Red Devil (Dangerous Spirits) (2 page)

“I do not drink much anymore,” Alexei said.

“Yeah,” Colin said. “You don’t want beer after a workout anyway. How about a Bolt now, then we can go out? We can go to a place where you guys can get something non-alcoholic.”

As they walked down the sidelines, the white ermine detached herself from the conversation to reach down into the orange plastic cooler and toss Alexei a Bolt Energy bottle. “
Catch
,” she said in Siberian, and then, without looking at the muskrat, “
So does he like you?
”

“
I have to work harder
,” Alexei said, before cracking open the plastic screw-top and gulping down the blessedly cool, sweet drink. Lizabeta, a friend of his from the Internet, had not only introduced him to the VLGA, but had gotten him his job. Since moving to Vidalia, he’d gotten more used to speaking Siberian with her. In the past year, he hadn’t spoken his native language with anyone but his sister on their infrequent phone calls. And that reminded him that he hadn’t heard from Cat in several weeks.

Liza grinned. “
This is what I always tell you
,” she said. Then, in English, “How is the job? Vlad is treating you well?”

He nodded. “Good. The job is mostly moving boxes, learning postal codes. He says I am doing well.”

“No wonder you’re in good shape.” Mike grabbed a Bolt of his own. “Your job is a workout. I just sit at a computer and file documents all day.”

Alexei saw Kendall talking up the muskrat, no doubt pushing him again about the goalie job. He swallowed down the sour taste in his muzzle. “You both did very well in the game,” he said, stepping close to Mike to draw Liza over to them. “I enjoy watching you.”

“Aw, it’s a pleasure to watch you, too.” Mike nudged his shoulder with a bump just gentle enough that Alexei didn’t quite lose his footing. “You’re always in the right place and you make it look so easy.”

“You could also try out for this team,” Alexei said in a burst of joy at Mike’s compliment. Liza was grinning hugely at him and he tried to ignore her.

Mike laughed. “That’s sweet, but I’m not that good. Anyway, I’m trying to find a permanent job, and I don’t think ‘minor league soccer player’ pays as well as paralegal work.”

“I like that you want to help people,” Alexei said. “My sister also wants to help people back in our home country.”

“She sounds pretty awesome. I hope I get to meet her.” Mike turned his big, beautiful brown eyes full on Alexei.

The fox swallowed. “I do too,” he said, and took a moment to figure out how to tell Mike more about Caterina.

In that moment, Kendall grabbed Mike by the wrist and tugged. “Everybody had their Bolts?” he said. “Let’s get going.”

Sol glanced at Mike and hesitated. A half-second later, he turned to follow, but Alexei had already noticed, and Alexei had had enough of Kendall for one day anyway. So the fox said loudly, “I am tired. I think I will just go home.”

“Oh,” Sol said. “I’ll come with you, then.”

Most of the departing group stopped long enough to wave. Mike tried to, but Kendall pulled him along, so the sheep just called over his shoulder, “See you at the barbecue Saturday!”

Alexei tossed his empty Bolt drink bottle into a nearby garbage can and grabbed another out of the cooler, the melted ice chilling his paw as he opened the bottle. Sol, still nursing his original one, walked beside Alexei through the park gates. “Why didn’t you want to go?” Sol said when they were well out of earshot of the group, back on the hard, warm sidewalk.

“I am tired.” Alexei gulped the cold, sweet, chemical-orange-flavored drink.

Sol’s tail swished from side to side. “Uh-huh. Why don’t you like Kendall, anyway?”

“Why don’t you like Mike?” Sol went quiet, and Alexei lowered his ears and kicked at a stick on the ground. “I am sorry. But Mike is nice, he is not like—” He breathed in. “I do not like the way Kendall talks about me.”

“What, the comment about the footwork?” Sol’s ears came back up. He waved the paw with the bottle dismissively. “Everyone knows he doesn’t do shit to work with you. What’s the harm?”

“And the comment about my English last week. And how he explains my not drinking. And always it’s in front of Mike.” Alexei kicked at a piece of trash on the ground. “I don’t want to talk to Mike with him around.”

“He’s just teasing you. Like a big brother.”

Alexei focused his slit-pupilled eyes on Sol. “Did Natty tease you that way? Talking about how you have ‘potential to improve’?”

“Sometimes, yeah.”

“Did he also help you? Really help?”

Sol scratched behind his ear and took another drink while they waited to cross a street. “I don’t get you,” he said at last. “You stood up for me against Tanny that time, and you stand up for me against Meg.”

“It is—it’s different,” Alexei said. “Easier to stand up for you than for me. And he is president of this group.”

“I don’t think that means anything.” Sol made a slightly exasperated noise, but didn’t let it affect his voice. “Well, I’ll tell you what. How about if I stand up for you, then?”

Alexei turned his head. The brotherly concern alone relaxed him. Sol wouldn’t abandon him, and as long as they were friends, he had hope. After all, Mike was only the second most important person at the VLGA to him. It was important he remember that. “It’s okay. You don’t have to.”

“No,” Sol said. “At the barbecue—we’re going, right?—I’ll keep Kendall’s attention away from Mike. Give you a chance to talk to him a while. Which reminds me, uh…”

“There’s our bus.” Alexei pointed ahead to where the #45 was pulling up to the stop. They ran for it, which set them both panting again. The bus was full of people and smelled it, but in the refreshingly cool air, it was easy to ignore the various scents around them. Anyway, when they were seated together, Alexei mostly smelled fox and wolf, and that was fine.

“What did I remind you of?” he asked, but Sol shook his head, looking at the mule deer sitting next to them. So they talked about the game, the weather, the Typhoons (the Millenport baseball team), and anything else Alexei thought of as their “public-safe” conversations: things that did not touch on gay relationships. They could use the acronym for the Vidalia Lesbian and Gay Alliance if they needed to, but it was safer to just leave those discussions for home.

The bus let them off at their corner, where even though the sky was brilliant orange and gold with the sunset, the air remained oppressively hot and thick. Here, in the midst of several blocks of run-down apartment buildings, heat assaulted them from the pavement, the bricks, and the exhaust of the bus as it pulled away, a choking cloud of gas fumes that left both canids breathing into their shirt sleeves. Alexei’s shirt was damp when he took his muzzle away from it.

Sol was quiet the rest of the half-block to their building, but when the fox put a paw on the door handle, the wolf tugged him back. “Let’s not go in right now,” he said.

Which meant that he wanted to talk to Alexei without Meg hearing, and that was impossible in the apartment because Meg rarely left her room. They could sit on the front stoop and talk, though, because their apartment faced the rear of the building, and Meg’s room, at the back, looked onto what was now a construction site, so she kept her window closed most of the time anyway.

Alexei curled his tail around his hips, sitting on the warm concrete, and Sol did the same beside him. The wolf hunched his shoulders so that he was the same height as Alexei, though the fox was sitting up straight. At first, Alexei thought something was wrong, but then he felt the twitching of the wolf’s tail wagging beside him. “I got a date,” Sol said softly.

He grinned when Alexei gaped, and then the fox laughed. “Just this morning? That’s wonderful,” he said. “Who is it? Do I know him?”

Sol shook his head. “He was a customer at the store. He bought ‘Up and Out’—that’s a movie that came out about ten years ago, with that cougar Devin Murphy? He plays a guy everyone thinks is gay—anyway, I said, ‘Nice movie,’ ’cause you don’t see many people buying gay movies. I mean, I’m surprised we even stocked it. Probably it’s been on the shelf since it was released. Anyway, I just felt like I could say that to him. And he said, ‘I haven’t seen it since it was out and I was in middle school.’ So it turns out he’s only three years older than me, and he asked if I wanted to have coffee with him Friday.” He laughed. “Well, he asked about today, but I told him I had a soccer game. He thought that was cool.”

The wolf was so excited that Alexei found it easy to quell the pang of jealousy he felt. “What’s his name? What’s he like?”

“He’s a bear, another predator, so that’s good. His name is Mitch, and he’s pre-law at the U. That’s really all I know. I mean, maybe he just wants to talk about movies, but…but I have a feeling.”

“Aw, I’m glad.” He was glad, but still. This had just fallen into Sol’s lap, without any effort. Why was it so much harder for Alexei, when the sheep he wanted to date was right there in front of him on the football field for hours? And why couldn’t Sol accept that Mike was different? As soon as he thought that, he chided himself. Sol was going to help him talk to Mike. The wolf was trying to get over his prejudice, to be a good friend. “You don’t want to tell Meg?”

“Not until after.” Sol laid his ears back. “You know how she is. She’ll be all like, ‘I’m not going to call your parents after they find your dismembered corpse,’ or something.”

“Ha.” Alexei smiled at Sol’s imitation. “She means well.”

“I know,” Sol said. “Just sometimes I don’t really want to deal with it.” He stared down at his paws, fingers rubbing over his right wrist. “I was wondering if, uh…if you’d…come along maybe.”

“On your date?” Alexei perked his ears.

They waited, growing quieter as a skunk couple padded up the walk, around them, and into the building. Sol rubbed his paw again. “Not on it,” he said. “Just…to the coffee shop. I’d feel better knowing you were there.”

Alexei patted Sol’s knee fraternally, feeling like an older brother even though he and Sol were pretty much the same age. That wasn’t how things normally were, but Sol was all abashed and his ears were half-down and he looked like he needed an older brother, just as Alexei had needed one a half hour before. “He will not do anything bad in public.”

“I know.” Sol exhaled, and his shoulders sagged further. “It’s stupid. But I’d feel better.”

“All right. If you would feel better.” He didn’t have any plans for tomorrow evening anyway, not if Sol was going to be busy elsewhere. He could stay in and watch a movie with Meg, but the smell of the close apartment grew difficult to bear after a short time, and Meg rarely wanted to go out to movies.

“Thanks.” Sol’s tail twitched again. “Don’t tell Meg, would you? I feel stupid enough about this.”

Alexei leaned against the wolf. “You have not—you have no reason to feel stupid. You had a bad experience, and you need to have a good time to forget about it.” He put on a smile he didn’t completely believe, but knew was necessary. It had been only a few months since that ex-online-boyfriend bastard had tried to rape Sol, and had only been stopped by—Sol claimed, and Alexei believed—a ghost.

“It’s just a date,” Sol said.

“It’s good.” Alexei wagged his tail, too. “I thought you would meet someone in the VLGA, but this is also good.”

Sol shrugged. “None of them really clicked like this guy. I mean, when you feel that click, you’ve got to do something about it, right?”

The question followed Alexei into the apartment, which tonight smelled of noodles and soy sauce. Meg, a stocky otter about Alexei’s height, sat finishing her meal at the table. She’d dyed most of her head fur black, either to set off the many silver studs and rings in her ears, or just to be a black otter, and even when she wasn’t eating, she sometimes lost herself in her own moods and didn’t talk much. Alexei had learned that if she didn’t respond right away when he said something, he was better off just waiting to ask her later. At least she did cook most of her own meals and was happy to share with the boys when they wanted. Tonight, Alexei was not hungry, though he knew he would be soon. He waved to her, walked past the small kitchen table, and into the room he shared with Sol.

Sol sat down to talk to Meg and tell her more about the game—he hadn’t scored, but he’d stolen the ball and passed to Mike, who’d kicked it forward to Liza for a goal. The bedroom door hung ajar, so Alexei could hear every word of their conversation, but he tuned them out.

When you feel that click
. He knew he’d felt it with Mike, and yet every time he tried to talk to the sheep alone, he had been headed off by Kendall. Still, Sol was going to block for him at the barbecue, and Mike wanted to get to know Alexei, so perhaps things would start to improve.

If anyone in the VLGA were a potential rapist, Alexei thought darkly, it would be Kendall. Everyone else seemed to like him, so maybe that was just Alexei’s own insecurity. He muttered to himself in Siberian, a habit that made him feel better on one level and worse on others.

He breathed in his scent and Sol’s, and opened the window. Sol had shown him how to set up the box fan to blow the hot air out, but Alexei still wanted to feel a breeze on his fur, so tonight he set up the fan to blow inward and stood in front of it, closing his eyes.