All the King's Men (The Turning Series Book 1) Page 3

  “Y-Your back’s fine. It’s just… red.” Charlie propped himself up on his elbows, as he watched her walk away.

  Her eyes were furious when she looked over her shoulder. Danika pointed at the only barstool that hadn’t been rendered to splinters. “Sit.” Danika barked, and Charlie obeyed. “Stay.”

  He nodded.

  Danika noticed he had trouble looking directly at her, which might have been because she was dressed down to her bra and panties, or perhaps that she’d frightened him, but either way it didn’t matter. She grabbed her hoodie off the back of her couch and threw it back on. The length of it covered her down to her knees (she figured it must belong to that Tattooed guy, since he was a lot larger than she was), so she didn’t feel the need to slip into pants. No decency. No shame. They’d just battled it out while she was in her skivvies after all. It was like deck changing or being backstage in her dancer days. She had no boundaries.

  She turned off the record player with an exasperated sigh, and kept her eyes on him, like a hawk, taking in the visuals to analyze his appearance as she returned to the kitchen. He looked about her age. Dark hair, deep brown eyes, no scars, scuffs, or burns showing, but he sure looked like he needed a shave. The five o’clock shadow look suited him, though.

  He ran his hand through his hair, a nervous smile in the corner of his lips.

  “You got a name?” Danika kept her tone as hard as a rock. She tied her tousled mess of her black mane into a ponytail, high on the back of her head, and swept the length of it over her right shoulder.

  “Charles—er, Charlie. Charlie Matthews.” His accent was faint, though noticeable now that he wasn’t being attacked.

  “Welsh?”

  “Liverpool, but I was raised in London.” He tilted his head, looked impressed. “Good ear.”

  Danika snickered. “Trust me, you learn to appreciate cultures after hearing the words you’re all the same your whole life.”

  “Guess I’m just used to people spouting Cockney on me because that’s apparently what we all sound like.” Charlie smiled at the information offered, relaxing some as she spoke. It was an insight to her personal life, details he hadn’t solicited.

  “Don’t worry, you won’t get that from me. My father’s family was English—Kent, but he came to the States when he was a kid. My mom was Filipino but raised here.” She could have gone on. She could have explained that her mother was a first-generation immigrant, and a registered nurse. She could have explained that her father was a firefighter in his younger days and a lawyer later in life, and that he’d trained her in Kali and Shoto-Kan Karate when she was a kid. Danika could have gotten into how she’d had siblings too, but then she’d have to run the gamut of telling him where they were now.

  Wait…

  Was she trying to socialize with this guy? They just spent ten minutes blasting each other across the room, and now he was being treated like any other guest in her home. Other guests in a home, that is. Rarely was Danika ever the hostess.

  She caught sight of her own reflection in a steel basin that was sitting in the dish drainer beside the sink. She looked haggard. Between the fight and the chase, she looked like she came tumbling out of a tornado. She leaned in closer and tapped the cut on her lip and hissed. She gritted her teeth when the pain spread through her face, like little needles on her chin and cheek. Danika pinched the blood between her fingers and rubbed them together until it faded. Using a paper towel, she dabbed the cut until the bleeding stopped, but the metallic taste was hard to be rid of. “How did you find me?”

  Charlie raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “Simple. You left, and I tracked you. A skill of mine.”

  “Well that’s handy.” Danika replied, dryly, her eyes drooped with sarcasm. “But stupid.” She’d finally put it together that he was the recruit she’d left in Aldo’s care. “Why the hell did you follow me? What do you want? I left you at HQ for a reason, you needed healing. Doc’s the best we got, so…”

  “I don’t know…” He nervously chuckled and shrugged.

  Silence settled in as he gave his answer some thought, which set off some red lights in Danika’s head.

  “You don’t know why you broke into someone’s house…” She tilted her head.

  “A-Aldo said you were the one to beat.”

  “Excuse me?” She tensed again.

  “Wrong verbiage. Pardon,” Charlie sensed the offense and cleared his throat. “Aldo talks highly of you and told me that you were one of a kind. He said you saved my life, and I wanted to thank you in person.”

  Gee. Thanks Aldo.

  She snickered at his reposition. “So, you took the word of a blind doctor—who is a stranger by the way—and decided to stalk me home. Another stranger. Sorry mate, but my bullshit meter just shot through the roof.”

  “Not stalking, please don’t think of it that way.” He seemed to blush easy, as she noticed a little color under his light skin.

  “Well? What should I think?” Danika just laughed. “Jeez, you are something, aren’t you?” She studied him some more, watching him fidget nervously as it got uncomfortably quiet. He hadn’t tried to look at her, gawk at her, or ogle her, so at least he wasn’t after anything like that. Presumably. “Okay. Charles, if that’s even your real name—”

  “It is, I promise.”

  “How did you end up the way you were when I found you?” Danika poured the man a beverage, a nice tumbler of bourbon on the rocks (since no one could have her precious Jack Daniels) and slid it his way.

  “Well, one minute I’m heading home from my job at Brightman, Bullock and Associates—”

  “Ahh.” She made a face.

  “What?”

  “You’re a lawyer,” she groaned.

  Charlie nodded. He seemed proud of his career, despite the natural stigma against it. “Yeah, just started there. I literally just set up my office today, and the next thing I know, I’m getting chased by a woman… cat… thing.”

  Aw great. The last thing she wanted to do was have anyone tied to the law in her home, but she couldn’t kick him out now. At least, not yet. She wanted to get intel on the creature. The attorney stink wasn’t something she’d picked up on when she retrieved him from the fight earlier, but now that he admitted to it, she could pin him as ‘the type’, even dressed down to Alliance standard issue sweats and a thin hoodie he was wearing now.

  “Hmm…” Danika took a swig of her bottle again and smacked her lips. “I gotta say, you look like you’re well-rested for—” She eyed her watch, as her teeth raked over her bottom lip, and her eyebrows raised. “Three hours? What the hell? I found you, all torn to shreds by our friendly neighborhood pussycat. How…”

  Charlie cleared his throat and he sat up straight with a cocky smirk on his lips. “I heal up fast.”

  “Must be nice.” Danika seemed impressed, giving him a slow nod.

  Her own healing factor was nowhere near the level of his. She seemed skeptical, but at the same time, the proof was sitting in front of her. When she found him in the alley, he was extremely close to death. He’d been covered in blood, his entire body covered in cuts and slashes from the claws of the cat. Anyone else might have taken weeks, if not months to recover, let alone be up and walking around. His slashes were still puffy and raw, but no longer bleeding, and he’d need another few days for the nasty scabs and bruising to disappear completely. Yet here he was, picking fights in the time it took to get home after her chat with Aldo and Morgan.

  “You can fight, I’ll give you that.” Danika took another drink from the bottle and set it down on the counter. “But…real talk. What the hell are you doing here?”

  Charlie leaned on his elbows, running his hands over his hair. “Look…I already explained the first part of it. They told me I couldn’t leave, so… I proved that I could.”

  “Ballsy.”

  Charlie shrugged. “I guess, more just that I don’t like feeling like I’m trapped. Messes with my mind. I didn’t mean any ha
rm in all of this—” He gestured toward the living room, “And I apologize. I just didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

  Since he had broken in, wrecked up her furniture and seen her practically naked, she figured manners were out the door, but she gave into being more polite than rude to her uninvited guest. Danika pulled a tumbler out of the dish drainer and poured her drink into the pit of it, to about halfway. “Morgan thinks you have a lot of potential.”

  Charlie took a sip of his drink, bit back the sting of the liquor, and set down his glass. “Morgan? The old military looking guy?”

  “Yeah. And I won’t tell him you said ‘old’,” she snickered.

  “Thanks,” he chuckled. “How do you know him? Are you one of his star heroes?”

  “Not a hero.” Danika said firmly. Most everyone put the words “Powered” and “hero” together, but they were not interchangeable, not every time. She’d been around plenty of anti-hero types and villains, but this fell under the category of her refusing to take on a title. “Morgan is…my uncle.”

  “Runs in the family, then?”

  Danika nodded. “Something like that. He was one of the founders of the Alliance. With all the Powered folks emerging during the Turning, he wanted to do something about it. He started with trying to protect us when the normies were killing us on sight. We went full-fledged underground and hid in different safe houses around the state, gathering more people along the way until the treaty was signed. He was pretty influential in getting that together too. He convinced Powered reps from all over the world to join him, then pulled a bunch of strings with all his contacts from his military years to get the first sit-downs to happen between their group and the governments. After the treaty was complete, the HQ building was given to him by the government as a public relations stunt, though they said it was an award for his role in stabilizing relations. It was owned by the military before that, but it was small, so they were looking to get rid of it anyway. I think they mostly gave it to him so they’d know exactly where the Powered were gathered, but he made it into what it is now. The base might not look like much, but it’s a lot better than the old basements they used before. After the registry, things were mostly contained, but…now we have extremists, probably like the crazy asshole chasing you.”

  Charlie had a look about him, like he’d tasted something sour. Even if he was offended by her language, she wasn’t going to accommodate her intruder that much.

  “Why do they want you anyway?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Yeah, he’s funny that way.” She pursed her lips in disapproval. Morgan liked to keep things vague until “absolutely necessary”.

  “Hm…” Charlie nodded took a decent pull of his drink. “I’ve only run into the Alliance once before—a couple years ago, had some trouble go down at my place and I was pulled from it with some of the other survivors.”

  Danika’s eyes flickered with suspicion. Could he be… Nah. She shook the thought from her mind. She remembered that night like it happened yesterday; he might have resembled someone from that rescue, but there were so many people that night, she couldn’t remember all the faces. He also could have meant other encounters, like the times Morgan sent his team on search and rescues after she’d already up and left.

  “When did you find out about…”

  “My powers?” Danika took another sip. His voice was distracting enough to pull her out of that dark line of thought. “I was sixteen.”

  “Ouch.” He raised his eyebrows.

  “You?”

  “Three or four years ago, give or take. Hah, I thought I’d lost my mind. I had headaches. I thought I was crazy! I heard people’s thoughts, and some other weird stuff too, but it wasn’t permanent, so I thought it was a fluke. Hallucinations. A few things happened here and there, but not that extreme. But then, about a week ago, something else happened.”

  “Like what?” She sipped at her drink, swishing the liquor from side to side in the glass.

  “I was walking home late from the office, after finally getting some paperwork done, and the next thing I know, I was being jumped by thugs after my stuff. Standard mugging. They were after my watch, shoes and tried to grab my wallet, but I moved faster than I could even process their attack and when I came to, they were down.”

  “Down? Like dead?”

  “Oh, no. Just, like, knocked out.”

  He wouldn’t be the first lawyer she knew that would have had blood on his hands. It seemed out of character for him, from what she could tell in the few minutes she’d known him, but it was worth asking. She had other questions for him, like what he expected to establish after intruding on her privacy, or personal matters like: if he was single or how he ended up in Augusta from England. It was too soon for any of that, as they’d just met after all.

  Charlie shifted on the stool and sat up. “I apologize if I’m out of turn here, but who’s Carter?” His voice was low, cautious.

  Danika froze. Her grip was tight on the tile at the edge of the counter. Anytime someone brought up Carter, even someone like Morgan, it made her uncomfortable. “How do you know that name?”

  He gulped, so loudly she could hear it from where she was standing. “When I was in the Ward, they mentioned a Carter, but I didn’t know who they were referring to… they mentioned you too, but you’re not Carter, are you?”

  Danika thought for a moment but shook her head. This would be crossing a line, subject matter she wasn’t ready to talk about with a stranger. “I think that’s enough for tonight.”

  “I-I’m sorry.” Charles had already stolen the privilege of knowing certain details; from her, from Aldo, from eavesdropping. While his apology was noted, it didn’t make the ill feeling pass.

  Breathe… she thought, as she took a few moments to compose herself.

  “I gotta get some sleep. You got somewhere to go?”

  “Actually…” Charlie scratched the back of his neck. “This may be in poor form, but, erm, may I stay here for the night?”

  “Stay here?” Danika sounded more irritable than she wanted, but it was a gutsy move to ask for such a thing. “You want to sleep here? I mean, you already busted in without invitation so why not crash here, right?”

  “If you don’t mind.” He nodded, with a tight and crooked grin.

  She scoffed. “Nice. You try this with all the ladies?”

  Charlie tilted his head and gave her a bit of a glare. He looked like he was biting back a response, like he wasn’t sure if she was ready for his retaliation.

  Bring it, she thought.

  “I don’t know my way back to HQ, so that’s out right now. Fortress is hidden pretty well. And what if I leave and that thing is still out there?” Charlie had a point. She’d already fought twice tonight, she wasn’t interested in a third; and while he’d already been taken down by it once before, leaving him to fight it alone was essentially a death sentence.

  “Fine. You can take my bed—” She noticed him raise his brows with that one, “and I’ll crash on the couch.”

  Charlie shook his head. “I couldn’t do that.”

  “Well too bad, I insist. You don’t have to pull the gentlemanly thing with me.”

  “They’re called manners.”

  “If you had manners—”

  “I wouldn’t have broken in. I know.”

  “Just so we’re clear.” She smirked. “You. Bed. Me. Couch. No funny business.”

  “No funny business.” He chuckled, raising his hands innocently. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it, just give me a sec to get my PJs.” Danika grumbled, walking towards the linen closet and pulling out some spare blankets and pillows before going to change. She could sense his eyes on her backside as she slinked by, but that didn’t bother her one bit.

  Maybe Mr. Innocent wasn’t so chaste after all.

  “And Charlie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You owe me a new living room.”

  Return to Sen
der

  The alarm was blaring on her clock, chanting its obnoxious chime in half-second intervals. She nearly knocked over the tumbler of Jack Daniels on her nightstand as she reached over to tap the button to snooze it. It felt like only a second later that the alarm started up again, this time seeming louder since she’d been bumped out of her deep sleep from the first run.

  Nightstand?

  “What the hell?” she grumbled groggily as she felt the fabric of her pillowcase under her head.

  She practically smacked herself when she brought her hand up to wipe the hair from her face, which was adhered to her skin by sweat and saliva. Danika remembered offering her bed to that Charlie fellow, and wanting to take the couch instead, so how the hell did this happen? They didn’t sleep together…did they?

  Quickly, she shot up into a sitting position. She felt the throbbing of blood rushing to her head, sparks of light spots in her eyes, and a taste of a lingering hangover she didn’t think she’d get, while her hands searched along the bedspread beside her to feel anyone else there.

  Thinking back, Danika remembered that she hadn’t eaten at all the previous day before downing half a bottle of Jack.

  Geez, no wonder I’m so messed up. Ugh. Danika was alone in the bed.

  Phew. She exhaled. At least she was wearing clothes, pajama bottoms and a spaghetti strap top.

  The sound of metal clattering came from the kitchen, causing her to wonder what the guest she’d welcomed was up to in there. Not quite welcomed, exactly, but he was a guest nonetheless. In one big sweep, Danika pushed back the duvet, and kicked her feet over the edge of her bed. It felt like she had twenty-pound weights tied to her ankles. She yawned, stretched and let her bare feet hit the frigid, hardwood floor.

  It took a moment to find her walking legs, but she padded over quietly. When she pulled her bedroom door open, the wall of scent and sound hit her at once. It smelled delicious, whatever it was, almost like a cartoon fog in the shape of a beckoning finger luring her towards the kitchen. Danika didn’t let her guard down, even though she was thoroughly enticed by the aroma.