
Kate's curiosity got the better of her. She glanced back in the direction that the goon went, then picked her way through the maze of boxes and shelves towards the noise, her FireStorm .22 firmly in hand.
All the way in the back row of shelves was a cage, maybe two yards by two yards. And in it...
Her skin shimmered translucent gold, her hair was a blue so saturated it looks black in the low light, and the face was pointed and perfect. Human-sized, humanoid, winged, and fork-tailed, the succubus glared at Kate with huge silvery eyes, while her tail lashed sharply behind the confines of the cage's bars.
They were incredibly rare - so rare that Kate had only ever seen drawings of them, not even photographs. There'd been hundreds of them five thousand years ago, when human civilisation was just starting out, but humanity weeded them down to less than a half-dozen by the 1900s. Declawed, with their wings slashed to ribbons and their tongues cut out of their mouths, they were paraded as freaks of nature in circuses, or used as sex toys by generation upon generation of wealthy elites.
She stared at the succubus, drawn by the glowing silver of those eyes. It stared back at her, wary and watchful. She took a step forward, then stopped as metal scraped, ground between her foot and the cold cement floor.
Even in their plastic sheaths the scalpel blades had a deadly sheen. Medical-grade blades, Kate saw when she crouched down to sweep a hand through the packets. Only why did it want--?
"Shit."
She leaped back as the succubus' tail lashed out towards her, fast as a whip, missing her by inches.
In its cage, the succubus glanced over its shoulder and bared its pointed teeth in something like a grin - or a grimace. Its tail scraped across the floor, a whisper of sound beneath the thumping bass line overhead. Kate scrambled backwards, panting.
It wasn't reaching for her.
The forked tail swept along the ground, just shy of the nearest scalpel blade. The succubus hissed in frustration, then looked up.
Kate met the creature's gaze through the bars.
Large silver eyes were set in a sharp, pointed face, her wings were a lattice of holes and patterns that looked pretty enough but which meant she hadn’t flown in years. Her hands and feet were declawed, the nails ripped out entirely, never to grow back. And in her mouth lay the stump of what was once a tongue, forever silenced.
A thousand years old - if not more - and reduced to this.
The music upstairs pounded away, like Kate's heartbeat, like the triple hearts of the succubus in a chest Anna Nicole Smith would envy.
Voices sounded, far and distant through the shelves.
Kate climbed back to her feet and brushed herself off. She looked back at the creature she'd never seen before, and which she'd never see again. Then she kicked at the scalpels so they slid across the floor towards the cage, and walked away.
At the turn of the aisle, she glanced back.
A sliver of light gleamed in the darkness, brimming at the edge of lucent eyes.
--
Kate's never told Helen about the less salutory things she's done.
But she wouldn't be surprised to find that Helen already knows.
fin
SUMMARY: Kate's not proud of everything she's done.
RATING: PG-13
CHARACTERS: Kate, Henry, Will, Big Guy
CATEGORY: character study
WORD COUNT: ~3,500
WARNINGS: ( warnings) Scenarios containing schoolyard bullying, self-termination.
DISCLAIMER: Kate Freelander and co aren't mine, this is just some fun, and I make no money from writing these characters.
NOTES: Right, so this was my idea for the sfaflashfic challenge 'Secrets'. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to finish it before the deadline, so it's just going to halfamoon's Celebration Of Female Characters. It's rather dark in parts; she's not exactly a tame lion. (Yes, I think I am going to use that phrase for Kate. Helen, on the other hand, would be the opposite: a creature that was supposed to be tamed to the hand and went slightly feral instead... The Cat That Walks Alone, perhaps?)
Untold Things
Kate's never told Henry about the month her family left Chicago.
--
The Big Guy brings the mail around while she's helping Henry with a security upgrade in his lab. Well, she's doing the security upgrade, while he's purring over MOL-E like a guy with a serious hard on for his weapon.
"Hank? You need to get out more."
"Ah, but MOL-E's my special girl. She's my precious."
"Shouldn't you be pronouncing that with two 'S's?"
Henry grins and strokes the weapon like Gollum over the One Ring. Kate rolls her eyes, but smiles as she goes back to executing the upgrade scripts. He could have done this himself and let her play with MOL-E, but no. Boys and their toys.
Movement at the door turns their heads, but it's just the Big Guy, coming in with packages under his arm. "Mail."
Kate avoids receiving mail at the Sanctuary wherever possible, so she doesn't have anything in the pickup. Henry, on the other hand, gets a long, flat box that the Big Guy holds up. Only Hank has his hands full with MOL-E and there isn't a spare bit of space for it to go.
She takes it from the Big Guy, and hefts it in her hand. It's pretty light and doesn't feel very solid. Not electronics, then. "What is this?"
Henry is trying to set a new record for putting MOL-E back on her charger as Kate turns it over, noting the return address, the postmark, the 'do not bend' and 'fragile' stickers. He nearly snatches it out of her hands.
"Oh, man, it's arrived!"
"Yes, it has." Kate says, holding it back. "And what exactly is 'it'?"
"Give it to me and I'll show you!"
He clears a space and starts taking the box apart with exquisite care. It's like watching one of Magnus' surgeries take place - painstaking and very very precise.
"You're making me think you've got a rusalka caul in there," Kate says, taking a break from watching him peeeeel off the tape as though it's made of diamond or something.
"Oh, this is just as rare!"
He lifts the lid with something like holy awe and his eyes light up. Kate peers at the rather tatty looking comic-book sitting inside a precisely-cut foam cushion and feels her stomach lurch a little.
"First edition?"
"Oh yeah. Adventure Heroes #10 - the introduction of the Diabolical Duo!"
Kate winces, but Henry's too involved in admiring his new acquisition to notice.
--
His name was Derek Baker, and he was a huge nerd. The kids would call him 'Der-der-derek,' in thick, slow accents and he was the butt of every joke around school.
Kate was nine and 'acting out' according to the school counsellor. Her mom was busy with Thad, who was a noisy, sleepless baby, and she was bored and missing her dad. And Derek annoyed her with his too-quiet voice and his too-blunt stare and his inability to realise when someone wasn't listening to him ramble on about whatever topic he'd gotten into his head.
This one day, Derek had been particularly annoying - chattering on about something Kate wasn't listening to. She was tired because Thad had screamed all night, and angry because her mom was thinking of moving away from Chicago and heading east and Kate didn't want to leave.
So when Mitch Hadrell cornered her at lunch, she was ripe for mischief.
"Hey, Freelander! Bet you can't sneak this leaky bottle into Der-der-derek's backpack without him noticing!"
"Of course I can," she said, nonchalant. Mitch was one of the best looking boys in the class, after all.
"Bet you ten dollars you can't."
Kate sniffed. "Do you even have ten dollars?"
He pulled it from his pocket and waved it around. "It's all yours if you can get this," he brandished the full bottle of water, "into Dorkhead's backpack."
She snatched the bottle and the bill. "You get it back if I fail," she said and dodged when he lunged for her. "A Freelander keeps her word." That had been her dad's phrase, too. A Freelander keeps his word, Katie. As they say here, you dance with the one what brung you.
It was easy peasy.
"Hey Derek, whatcha doing?"
"I got this comic book!" He brandished the cover, red and gold and blue at her, apparently delighted that someone was taking an interest in him. "See? It's called Adventure Heroes #10!"
"Yeah, nice," she said, dutifully looking over at the brightly-inked pages and leaning back a little as though to look over his shoulder while she angled to drop the bottle into his open bag behind him. "So it's a really old comic book? Why don't you just get a new one at the comic book store?"
"It's not just an old comic book!" He peered at her, offended by her ignorance. "It's the first appearance of the Diabolical Duo! They're new in this chapter, although they're not new anymore. They've been around for nearly thirty years, causing trouble for Powerman and his friends!"
"Right. I forgot." Not that Kate had known in the first place. Not that she cared. But by now, the bottle was safely in the bag, so she put her hands back in her lap and wiped them surreptitiously on her jeans. She smiled and nodded as he went on about how much his dad had paid for the book and how he wasn't supposed to bring it to school, but he was going to take such good care of it - things that were pretty boring.
Kate resisted rolling her eyes, tuned him out, and made good her escape just as soon as she could.
Mitch Hadrell and his buddies thought she was okay after that.
But Derek burst into tears when he saw her the next day and never spoke to her again.
A month later, Kate's family moved to Detroit.
--
Kate's never told Will about the drugstore robbery.
--
She's up in her hideaway with her laptop when Will drifts in. She glances up from her tables of market prices on several items that she might be able to persaude Magnus to pay for if she plays her cards right. The double-take is hammed up for fun - he’s dressed in shirt and tie with his jacket hanging over his arm.
"Looking pretty snazzy there, Z-man."
He smiles, but it's halfhearted as he loosens his tie. "I had a funeral to go to. Stan O’Farrow."
Oh. That was today? Kate manages not to grimace, manages to remember to breathe. "You knew him?"
He shrugs. "Not very well. We weren't exactly buddies." His eyes drift across the sunlit room, skimming furniture and knick knacks. "My ex knew his wife pretty well, though."
“How is she? His wife, not your ex." She adds the qualification on more to make him smile than because he might think she's asking after his ex-girlfriend..
A half-smile tilts the corners of his mouth before it fades. "She's coping. I guess. As much as you cope when you've been held hostage and get out to find your husband's dead. The department has people to get her trauma counselling, but..."
"It's not enough." Kate can imagine. And she can imagine the kids now, the realisation that their dad won't be coming home ever again, feeling the loss like a slap in the face.
"At least they were found."
Will says it like a mantra, like it's something he can cling to, even if other things are going pear-shaped. It’s a side of him she doesn’t see too often - the more emotionally open side. More since the incident with the macri in Mumbai, but still pretty rare.
"No leads on Mr. Mysterious?"
He glances around the room again, his eyes narrowing a little as he takes in the bright space - comfy rugs and well-worn furniture. It's not a formal workspace like his or Magnus' offices, but then the kind of work Kate does tends to avoid papertrails and formal categorising.
"They've got no leads, no hints. Neither she nor the kids ever saw his face, just a hood and robes. You guys didn't see him at all?"
Kate shook her head. She doesn't like remembering the way O’Farrow cowered, collapsing like someone had cut his strings, the way he convulsed before his body relaxed into death. "He was staring past us up onto the roof, but when we turned, there wasn't anyone there."
Will opens his mouth. Shuts it. And Kate looks up at him, her eyes sharp and narrow. "What?"
He shuffles his feet. It's never a good sign. "I was thinking on the way home from the funeral. You say you didn't see him, but there are things we notice without realising it. If you were willing to do a memory recall exercise - a kind of hypnosis..."
Kate blinks. "No."
"Kate--"
"Save it. The answer's no. And it's always going to be no." There is no way she's going to let anyone rummage around her subconscious. Especially not a cop. Or ex-cop.
He holds up his hands. "Okay, I just thought I'd ask." But there’s a distance now, none of the openness of before.
Kate regrets the distance, but she doesn’t apologise.
At least this time there wasn’t any blood.
--
By the time she was sixteen, Kate was well on the way to being an accomplished thief.
Shoplifting was easy - no challenge to it. The trick was being aware of what you wanted, not taking more than you could carry, and knowing how to hold yourself on the way out. It was just panache, and having the sense to pick the right time.
Technology was something she learned along the way - both the capabilities of hers and the limits of theirs. Besides, procedure never kept up with the pace of technology, and the trick was to think of the holes faster than they did, and pick the right time to move.
And when things went wrong, to get the fuck out.
Things went very wrong very fast at the drugstore.
She’d been running with those guys for nearly two months, the youngest and the tech-head; nicknamed ‘Indie’ since she wasn't about to give them her real name. That was how these things worked. And she didn't want her exploits to trace back to her mom and Thad.
It started with the alarm codes. Kate swore at the laptop several times, ran her breaker program again to the tune of no love, and then leaped back when Della shot the door up.
Glass shattered everywhere, a few fragments spilling across the precious laptop. "What are you doing?"
"Della--" Tim protested.
"I'm getting us in since little Indie can't!"
"You're gonna get us in trouble with the cops!"
"Fuck the cops! Are you gonna help or are you gonna whine, Timmy?"
This wasn’t the plan. The plan was organised and prepared. But Della had been twitchy of late, with the wild-eyed look that said she was using. Kate didn't use and didn't approve - not that that meant shit around here. She was the youngest of the gang, the tech-smart one. The one to get them in and out without alarms.
That was what she should've been.
Later on, when she was driving too-carefully down the road in a stolen car, all she could think was that this was her fault. If her code breakers had worked they’d have been in and out with the goods before the young cop spotted the flashing light on his way home from the precinct and came to investigate. She wouldn’t have been surprised. He wouldn’t have been shot by Della.
And Kate wouldn’t have dropped to her knees beside the bleeding cop, trying to staunch the wound while her senses screamed that she should run, run, run before she got caught and ended up with a charge sheet at sixteen.
The others fled without looking back. Kate never saw them again.
Self-preservation and fear tried to take front seat; she shoved them to the back.
Maybe he was a cop, but he wasn't gonna bleed out on her watch. Not if Kate had anything to say about it. It was a drugstore, for God's sake. There was everything from plastic gloves to medication - not that she was going to get that detailed.
Kate created a makeshift tourniquet from bandages and weighed down a display unit to press against the wound. But she only just got out ahead of the security guard and ended up boosting a car several parking lots away. Her hands shook as she hotwired the old Escort, but she steadied once she had her hands on the wheel. She had to.
Now, self-preservation took over. She needed a plan. She needed to get out of town. And she needed somewhere to stay.
Family friends provided a temporary refuge - Parvi and Sunil scolded her for running away and not telling her mom, but they took her in without question, which was more important.
The cop survived, so she heard.
And two weeks later, Kate headed for Montreal.
--
Kate's never told the Big Guy about the succubus.
--
It's August in Florida. The temperatures are clearing 100 easy, and the salt air off the Gulf is making her think of margaritas and buffed and tanned hunks down by the beach. At least until they get to the warehouses.
The first thing that greets her nose is the stench of the place. No air conditioning here - it's a bakehouse. "My God."
Beside her, the Big Guy huffs. “Needs cleaning.”
“I don’t even want to think what the cages are like,” Kate says.
Problem is that she doesn't have to think what the cages are like - she can see what they are, perfectly well.
"This doesn't make sense," she mutters as she hauls up a small cage in which an Inferior Quetzalcoatl is shuffling around and around, his 'feathers' lank in the heat and humidity. "If this is their merch, they should've been taking better care of it."
"Don't care. Money's money."
"Yeah, but this little guy?" She holds up the Quetzalcoatl cage. "Like this, he'll fetch, oh, two, maybe three grand. You groom him properly, get him through the molt so he's got his plumage back, he'll fetch five or six. That's easily double the price for a little extra work."
"And you always did the extra?" The ironic look is probably supposed to shame her.
"Of course!" Kate never saw the point in mistreating your goods.
She goes out to put the Quetzalcoatl in the truck and lets him nip at her fingertips before tapping him fondly on the brow, then heads back into the stench of the warehouse.
And finds the Big Guy kneeling beside an abnormal curled up in what looks like pain. The body's humanoid, but arms are insectile, with pincers that Kate wouldn't like to end up fighting against. The head is long and pointed like the Alien, only with large, bulbuous eyes, green as moss. Those eyes flicker to her then back to the Big Guy, who glances at her and huffs.
"A friend. Can we get you anything?"
The abnormal makes a huff, not unlike the Big Guy’s ones. And Kate, beginning to turn away to see to some of the other smaller creatures, pauses as he rears back.
"Magnus can--"
A huff interrupts him, and one delicate, insectile limb brushes across the abdomen, the claws opening as though to show the spread of something through the body.
"What?" Kate asks, although she can guess.
"The liver has already broken down into poisons."
"So it's dying?"
"By slow degrees." The Big Guy huffs as he looks up at Kate. "Zhe is asking for mercy."
She swallows. "Can we give it?"
"There's a box with a red handle in the van, behind the passenger seat. Second syringe from the left - with a blue cap on the tip."
Kate finds the box where he says, finds the syringe as he describes it. Her hands don't shake as she takes it to the Big Guy and the dying abnormal.
She never traded in the intelligent ones - nothing that could ask her why. It was only that last job when the Cabal demanded not just animals or Abnormals, but people; and that was because they had her over a barrel, and it was jump or be pushed.
This time, she makes herself watch.
--
It was a club in New York, flashing lights, pounding music, and a backstairs entry down to a storage space below full of boxes labelled with everything from medical supplies to electronic goods.
Kate didn't ask, just waited where she was told to wait. Still, she couldn't help peering around the room, curious but not minded to explore at the cost of this job. The music was still audible down here, but muted. If they kept the offices down here, the rooms were probably soundproofed - useful for working, among other things.
Deep in the back of the storage area, something metal clattered to the ground - not a crash or a smash, but the tinkle of something spilling small, metallic pieces all around.
Silence.
Kate's curiosity got the better of her. She glanced back in the direction that the goon went, then picked her way through the maze of boxes and shelves towards the noise, her FireStorm .22 firmly in hand.
All the way in the back row of shelves was a cage, maybe two yards by two yards. And in it...
Her skin shimmered translucent gold, her hair was a blue so saturated it looks black in the low light, and the face was pointed and perfect. Human-sized, humanoid, winged, and fork-tailed, the succubus glared at Kate with huge silvery eyes, while her tail lashed sharply behind the confines of the cage's bars.
They were incredibly rare - so rare that Kate had only ever seen drawings of them, not even photographs. There'd been hundreds of them five thousand years ago, when human civilisation was just starting out, but humanity weeded them down to less than a half-dozen by the 1900s. Declawed, with their wings slashed to ribbons and their tongues cut out of their mouths, they were paraded as freaks of nature in circuses, or used as sex toys by generation upon generation of wealthy elites.
She stared at the succubus, drawn by the glowing silver of those eyes. It stared back at her, wary and watchful. She took a step forward, then stopped as metal scraped, ground between her foot and the cold cement floor.
Even in their plastic sheaths the scalpel blades had a deadly sheen. Medical-grade blades, Kate saw when she crouched down to sweep a hand through the packets. Only why did it want--?
"Shit."
She leaped back as the succubus' tail lashed out towards her, fast as a whip, missing her by inches.
In its cage, the succubus glanced over its shoulder and bared its pointed teeth in something like a grin - or a grimace. Its tail scraped across the floor, a whisper of sound beneath the thumping bass line overhead. Kate scrambled backwards, panting.
It wasn't reaching for her.
The forked tail swept along the ground, just shy of the nearest scalpel blade. The succubus hissed in frustration, then looked up.
Kate met the creature's gaze through the bars.
Large silver eyes were set in a sharp, pointed face, her wings were a lattice of holes and patterns that looked pretty enough but which meant she hadn’t flown in years. Her hands and feet were declawed, the nails ripped out entirely, never to grow back. And in her mouth lay the stump of what was once a tongue, forever silenced.
A thousand years old - if not more - and reduced to this.
The music upstairs pounded away, like Kate's heartbeat, like the triple hearts of the succubus in a chest Anna Nicole Smith would envy.
Voices sounded, far and distant through the shelves.
Kate climbed back to her feet and brushed herself off. She looked back at the creature she'd never seen before, and which she'd never see again. Then she kicked at the scalpels so they slid across the floor towards the cage, and walked away.
At the turn of the aisle, she glanced back.
A sliver of light gleamed in the darkness, brimming at the edge of lucent eyes.
--
Kate's never told Helen about the less salutory things she's done.
But she wouldn't be surprised to find that Helen already knows.
fin