“You know what, honey, I think we should go somewhere.”
Ooh. A fast mover. Claire squinted at him as if she didn’t have eyesight five times sharper than a human’s 20/20, plenty sharp enough to watch his pupils dilate in the dim corridor as he looked her up and down. She said, “Have we met before?”
“Totally possible, if not in this life then maybe a past one. That might explain our connection, right? I felt it as soon as I laid eyes on you.”
For crying out loud, why did they all have the same script?
“I’m Max. And you are?”
“Verena,” she said.
His forehead crinkled for a fleeting moment of thought, then smoothed out as beer and his baser nature took over again. “Cool name.”
“I think so too.” Germanic forprotector, or so had claimed a baby-name book at the bookstore downtown.
“So, Verena, want to get out of here?”
“Where would we go?”
“I’m here on business from out of town. My hotel’s really close, and the room’s really nice.”
Her scalp prickled, but no sign of her rage showed. She knew this from long practice, long attunement to her body. Her expression was still clueless. Her stance was still relaxed. “Maybe we could get out of the noise, at least. But nothing…well, you know. Nothing too far, okay?”
“Of course not,” he said. “Only what you want.”
“We could just talk, and…maybe a little more? But if that sounds boring, we might not have a connection like you thought.”
He drew a cross over his heart. “No worries, baby. Talking sounds great to me too.”
“Let’s go then. It’s pretty loud in here.”
She made sure to stumble exactly once on the way to his car, which had a Virginia license plate and didn’t in any way resemble a rental. He wasn’t lying about the proximity, though. In five minutes, he pulled into the lot of the closest hotel.
Tonight was for justice.
Max’s human vision hadn’t even seen her as she flipped him face-down on the bed and zip tied his hands, then his feet. He’d tried to fight back without the slightest chance. Claire left him on the bed and walked a few paces away from it. One more down.
He lifted his face from the bedspread to stare at her. “You’re not drunk.”
“Good catch,” she said.
“And you’re not human.”
“Two for two.”
Claire walked to the far end of the room and unzipped her purse. First, of course, she tugged on her gray knit gloves. Then she withdrew a slightly creased manila envelope from her purse. She unpinned her daisy, keeping the lens pointed at the floor as she pressed her thumb to the left side of the stem to end recording. Then she pressed the right side, and the tiny memory card popped out into her hand. She slid the memory card into the envelope.
Max was silent while she searched the pockets of his jeans and freed his wallet. She opened the flap and performed a speculative head tilt at his driver’s license picture.
“I thought you might be a Maxwell or a Maximilian, but you’re just Max.”
He said nothing.
Claire slid his wallet into the envelope to join the memory card and held it, flap up, toward the zip-tied man. “Okay, Max Forton. Lick the seal.”
“Excuse me?”
Such a polite would-be criminal offender. “Do it.”
