Chapter Two
Wendy Watson pulled her outfit back together. The little silver dress (she didn't like black, for a date) hadn't actually come off her at any point. But it had had a hard night. First slept in, then pushed vigorously aside and pretty well rolled around her waist from both directions. The matching panties - she'd skipped a bra – were in much the same condition.
She'd planned for sex when she got dressed to go out last night. Just – and she told herself it was not slutty, just special circumstances – not with the man she'd ended up in bed with.
He was dressing too, in the windowless little room that could have come straight out of any low-end motel. He buttoned his dress shirt but left the shirttail hanging loose. Wendy had seen the Middleman naked – more than seen, now – but she'd never seen him this informal. He bundled his uniform jacket and other equipment under his arm. "I have a shower upstairs, in my living quarters," he said. Of course he lived at Middleman HQ. God forbid he might be delayed five minutes answering a call to duty. "Do you mind using the one in the locker room? All your clothes are there."
"Yeah, I'm good." Wendy tried to remember if she'd left any civilian clothes in her locker, or just uniforms. "I'll see you in a few."
He hesitated. As partners and friends, they touched without thinking about it. In the last half hour, they'd rutted all over each other. All the rules were in flux. Wendy kind-of smiled, acknowledging the awkwardness.
He relaxed a little. He was usually so serious, so controlled. Now she got the rarest smile of all; the off-center, incandescent grin of the goofy teenager he'd obviously once been. Wendy couldn't help smiling back. He cradled her chin, traced the full line of her lower lip with a thumb-tip. "Dubbie," he murmured, and fit his lips over hers. A considered, considerate kiss a thousand miles away from the out-of-control frenzy that had gripped both of them a few minutes before. Against her mouth, "Don't be long." When he drew back, the grin was bigger than ever.
[*]
Wendy stripped down in the locker room. If she'd thought about it – and she hadn't, much – she would have expected a respectful, gentlemanly sexual style from the Middleman. In the event, he'd been all over her. No wonder; the man hadn't had sex in what was probably literal years. There wasn't a mark on Wendy's skin, but parts of her felt sore and stretched. She had no complaints. She wasn't sure she'd ever gotten that many orgasms in one session, let alone a first time. It was just ... tiring.
She'd had a fight, the last fight, with her boyfriend Tyler last night. But that wasn't why she'd wound up in bed with her boss. She'd come to HQ looking for quiet, not a hookup. It wasn't love, or even straightforward lust; it was mathematics.
One. The woman he really loved, his old partner Raveena Rao. The death that had left the Middleman as Wendy had found him – quietly content in his work, world-class competent at it, but rejecting the rest of the world as he waited to join Raveena.
Two. Wendy's own roommate, Lacey. The Middleman had come to love her despite their vast personality differences. Had worked through who knew how much grief, to the point of acting on that love, when an apocalypse intervened. The Middleman had saved the world as usual, saved Lacey in doing so. But she'd forgotten about him. I'm not on Lacey's emotional map, he'd said. I never will be, not if we met every day for ten years. Wendy knew his own feelings were unchanged. Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds...
Three. That left good old, reliable Wendy. Even Tyler had gone through a brief Lacey phase before connecting with her. Funny how that thought hadn't hurt. Thank God Wendy had been honest with the Middleman. She hadn't asked him to love her; it would be horrible if he'd felt obligated or burdened. She'd just used the oldest positive reinforcement in the book to motivate him to stay alive. Outside the range of that radiant smile she felt a little – no, a lot – cheap. She hadn't lied. But she'd used sex for a purpose other than simply expressing love, and that wasn't something she'd ever done before.
It's a good cause. And it wasn't like she'd pretended to true love.She hadn't used his name, or any endearments. Just boss, her usual way of addressing him. And once, partner.
That was the right approach, partners. Saving the world together, working together, sleeping together. Wendy didn't expect to mend his broken heart with that kind of second-best. But repeated sex would work on his subconscious, incline his gut reactions toward survival instead of sacrifice. That was more important than anything else Wendy could be doing with her time. Take care of the partnership. Never mind that he didn't exactly love her and she didn't exactly love him.
Wendy turned the hot water on full, ducked her head under the nozzle. Anybody might need a good cry once in a while.
[*]
Wendy was bright-eyed and neatly dressed in uniform when she left the locker room. The Middleman waited outside, back to his usual white-glove-inspection self. "You mentioned breakfast," he said cheerfully. "Eggs?"
"Depends on where." Wendy's first thought was the Batter of the Bulge, a World-War-Two-themed diner where she and Tyler had had their third date.
"A new place. You'll like it."
Heading for the garage necessarily took them through their main control room. Ida was exactly where the Middleman had left her last night, in front of the silver HEYDAR ball.
She wore the expression of someone who had gone hang-gliding through Hell.
I didn't set a code 86 on the Middlewatch to lock her out of monitoring us, was Wendy's first thought. The second, and neither did he. Ida, whose contempt for 'meatbags' was only exceeded by her personal dislike of Wendy, had gotten the whole thing in stereo.
She saw the Middleman get it at the same instant. "Ida," he said, frowning, "I'd like to apol..."
Ida held her hand up. "We will never speak of this," she said stiffly. "Ever." The robot turned and walked away.
Wendy got all the way to the garage before she burst out laughing.
[*]
Wendy took a quiet moment to text Lacey in the car. Sry I ws jerk forgive? In a few minutes she got a line of smileys back. She relaxed, but didn't share the exchange with the man beside her. Bringing up Lacey to him felt questionable right now. As she paid more attention, she noticed they were heading for the outskirts of town. "Where are we going?"
He smiled. "It's a surprise."
They drove in silence for a while. Wendy found herself studying the Middleman from a whole new perspective, as boyfriend material. Not that 'boy' was the right word. From a story – almost the only one he'd shared – about his high school days, he had to be about twelve years older than Wendy. Normally she wouldn't even consider that kind of age gap. It wasn't like he looked younger than his age, either. His classic bones would always be beautiful but the lines were there, marks of half a lifetime of thought and worry and stress. That only made Wendy want to soothe them.
Half a normal lifetime. Neither of them should be making plans for old age. The previous Middleman had died of natural causes; most of them weren't so lucky. If he's going to be happy, it has to be here and now. The thought made Wendy all the more set in her decision.
"I was meaning to ask, Dubbie. What school of feminism do you prefer?"
Wendy came back to the present. And stared. "Do I what?"
"I haven't always understood you as well as a partner should, especially if we intend to carry on on a more personal level," the Middleman said. "I thought it might help if I researched your ideological underpinnings. I gather the differences between sections of the movement can be intensely felt."
Every time he got onto a tangent like this, Wendy was unsure whether to start laughing or to speak in very small words. She chose laughter, or at least a smile. "I'm a girl. Person. Not a movement. A bunch of women with a 'y' don't tell me what to think any more than a bunch of men do." She thought. "If I do something confusing? Just ask. I'll try to make as much sense as I can." He looked relieved.
The Middlemobile had stopped. "Where are we?" Wendy asked. The answer appeared to be, an honest-to-bleep farm, if a small one, jammed in between two suburban blocks. Green grass, red barn, black and white cows, white farmhouse, all as classic and incongruous as a child's crayon drawing.
"The Creamery," the Middleman said happily. "They know me here. Absolutely fresh milk, and eggs. Lately they've opened a breakfast counter." He circled the car and opened her door for her. "Care to join me?"
The breakfast room inside was tiny, clean, and gleaming white and silver. A smiling woman set a glass of milk in front of the Middleman without being asked. "Black coffee, thanks," Wendy said.
The coffee came quickly. Wendy leaned over the cup and breathed steam. "There are some things I ought to tell you," she said quietly.
Wendy's Room
The Illegal Sublet She Shares With An Equally Photogenic Young Artist
Earlier Last Night
Lacey had that vague expression she got when Wendy talked about the Middleman. The power of Chac-Mol continuously taking away the words, or at least their emotional import, as soon as they were spoken. "I'm sure your bossman is very nice," Lacey conceded. Which was more than Wendy usually got at these moments. "And I'm gonna meet him at some point. But can we concentrate on what's really important? Which is, that Tyler and Warren are going to be here any minute, and you're not ready?"
"You did meet him." Wendy slid the new, glossy silver dress on over her head. "You've met him dozens of times, you just don't remember it. You danced together on a yacht 86 feet longer than the Titanic. You saw part of a cowboy movie together. You kissed him." The memory of seeing the end of that kiss, via the Middlewatches, was as vivid in Wendy's mind as it was absent from Lacey's.
"I know you like working with him." Lacey's attention was arrested as she looked at Wendy's dresser. "Can I borrow the green earrings? I promise I won't lose them." She and Warren planned to stay in tonight, while Tyler and Wendy went out for dinner.
Lacey continued, "It's natural for anybody to want their friends to be friends with their other friends. But I don't know why you keep trying to set me up on a date or something. I'm with Warren." The alertness returned to her eyes as she found a non-Middleman subject to discuss. "That's it, isn't it? You've got something against Warren."
Wendy spoke louder than she'd intended. "I have nothing against Perfect Warren. Perfect Warren is perfect." If you liked over-privileged second-generation flower children who obsessed about recycling to hide their own carbon footprints from themselves. "I'm just saying, Boss..."
"What does it matter?" Lacey was drifting off again. "How is anything going to be different if I do?"
An idea appeared whole in Wendy's mind, with the force of fact not theory. The Middleman had used the power of Chac-Mol to save the world, knowing the Mayan goddess would exact the ultimate sacrifice in return. They'd all expected Chac-Mol would claim his life. Instead it had struck at his love for Lacey, permanently removing him from her mental horizon. If Wendy succeeded in undoing that sacrifice, wouldn't another one have to replace it?
He'd die. He'd die, and Wendy would be alone with the Middle-vocation in a world that wasn't truly hers. The thought stabbed her like a sacrificial dagger to the heart, brought tears to her eyes. She had to give up, forever, any hope of having her best friend and her best … Middleman happy together. Wendy turned aside, reaching for a hairbrush, so Lacey wouldn't see her crying.
A token knock on the door downstairs, followed by the sound of someone using their own key; that meant either Tyler or Warren. Lacey brightened and wandered down.
Wendy sat down, numbly, on the side of the bed. She'd nearly destroyed the Middleman. He could die, because of her. She pulled the Middlewatch around her wrist until she could see the face of it, checked the time. Boss rarely left the HQ, apart from the occasional Western movie revival; a quick call wouldn't interrupt anything. Wendy just needed to see his face and hear his voice for a few seconds, to get her center back. Her finger hovered over the transmit button.
Footsteps coming up the spiral staircase. "Hey, Dubster. We're gonna be late for the dinner reservations," Tyler said.
Tyler Ford in this universe was a newly minted alternative-rock star instead of a starving guitarist. He hadn't changed much to the naked eye. His crisp black curls were cut in the same semi-shaggy style. His deep blue eyes still lit up when he caught sight of her. Even the outfit, black slacks and a casual jacket, was one he'd owned in the original universe. But he was about to leave on a six-week musical tour – about to as in catching a red-eye flight five hours from now – and there was a slightly distracted look in his eyes. Not magic, as with Lacey. Just the mark of a budding workaholic who'd finally found the work he could devote himself to heart and soul. Wendy knew the feeling.
Wendy wiped her eyes. "Hey, Ford-o." She got up, kissed her boyfriend.
"That is one smokin' outfit." Tyler stepped back from the kiss, ran his eyes up and down her. "Definitely your color. And it matches, too."
Wendy scuffed a toe under the bed, looking for the dressy flats she'd laid out a short time ago. "Shoes are here somewhere."
"I mean, it matches this." Tyler held out a palm-sized, black velvet box wrapped in a ribbon.
Wendy smiled. "Thank you." Deep down, she was dreading a repeat of a gift he'd given her in the original universe; a diamond tennis bracelet that had led to disaster.
"I've always dreamed of giving my lady diamonds," Tyler said. "It may not be much – I know you're not the frilly type – but it's a start."
She opened the box. A watch. Silver – or platinum – in a sporty unisex style but clearly feminine. The mother-of-pearl dial was barely the size of a nickel. A tiny diamond replaced each number on the dial; even tinier ones circled the face. "Try it on," Tyler urged.
Wendy clasped it around her left wrist; the sleek band hugged her like a living thing. "It's lovely, Tyler." Her eyes went to her right wrist – the plain steel, loose-banded, oversized Middlewatch that was her link to her job and headquarters. Maybe if she put that one in her purse, she'd still be able to hear the signal...
Tyler's long, lean fingers closed over the Middlewatch. "So you won't need this tonight," he said, and slipped it over her hand.
The Middle-apprentice in her reacted first, mapping out a throat strike against the sudden threat. Wendy got a firm mental grip on herself, and merely grabbed the watch back. "I do need it."
"In case there's a temp-agency emergency?" Tyler joked.
Yes. "You know I'm on call," Wendy said, a little irritably.
"You're always on call. You are never off call." Tyler matched her tone. "I know, because about every third date goes south when he calls you and you run off without me. God knows why."
Wendy didn't think it had happened that often. "The work is confidential..."
"And the clients demand discretion, international problem solvers, yadda yadda. Wendy, you're a temp. Which pays like crap, and in exchange for pay-like-crap you're supposed to be able to put it aside at the end of the day. It's not a career."
Wendy's temper flared. "Unlike going through sixteen cities in sixteen days to meet sixteen sets of groupies trying to worm their way backstage."
"I asked you to go with me," Tyler shot back. "They owe you some time off."
Middlemen don't get time off. One of a thousand things she couldn't say. "They need me."
"Why are we even saying they? As far as I can tell this company is one guy, your boss," Tyler snarled. "Calling you out all hours of the day and night on a whim..."
"He doesn't get whims!"
"... and you turn up God-knows-when later, worn out, sometimes bruised up, and you'll never say where you've been or what you've been doing. And whenever he turns up he looks at you all the time, like a dog with a bone. Like a guard dog, more like. What is he to you?" Tyler said hotly. "Is there something I have a right to know about?"
They'd fought before. They'd fought over her work before. Arguments seemed to interrupt nearly as many of her dates as missions, these days. But they'd never descended to this level. "I'm not even going to answer that."
"Uh-huh," Tyler said meaningfully.
"Are you asking me to hit you?"
"I'm asking what my girlfriend is doing hanging on every word of a guy who won't even give out his name..."
"Don't say mine in that tone. Like you've got a pet," Wendy snapped.
"I thought I had a soulmate," Tyler said. Less heat, more sadness. "I thought … Wendy, I was going to ask you to marry me. After I got back from this tour."
"You what?" That had been everything she'd wanted, once. Now her first thought was, covering my tracks as a Middleman would be impossible. "Tyler, it's … I can't marry you."
"Yeah." She could barely hear his voice. "Yeah, I know."
Wendy's eyes blurred. She found the new watch by feel, opened the latch. "I'm sorry, Tyler." Handed it to him.
Tyler Ford looked like she'd struck him. Worse. "So. I guess that's it."
Wendy wanted to touch him, to comfort him. When she didn't, she realized the last time they'd touched had been the last time. She wanted to say she was sorry, but it wouldn't help. "I guess it is." Tyler walked away.
The Creamery
A Free-Range Dairy and Breakfast Restaurant
This Morning
"You didn't say much of that last night," the Middleman said. "Mostly that you'd fought with Lacey, and that you were afraid for me."
Wendy drew circles in her fresh scrambled eggs with her fork tip. "I guess I didn't. Splitting up with Tyler seemed less important than your life being in danger."
"Anything that happens to you is important." The Middleman reached across the little table for her hand. Stopped. "I … made some assumptions, this morning, about your future plans. My role in them. If you want to go back to Tyler, I won't stand in your way."
Wendy shook her head. "There's no going back. In a week we'd be ripping each other up again. He thought he was asking me to choose between you and him. What I actually chose was the job." A crooked smile. "I really am getting to be like a Middleman, aren't I?"
"You always were," he said softly. His big, square hand did close on hers this time. It felt warm. "I knew you would."
Wendy smiled back. "Thanks, boss."
He looked a little blank. "You know my name now."
"Sorry." Wendy still had some limits. "There was this animal show on tv, when I was a kid, with Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion. That's all I can think of."
"Good heavens, was that still on in your time? Me, too. It made fifth grade fairly difficult. There aren't any good nicknames for Clarence, either."
"People have been known to change their names."
"But it was my father's," the Middleman said. "My grandfather was a lawyer. He named Dad after Clarence Darrow."
After so much aloofness and evasion and outright stonewalling, the sudden font of information was fascinating. "What did your dad do?"
"The same. Nothing exciting – mostly real estate law – but he liked it. Mom was a math teacher. I didn't really take after either of them. I told you about football; that was all I cared about in high school. Joining the Navy was more a default than a reasoned decision, at the time. Though I found my vocation eventually," he said.
Wendy had seen Navy SEALs, from time to time, while she was growing up on military bases with her parents. "I can imagine you in the uniform."
He drained his glass of milk. His plate was already empty, while Wendy's only held a last few bites of egg. "What would you like to do now? I think Ida would be more comfortable if we stayed out of HQ for the moment."
Wendy grinned. "Meatbag cooties. She really did think better of you than that, you know."
"Ida," he said flatly, "will just have to adapt." He looked expectantly at her.
Oh. The question. She'd never actually had the Middleman to herself without a mission to occupy them. He'd said something like that, earlier. "Would you mind going to an art gallery? Joe 90 placed some pieces. It'll do him good if people come see them. We don't have to buy anything."
His expression stiffened; Joe 90 specialized in out-of-scale phallic sculptures. "Too much, too soon?" Wendy asked.
"I said, your choice." But when the Middlewatches made their bork-bork sounds a second later, he looked all too relieved. "Yes, Ida?"
"If you're not too busy violating the laws of God and nature," Ida said sourly, "Roxy Wasserman sent up a flare. Apparently one of her succubi isn't as reformed as advertised, and it's about to sit down to a steak dinner. You're closer than any of her bunch. She needs somebody to buy the sex-crazed idiot human some time until she can whip up a containment spell. You know all about sex-crazed idiot humans, right?"
One corner of his mouth twitched. Coldly, "Just send the address, Ida. We're on our way."
[*]
A quick (but still one mile under the speed limit) car trip left Wendy and her Middleman at the door of a shabby townhouse. He pounded on the door, hard enough to shake it. No answer. "Universal key," he said, and did something to the latch.
The door led into an open ground floor. Living room in the front, kitchen in the back, stairs going up to the left. A moan, not a pleasurable one, drifted down the stairwell. They broke into a run.
The succubus had been impatient, Wendy noted as she came out at the top of the stairs. Blood, a few scarlet drops, on the light-colored carpet outside the bedroom door. Her first couple of encounters with succubi in a bad mood, she'd taken their shark-like teeth as a straightforward danger like, well, shark teeth. She knew now that the teeth were mostly a vector for the demon's venom, which made humans easy prey by bringing irresistible drives to the surface.
The human, male, was lying on top of the succubus, humping away. Oblivious to the fact that they were both fully clothed, just as oblivious to the mouth on his neck sucking away his life's blood. She snarled, red-eyed, at the Middlemen as they entered the room. The Middleman pulled her victim up by his shirt collar and spun him toward a corner. The division of labor was obvious. The Middleman wasn't as strong as a succubus, but he had a far better chance than Wendy did. He hauled the demon to her feet next. She hit him like a pile driver.
"Take it easy, mister," Wendy told the victim in a soothing tone, hoping this would be simple. Instead the thoroughly envenomed man grabbed her with the same intent he'd had toward the succubus. Wendy sighed. She launched into Sensei Ping's Pattern in Amber, finished off with an old-fashioned knee that was more than usually effective. Their rescue-ee curled into a tiny, agonized ball in the corner and whimpered.
When Wendy looked up, the succubus was throttling the Middleman with an efficiency that had turned him purple. His attempts at counterattacks were growing more and more feeble. Wendy, scarlet rising in her vision, pulled out her energy gun and blew a hole in the creature's right leg. It shrieked, bleeding a stinking black fluid, and collapsed. Wendy steadied the Middleman before he could fall too. "Got you." Her hands were shaking. She raised the gun again for a head shot.
"Enough." Almost a croak, but understandable. His hand wrapped around hers on the gun. "She's under Roxy's protection."
"How does she rate protection, with the thing," Wendy waved, "And the deal?" She let the gun fall, stroked his head and neck looking for other injuries.
"The floor's on fire," the Middleman said in a slightly more normal voice.
Where she'd, yeah, fired a class two plasma gun in an enclosed space. Wendy stamped the flaming edges of the hole in the carpet until they stopped burning. Her uniform boots protected her feet, mostly. The paper on the Sheetrock walls smoldered but hadn't actually caught. A smoke detector was screaming in the background, drowning out the wounded succubus. Wendy retrieved her gun.
"Gods of fire," Roxy Wasserman's voice came from the door. "What have you done, MM?"
He straightened up. The fashion diva and retired soul-destroyer looked horrified. She studied the wounded demon in more detail, and her own eyes went scarlet. "Kerrin will be days healing that . Why did you use weapons?"
"Your gal-pal was eating a human in our town," Wendy snarled. "She tried for two. I never liked the prom-queen type anyway."
"Regardless of which, the situation was urgent and a human life at risk," the Middleman said quickly. "The pact authorizes us to use force when necessary."
"The letter of the law? From you?" Roxy stepped around them and helped the wounded succubus stand, one arm over Roxy's shoulder.
Wendy gestured to her own mouth. "She's got a little smudge right there." Blood.
Roxy gave her a hard stare. Then looked at the Middleman. "You've stopped starving yourself," the sex demon said with sudden interest. Looked back at Wendy.
His cheekbones colored pink. "Thanks for the assist, Roxy."
"I didn't do it for you." Roxy took the other succubus away without a backward glance.