Schuldig
didn’t run into Willow for another week, which on the one hand might have
been strange considering how certainly Crawford had prophesied that the girl
was inevitably entangled in his future, but on the other hand, Schuldig *had*
locked himself in his apartment and refused to come out.
Pure
bloody-minded stubbornness, however, as Bradley Crawford felt free to point out
with an unbearable air of self-satisfaction, could only go so far; he
considered it impressive that Schuldig had lasted a week when the telepath
could clearly hear Farfarello’s nonsensical and increasingly bloody
thoughts from the storey above.
Thus it came to
pass that Schuldig, his teeth gritted in irritation against Crawford’s
smug thoughts and Farfarello’s gruesome ones, dressed himself fully in
black (it was a new trend he had found he liked), wrapped his new black
bandanna around his head, found his sunglasses under the couch, and
rollerbladed defiantly out onto Fifth Avenue.
It took him a
good hour and a half to get to the Hudson River Park all the way down by
Battery Park City. Crawford had wanted headquarters that would impress even the
richest of clients and had only found what he was looking for in one of the
most expensive buildings in Manhattan, on Fifth Avenue in the mid-nineties.
Schwarz’ leader had claimed the penthouse for himself, because with his
back to the gargantuan windows overlooking Central Park it appeared the whole
of New York City was under his command. He had also taken the storey below it
as his own personal living quarters.
On the storey
below him was Nagi; below that, Farfarello and his eerily padded walls. Then
came Schuldig himself, and six storeys from the top of the building was their
“communal area,” which was where the entrance to the extraspace
room had been placed, but was pretty much just where Schwarz sat and watched
reruns of their favorite soap operas—“Passions” in
particular—on the Friday nights when they had nothing to do.
The building was
quite nice; everyone who lived there was so unspeakably wealthy that there was
no way on Heaven or Earth they had made their money legally—so late-night
comings and goings were overlooked by neighbors, porters, conciérge and
doorman (Schuldig still didn’t know what the difference was between those
last two). The only problem was that, besides the Metropolitan Museum of Art
and the Guggenheim, there was absolutely nothing to do on the Upper East Side
of Manhattan. Schuldig hated museums. He wasn’t into art and he
didn’t much care about wine jugs some dead guys had used thousands of
years before his own time. Crawford called him crass, but then, Crawford fell
on his well-bred derriére every time he tried to rollerblade, so
Schuldig didn’t much care.
Either way, the
nicest parks, best restaurants and most illegal clubs were downtown, which was
a Hell of a commute to take all the time if it was out of Schuldig’s way
to go down the bike path by Riverside Drive. Luckily, today the bike path was
exactly what he needed as it went straight to Hudson River Park; it was a warm,
sunny May day, and enough of the people around him were having such a miserable
time that Schuldig felt like a king in comparison. Once he’d gotten
across town and to Riverside Drive, Schuldig bladed lazily downtown, listening
to a mix on his MP3 player and eavesdropping on unsuspecting citizens’
thoughts.
Oh, what a
relief it was to be able to *hear* people again. If—no, *when*, according
to Crawford—Schuldig ran into Willow again, he was going to ask her
exactly what she thought she was doing, blockading her thoughts like that, and
why the Hell the vampires had seemed to suck his *own* thoughts out altogether!
Schuldig complained constantly about the rush of intruders’ consciousness
against his thought barriers, and he meant what he said. But the sense of
complete isolation that his lack of telepathy had left him with had *not* been
pleasant.
Schuldig
impatiently dismissed his gloomy thoughts as he cruised past the Tribeca Bridge
and onto the curve of the promenade. The wide green lawns were populated but
not quite crowded yet, as it was still before noon on a weekday. Schuldig
spotted his favorite place—underneath a particularly shady tree—and
passed a group of people who had just finished their morning aerobics class. He
smirked—some of them were *really* out of shape and needed, desperately,
to be warned never to wear spandex again—and braked at the edge of the
lawn before gingerly teetering out onto the grass.
As Schuldig
headed towards his tree, he noticed with a scowl of annoyance that
someone—he didn’t really notice much about them—had already
taken his spot against the tree trunk. Well, it was tough luck for them; it
would be easy to hop into their mind for a second and do a quick bit of casual
suggesting that somewhere *else* might be far preferable. It was
Schuldig’s favorite method of getting his way.
Suddenly he
became deeply interested in something else and turned right. Schuldig,
intrigued, went with this urge for a couple of steps until he realized that he
was complying easily—like the idiots he persuaded all the
time!—with the kind of subtle manipulation he was accustomed to using;
this abrupt need to wander off in a different direction was certainly not his
own.
Schuldig frowned
darkly and turned back around towards the tree, finding to his frustration that
whenever he tried to focus his eyes on the person in *his* spot that his gaze
slid casually away to the side; his feet didn’t seem to want to move
either. The person, from what Schuldig could see from quick glances out of the
corner of his eye, was completely disinterested in whatever was going on around
her—or was it a him? Schuldig was dutifully impressed by the amount of
skill and control it would take to keep a mind-bender like this one up,
particularly around a large group of people: none of the stragglers from the
aerobics class showed any sign of even thinking about glancing in this
direction. The only reason that Schuldig had noticed himself was that he was a
telepath.
Impatiently,
Schuldig probed towards the mind of his newfound rival and was quite surprised
to find… nothing. Oh, there was undeniably a *presence* there, but
sheltered behind a carefully blank wall which was, now that Schuldig thought
about it, oddly familiar…
<Willow?!>
There was a
sudden jolt of *awareness* from the blank mindscape and then Schuldig was
shoved unceremoniously back into his own mindscape with a strong—and
deliberately rough, like that of a nightclub’s bouncer—mental flex.
Affronted,
Schuldig poked again and was met by steely guards and a voice—sharp,
dismissive, annoyed, but most definitely Willow’s—that informed him
in no uncertain terms that whoever he was, she knew he had mind-probes and he
had no business using them against her (she also added, in no uncertain terms,
what she thought of those probes and where he could stick them. Schuldig
winced.).
<Damn it,
Willow, you know me!>
There was
surprise, incredulity, and then sudden, vague recognition.
<Oh—you’re the telepath from last Tuesday, aren’t you?
Hm.>
Mildly offended
that he didn’t strike a more enthused chord, Schuldig frowned slightly
and said, <C’mon, let me in.>
<… Into
my mind? I think not.>
Schuldig
didn’t think he much liked the contemptuous tone of Willow’s voice.
<Into your personal space, then? I feel like an ass standing out here.>
Willow seemed to
be weighing the idea dubiously. <…Nah, I don’t think so. I was
just about to leave anyway.> The compulsion shields dropped unceremoniously
and Schuldig was suddenly able to properly look at his new telepathic rival.
Slightly more
petite than he remembered, Willow stood a couple of inches shorter than
Schuldig himself did. She had apparently been participating in the aerobics
class that had just finished; she wore a loose gray tank top above calf-length
black spandex leggings and worn jogging sneakers. Her hair, gleaming almost orange in the late morning
sunlight, was pulled back into a bun; several loose strands stuck to her
slightly sweaty face.
Willow hefted a
small sportspack onto her shoulder and arched an expectant eyebrow at Schuldig.
“Well?” she said aloud. “Let’s go.”
“Where,”
Schuldig asked testily, “are we going?”
Willow directed
an unladylike snort in his direction as she turned East, towards the stairways
that led onto the sidewalk and out of Hudson River Park. “And you call
yourself a telepath.” She shook her head despairingly.
“You’re buying me ice cream. Come on.”
* * *
“Didn’t
you just finish an aerobics class?”
“Sure
did.”
“Then why
are you stuffing yourself with fat, caffeine and sugar? At my expense, I might
add.”
The pair was
making their way East down Fourteenth Street. They had just walked to Emack
& Bolio’s—an ice cream parlor that, Willow assured Schuldig,
was the only place in New York City that could rival Cones. Schuldig assumed
this was another ice cream parlor and took Willow at her word—he
didn’t keep track of sweet shops.
“I like
ice cream,” Willow explained. Schuldig grunted dubiously. “I
don’t take the aerobics class to lose weight, I take it to build up
muscle. It’s not the same thing at all,” she added, giving Schuldig
her I-know-what-you-were-about-to-say look, which he had come to know all too
well in the last forty-five minutes. “I don’t need to lose
weight.” This was true—the last time they’d met Schuldig had
been able to observe, even in the dark, that Willow was on the bony side.
“I *do* need to keep in shape.” Fair enough.
Willow tilted
her ice cream cone in her hand and gave the sweet stuff a satisfied lick.
“Mm—Grasshopper pie. I love this stuff. Want to try it?”
Schuldig
blinked. “No.”
“Your
loss.” Willow shrugged nonchalantly. “Now. What did you
want?”
“Want?”
Willow gave him
her reproving look. “Come on, don’t give me that. You
wouldn’t put up with me mooching off of you if there wasn’t
something you wanted. Not that I don’t appreciate the ice cream.”
Schuldig
blinked. “Ah. True.” He considered for a moment, and then said,
“I want to ask you out to dinner.”
Willow’s
reproving look intensified as she raised her eyebrows further. “*You*
want to ask *me* out to dinner? Why? You don’t even like me.”
“Excuse
me, but who here is the telepath? That’s what I thought. Yes or
no?”
“To the
dinner question?” Willow nibbled thoughtfully on the waffle part of her
cone and shrugged. “I don’t know. Why do you want to go out to
dinner with me?”
Schuldig
hadn’t really planned this ahead of time. “Um…”
“I *knew*
you didn’t like me. Look, I’m all sweaty and gross. We can go back
to my apartment. I’ll wash off real quick and change, and I’ll make
us lunch, and you can think about why you want to take me out to dinner. Okay?”
She was taking
this surprisingly well. “All right. Lead on.”
