Steal the Lightning: A Field Ops Novel (Field Ops #3)(2)

Chapter 2

Getting to Know You




I could boast about my job. My proper job, I mean; talk it up and make it sound like one gigantic, ongoing adventure, terrifying and miraculous. Through the working week I have seen time transformed and shuffled like a deck of cards. I have come close to creatures once worshipped as gods, and seen them crystallize into a brute, destructive physicality, or else a beauty of such force that it could eat your soul; while somewhere in the world, there is an entity who wears my face, speaks with my voice, and yet is not, by even the most twisted definition of the term, remotely human.

All this, I could have told her. If I’d wanted to. And if, you know, I’d been a bit of a prat.

As it was, I’d given her a few moments of candor, right back at the start, when I’d been hoping that we’d get along. Then I’d clammed up. I hadn’t been particularly subtle with it, either. So now, over cakes and coffee, Melody Duchess had her reckoning.

“You’ve not been open with me, Christopher.” She tipped her head back, sighting at me down her nose. “You’re kind of secretive, you know?”

“I’m English. It’s called ‘reserve’.”

She wagged her pastry fork at me.

“What you’ve been doing, young man, is giving me the runaround. The company line. And I am sick of it, you hear?”

Her face was narrow, cheekbones sharp, her skin pleated with lines. Her eyes were very pale, as if the color had been draining from them, bit by bit over the years.

“So now,” she said, “you’re going to tell me all about yourself. Are we agreed?”

We weren’t. “Not much to tell. I’m Chris Copeland, I work for the Registry. That’s about it, really.”

“Flim-flam.” She chopped the air with her fork. “I know all that. Not interesting at all.” She sliced a corner off her apple-almond turnover.

“You’re from London,” she said.

“I’ve got a place there. When I get chance to visit. I’m from up north, originally.”

“Married?”

“Once.”

She put the pastry in her mouth, chewing with a sideways motion, like a sheep.

She raised her brows to me, demanding more.

I said, “We’re friendly still. We talk, see each other sometimes. I think she’s found someone. There’s been this guy around, the last year or so . . .”

“And how do you feel about that?”

It was like dealing with a really irritating psychoanalyst.

I said, “I’m glad she’s not alone.”

“You get along with him?”

“I only met him once. Seems OK. A bit, um . . .” I wanted to say, “dull,” but I said, “steady. You know?”

“Jealous?”

“Not a bit.”

“Now, see.” She wiped a crumb from her lip. “Now, I’d never be second best. Not in anybody’s life. I would never stand for that.”

“I’m not in her life. We’re divorced.”

“Doesn’t matter. You don’t sell yourself short. That’s what Frugs would have said. Don’t sell yourself short, Duch. Not for anyone.”

She gouged another chunk out of her pastry, raised it to her lips, and stopped.

“Still,” she said, “you’ve got your colored girl now, haven’t you?”

I had told her about Angel on our first day, when I was trying to be nice. It was supposed to be a trade-off: here’s a bit about me, let’s hear a bit about you.

Building trust, familiarity.

I’d soon stopped doing that.

“Dr. Farthing is my colleague at the Registry. I’m not sure she’d appreciate the way that you referred to her.”

“Oh! Is that what you call her? Doctor Farthing?”

She gave a great caw of a laugh.

“‘Oh! Doctor Faaarthing!’”

It was a wail, mocking, lewd, and she drew the syllables out in a way that was unsettlingly lubricious. Her shoulders shook. Crumbs spilled from her lips.

Across the room, faces looked up, startled.

And then suddenly, she froze.

Her pale eyes she fixed on me. The laughter just drained out of her, and in a small, resentful voice, she said, “You’re here to take the god, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I told her. “Yes, I am.”





Chapter 3

We Ought to Be at Macy’s




She did not like Union Square.

“Always such a filthy place,” she said. “Full of drug addicts and queers.”

“They cleaned it up,” I said.

But she scowled, skeptically eyeing up the park, with its throngs of shoppers, tourists, dog-walkers, commuters, and the single homeless man, dozing amid piles of plastic bags.

“We ought to be at Macy’s now,” she said.

But I’d insisted that we stop. I sprawled across a bench. I put my head back, flexed my neck, and tried to ease the aching in my body. You’d think my legs would hurt the most, but they didn’t. The pain was in my hands, my wrists, my arms, and worst of all, my shoulders.

I needed rest. And more than that, I wanted, if I could, to push our business just a little nearer a conclusion.