Chapter Sixteen – Under the Table and Hiccuping
"A'ight homies, here's the deal." Kenzi leaned forward on her stool. "I don't make smart choices. Like, there was the time when I was six and my friend Wendy told me if I ate crayons I would poo rainbows, so I polished off the whole box. Or the time in high school when my friend Bill dared me to bong a bottle of Jagermeister and I almost died from alcohol poisoning. Then there was the cheese grater incident…"
"Kenz? You're going off topic," Bo said.
"Right. The point is, I'm more of a go with your gut and let the shit hit the fan kind of girl. As long as I have an umbrella with me it's all gravy. When I met Bo the umbrella was upside down and inside out and full of holes."
Dyson frowned. "I have no idea what you just said. Can someone translate?"
"She's trying to say she was an idiot before she met me," Bo replied. "And she's right."
Kenzi continued. "As much as I'd love to go full Aviator slash Ali style biopic on your asses, I'm sticking with the third grade book report version. Just the basics, with bad grammar. Here goes: I was born on the prairies of Saskatchewan, where my dad was a wheat farmer…"
Lauren had ceased paying attention after "I was born". She wasn't much of a drinker, and her nervousness about the evening had caused her to imbibe a little more than normal. The various rounds of alcohol with their various takes on fermentation – barley, grapes, potatoes, sugarcane, agave – were taking their toll, churning through her stomach and small intestines, getting absorbed into her blood and distributed throughout her body in massive quantities, and starting to make her vision go hazy. She tried to decide whether the look Bo was shooting her way was one of seduction, irritation, or pity.
"…that's how I hacked my first system and earned a criminal juvenile record…"
Lauren took a sip of Southern Comfort and Lime – Hale's contribution to the mix. She tried to count how many centiliters of alcohol she had consumed, to give her brain something to do while Kenzi rambled. Long Island Iced Tea – one part each rum, vodka, gin, tequila, triple sec, each part 1.5 centiliters. Equaling 7.5 centiliters.
"…my juvee nickname was 'Special K'…"
Then there was the rum and coke – Lauren suspected from the pure concentration as opposed to dilution that the drink had been a double. So make that 9 centiliters plus the original 7.5.
Bo tried to catch Lauren's eyes, but the Doctor had that look on her face – mouth slightly open while behind her eyes the gears were clearly turning. Bo's horndogedness ramped up a notch as Lauren subconsciously bit her lower lip.
"…and I said, 'don't screw with me Lexi, I'll cut a bitch'…"
Dyson felt his attention wane and his eyelids droop. He couldn't believe Lauren had put them in such a ridiculous position. Six years they'd known each other, you'd think that would be enough for her to respect his opinions…or at least listen to them. But no. Lauren Lewis was stubborn, and headstrong, and when she wanted something she got it, by God. Dyson snorted. Kenzi was undeterred by the sound, her lips still moving a thousand miles a minute.
"…two months in lockup and I came out a hardened criminal. I went to Vancouver to live with my cousin, Evgeni, and get away from my asshat stepdad…"
Dyson's patience was rapidly eroding. He turned to give Lauren a pissed off look, but she was staring out into space, oblivious to the world.
Lauren frowned. There was the beer, one bottle, 16 oz. That came to 35.5 centiliters. But how was this equation going to account for the fact that hard liquor was more powerful than beer? This would require much more thought. And what was that saying? 'Beer before liquor never been sicker'? Or was it 'liquor before beer, death my dear'? It had been way too long since her keg-stand-beer-bong-Never-Have-I-Ever college days.
"...Evi taught me how to pick pockets. One time I snatched the car keys from a cop. Evi mooned him as a diversion, and I drove away in the squad car. I dumped it in Lake Ontario. Serves him right for giving ME a ticket for jaywalking…"
Ciara nodded, listening intently to Kenzi's story.
Hale watched Ciara's head gracefully bobbing up and down on her slender neck.
Lauren chuckled silently to herself. She always lost at "Never Have I Ever". She'd done a lot of stuff in her younger days.
Dyson's eyes flickered from Lauren to Bo. He snarled protectively. He didn't like the look the Succubus was giving his friend. Not one bit.
"…at one point the shooting guard for the Toronto Raptors owed us six thousand dollars and a Lexus GX…"
Lauren decided that the proper formula to monitor her alcohol consumption was C = .25x + y, where x equaled beer, y equaled hard liquor, and C equaled total consumption. Now to determine where she fell on the drunkenness scale…Buzzed? Tipsy? Inebriated? Drunk? Plastered? Shit-faced? Gone? All very scientific terms. She settled on somewhere between 'plastered' and 'shit-faced'.
"…that's what happens when you can't pay off a debt in Evi's poker game…public humiliation involving nudity, and lots of pain…"
Bo stared shamelessly at the Doctor, eyes turning a dim blue.
Dyson decided he'd had enough. He sunk down into his chair, reared his leg back, and kicked as hard as he could.
"SON OF A BITCH!" Hale screamed, clutching at what was left of his shin bone.
Kenzi finally stopped talking.
"Oh, Bro! I am sooooo sorry!" Dyson got up to check on his friend.
"What happened?" Lauren was pulled out of her mathematically proven state of drunkenness.
"You're sorry? Fuck, man!" Hale rubbed his leg and winced.
Kenzi looked around the table, annoyed that her story had been interrupted.
"Nice aim," Bo teased the Wolf. "I take it that was meant for me?" She got up and pushed Dyson out of the way. "Here," she pulled Hale's chin up to her face, and breathed some of her own Chi into the whimpering Siren. His features relaxed immediately, and a smile crept across his face. "Feel better?"
"Your breath is like sweet sweet morphine and oxycodone." Hale took a deep breath of his own. "I feel…amazing." He lifted his pant leg just in time to see an angry purple bruise as it faded away.
"Now that's a neat *hiccup!* trick." Lauren covered her mouth. "Excuse me." She giggled. "I hiccuped."
"HelllOOO?" Kenzi snapped her fingers. "Was anybody listening to my story?"
"Yes," Ciara answered, while the others looked around the room, anywhere but Kenzi's accusing eyes. "You moved to Toronto, you worked with your cousin, and you were a wannabe gangster."
"Ha!" Lauren blurted out. "She just said in five seconds what took you five minutes." She took a drink of SoCo then raised her glass. "Succinct!"
Kenzi glared at Lauren. Dyson glared at Bo. Bo glared at Dyson. Hale grinned stupidly.
Lauren hiccuped.
Ciara rolled her eyes. "How did you meet Bo?"
"Right, back to my awesome story of awesomeness," Kenzi said. "So, I go with Evgeni to this billionaire's house. Evi says the dude wants to hire us to steal some sort of mucho dangerous self-replicating computer virus from his business rival. But there's something off about the guy, I was thinkin'. Cause he's looking at me like he wants to eat me. And I don't mean in the fun sexy times way, I mean in the Kenzi on a platter with ketchup and Grey Poupon and a Caesar side salad kind of way. But we still took the job, because hot damn, a few million bucks is enough to supply me with cheese pizza and wine for at least three years..."
Bo had heard all this before, and went back to staring at Lauren. This time Lauren noticed, and stared right back. Bo eyed her lustily, having finally gotten her undivided attention. She slipped a foot out of her high heels, and reached under the table with her leg. She poked one toe, and then another underneath the leg of Lauren's jeans. Bo watched with delight as the Doctor squirmed in her chair and her cheeks burned red.
"…so we broke in and we found the USB drive. But dude, the way this guy described the virus I just had to check out the code for myself…"
Bo pulsed red into Lauren's skin. The Doctor blinked as she felt a familiar ache building between her legs. She almost cried out with disappointment when Bo pulled her foot away, winking, the very picture of a 'cock tease', minus the cock. 'Vag tease?' Lauren wondered.
"…but here's the thing. Mr. Moneybags thought the virus was meant to target defense satellites and government instillations. He planned on auctioning it to the highest bidder on the black market. But really, the virus was designed to go right for Moneybags' jugular. So as soon as I opened it up, freakin' Pandora's Safety Deposit Box got released. His private assets and the company's savings started flying off into untraceable offshore accounts. I plugged the hole, but almost 20 million dollars had already been sucked down the drain…"
Lauren playfully slid her fingertips along the collar of her shirt, opening it wider and exposing more skin.
Bo realized that she was really starting to like button down shirts.
Hale caught on to what was happening. He wished he had amphibian eyes so he could watch both women at once instead of swinging his head back and forth like a spectator at a tennis match.
Kenzi continued, oblivious to the fact that her audience had gone down by three. "…Evgeni ran for it. Still don't know where he is, the punk. Two bodyguards found me and dragged me back to Moneybags, kicking and screaming. I thought I was gonna get whacked. Moneybags in the Study with the Lead Pipe. Game over. I was ready to be whacked, but I wasn't ready for the style of whacking…"
Lauren kicked her shoe off, with much less grace than Bo had. She reached low under the table, sliding her toes up a pant leg, her foot coming to rest in the general vicinity of a crotch. She wiggled her toes.
They came into contact with a certain piece of anatomy she knew Bo didn't have.
"SERIOUSLY!" Hale shot up out of his chair. "What is wrong with you people? The SUCCUBUS is over HERE!" He gesticulated wildly at Bo. "If you really want some of this Doc, we can work something out. But at least have the self-respect to keep from toeing the testes until after we get a room, kay?"
Ciara choked on her drink. "Toeing the testes?"
"HEY!" Kenzi slammed her palm on the table, making the others jump. "The more you keep interrupting, the longer this is gonna take! You wanna be here all night!?"
"No," they answered in unison.
"Then listen up, because this is important! Buncha freaks." She cleared her throat. Her outburst had earned her their undivided attention, as five pairs of eyeballs fell on the tiny, tiny human. "Okay. That's better."
"So I'm standing in front of Moneybags, ready to die. And the guy grins, but all of a sudden he has 9,000 freaking teeth, and he tells me he's gonna suck the marrow out of my bones and I'm all like, 'Whaaaaat? Listen Voldemort, this isn't a fairy tale. Is this some kind of joke? Are you gonna grind my bones to make your bread, you Jack's giant wannabe?'"
"Huh?" Hale looked at Dyson. Dyson shrugged.
"I guess my reaction caught the guy off guard. I think he thought I'd be too scared to even move, let alone talk back. But that's how I roll. And it bought me a few seconds. Then out of nowhere this one," she pointed to Bo, "comes swinging down from the chandelier like Tarzan at a debutante ball. She sucked the juice out of Moneybags and his guards and picked me up under her arm. We booked it out of there like Usain Bolt on caffeine pills."
Bo cut in. "I was there on outside business. 'Moneybags' was actually a Naga named George Lachlan. I hear his brother used to be your Ash."
"Small world," Ciara said.
"Anyway," Bo continued, "I couldn't just let him kill her, so we ran. I have regretted it every day since."
"Hey!" Kenzi flicked Bo's ear.
"Kidding, kidding."
"Wait," Lauren gathered up her mental faculties enough to make an astute observation. "How did you two manage to escape and hide from a Naga with unlimited resources?"
"We didn't," Kenzi said.
"At least, not for very long," Bo added. "We headed east, picking up jobs along the way. When Lachlan's guards caught up with us, we convinced them it would make better business sense to let us stay alive so we could pay back the money."
Kenzi picked up the story. "Right before they found us, we'd finished up a lucrative gig getting a dwarf miner his stolen diamonds back. Miner as in pickaxe, not minor as in ten year old. He paid us with gold, and for almost two full days of glory we were millionaires. Our share ended up making a sizable dent in our debt, so the Naga agreed to let us live on the condition he got reimbursed, with interest."
"You keep saying 'we'," Dyson cut in. "Bo, why would you put your own life at risk for some puny human you didn't even know?"
"After I told her what I was, and what Lachlan was, and explained about the Fae, she still accepted me for who I am."
"We got on like Ghostbusters," Kenzi said.
"Gangbusters," Lauren corrected.
"I thought it was gangbangers?" Hale frowned.
Dyson ignored the peanut gallery. "That's still a big leap to take."
Bo shrugged. "What can I say? I lost my big sister in New York. I found my little sister in Vancouver."
"Aaaaaawwwww," Ciara and Hale gushed. Dyson rolled his eyes.
Lauren hiccuped.
"I have to tell you," Dyson scratched his beard, "the fact that you are millions of dollars in debt to a Naga makes me even less interested in going into business with you. I don't want any part of that."
Kenzi peeled the rest of her beer label off. Perfect. Not a scrap of paper left on the bottle, just glue. A clean swipe. "Think of it this way. In two years, we paid back all but five million bills. That's 15 million dollars. Pretty serious earning power."
"Dyson, that's Wall Street hedge fund manager money," Hale whistled.
"Dondothat," Lauren slurred. "Nowhissling."
"Sorry."
Dyson was impressed, but did all he could to hide it. He looked at Kenzi. "You still haven't told us what you can do. What can you possibly contribute, other than poor decision making and general stupidity?"
"I already told you I'm a hacker. A good one."
"So is Lauren," Dyson countered. "What else do you have?"
"I'm the Canadian Artful Dodger."
"What practical use is pickpocketing?" Dyson scoffed.
"Where's your wallet, Snoop Dog?" Kenzi raised an eyebrow, while Dyson dug in his pockets.
"What the…?" He searched frantically, but the strip leather wasn't there. He looked up at Kenzi, who held the wallet aloft with pride written all over her face. "Give me that!" He snatched it away, and checked to make sure his money and cards were still there. "Not bad," he conceded.
"And what about your watch?"
Dyson rolled up his sleeve. His Rolex was gone. "I just had it! When did…?"
"Just now. When you took your wallet back."
"Whaaaat?" Hale leaned back in his chair. "Damn, girl!"
"I know, right?" Kenzi slapped him five.
"Uh, guys?" Ciara pointed to Lauren, whose head was bobbing up and down, her body fighting itself to stay awake.
"Right," Hale said, as Ciara shook Lauren's shoulder to bring her back to the world of the living. "Who's ready for a vote? Bo and Kenzi, in or out?"
"I vote in!" Lauren said, a little too loudly.
Dyson rubbed his ear, and shot Lauren a dirty look. "I vote out," he growled.
"Well," Hale grinned, "I'm all about Succubus sexiness and feisty short stack humans, so I vote in. Ciara?"
"Hmm." Ciara looked around the table. Hale and Lauren were voting with their libidos, Dyson was voting with his pride. It was up to her to be the vote of reason. "There's no questioning that you'd bring an impressive skill set to the team," she said. "On the other hand, I still don't know if I can trust the two of you not to run away with our money." She frowned.
"Use your common sense, Ciara!" Dyson growled.
It was the tone of his voice that tipped the scales. "Okay. I vote in." Bo, Kenzi, and Hale jumped up, celebrating. Lauren would have jumped up too, if the room would stop spinning. "Conditionally!" Ciara added, and everyone sat back down. "Dyson has a job lined up. I want you to join the team for this gig. If it works out, we'll make the situation permanent. Does that sound reasonable?"
Everyone except Dyson nodded their assent. "Good," Ciara smiled. "Dyson? Why don't you tell the group about the very unique object we've been hired to track down?" She gave Dyson a meaningful look.
He grinned, as it occurred to him why. "We're looking for a pair of handcuffs."
"Handcuffs?" Bo raised an eyebrow. "You've got a pair, hanging from your belt. Case closed. Where's my money?"
"These are special handcuffs. They belonged to a Fae posing as a priest during the Spanish Inquisition. They have a set of unique properties, among which the victim who is wearing the handcuffs is incapable of telling a lie. The priest used them during interrogations to discover the true intentions of the men and women imprisoned in Avila. Their last known location was Barcelona, two hundred years ago. That's where we'll start."
"We're going international now?" Hale asked. "How do you expect all of us to get time away from the Light?"
"Your sister is the Ash, bro," Dyson grinned. "That's your job. You figure it out."
"Aw, man."
"We leave in five days," Dyson said. "I only have four plane tickets, so you two will have to figure out how to get there on your own. Same goes for hotel reservations."
"No prob, Bob," Kenzi pulled out her cell phone and was at the Orbitz website before she even finished her sentence.
"Barcelona," Lauren mumbled. "Home of Ignacio Barraquer, ophthalmologist known for advancements in cataract surgery. Ignacio sounds like Inigo." Her voice deepened into a sexy Spanish timbre. "My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die." She erupted into a fit of giggles.
"Ummm…I should probably get her home," Bo said. She shook hands with each of her new teammates, except for Dyson, and helped Lauren to her feet. "I guess we'll see you in five days."
Lauren groaned as Bo carried her up the stairs to her bedroom and gently laid her on the bed. "Wanna fool around?" Lauren asked. Bo could sense very little desire in Lauren's aura…her feelings were almost completely drowned out by the alcohol.
Bo chose to ignore the proposition. "You were worried about me. That's why you're drunk."
"Yep." Lauren licked her parched, dehydrated lips. Somewhere in the sober doctor part of her brain, she knew she should drink a lot of water to avoid a hangover. But the sink was in the bathroom, and the bathroom seemed to be a thousand miles away.
"That would be cute if it wasn't so pathetic," Bo teased.
"I'm not pathetic," Lauren whispered, as Bo took the Doctor's shoes off and tossed them in a corner. "I'm a very accomplished physician." Her words slurred, and sounded more like, "Imavrrcmplishfizzy." But Bo understood all the same.
"You're a very sexy one too. Even when you're drunk as a skunk." Bo brushed a stray hair from her cheek. She got up and went to Lauren's bathroom. She filled a plastic cup with water, and shook two ibuprofen from a bottle on the sink. She placed them on Lauren's nightstand. The Doctor was already asleep. Bo kissed Lauren's forehead, pulled the blanked over her and tucked her in. With one last glance at the slumbering doctor Bo said, "goodnight", turned off the light, and closed the door.