The Living End (Daniel Faust #3)(42)

“Daniel?” Caitlin said, sounding a little deflated. “Could you come over? I’d like to see you tonight.”

She’d watched the aftermath of her best friend getting stabbed in the back by her human lover. It didn’t take a genius to figure out why she wanted a little reassurance tonight. Work could wait. I hooked a U-turn at the next light, stopped at Bentley and Corman’s place for a change of clothes, and headed for the Taipei Tower.

Caitlin had a penthouse on the top floor with a view of the Strip to kill for. The Southern Tropics Import/Export Company had a great incentive plan for its top employees. The ones at the bottom, not so much. She took my hand at the door and led me inside, across the expanse of black leather, ivory, and chrome. A Duran Duran album played softly on the stereo.

“Did you eat?” she said as I followed her into the kitchen. “I’m just cooking up a little something.”

A little something, in this case, was a bowl of tortellini mixed with edamame and slices of smoked sausage. We sat together at her glass-topped table with a single white candle and a bottle of Argentinian Malbec. She didn’t open up until her second glass of wine, but I wasn’t trying to push her.

“When Emma fell in love with Ben,” she said apropos of nothing, “she took a lot of snide comments for it. Relationships like—like theirs—aren’t exactly favored in our society. I mean, it’s generally considered, like…”

Her voice trailed off. I cracked a smile.

“You’re trying to find a way of saying something like, ‘It’s like a human marrying their pet dog or their dinner,’ without offending me,” I said. “It’s okay, Cait. I understand we’ve got some cultural issues to work through. And I know you’re not like that.”

Caitlin poked her food with her fork. “She didn’t see him like that either. There was a lot of, ‘Just wait, it’ll work out. You’ll see.’ I backed her up, of course. Sometimes forcefully.”

“How forcefully?” I said.

“You can tell someone to stop saying nasty things about your best friend a hundred times,” she mused over a forkful of pasta. “But you only have to rip their tongue out once.”

I poured myself another dollop of wine.

“Now she’s eating crow,” I guessed, “because all the people who told her the relationship was doomed turned out to be right.”

“She’s lost face in the court, and the shame stings almost as much as what Ben did to her. The only reason she didn’t lose her position is because she helped take down Sullivan. That, and I put a word in my father’s ear.”

She fell silent after that. I took another bite, chewing into a spicy sliver of sausage, and contemplated my fork.

“They’re saying the same things about you now, too,” I said.

She nodded, eying her plate.

“Not as loudly, of course,” she said, “but the grumblings are there. It’s funny, you know. Emma’s become your biggest fan. If we succeed where she failed, it actually vindicates her in a sense. Proves that the problem was Ben, not the entire concept of a relationship between our species.”

“Does that mean she’s going to stop flirting with me?”

“Of course not,” she said, glancing up at me with a light smile on her lips. “We all have to be true to our nature.”

“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I don’t want you to take any flack on my account.”

I reached for my glass. Her hand met mine halfway, closing over it, gently pressing it down onto the table. In the shifting candlelight, her eyes glimmered with flecks of molten copper.

“My choices are mine,” she said. “You helped see to that. And I choose you. Anyone who has a problem with that is welcome to challenge me on the plains of Limbo. Every notch on my hunting spear is the end of another fool’s story.”

After dinner we took small plates of caramel-drizzled cheesecake over to the plush leather couch, cuddling together in the television’s glow. It was the only place in the world I wanted to be.

? ? ?

I woke to sunlight on my face, streaming in through the half-turned venetian blinds in Caitlin’s bedroom. I was alone in the tangle of gray silk sheets, but that didn’t surprise me—Caitlin didn’t sleep much. I found her in the dining nook, draped in a burgundy velvet robe and pecking away on her laptop.

“I’m hunting woodworkers,” she murmured, giving me a tired wave. “Rather pleased to see how many people are keeping the artisan’s craft alive, even if it does make it harder to track down whoever is building Meadow Brand’s puppets. Also, when this is all over, I want to go to a Renaissance fair.”

“Why?”

“Nostalgia,” she said, so deadpan I couldn’t tell if she was kidding. “You look like you could use some coffee.”

“Love some,” I told her, stumbling toward the kitchen.

“Excellent. You can start a pot, then. I’ll take mine with one sugar, no cream.”

Once I was properly caffeinated and cleansed, after luxuriating under the pulsing twin heads in Caitlin’s shower and soaking in a bath of white steam, I mussed my hair a little in the mirror and figured I could pass for a functional human being.

Ironic, considering my plans for the morning.