“Why
didn’t you tell
me I was going to get rescued from seven vampires by a skinny little redhead
from California?” Schuldig exploded hoarsely, clenching his hands into
tight fists by his sides.
Bradley
Crawford, quite unmoved by his colleague’s outburst, propped his elbows
on his expensive maple desk and steepled his fingers in front of his face in a
carefully composed manner. “You’re still alive, aren’t
you?”
“That’s
not the point!” Schuldig raved. “Your visions aren’t sure
things, Brad!”
“—Don’t call me Brad,” Crawford
interrupted smoothly. He peered expectantly over his fingertips. “But do
go on.” He tacked a smirk onto the end of his request to make sure the
condescension was clear.
Schuldig, being
a telepath, was receiving Crawford’s attitude with perfect clarity and
didn’t need or want the accompanying facial expressions. “I could
have gotten
killed,” he said, “very dead. I couldn’t think at all when
they were around! I have no idea why they affected me like that, I never thought they would—”
“Did your
rescuer provide you with any sort of hypothesis as to why the undead render you
incapable of action?” Crawford asked, folding his hands on his desk and
leaning forward.
“No. She
had plenty of helpful info on vampires themselves, but—Hey. You know this already. Why do I bother
telling you stuff? Why do you bother listening?”
“I
don’t usually listen,” Crawford pointed out curtly, “but it
often helps you to
recap your experiences. And while I very often get multiple good ideas of what might happen, it is a less than usual
occurrence for me to know for certain that a single something will happen, and even more unusual for
these… premonitions to come equipped with a clear video reel, soundtrack
and Cliffs Notes besides. I am then also saddled with the tedium of separating
the relevant of what I can see before me from the inconsequential. Please,
Schuldig, try to remember that I am not omniscient. We’re not done
here,” he added sharply as the telepath rolled his eyes and turned to
leave.
Schuldig heaved
an impatient sigh and rotated to face the desk again. “We’re
not?”
“Quite
soon,” Crawford said, ignoring the other man’s tone and shuffling
some papers importantly, “You will run into that girl—”
“—Willow—”
“—Yes,
her—again. You will invite her to dinner with Schwarz, here at our
headquarters.”
“Dinner,”
Schuldig repeated.
“Yes.”
“Here at
headquarters.”
“I
believe,” Crawford said with long-suffering patience, “that that is
what I said.”
“I
don’t suppose whatever vision you just had dropped a hint as to why the Hell I’d invite her here for
dinner?” Schulding asked dryly.
“As a
matter of fact, I know exactly
why you’ll invite Willow here.” Crawford shuffled some more papers
and assumed an infuriatingly smug and oddly predatory smile. “The
reason,” he continued, rolling the r slightly, “is that I am giving you a direct order,
now, to extend the offer of a dinner to the girl the next time you see
her.” The smug expression was bordering on unbearable now, and in an
unusual fit of self-satisfaction, Crawford lifted a manila folder from a
discreet drawer in his expensive desk and shuffled the papers into it.
“Before you ask why I am giving you this order, which you were about to
do, so don’t bother, I’ll tell you that Willow is tangled up in
every single possibility I can see for you. You will be spending quite a bit of
time with her in the near future. Seeing as this is apparently inevitable,
I’d like to start the process quickly and get this whole thing over with
as soon as possible.”
“What
if,” Schuldig said irritably, “she proves impervious to my charms
and declines?”
Crawford slapped
the folder down on the desk and looked as if he were considering losing
patience. “That is extremely unlikely; as I understand it now, that will
only happen if you’re particularly insufferable. But, anyway,
that’s what you do,
isn’t it? Get inside her head and change her mind. Don’t tell me
you’re developing scruples now; you don’t even know what they are.
You may go. You need to shower and sleep and leave me alone.”
Schuldig did as
he was told for once, closing the penthouse office’s door behind him and
making his way down the long flights of stairs to his own apartments, five
floors below. As he unlocked the doors—and then, after he entered, locked
them firmly behind him because Farfarello did live in the same building, after
all—Schuldig reflected on how very far off the mark Crawford’s
closing suggestion had been—that, for some reason, Schuldig didn’t
want to worm his sneaky way into Willow’s mind.
Far from it. As
a matter of fact, at that moment there was probably nothing that Schuldig
wanted more than to gain access to the unknown depths of his petite
savior’s psyche.
Unfortunately,
it seemed that what Schuldig wanted didn’t really matter, because almost
all of his attention while with Willow had been devoted to trying to break
through the blank surface of the girl’s mind, and the telepath had gotten
approximately nowhere. Thus, it stood that the little information he’d
been able to glean about Willow had not been from the girl herself but from the
unsuspecting Ray, who worked late nights behind the counter of Two Boots
Pizzeria.
Willow came in
almost every night, usually accompanied by a dazed-looking stranger. She would
buy her new companion—and occasionally herself as well—a slice of
pizza and a soda. Ray seemed to have had some awareness of the supernatural
before he’d met Willow, and was therefore relatively unfazed by the
girl’s hushed nightly explanations of vampires or witches or ghosts or
assorted demons to her shocked rescuees. Eventually, after several months of
nightly pizza-buying, Willow had brought in a heavy First Aid kit to Two Boots
and had asked Ray if he would mind keeping it under the counter for her, as
some of the people she brought in sustained injuries. When gently pressed for
information, Willow’s only comment had been that she didn’t think
that folks who were already plenty freaked out really needed to see her pull
medical supplies out of thin air.
Schuldig had
digested this along with his pizza, along with the fact that Ray had developed
a slight crush on Willow—whom he barely knew. The telepath found this
laughable, but had managed to keep it to himself.
Excepting the
impenetrable blocks around her mind, Willow had been friendly and forward with
information about what had happened. She’d given Schuldig an efficient
run-through of pertinent facts about vampires—standard methods of killing
them, their typical feeding habits, the necessity of cleaning bites from the
creatures as soon as possible because you couldn’t know where their
mouths had been—and mentioned one tidbit that Schuldig thought might help
him on his future inquiries as to why the vampires had caused his mind to go
all vacuum-y. Vampiric thoughts, Willow informed him matter-of-factly, were
undetectable. It had something to do with the fact that they had no
reflections.
Interesting.
Schuldig had
barely refrained from asking if *Willow* was a vampire, since her thoughts were
so thoroughly protected. So far, the only things she’d revealed about
herself were her name—first, not last—and where she’d come
from: California. She’d seemed eager to supply Schuldig with vampiric
pointers both obscure and practical, but Schuldig strongly suspected this was
because he was one of the only people Willow had rescued that received all of
this new information calmly and without bursting into hysterics.
Actually, that
last had been Ray’s personal opinion, which the man had done a fine job
of keeping to himself; Schuldig had merely, as it were, picked it up in
passing. But Ray’s thoughts had so far supplied Schuldig with good, if
spare, information on the unknown that was Willow; perhaps the other man was
right.
Willow herself
had been an animated speaker with a surprising repertoire of facial
expressions, shrugs, and hand gestures. She was only an inch or two shorter
than Schuldig, and slender; her waist definitely curved in sharply beneath her
ribs, which weren’t indecipherable. She sat with her long legs folded up
beneath her, which meant she balanced only precariously in her seat. Her hands
were a little over-large, with callused palms and long, square-nailed fingers;
her wrists were delicate, her arms bony and sharp-elbowed. A deep Widow’s
Peak made her pointy-chinned face heart-shaped. Dark hair, stylishly ragged,
gleamed red and gold in the dim light from above the Two Boots’ cash
register, and was pulled back into a brisk high ponytail that just brushed the
back of her neck; tendrils of hair, perhaps tugged loose in the fight with the
vampires, curled loosely around her face. High thin eyebrows quirked
good-naturedly above waifishly large hazel eyes framed with long thick
eyelashes, and her slender lips were curved into a perpetual generous
half-anxious smile.
Schuldig
decided, much to his own personal satisfaction, that Crawford would not like
Willow much at all. Bradley Crawford didn’t like women much, period;
he’d mentioned before that all of the ones he’d met had been
aggravatingly codependent and ingratiating. Willow didn’t particularly
seem to be either one of those, but she was young—certainly not older
than twenty, and Crawford hated young people, with the singular exception of
Nagi Naoe. Crawford also hated personable people: he preferred those who
addressed him in a deferential but business-like manner, and Willow had been
friendly, casual and enthusiastic (Crawford loathed enthusiasm unless it was
unfounded and bloodthirsty—more Farfarello’s brand of enthusiasm
than anyone else’s).
Crawford also
disdained kindness (which Willow appeared to have in abundance), charity
(Willow had that, too), slang (Willow peppered her speech with plenty of
“likes”), and casual dress (Willow had been wearing frayed jeans,
faded Keds, and an obviously old and much-beloved ratty sweatshirt). In fact,
Schuldig couldn’t much think of a single thing about Willow that Crawford
wouldn’t despise with all of his high-class, tight-assed, miserly heart.
Well. Tough luck
for Crawford. If Schuldig was going to see Willow again, he knew he
wouldn’t enjoy it—and, if he was lucky, neither would any of the
other members of Schwarz. Misery, as it was so eloquently said, loves company,
and Schuldig supposed that somewhere in the world, Crawford had to count as
human enough to be “company”…
