“Sherman Dudley?” a womans’s voice asked as his cab door opened.
“The same.” he said with a grin extending a hand for a friendly handshake.
She was stood five-foot-nothing and looked like she weighed barely ninety pounds when wet, even with change in her pocket. Her platinum blond hair was cut in a fashionable boyish short back and sides with a side parting. Her eyes were what held Dudley, an intense violet colour flashed through with gold. Dudley felt himself drawn into the eyes, a sensation he’d felt a few times as he was dozing off and it felt like his awareness was floating just above the recliner. In a fully waking state it was disconcerting in the extreme. He attempted to break eye contact. It was a fight, a magnetic attraction, a compulsion to keep staring.
“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour…” Dudley said under his breath.
The magnetism vanished, Dudley broke eye contact and the blond hissed in frustration.
Dudley rubbed his eyes. They felt gritty, like he’d just stepped off a red-eye flight with no sleep. He ran a hand over his smoothly shaved head and found a sheen of sweat like he’d been working out; far more than he would have expected for the warm Baton Rouge morning. He focussed on the pavement as he got his bearing.
The woman’s shoes were … missing. He’s not noticed before. Bare feet with cute purple painted nails. He frowned and scanned up slender legs to neatly tailored skirt and jacket, white blouse. Normally when someone says “choke chain” of jewellery there’s a little slack, a necklace that looks comfortable. The blond wore a necklace that made Dudley wince. The silver links were tarnished and aged. The chain links were around a quarter-inch in size and the whole think bit into her neck in a way that he’d seen of old couples wedding rings that had never left their fingers for a half century. What would possess a person to wear something so obviously painful and never remove it, and how long had she worn it? She looked young, maybe late twenties, but the necklace was old and looked like it hadnt been removed. His mind leaped, making an unwanted association, perhaps it hadnt been removed because it couldnt be removed? Perhaps it hadnt been removed in all those years? It was like an inner voice was speaking to Dudley, saying that the necklace had been shiny and new when she’d received it as a gift from the Senior Partners of the law firm for her dedication above and beyond the call of duty. He could picture the scene in his mind, an office party but everyone was dressed in such archaic styles, maybe 1920’s? The blond was dressed as a man, her hair cut and styled in a masculine style, in an office devoid of other women. A man in his fifties shook her hand and gave her the necklace in a small box, his lips mouthing “from the Senior Partners” as he raised an eyebrow. She slipped away from the celebrations and lifted the necklace from its box. She turned it around in the air before her face. The glitter of gold-in-violet in her eyes seemed particularly pronounced as she gazed at it. She turned it around in her hands then made the decision to put it on. Dudley winced again, it went on loosely but crawled up her skin and drew tight around her throat. The clasp at the back morphed into a plain silver link. She clawed at it, broke a nail, and fell against the wall gasping.
The vision of the lawyer’s past faded from view and Dudley found himself looking at her with new eyes. Compassion rose. All those years of pain, the necklace marking her as “owned” by the company. The unsettled feelings and annoyance at the bizarre nature of their meeting fell away. Embarassment flickered across his mind as he realized he’d been staring.
He extended his hand again for a handshake, “Sorry, Revd Sherman Dudley … and you are?”
She smiled, “Pleased to meet you.”
They shook hands and this time it was the lawyer’s turn to be unsettled. Her eyes went wide, wild, gold flashing and swirling in the violet irises. She gasped.
“You should be dead. You shouldnt be here. No. You’re wrong…” her face took on a look of horror, “… please…” tears welled in the corners of her eyes, defensive shields falling, “… your fate … you escaped your fate.”
She pulled her hand away and turned. Dudley watched her shoulders shake and caught scattered words as she began to cry, “… trapped … a slave …” then her words were lost as her whole body quaked and sobbing welled up from a place deep in her gut.
Dudley felt uncomfortable. He glanced around and found the taxi driver was watching intently, “You always have that effect on women?”
“Yeah, total heart-breaker. Dont you have any place to be?”
The driver looked sheepish and drove off. Dudley took a deep breath and prayed. There was a nervous knot in his gut and a war was being waged in his brain - part of him saying “its stupid, dont make a damn fool of yourself again. You know how it went last time?” Another voice was urging him to action, buoyed up by faith after the picture he’d seen. He extended a hand and the accusing voice spoke ever more strongly, “its not going to work. Dont go there. You’ll only make it worse. Kick one out and it will come back with seven more of its brothers worse than itself, find the house swept and clean and things will be worse than before.”
Dudley shook his head and found the inner dialog coming from his lips at a good volume, “Oh, you quoting scripture now … that’s rich. You know how much that pisses me off you horny old goat? Get your hell outa here, go on, scram.”
His extended hand brushed lightly across the necklace. The clasp reappeared and under the tension it shattered. The necklace fell from the woman’s neck. It writhed, snake like, as it fell. By the time it reached the pavement it had twisted into a painful knotted configuration. Tarnished links snapped. The pieces fell apart. All that was left were fragments no longer than an inch. Dudley ground them under his heel, “Yeah, you heard me. Out. And dont you come back now!”
There was a red welt around the blond’s neck where the chain had been. She looked up at him. Her violet eyes brimmed with tears but something had changed in her. The agonized sobs had gone.
“for I will turn their mourning into joy, and will comfort them, and make them rejoice from their sorrow.” Dudley quoted with a smile.
She nodded.
“Now what’s this about fate, and me being wrong?” he asked, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket and handing it to her.
She wiped streaks of mascara from her face, “You are. You should have died five years ago. Your fate was written, the powers had seen to it. She should have survived to continue her work.”
“She?” Dudley asked, raising an eyebrow
“Yes, the doctor. Thin, long dark hair and English accent.”
Dudley paused. He rubbed a hand over his head again thoughtfully.
“You know all this … how?”
“I work in the Baton Rouge office of Wolfram and Hart. Always have. Probably always will. I have … gifts … that they employ from time to time. Outside of that, I’m a paralegal that gets no special information just have to do what I am told most days. Like today - ‘collect him from the taxi, take him to the hotel and prep him for tomorrow’ - I only learned your name a few minutes ago when you introduced yourself.” she explained. She handed Dudley his makeup stained handkerchief.
“Keep it. SO, you never explained how you knew all this. I’m betting you snuck into someone’s office and read the file.”
“No. No. Nothing like that.”
“Then, what?”
“I’m a seer. The soul-gaze just now … I tried to read your lifeline. I dont know what kind of wards you have running but I was slapped down so hard from that. Then your touch. You were wide open. How? No-one can build and tear down defenses like that. Its not natural!” she said
Dudley laughed, “I didnt do a thing.”
“You … someone … doesnt matter. Senior Partners have been pouring a measure of their power through that necklace for ages, augmenting and empowering my gifts. I was powerless in their grip. The gift was a curse. I was beholden to them. Whatever, or whoever, broke that has my thanks.”
Dudley nodded. “Yeah, the Lord stepped in when I was facing certain death. I guess if I’d bought the farm then she … yeah, she might have survived. She might have been annoying but something woke inside her at that last moment.”
The lawyer nodded.
“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. If she hadnt gone back into the water, we’d never have made it. She was a hero, a villain, like us all.” He gestured toward the welt on her neck, “We need to go get that looked at, oh, and we really need to talk…”
“Nelson Arquette, get your ass over here!” the voice shouted.
Nelson looked up from the motor he was working on, dropped his wrench and swore, colourfully for a minute straight witout repeating himself.
“Are you quite finished?” the voice shouted
“Coming…”
Nelson wiped engine oil from his hands and walked over to the small Asian woman who was pointing at the engine that lay in pieces all over the kitchen table.
“How the hell am I supposed to work when I find this all over the house?” she demanded.
“Well -“
She interrripted im, “Dont start with me, get this crap out of my way this instant or I’ll have your ass.”
Nelson sighed and nodded. Roomates, cant live with ‘em and you cant kill ‘em, especially when they’re five foot nothing and a mean killer in their own right.
“By the way, how was trhe training flight?” he asked her.
“Great. Killler performance. I’ll give you one thing, those choppers you cobbled together work pretty well.”
He turned and returned to the engine he’d been working on. There was something almost sublime about stripping down a broken and ruined motorcycle and rebuilding it into something that would purr down the highway. What they had forced him to do with the one-man helicopters was the equivilent of scraping fingernails down a blackboard. Sure, they were fun to build and fly, but the addition of bullet-proof plastic cockpits and rocket launchers were too much. Nelson felt his concience pinging him but time had taken its toll. His concience wasnt the thing it was … no, he and his concience had parted company in what might have been a no-fault divorce a while back. It had begun as a trail separation but both parties agreed to remain out of contact since then.