Crash Morph: Gate Shifter Book Two (30 page)

“A drink.” Nik turned his eyes on me, and I saw they were a dark green, edging into fight territory for him. “You are thirsty?”

I smiled; I couldn’t help it. “Nik, you gotta learn to either blend, or stop talking when we’re in public...okay?”

He frowned, but only nodded.

“Okay,” he said.

I walked over to the bar. I pulled off my jacket once I got there, mostly because it was hot in there. Draping it over the leather cushion of a high, chrome-legged barstool, I slid on top of it, propping my boot heels on the low railing under the bar itself.

Nik followed, and did essentially the same thing to my right.

He left his jacket on, however.

I found myself looking around the club again as I waited for the bartender to notice us.

Everyone in there had gone back to ignoring us, probably because they figured me and Nik were a couple. I got a few stares from some of the men, but not enough interest for it to be much of a concern. Dressed like I was, I definitely didn’t look like the girls they advertised on their flyers, so I probably wasn’t a huge draw, anyway.

Nik got more looks than me, mostly from the handful of women I could see sitting at the other end of the bar. A number of them looked at more than just his face, which caused me to give him a once-over, too, noting again that he looked pretty damned good in Jake’s clothes. The leather jacket fit his broad shoulders perfectly, as did the jeans, and while the t-shirt was a little small, it didn’t exactly make Nik harder to look at, if you know what I mean.

Nik was becoming more of a distraction for me every day, I’d noticed.

Pushing the memory of that morning out of my head, I tried to decide what I thought I could accomplish here...if anything at all.

The first booth I looked at, the one closest to the front door, held a pair of businessmen in outdated suits, each of them clutching beers. One of the two, the guy with bloodshot eyes and rumpled brown hair, appeared to be doing most of the talking.

Guy going through a divorce,
my mind interpreted, seeing the empty ring finger he kept touching. His friend obviously came along for a sympathy binge, which was a pretty good friend since it wasn’t even two o’clock yet on a weekday.

The booth nearest to me, directly across from the bar, held five guys wearing what I would categorize as “newly-Western” chic.

Meaning, they probably weren’t from the United States and probably hadn’t lived here all that long, but they really, really wanted to look like it.

I could only see three of their faces––one in the mirror and two because I had direct line of sight. A fourth sat backwards on a black chair, his reflected face in shadow, his leather jacket clad back to me. The fifth sat facing away from me in the booth, his profile blocked in the mirror by the guy sitting to his left and closer to the mirror.

All five appeared to be wearing roughly the same clothes––black designer jeans with black leather belts and tucked in black t-shirts, cheesy leather jackets with bright slogans on them and leather shoes that looked like Italian knock-offs but might have been the real deal. They also wore large, gold men’s watches, a fair bit of hair product, gold chains and pulled-up black socks.

They could be Eastern European, I guessed. Or Italian. Maybe German...although Germans didn’t tend to go as much for the all-black look.

All three of them drank clear liquor on ice––probably vodka––which added credence to the Eastern European theory. From working bars in Queens, I happened to know the vodka-Russia-Eastern-Europe stereotype wasn’t just a stereotype. A lot of them really did drink that stuff like water, especially the more recent immigrants. Maresh, a pal of mine in New York, told me that in Russia, you rarely saw actual drinks in people’s hands in working-class bars. You just saw people (men, usually) talking and smoking.
 

If you were paying attention, however, you would occasionally see waitresses make the rounds, carrying trays covered in shot glasses. The bar patrons would down the shots on the spot, pay her, then go right back to talking and smoking.

That image always stuck with me for some reason.

The third occupied booth I saw looked to be filled with a bunch of guys from India, or maybe Pakistan. They also had that recent immigrant look, but seemed less self-conscious about it for some reason. Maybe they just weren’t trying so hard to look like they were from here.

Either way, they smiled a lot more and drank mostly beer.

The impression I got from watching them was that they were thrilled just being in a place where they could drink and look at pictures of naked girls in the middle of the day.

The fourth booth housed an actual male-female couple, but my cynical mind wondered immediately if she was a working girl, especially when I noted the age difference. The guy just looked like a run-of-the-mill businessman, like one of the suits I saw at the black office building earlier that day. Nothing overly sinister there.

Glancing around at the two older guys on the other end of the bar and the three women who’d been checking out Nik, and a few more couples sitting at smaller tables closer to the door, it struck me that the clientele was pretty mundane for a day crowd.
 

It was also pretty different than what I remembered from that night I’d been sent here to set up Evers. That could have been a result of the new look and new name, but I doubted it. I suspected it had a lot more to do with the time of day. Any place that remained open for as close to 24 hours as they could pull off legally had different crowds. The day crowd sometimes bled into the night crowd, sure, but they got buried under the louder clamor of the generally younger and more affluent party crowd.

Regulars existed in both crowds, of course, but they were a lot more common and consistent among the drinking-during-working-hours types.

The true daytime regulars were usually full-blown alcoholics, with the occasional drug dealer and prostitute thrown in, as well as walk-ins like divorce guy (situational drunk) and the business lunch drinkers who might also be alcoholics, just slightly higher functioning ones.
 

This bar, being a new immigrant haunt of sorts, was different than your average Seattle bar in that they also had the we-aren’t-yet-legal-to-work-here crowd (or possibly the we-just-got-here-and-don’t-have-jobs-yet crowd) from India or Pakistan or Yemen or wherever they were from. I did see a few of the low-functioning alcoholic-types at the bar itself.

My eyes got pulled off the tables a second time when the bartender reached our end of the black lacquer, chrome and leather masterpiece of a man-bar, and plopped down two cocktail napkins with thick fingers. He barely grunted a reply when I ordered two beers and he set them down without telling us how much they cost. I guess people normally ran up tabs in there, or handed him credit cards, but I did neither, slapping down a twenty and hoping for the best.

He gave me change, which was a relief, really.

I spent a few more minutes sipping the beer and watching the people in the various booths via the mirror behind the bar. Using mirrors was another trick I learned from my bar-backing days––one used by every bartender I knew.

I heard a faint choking sound next to me and turned.

Nik was staring at his pint of beer, an odd expression on his face.

It struck me suddenly that maybe alcohol and the ability to shape-shift weren’t such a great combination.

“You don’t have to drink it,” I told him sympathetically. “Tastes pretty bad, eh?”

He gave me a wan smile, then followed my eyes to the mirror.

Again, I saw him take in every aspect of our surroundings carefully.

He’d already observed how I was using the mirrors, I noticed.

Before he looked at the humans in the booths, Nik’s eyes paused carefully on each specimen in the assortment of tall and squat bottles and glasses standing in neat rows directly across from us, as well as their different labels, liquid levels and colors. It struck me for the second time that Nik likely noticed a great deal more than me, and not only because he was observant. Being new here, he was a lot less likely to dismiss a good percentage of the details I brushed past from sheer familiarity. I was thinking about how I might use that, when Nik nudged me with his arm.

“Something is happening,” he told me.

I glanced towards the spot of mirror where he focused and saw one of the Eastern Europeans on his phone.

I wondered at first, what Nik meant.

Then I realized two things. One, the guy wasn’t speaking English. Instead, he spoke some kind of Slavic-sounding language, which told me I’d been right in pegging their basic stats. Two, the Slav on the phone sounded pissed off. Possibly he was pissed at whoever was on the other end of the line, or possibly he was just mad about whatever they were telling him.

I found myself wishing the translation function of the implant worked on Earth languages. Nik had already told me that it should, but he’d first need to update the wetware. I hadn’t asked him what that meant, exactly, but I got the gist from hearing him talk. Apparently, because none of the humans were implanted here, the device in me had no way to “talk” to the mind of the people here speaking another language.

Yet another conversation that went somewhat over my head.

Bottom line, no translation function. Not yet, anyway.

So I listened to the guy grumble and snarl through the line, not understanding a word. Occasionally, I glanced at Nik, trying to read him as much as the guy on the phone. I had to think that Nik probably paid more attention to tone and body language than I did, just from specializing in surveys of foreign worlds, but I couldn’t absorb any of it through him.

I wondered what he’d picked up that got his ears so pricked.

So far, I wasn’t seeing it. Just a grumpy Slav on the phone.

I noticed he happened to be one of the ones whose faces I couldn’t see.

I leaned deeper over the bar, and against Nik’s shoulder. Sliding my hand over his thigh without thinking about it much, I paused when I felt him tense.

“Just playing the part,” I joked quietly near his ear.

“You are distracting me, Dakota,” Nik told me, equally quiet.

“Maybe
you
were distracting me.”

“I thought we came here to work,” he said, meeting my gaze.

Even so, his hand slid down to mine, caressing my fingers briefly before pressing them more deeply against his thigh. I felt that heat start up in my chest again, right before his eyes drifted down the rest of me, taking in my body slowly. I’m not sure what he could see, exactly. Underneath the leather jacket, I just wore a regular, if a bit clingy, dark blue T-shirt.

I saw the distraction he’d mentioned clearly in his eyes, though.

After a few seconds, I found Nik’s fingers pretty distracting, too.

Then his mouth when he leaned down to kiss the base of my neck.

“Dakota,”
he said through the link.
“I want to talk to you tonight.”

“We will,”
I assured him.

“I don’t want to sleep on the floor again.”

Feeling the meaning behind his words, I felt my neck flush, and not in embarrassment.

I only nodded, however.

“I understand,”
I told him.

He looked at me directly that time, and I felt that heat through the lock intensify.

My mind got pulled off that when I refocused on the mirror, looking at the guy on the phone. The grumpy Slav ended his conversation while I watched, tossing his smart phone to the top of the table with what sounded like a curse. I watched as he raised his hand to the wall, using his knuckles to rap on the mirrored glass with three sharp taps.

A door opened in the wall not far from the edge of the booth...making me jump.

The wall had been seamless, unbroken until that opening appeared.

A big guy stood there. A really big guy, wearing a colored silk shirt and suit jacket.

I didn’t get a good look at his face. First the door itself blocked his features from my view, then, when he fully emerged from that opening behind the mirror, he turned so that all I could see was his broad back. His features fell even deeper into shadow as he faced the guy who’d rapped on the glass, then leaned down to talk to him.